"GREAT TREES SOMETIMES FALL"

    In times like these, with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (among many giants who have left us this year - Gay Wilmore, John Prine, Joseph Lowery, CT Vivian, John Lewis, and now the notorious RBG), I think that the only words I can say are from a powerful poem from Maya Angelou that I encountered when John Lewis died, so here it is.

"WHEN GREAT TREES FALL" by MAYA ANGELOU

When great trees fall, 

rocks on distant hills shudder, 

lions hunker down 

in tall grasses,

and even elephants lumber after safety.

When great trees fall in forests,

small things recoil into silence,

their senses

eroded beyond repair.

When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe, briefly.

Our eyes, briefly,

see with a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words, unsaid,

promised walks never taken.

Great souls die and 

our reality, bound to

them, takes leave of us.

Our souls, dependent upon their nurture,

now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed 

and informed by their radiance,

fall away.

We are not so much maddened

as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of 

dark, cold caves.

And, when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly.  Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed.  They existed.

We can be. Be and be

better. For they existed. 

“MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA”

 “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA”

 

             This week begins the month of celebrating the heritage of the diaspora of people from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, who are now in the USA.  Some have been here for centuries, predating the Anglo arrival, some arrived as recently as today.  The month is sandwiched between famous battles for independence by Latinx or Hispanic peoples from European colonial powers, and the dates are September 15-October 15. 

 

            The recognition began under President Johnson and was originally called Hispanic Heritage Week.  It has expanded into a month, and in line with the arbitrary nature of the American system of race, it is ever evolving.  “Hispanic” was the earliest term because it is a word derived from the Latin word for the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal (Hispana).  

 

            The word “Hispanic” began to fall out of favor, however, because it does not cover all the language groups in the brown Americas.  “Latino” has begun to develop as an alternative, and it is a strange term because no one speaks Latin in the brown Americas except priests and some scholars.  Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle infamously noted that he would have to learn “Latin” before he visited Latin America.  Why did a word referring to a “dead” language from Italy become the definer for people from the brown Americas?  Because Latin is the basis for what were called the “Romance” languages when I was growing up:  Spanish, Portuguese, and French, which became the dominant European languages in the brown Americas.  “Latinx” has begun to replace the masculine “Latino” as a word of choice to include all  people. 

 

            Whether one prefers “Hispanic” or “Latino” or “Latina” or “Latinx,” all of them still define people from the brown Americas by the history of the European domination of the region in the colonial era.  This crunching of experience is further squeezed by the American system of race, which demands to know who should be classified as “white” and who should not.  This demand, born out of the struggle between slavery and equality in American history, means that everyone must be assigned their place in the system of race, obliterating cultural and language differences, so that those classified as “white” may know where to assign the goodies of American racial capitalism.  One of the great things about “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA” is that we hope that it will lead to peoples of the Americas helping to break down the oppressive system of race.  We will be hoping and looking for more accurate and just terms and descriptions to emerge.

 

            I got my first real insight into this system of classifying brown Americans in 1994 when I was a commissioner to our denomination’s annual General Assembly in Wichita.  I was assigned to the deadening (but really Presbyterian) Committee on Assembly Rules and Procedures.  For the most part, it was a deadening time, but we all perked up when a light-skinned woman commissioner came to meet with us.  She was an elder in her Hispanic church in Texas, and she came to ask us to consider changing the wording on the form which churches use annually to report the racial composition of their membership.  At that time the form had these categories:  “White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American.”  She wanted to divide the “Hispanic” category into two sub-groups: “Hispanic-white” and “Hispanic-black.” 

 

Few of us had heard of this at that time, and we asked her why her church was recommending this.  She was unusually frank with us about race, which was then (and still is) highly unusually.  She noted her light skin, and she indicated that most of the Hispanic members in her church looked like her.  They had perceived how the system of race works in America: “white is right; black get back; brown stand down.”  So, she wanted to keep her Hispanic heritage but also receive the goodies of being classified as “white.”  Some of us appreciated her candor; some of us were shocked (and offended) at it.  A few of us argued to make the change because it would help to expose the hypocrisy of race in America, but the majority opposed the change precisely for the same reason:  though they never voiced it, they simply did not want to admit that the dynamics of race worked in that way. 

 

Almost thirty years later, we know that it does indeed work that way, and the advocate who met with us has prevailed, with all kinds of permutations evolving out of the attempt to lump all brown peoples of the Americas into one category.  The “white” fear of the growing presence of “brown” people in the United States  is one of the foundations of the Presidency of Donald Trump.  Joining with the historical white fear and dread and exploitation of those classified as “black,” we face a fundamental divide in November.  May “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA” help us move towards the inclusion of all in a different system of the classification and celebrations of all cultures and all people.

 

"CELEBRATING SUSAN"

CELEBRATING SUSAN”

 

            This week brings our daughter Susan’s birthday, and I want to give thanks for her and for her life and witness and power in our lives and in the lives of so many.  So, today’s blog is dedicated to her!  She was born in Nashville, and she was ready to come out of Caroline’s womb.  Two hours after we arrived at Vanderbilt Hospital’s birthing room, Caroline said that she did not think that she could birth this baby without some drugs.  I went to get the nurse, and the nurse looked at the situation and said “No wonder you’re in distress – the head is crowning – hold on, Dr. Betty Neff wants to be here for this first birth in her solo practice!”  Somehow, Caroline held on, and out came baby Susan!

 

            We moved to Oakhurst Church and Decatur when Susan was six months old, so Decatur was her home until she left for college.  She was very shy as a young girl, and indeed the rumor spread in the church that she had some sort of impediment because she would not talk at church.  Her big brother, David, was incredulous and defended her, saying “She can talk – she talks all the time at home!”  Her verbal debut at the church came while Dr. Lawrence Bottoms and I were officiating at the wedding of Christine Johnson and Charlie Callier – she called out from the pew: “Da-da, Da-da!”  When people turned and looked at her, Caroline replied:  “Well, at least you know that she can talk!”

 

            It was perhaps the beginning of her drama career, which she continued to develop.  In the first grade, she was given the lead part of a young granddaughter in the elementary school play, and she had many lines to memorize.  We went to her wonderful teacher, Debbie Miller and expressed our concern for someone so young having so much to learn.  Ms. Miller replied:  “Are you kidding?  She not only has her own part down – she has memorized the entire play, everyone’s part – she gives cues to her fellow actors!”  So began her directorial career also.

 

            She joined Oakhurst as a member and became part of the youth group, and she began to move theatrically during one of our famous Christmas pageants.   Under Caroline’s leadership, we had begun to develop themes for the Advent season.  The theme that year was “Legends of Christmas,” and we had emphasized both plants and animals involved in the tradition.  Susan’s middle school group was asked to portray the plants, which they dutifully did.  After the pageant, Susan complained that having to act as a plant was boring.  Our reply was that if she thought that this year’s pageant was boring, maybe she and the youth should write the one for the next year.  She said:  “That sounds fine,” and it began a 25 year tradition of the youth writing and producing the Christmas pageant every year. 

 

            David went off to college after her first year in high school, and she thought that it would be great to get a bigger room and to have her big brother out of her hair for awhile.  What she didn’t reckon with was the fact that now both parents would be focusing on her rather than on her and David.  So, she got her driver’s license as soon as she could, and from then on, we would have “Susan sightings” at our house.  But, she used her time so wisely and creatively – with Lauren Gunderson, she co-founded “Life Is Sacred Campaign” seeking to limit the accessibility to guns.  For this work, they won the Metro Christian Council’s  Andrew Young Award for Faith and Public Policy and got to meet Andy Young himself.   By the time that she graduated from Decatur High, she won the AJC Cup, awarded to the most outstanding senior in each high school in the metro area.

 

            She received many scholarships for college, and we tried to get her to go to my alma mater Rhodes or to Guilford.  But, she had had enough of the South (it is always with us and in us) with its overt racism and sexism and general repressive approach to life.  She headed up to cold Minnesota for Macalester College, where she learned theater in a deep and powerful way and saw more snow in her four years there than she will probably see for the rest of her life!  But, she blossomed into a great human being!

 

            Since then, she has become our teacher on many levels.  She has vastly expanded our limited theatrical horizon, including her work in Americorps in Albuquerque where she was a drama teacher for developmentally disabled adults.  After getting her MFA in theater at Towson, she has settled in Baltimore, where she is a partner in an immersive theater company called “Submersive Productions.”  As an artist in America, she has to work other jobs to support herself, but fortunately she has found work in theater-related areas, teaching part-time in various colleges and working with drama teachers in high schools and middle schools.  She also joined Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, and to no one’s surprise, she is now chairing their worship committee, as they seek more inclusive and welcoming worship for people of all cultures and backgrounds.  She sings in their choir too!

 

            I could obviously go on and on about our great daughter, but for now, it’s “Thank you, Susan,” and “Happy Birthday!”  You are such a powerful gift to us and to so many others! 

"WASHERWOMAN'S STRIKE, 1881"

 “WASHERWOMAN’S STRIKE, 1881”

 

            As we approach Labor Day in an acrimonious time, I want to note a little-known labor action in Atlanta in the early union days of 1881.  I’ll be using a condensed version of an article that I wrote for Hospitality – the longer version is found at  http://opendoorcommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/July-2020-web.pdf.  After the Civil War ended, many rural Black women in the South, previously held as slaves, moved to the urban areas to seek employment and to seek to get away from the neo-slavery that was rapidly redeveloping.

 

Many of these newly arrived black women took in laundry as a way to make money.  Known as “laundresses” or “washerwomen,” more black women did this kind of work in 1881 in the South than in any other occupation.  It was back-breaking work, with long hours and very low pay.  Picking up dirty clothes at white peoples’ homes on Monday, making their own soap from lye, hauling water from wells or pumps to washtubs made from old beer barrels, scrubbing the clothes on washboards, wringing out the clothes, then hanging or draping them to dry, then ironing the clothes with hot, heavy irons, then delivering the clothes on Saturday -  all for the pay of $4-8 a month.  Still, the women were glad that their “domestic” work enabled them to stay home, rather than have to move to the white peoples’ homes as “almost slaves.” As Sarah Hill put it: “I could clean my hearth good and nice and set my irons in front of the fire and iron all day without stopping…I cooked and ironed at the same time.”  They made a way out of no way. 

 

Making a way out of no way did not mean, however, that they were content with it.  In 1881, some 20 of these washerwomen began to meet and to organize to seek better wages.  They also went door to door in their neighborhoods, seeking other washerwomen to support the effort and join in the strike.  Their efforts built on the efforts of others, but it was still early in the labor union movement.  The first labor union in the state of Mississippi was a washerwoman’s union in 1866 in Jackson.  The Knights of Labor was formed in 1869, but the American Federation of Labor was not formed until 1886, so these washerwomen were in the forefront of this developing movement to support workers in their demands for better wages and working conditions.

 

The washerwomen of Atlanta named themselves “The Washing Society,” and we have the names of six of them:   Matilda Crawford, Sallie Bell, Carrie Jones, Dora Jones, Orphelia Turner, and Sarah Collier.   They began to organize, and soon their numbers had grown from 20 to 3,000.  They went on strike in late July, 1881, letting their white employers know that unless their wages were raised, no more laundry would be done.  It caused a furor in the white community.  The Atlanta Constitution (AJC) covered the strike almost daily, and its coverage – which is the only written records that we have of the strike – was filled with both contempt and amazement at the temerity of these black washerwomen.  The AC called them the “Washing Amazons,” and in using what it deemed a derisive term, it revealed the fear which these women struck in the heart of privileged, white society.  The idea of “Amazons” originated in ancient Greece and referred to a fierce band of women warriors – indeed “Diana” of the recent movie “Wonder Woman” was living among and trained by Amazons. 

 

The AJC had these words about the Washing Society:  “The laundry ladies’ efforts to control the prices for washing are still prevalent and no small amount of talk is occasioned hereby.  The women have a thoroughly organized association and additions to the membership are being made each day……The washerwomen of Atlanta having ‘struck’ for very unreasonably high prices.”   Even more ominous for white society was that talk began among other domestic workers about going on strike.  As the Washing Society strike held out, the City Council went into action to end the strike.  Strikers were arrested for disorderly conduct ; white businessmen proposed building an expensive steam laundry to end the black women’s “monopoly,” and the Council levied an exorbitant tax of $25 on each Washing Society member.  In response to the tax, the Washing Society met at Wheat Street Baptist Church and voted to send this letter to the Mayor – they are the only words that we have from the Washing Society:

 

“We the members of our society, are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing, and we have agreed, and are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection, so that we can control the washing for the city.  We can afford to pay these licenses, and will do it before we will be defeated, and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices.  Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council meeting Tuesday morning.  We mean business this week or no washing.”

 

            The city council voted to rescind its action, and the strike proceeded.  Yet, we do not know the resolution of the strike.  The articles in the Constitution eventually faded out, and since we have no other sources, the conclusion of historians is that the Washing Society only got a few of its demands.

 

But, as we approach Labor Day,  it reminds us that the struggle for justice and equity is long and difficult, but so essential.  The economic forces that shaped racism and slavery are deep and powerful, and the only way to bend the arc of history towards justice is to engage in the struggle for such bending.  We are now in a crucial period.  Significant changes will be made in these times.  Let us be inspired by the Washing Society, and let us take up their dirty but cleansing work in order to bend these times toward justice.

 

'CELEBRATE THE PASSAGE, FIGHT FOR THE PROMISE"

 Since she is Tennessee born and bred,  today’s blog is written by my partner and co-pastor, the Rev. Caroline Leach, who was the 21^st woman ordained to the ministry in the former Presbyterian Church US.

 

“CELEBRATE THE PASSAGE, FIGHT FOR THE PROMISE”

 

            On August 17, 1920, Seth Walker, the Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, left his position and went down to the floor to speak in favor of tabling the motion to ratify the 19^th Amendment, which would give women the right to vote.  Tennessee was one of the last chances for the Amendment to be ratified – if it did so, it would be the 36^th state to do so, and it would push the amendment over the line for ratification to amend the Constitution.  If it failed to do so, the Amendment was likely dead. 

 

The vote on passage in Tennessee would be exceedingly close, and thus the Speaker took the unusual step of going to the floor to speak on defeating it.  In his speech Walker got to the heart of the matter.  He was against giving the right to vote to women, and his reasoning boiled down to one fundamental reason:  “This is a white man’s country.”  He spoke this to a legislature full of white men, called into special session by Gov. A. H. Roberts in sweltering August heat in Nashville.  They came into Nashville – all white, all male – ready to put women into their place once and for all.  Most would have preferred to have been sitting on the porch with a cool drink or swimming in a creek or lake that dot the hills and hollers and flatlands, but here they were. 

 

So, the women of Tennessee had ridden the trains, hired drivers (because they weren’t allowed to drive), and walked dusty roads and trails to talk with each of Tennessee’s legislators, seeking to get a signature for a “yes” vote.  There were plenty of women and men opposed to the 19^th Amendment, and there was heavy opposition funding from the railroads and the liquor lobby.  There is a great book about Tennessee’s journey on this, called “The Woman’s Hour”, by Elaine Weiss – it will take your breath away.

 

After he made his “white man” speech, Speaker Walker received a dismaying surprise later that day when Banks Turner changed his mind and voted against tabling the motion, thus freeing it for an “up or down” vote the next day.   And, that day brought another surprise.  Although he had voted to table the motion the previous day, Harry Burn - the youngest member of the legislature – had received a letter that night from his widowed mother Phoebe “Febb” Burn, urging him to vote for the 19^th Amendment.  He had been vacillating over what action to take all during the session, but his momma’s words convinced him.  He voted “aye” on the 19^th Amendment, shocking everyone, and a tumult followed on the floor of the Tennessee House.   The 19^th Amendment, certifying the right to vote for women, would now become the law of the land.

 

The final vote was 49-48 – ONE VOTE determined the fate of voting for women – ONE VOTE!  Having broken through this wall only led to confronting more walls – despite the 15^th Amendment, many Black men and women were denied the right to vote.  Native Americans, Asian-Americans, LatinX Americans had to claw and scrape their way to the vote, finally achieved in the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Or, so we thought – that act was eviscerated by the Supreme Court in 2013, so we are back, way back, in the parade. 

 

The fight for voting rights for everyone continues today.  We see it now in the voter suppression for 2020, so make a plan to vote and to get others registered and voting.  Following the 19^th Amendment, we have heard so often that “woman’s place is in the home,” but we have added “and in the House!”  It was clear then, and it is clear now that there were (and are) many roadblocks to voting.  When the 19^th Amendment passed in 1920, there were 10 weeks left until the presidential election of that year – about the same amount for us 100 years later.  The roadblocks remain – let us be like those dedicated women in Tennessee and hit the streets to make certain that the community votes.  It is as crucial as that vote on the hot August day in Tennessee in 1920.  Let us celebrate the passage of the 19^th Amendment, and let us now fight for its promise. 

 

"WE INTEND TO GETE THE VOTE...."

 “WE INTEND TO GET THE VOTE….”

 

            This week marks the 100^th anniversary of the ratification  of the 19^th Amendment which gave women the right to vote.  On August 18, 1920, the state of Tennessee became the 36^th state to ratify the 19^th Amendment, passing it by ONE vote.  I’ll have more on that process next week, when we celebrate the certification of the 19^th Amendment on August 26, 1920, by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby.  It had been a long, hard journey to that point, and still Black women were denied the vote in the South until 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

 

            As I wrote last week, the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in 1848 is seen as the beginning of organized efforts to gain the right to vote for women in the USA.  Some colonies had allowed women to vote (Massachusetts and New Jersey), but by 1807, all states denied the right of women to vote.  The work to obtain the right to vote was long and arduous.  A bill to allow women to vote was introduced in the Senate in 1866 but was defeated.  In 1869 Wyoming voted to give women the right to vote, as did several other Western states.  In 1872 Susan B. Anthony was allowed to register to vote in the Presidential election, and she was later arrested and convicted for voting in that election.  In 1875 the US Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that the US Constitution did not guarantee women (or anyone) the right to vote, despite the 15^th Amendment stating otherwise.  In 1878 the “Susan B. Anthony” Amendment was introduced into the Congress for the first time but was defeated there.

 

            As we are seeing now with the emergence of new leaders in the fight for racial justice, it would take a new generation of leaders to push through the passage of the 19^th Amendment.  There were many, but Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Harriet Stanton Blatch stand out.  And, as we are seeing now in the renewed Black Lives matter movement, it took millions of people galvanizing and organizing to get the needed changes.  They believed that more political pressure on state and federal leaders was needed in order to get the vote for women.  Paul and Burns went to Britain to learn under the Pankhurst family and others who were working there to get the right for women to vote.  Black women like Ida Wells and Mary Church Terrell were also working on the right to vote for women.  All joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association, though there was great tension over whether the 19^th Amendment would include Black women – the white women were afraid of alienating Southern white women, and the Black women had heard that story so many times!

 

            Burns, Paul, and Stanton Blatch began to raise the pressure in the early 1900’s.  Stanton Blatch believed that a state-by-state approach was the best, feeling that the Congress would never pass the Amendment.  Paul and Burns believed that they could not conduct such a state-by-state approach well.   In order to work on a federal, constitutional amendment, Paul formed the National Women’s Party (NWP), specifically designed to develop an amendment to the Constitution.  In 1913 they joined forces with Carrie Chapman Catt to form the first political mass protest in Washington, DC.  They gathered their supporters to march on March 3, the day before Woodrow Wilson was to be inaugurated as President.  There were tensions and struggles over whether to allow Black women to march in their state groups, or whether the Black women should be segregated to the back of the march.  Mary Church Terrell agreed to go to the back – Ida Wells did not.  They had many thousands of participants, and at one point, the march was broken up by white males.  The US Calvary was called in to restore order, and they finished the march.

 

            In January, 1917, Alice Paul and the NWP did another first – they began picketing the White House, demanding the right to vote for women.  Many of their allies felt that they were going too far, that it would alienate more people than persuade them.  What seems routine now was started by women seeking the vote.  Alice Paul and others pushed the envelope further – they managed to get arrested after the USA entered World War I in April, 1917.  Borrowing from tactics learned from the Pankhursts in Britain,  they began a hunger strike to force a vote on the amendment.  The authorities decided to force feed them instead of making martyrs for the movement.  Instead, it shocked the public, and the sympathy meter began to move.  All the while, Harriet Stanton Blatch and many others were working on the state levels. 

 

            On June 4, 1919 the Congress and the US Senate approved the 19^th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification.  The Amendment passed the US Senate by ONE vote, after a filibuster by Southern Democrats.  The vote in the Senate was 56-25, with 37 Republicans voting for it and 19 Democrats.  This would be an amendment that would squeak by – one vote in the Senate, one vote in Tennessee.  The passage of this 19^th Amendment, which has made such a difference in our democracy, is testimony to the combined power of political organizing, direct action, strong witness, and endurance.  It wasn’t perfect, but it is part of those steps needed to seek fulfillment of the great American ideal:  we hold these truths to be self-evident- that all people are created equal.  Next week on to Tennessee.

 

"THE SEEDS OF THE 19TH AMENDMENT"

 “THE SEEDS OF THE 19^TH AMENDMENT….”

 

            In the spring of 2009, Caroline and I went to visit our daughter Susan, who was living in Westfield, NY, while she did a theatrical internship at an internationally known puppet theater known as Das Puppenspiel.  Westfield was located directly on Lake Erie, but it was best known as the home of Welch’s grape juice.  When we had first arrived there in the late summer of 2008, I saw acres and acres of green plants that looked from afar like they were the cotton plants with which I had grown up.  I knew that cotton wouldn’t make it in this geography, so as I was wondering what they were, it dawned on me – grape arbors, aligned almost exactly like the rows of cotton plants that I knew so well from the Mississippi River delta.

 

            On this spring trip of 2009  we went to Seneca Falls, where the first convention for women’s rights was held in the United States in July, 1848.  Housed in the Women’s Rights National Historical Park is a powerful history of the women’s rights movement, especially in the 1800’s.  Nearby was the hull of the original building where the convention was held in Wesleyan Methodist Chapel – three brick walls were left. 

 

On this coolish New York day, you could almost see and hear the voices of the debate over whether to adopt the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which had been drafted a few days earlier by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott  (who would later accompany Mary Brown to Harper’s Ferry in 1859 to pick up the body of Brown’s husband John, who had been executed by the federal government because of his raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry).  Stanton and Mott first met in London, 1840, while they were attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention with their husbands.  That convention excluded women delegates, and  this denial helped strengthen their resolve to work for women’s rights and to hold a convention for that purpose.

 

            The gathering at Seneca Falls built on the pioneering work of many women who spoke and worked for equal rights for women:  Sojourner Truth, Angelina and  Sarah Grimke, Abby Kelley, Margaret Fuller, Victoria Woodhull, and others.   Its goal was to begin the work of developing legal and political rights for women in the United States and around the world.  It was a regional gathering and a white one – Frederick Douglass was the only African-American in attendance there.  Sojourner Truth was not there, Harriet Tubman was not there, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was not there.  This blindness and tension over the intersectionality of race and gender would plague and hurt the women’s rights movement for many decades. 

 

            This gathering at Seneca Falls is now seen as the official beginning of the women’s rights movement, a beginning that led to the passage of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution, whose 100^th anniversary will be celebrated later on this month.  Over the next couple of weeks, I will take a brief look at this history, noting the difficult fights, the internal struggles over the intersection of gender and race, the great successes, and the passage of the three steps in bringing voting rights to Black men in the 16^th Amendment, to white women in the 19^th Amendment, and then to Black women in the passage of Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Last week was the 55^th Anniversary of that Act, which ended neo-slavery in the country, but especially in the South. 

 

            The Seneca Falls Convention adapted a phrase from the Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men and women are created equal.”  They passed 10 resolutions unanimously in support of women’s rights, and the one contentious one was a resolution that affirmed voting rights for women.  It barely passed, aided by a fiery speech in support of it by Frederick Douglass.   But, its controversy at Seneca Falls would point to the difficulty of its passage.  It would be 72 years before white women (and some Black women) secured the right to vote in the 19^th Amendment.  Only one attendee at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was alive at the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920:  Charlotte Woodward Pierce.  

 

Its passage was a milestone, but for all the hard work that went into it, there was much work yet to be done.  It would be 45 more years before Black women were guaranteed the right to vote, and indeed that work continues.  In 2013, the US Supreme Court used the case of  Shelby (Alabama) v. Holder to strike down key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and we are still working to restore them.  If you think that voting is not much, just think of all the resistance that has been seen and continues to be seen – as John Lewis once put it, it is the only viable, non-violent weapon in a democracy.  We are seeing its importance in this year’s decisive November election.  In honor of Seneca Falls and all the women and men who have worked and fought and died for the vote, make sure that you are registered to vote for the November election – and commit to find 10 others who are not and to get them to register and to vote!