October 12, 2016
Page 7
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O PINION
Honoring a Warrior for Justice and Equality for All
Courageous
Sojourner Truth
M arian W right e delMan
I was recently deeply
honored to be asked by
Navy Secretary Ray Ma-
bus to serve as sponsor
for a Navy ship being
named for Sojourner
Truth, my lifelong hero-
ine and North Star in the
struggle for freedom, equality and
justice in our land.
This ship will join others in the
John Lewis-class of ships named
after civil and human rights lead-
ers. The lead ship in the class hon-
ors iconic civil rights activist and
Congressman John Lewis, D-Ga.
Other Lewis-class ships honor
Senator and Navy veteran Rob-
ert F. Kennedy; gay rights activ-
ist and Navy diver Harvey Milk;
19th-century suffragist Lucy
Stone; and the great Supreme
Court Justice Earl Warren. Navy
Secretary Mabus, the former gov-
ernor of Mississippi, had previ-
ously announced other ships hon-
oring labor rights and farm worker
organizer and Navy veteran Ce-
sar Chavez and Mississippi civil
rights leader and martyr Medgar
by
Evers.
I am so grateful to Secretary
Mabus for his commitment to
reflecting the inclusiveness of
American society and recognizing
each of these leaders’
extraordinary contribu-
tions to closing the gap
between our nation’s
creed and deed.
Sojourner Truth was
a brilliant but allegedly
illiterate slave wom-
an, a great orator and a powerful
presence who possessed unbeliev-
able courage and perseverance in
standing up for justice as a black
woman.
She challenged the racial and
gender caste system of slavery by
suing for the return of a son sold
away from her. She got thrown
off Washington, D.C. streetcars
but kept getting back on until
they changed the rules and let
her ride. She stood up with fi-
ery eloquence to opponents and
threatening crowds who tried to
stop her from speaking. When a
hostile White man told her that
the hall where she was scheduled
to appear would be burnt down
if she spoke, she replied, “Then
I will speak to the ashes.” When
taunted while speaking in favor
of women’s rights by some white
men who asked if she was really
a woman, she bared her breasts
and allegedly famously retorted,
“Ain’t I a woman?,” detailing the
back-breaking double burden of
slavery’s work and childbearing
she had endured. When heckled
by a white man in her audience
who said he didn’t care anymore
about her antislavery talk than for
an old flea bite, she snapped back,
“Then the Lord willing, I’ll keep
you scratching.”
Scholar Carleton Mabee tells us
a bit more about how in 1865, one
year after visiting President Abra-
ham Lincoln in the White House,
Sojourner Truth determined to de-
segregate the segregated horse car
system in Washington, D.C. She
was working with freed slaves in
Washington at the time and was
often ignored by drivers when she
tried to get them to stop.
“One day, in 1865, Truth sig-
naled a car to stop,” Mabee said.
“When it did not, she ran after it
yelling. The conductor kept ring-
ing his bell so that he could pre-
tend he had not heard her. When
at last the conductor had to stop
the car to take on White passen-
gers, Truth also climbed into the
car, scolding the conductor: ‘It’s
Black Youth and Elusive Freedom
Remembering
my brother’s
struggle
K areen C urrey
This
summer
brought too many
new videos of black
men — Alton Ster-
ling in Baton Rouge, Phillando
Castile in a St. Paul suburb, Ter-
rence Crutcher in Tulsa, Okla-
homa — losing their lives at the
hands of police officers.
As these videos circulated, I
found myself crying new tears.
Yet these new tears are filled with
old memories.
At the age of 11, I cried for my
brother for the first time.
He was 16 and had just bought
his first car. He so enjoyed the
freedom that came with it. But on
his first day driving it to school,
police stopped my brother and
searched his car. My mother and
I happened to be on our way
home when we saw my brother
sitting on the curb as police went
through his belongings.
I wept.
That wouldn’t be the only time
by
police stopped my brother. My
mother and I would see my broth-
er sitting on the side of the road
multiple times. He was never
charged or convicted of any
crimes during these stops.
My brother would sur-
vive all these encounters. I
now think back on how for-
tunate he was.
But this continuous
stream of searches — a ridicule of
my brother’s freedom — changed
how he viewed himself and how
our community viewed him.
My brother no longer felt he
had either the freedom or the
power to assert his right to drive.
Our neighbors, meanwhile, as-
sumed that he must be guilty of
some crime, and questioned my
mother about why he was getting
pulled over.
The police have the power to
protect us as citizens. But my
brother’s story demonstrates how
the abuse of that power can strip
the freedom and innocence from
of a free and innocent young man.
Stories like my brother’s hap-
pen all the time. They seldom
make national news, but their
negative impact is lasting. That’s
why we need to heal and empow-
er our young black boys and girls.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. un-
derstood that the sorts of indigni-
ties heaped upon my brother can
“cause individuals to feel that
they have no other alternative
than to engage in violent rebel-
lions to get attention.”
“I must say,” Dr. King added,
“that a riot is the language of the
unheard.”
In Ferguson, in Baltimore, in
Charlotte, and all across the na-
tion, we’ve seen our youth take
to the streets in protest after the
deaths of countless black men
and women in the presence of
police.
Those young people showed
their frustration with a criminal
justice system that can take a per-
son’s life without any appropriate
accountability, punishment, or
justice served.
But our youth need opportuni-
ties to share their stories.
Empowering them can offer a
loudspeaker to the unheard, like
it did during the Civil Rights
Movement, when student led sit-
ins fostered the creation of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee.
Our youth need the tools to de-
a shame to make a lady run so.’”
The Sojourner Truth Institute
says: “Sojourner Truth, who rode
the horse car that day‚ and many
horse cars afterward, sat where
she pleased; not where she was
told. Her determination followed
a lifetime of going where angels,
and her contemporaries, often
feared to tread.” We need the same
determination today.
Our nation is still struggling
mightily to live up to its creed
enunciated in the Declaration of
Independence and overcome its
huge birth defects that still plague
us in the implementation of our
political and economic system:
Native American genocide, slav-
ery, and exclusion of all women
and non-propertied men, includ-
ing white men, from America’s
political process.
We have come a very long way
but these deep-seated cultural, ra-
cial, economic and gender imped-
iments to a just union challenge
us still. We must remain vigilant
in rooting them out and deter-
mined to move forward and not
backwards if we are to become a
greater nation with an opportuni-
ty to show the majority non-white
world a living democracy.
Every day I wear two pendants
velop solutions, make real chang-
es in their communities, and be-
come future leaders, like those
who led the more recent move-
ment in Curtis Bay to stop the
building of a polluting garbage
incinerator..
Providing our youth with op-
portunities to make an impact
allows them a chance at that elu-
sive freedom.
Kareen Currey is a New Econ-
omy Maryland Fellow at the In-
stitute for Policy Studies. Distrib-
uted by OtherWords.org.
around my neck with the portraits
of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner
Truth. When I think I’m having
a hard day, I just touch them, re-
member their challenges, get up
and keep going.
Inscribed on the back of So-
journer Truth’s image are these
words: “If women want any rights
more than they’s got, why don’t
they just take them, and not be
talking about it.” Those are our
marching orders for building an
America where none of our chil-
dren, including our daughters and
granddaughters, face a ceiling on
who they can become and what
they can achieve.
Marian Wright Edelman is
President of the Children’s De-
fense Fund.
Letter to the Editor
Just Because
I’m Black
Just because I’m black
I’m not ghetto
I’m not poor
I’m not stupid
Just because I’m black
I don’t steal
I’m not bad
And I don’t rob people
Just because I’m black
It doesn’t mean I can’t play fair
Or even that I’m a fighter
Just because I black
Why do you hate me?
What did I do to you?
Why do you mess with me?
-- Jalen Mekhi Craig,
age 11,
Boise-Eliot/Humboldt
Elementary
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Patrick John Sweeney, P.C.
Patrick John Sweeney
Attorney at Law
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