Cluny News: February 2020 Black History Month

Celebrating the Agents of Change

Have you seen these recent MOVIES?

Great action for the celebration of Black History Month

2020 Black History Month THEME

The year 2020 marks the centennial of the Nineteenth mendment and the culmination of the women’s suffrage movement. The year 2020 also marks the sesquicentennial of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) and the right of black men to the ballot after the Civil War.

The theme speaks, therefore, to the ongoing struggle on the part of both black men and black women for the right to vote. This theme has a rich and long history, which begins at the turn of the nineteenth century, i.e., in the era of the Early Republic, with the states’ passage of laws that democratized the vote for men while disfranchising free black men. Thus, even before the Civil War, black men petitioned their legislatures and the US Congress, seeking to be recognized as voters.

Tensions between abolitionists and women’s suffragists first surfaced in the aftermath of the Civil War, while black disfranchisement laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries undermined the guarantees in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for the great majority of southern blacks until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The important contribution of black suffragists occurred not only within the larger women’s movement, but within the larger black voting rights movement. Through voting-rights campaigns and legal suits from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s, African Americans made their voices heard as to the importance of the vote. Indeed the fight for black voting rights continues in the courts today. The theme of the vote should also include the rise of black elected and appointed officials at the local and national levels, campaigns for equal rights legislation, as well as the role of blacks in traditional and alternative political parties.

The Congressional Black Caucus PAC is collecting 10,000 signatures to save Social Security from Republican attacks. Sign our petition now and read why below:

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Dignity: A Grasp For The Enslaved

By Margaret Nacke, CSJ

The largest single sale of enslaved persons in U.S. History, the Great Slave Auction called the Weeping Time, was held in 1859 at the now-defunct Ten Broeck racetrack in Savannah, Georgia. Men, women, children, and infants were sold in the course of two days bringing an estimated $300,000 or 9 million dollars in today’s currency. Alarming though this may seem in the 21^st century, today’s technological sophistication allows one to engage in similar auctions on a global scale.

The internet is one of the greatest auction blocks, allowing for no borders to impede and broaden accessibility to saleable “human products.” Newborns are no exception as birth mothers, made vulnerable by poverty with nowhere to turn, sell themselves and their children. No country is immune to this assault on the dignity of persons that tears the social fabric of societies. Slavery has never died but continues its attempt to obliterate the dignity of persons.

The words of Pope Francis, “Human trafficking is a crime against humanity because it denies human dignity of the victim” and calling it a “wound in the humanity of those who endure it and those who commit it,” may fall on fallow ears overpowered by greed and pleasure.

Project IRENE (Illinois Religious Engaging in Nonviolent Endeavors), along with many other groups, are engaged in making a difference, counteracting forces contrary to personal dignity. A recent banner of this group reads “Building dignity and respect for the work that makes all other works possible.” This statement puts into perspective the criticalness of efforts to make a difference in lives, regardless of country, age, culture, religion, economic status, uplifting them to their rightful freedom and dignity.

When we are motivated by hope, each one of us can make that difference. In the Gospel according to Luke (12:18-21) Jesus said: “To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch of dough was leavened.” Each of us can be leaven for one another. From Christ we learn to be signs of hope, to give life to those in need whenever and whenever the encounter.