This past Sunday, before I sat down and waited to see what Sinners was going to be awarded and denied by the Academy, I received a Spill alert about Reverend Jamal Bryant apologizing for his ego bulimic purge of self-delusion, unilaterally asserting a national authority to declare a termination of the boycott against Target, a movement that he neither initiated nor orchestrated. Let me acknowledge that three Minnesotans Nekima Levy Armstrong, Monique Cullars-Doty and Jaylani Hussein are the brains, brawn and baton passers behind this initiative. A particular mention goes to Levy Armstrong and Cullars-Doty, two Black women who were the spark and the fuse that lit this protesting powder keg. Bryant was just running “fast” at his sermonizing with yet another retch and heave of patriarchal misappropriation.
Nonetheless, reading that alert set me on a stream of consciousness about other Black women who have been relegated by Black men (many of whom were also clerics), during the Civil Rights Movement and who also suffered the theft of credit and recognition due them. I thought about Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Dorothy Cotton, Septima Poinsette Clark and Daisy Bates – names seldom heard and mentioned in the annals of the ‘50s and ‘60s struggles.
My thoughts leapfrogged from that thought pad to the river bank of consideration of mothers. This happened because shortly before getting the aforementioned alert, I read an article about Mother’s Day in the U.K., which happened to be on the same Sunday I was waiting for Michael B. Jordan to acknowledge his mother, after having won an Oscar for Best Actor.
Continuing along that stream, I began thinking about a scene from Saving Private Ryan, when Mrs. Ryan, the mother of several sons killed in combat, collapses to the ground as she sees the approach of a military car and a priest coming to tell her that yet another son has died. Given the war of choice the President has elected to engage us in, I’ve been thinking about that seen a lot. In fact, I do so every time I learn of the loss of more U.S. military personnel in Iran.
This got me to thinking about Julia Ward Howe, a feminist, abolitionist and poet. She is the reason Mother’s Day exists in the United States and in other countries around the world. At the end of the Civil War, roughly 600,000 men had lost their lives in battle, men who were the sons of many mothers. Distraught and determined to prevent this from happening again, in 1870 Howe wrote “The Appeal to Motherhood Throughout the World”, later referred to as the Mother’s Day Proclamation. It is a declaration against war that, in part, reads:
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Howe traveled the world over, translating and delivering this poem to audiences of mothers wherever she went. Seven years after the Civil War ended, in 1872, she commenced the first ever Mother’s Day Celebration in Boston. It was a peace vigil – against war. Yes, Mother’s Day began as a war protest. The observance continued for decades thereafter.
It was on May 9, 1914, three years before the United States entered World War I, that President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation that officially made Mother’s Day a national holiday. When this happened, there was no mention of Howe, nor of her manifesto, nor of the many women who had gathered for decades protesting against war and for peace.
Now, Mother’s Day is a $35 billion bonanza for florists, restaurants, greeting card companies and gift retailers. Far removed from the commemoration of the day is the reason it began. To complete my thought, this Mother’s Day, as we again find ourselves a nation of mothers losing their children in battle, I ask that we give some consideration to why Howe started it. And Reverend Bryant, please, sit this one out.