The next one will be January 8. All of Sojourners Social Justice groups are encouraged to meet after the service. If you’re new to the church, or simply haven’t attended any of these meetings yet, please feel free to drop in on one (or more!) that day.
The next regularly scheduled meeting of Sojourners Social Justice Groups is September 12 worship. These groups are open to anyone who would like to participate. If you’re new to the church or simply haven’t decided on a group yet, feel free to drop in on one or more of the meetings to find out what’s happening. This summer for Social Justice Sundays, we began inviting directors of various local agencies or organizations which we fund through our Service & Missions grants to join us for worship and to briefly address the congregation. We look forward to welcoming our second speaker in this series, Drene DeGood, Executive Director of the Alliance for Interfaith Ministries (AIM). All speakers are invited to stay for fellowship and the meetings after worship so that we can share more information about our respective social justice work.
Dr. Rosa Atkins, Superintendent of the Charlottesville Public Schools and Dr. Pamela Moran, Superintendent of Albemarle County School Division spoke to an enthusiastic group after the morning worship service on Sunday, May 16th, sponsored by the Racial Justice Social Action Group. This was a return engagement for both superintendents, a practice that has been in existence for a number of years. At least once each year, they have come to update Sojourners on what is happening in each school system.
They each talked about the impact of the budget cuts on their systems. It seems that Albemarle will be “hit harder” than the city of Charlottesville resulting in lost of some teachers and some programs. Classroom sizes will increase by one child in grades above 4th in the county.
Both Drs. Atkins and Moran spoke about the impact of technology on the world of education today. We must be able to expose students to the rapidly changing pace of technology and prepare them to explore and advance in “out of the box” thinking. Advances have been made in narrowing the much talked about achievement gap between black and white students. The importance of early childhood education, starting with classes for three years olds was felt to be the most important step that can be taken to change achievement gap statistics.
To the question about what can we, as citizens and Sojourners, do to support the school systems, the need for a strong consistent and constant education advocacy group was promulgated. The importance of public education needs to be frequently at the forefront of discussions in the community and regular support at times other than budget hearings or teacher cut-backs. The Education Action Group resulting from the Dialogue on Race was mentioned as a possible beginning of an advocacy group.
We thank Drs Atkins and Moran for their willingness to come to us on a Sunday morning and look forward to hearing from them again next year or before.
The next regularly scheduled meeting of Sojourners Social Justice Groups is June 6 after worship. These groups are open to anyone who would like to participate. If you’re new to the church or just haven’t picked a group yet, feel free to drop in on one or more of the meetings to find out what’s happening. You can check out details on this blog or on the Sojourners News bulletin board at church. Beginning June 6, on Social Justice Sundays, we’re inviting directors of various local agencies or organizations which we fund through our Service & Missions grants to join us for worship and to briefly address the congregation. We look forward to welcoming our first speaker, Cindy Stratton, a member of the Steering committee for the City’s Dialogue on Race, June 6. All speakers will be asked to stay for fellowship and the meetings after worship so that we can share more information about our respective social justice work.
At its meeting on September 17, the Sojourners Church Council voted to send the following letter to John O. Wynne, University Rector and chair of the search committee for the new president of the University of Virginia.
This letter grew out of the work of a group then called the University Community Racial Reconciliation Project, now renamed the University Community Action for Racial Equity. This group had written a letter to Mr. Wynne asking for issues of racial justice to be part of the discussion in the search for a new president. They welcomed signers from the community at large. Sojourners, however, decided to write its own letter, which was approved by and sent on behalf of our church council.
Upcoming symposium sponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies – The Problem of Punishment: Race, Inequality, and Justice on April 16 & 17, 2009. Keynote address by Angela Y. Davis, all events free and open to the public.
Organized by faculty members in the Departments of English (Deborah McDowell), History (Claudrena Harold) and Politics (Vesla Weaver), this multi-disciplinary symposium, sponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, will examine the historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural roots, as well as the myriad implications of the rise in incarceration in the United States. We briefly summarize the goals for the symposium and review crucial developments that serve as its motivation.
Due largely to several important policy changes connected to the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs,” the prison population has climbed steeply since the 1970s, an escalation resulting in the following developments:
The State of the Justice System
The trends outlined above were hastened by major policy changes affecting the ways in which the criminal justice system dealt with offenders before, during, and after sentencing. Punitive policies like mandatory minimums were passed largely without public debate. But while these statistics and the policy changes that led to their acceleration are among the most shocking developments in modern history, at best they have received uneven scholarly attention; at worst, they are routinely neglected in many fields: political science, economics, and psychology.
The Aim of the Symposium
The aim of this symposium, therefore, is to promote a serious, informed dialogue that will contribute to a growing national debate on the growth of the carceral state. We envision an intimate symposium featuring experts across the disciplines as well as policy practitioners. We will convene on the first day of the symposium with two panels focusing specifically on exploring the causes of the growth of the carceral state and growing racial disparities within it. The opening panel will consider the theoretical and historical foundations of rising imprisonment and shifting policy choices. The second will explore the politics of punishment and race. Following this session Angela Davis (author most recently of Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire and Are Prisons Obsolete?) will deliver a keynote address. On Friday, April 17, we will shift our attention to research that evaluates the consequences and implications of the rise in imprisonment. In these three panels, scholars will focus on the myriad implications of rising prison rates for forms of economic, social, and political exclusion in the United States.
Feb. 12, 2009, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, the NAACP turned 100 years old — just a few weeks after Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States. In the Spring of 2000 another milestone was celebrated with the publication of the book, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, edited by Julian Bond, Chairman of the Board of the NAACP and Sondra Kathryn Wilson, the executor of James Weldon Johnson’s literary estate in celebration of the 100th birthday of the song of the same name. The book is a collection of over 100 essays by prominent African Americans offering their thoughts about the songs’ impact on them.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing”, adopted by the NAACP as “The Negro National Anthem” in 1919, was originally written as a poem. It was publicly performed in 1900 by 500 schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, FL where James Weldon Johnson — poet, songwriter, and lawyer — was the Principal. The school was celebrating Lincoln’s birthday and Johnson wrote the words to introduce their honored guest speaker, Booker T. Washington. Five years later, the poem was set to music by John Rosamond Johnson, James’ brother, and it became a way for African Americans to demonstrate their courage, patriotism, and hope for the future.
James Weldon Johnson’s face was very familiar at the NY Headquarters of the NAACP in the 1920’s when he was the Executive Secretary. He worked alongside other well-known African Americans: W.E.B. DuBois, the editor of the organizations’ Crisis magazine and Langston Hughes, who wrote the first history of the NAACP. Julian Bond, as a young student, was also a member of the NAACP and led the activist Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He returned to the organization in 1998 as the Chairman of the board.
Sojourners – February 22, 2009
Questions: What does the election of Barack Obama mean to you personally, and how does it challenge our work in racial justice at Sojourners? Are we too “comfortable” at Sojourners, given the fact that we “love’ everybody?
The election of Barack Obama means this to me personally.
HOPE. One of the best-loved campaign pictures, and my favorite, is the one in black and red on which is written, “HOPE.”
Hope for many things-but especially hope for change for the injustices and inequalities experienced by African-Americans since they were first brought here in chains.
As a little girl in racist Alabama, I wondered why we called our maid, “Susie”, instead of Mrs. Kemp. All polite southern children referred to anyone older than they as Mr., Mrs. or Miss.
I wondered why my dad rebuked me for saying, “Yes, Sir” to an elderly dignified man riding by our country home on a mule. Dad said, “Never call an N—– sir.”
I wondered why my black playmate called me Miss Dell but I referred to her without the “Miss”.
When I went to college in Chicago, I often wrote Susie, and I always addressed the envelopes, “Mrs. Susie Kemp.” Perhaps with the hope that someday she would be treated with the respect of her white peers.
You can imagine my thrill at being able to say “President Barack Obama” to a partly African-American.
This poem was read by Allison Linney at Sojourners United Church of Christ on Sunday, February 22nd. It was written by her brother, the Reverend George E. Linney, III on January 21, 2009, a day after a watershed moment in our history, the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America.
A plea to 44 and me
Some said your inaugural words were condescending
I say prophetic
Your words were a call to service
A call to take responsibility
Critics said there was no memorable line,
like
Ask not what your country…
or
We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.
But you encapsulated both JFK and FDR when you charged me to fight poverty
I heard you charge me to educate the poor
Who are the poor?
In my world
they are children
they are boys of color
and while everyone around me wonders when will I arrive
When will George take a Church of his own? Why?
So I can give up teaching and learning from the least of these,
adolescent boys who the world says are more likely to obsess over Wiis and Weapons?
No, they are going to school by God and they are learning on my watch
And I’m learning from them
Soaking up all they have to teach me
Will all your political goals be achieved?
Probably not. But we can do some things—end this war and feed the poor. Yes We Can. That’s a start and if it is all we do, I’d be proud of these eight years.
Will the world ever be set to rights?
Setting the world to rights is the sole role of the Chosen One and you’re not Him.
But you are both a prophet and a leader. In you I see a rare combo of a King and a Judge. Stay faithful to both of these gifts. Don’t cynically become one at the expense of the other.
Stay radical. That does not mean simply stay on the Left, no, stay radical. Remain prophetic, inspire us, lead us, plea that each one of us takes action and does our part.
There’s a knock at the door of humanity right now and it feels like midnight is the hour
or even later
maybe 4am
the darkest hour
but it is always darkest before the light
As the martyr said, we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
The arc of light is bending toward and even breaking on the shores of the horizon
Towards a time when things will be better
Where the poor will have rights and food and care
Where war will be no more
And for those who said there was no line for our memories, try,
With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come.
Valley Forge was a dark time, darker even than now, and they got back in the boat. They crossed over. That line reminds me of the sea that’s Red. We face fears. We get back in the boat or we cross with walls of water on both sides.
Thank you Mr. President.
Rev. Marcus R. Ingram
February 22, 2009
Sojourners United Church of Christ
Does the election of Barack Obama usher in a new era of race relations, and how is it related to our faith?
The headlines around the world have been stunning – “Change Has Come,” “A New Dawn,” “Obama cambio la historia,” “A Dream Fulfilled,” and “Danke, Mr. President.” Without doubt, the candidacy and election of President Barack Obama has elevated American political consciousness in ways that most of us have never seen in our lifetimes. Our President’s international heritage and Kenyan ancestry invites a larger community into conversation unlike any other leader of the United States.
While history will likely tell the story of a little-known community activist who transferred his organizing skill onto a national political stage, the narrative will be incomplete if it does not chronicle the ways in which our racial consciousness has been unmasked, unnerved, and unsettled. From critiques in the African American community that inquire, “Is this Ivy-League educated, multi-racial politician ‘Black enough’?” to the fear-inducing “You know his pastor is a radical, anti-American Liberation Theologian,” President Barack Obama has at least kindled a discourse on race that has enlightened some, enraged others, and, I believe, enthralled us all.
Never once has our new President referred to himself as the “Black candidate,” yet even the most “progressive” of us have seen him as such. In the same breath that many of us want to celebrate the election of the first African American President of the United States of America, we also want to make this historic election an example of how race has been transcended. While I am not resistant to a “both-and” perspective, this seeming contradiction potentially points to a tendency in American (and Western) culture to be both reductionist and revisionist. It is remarkable to imagine what generations after us will think when they scroll through the photos of our country’s presidents and arrive at the early twenty first century. Astute historians will certainly speak about the powerful intersection of technology with grassroots activism that transitioned from being mocked, to a, if not, the defining factor in the victory of President Obama. But, many more will posture about what it meant for America to elect its first non-white president.