We learned hard truths in 2023. Let’s do better in 2024.
By Amy Miller
In 2023 it feels like we crawled out of one hole and into another. Covid did not dictate our lives so much, finally. My son began his last year of college and my daughter resumed her post-college backpacking adventures three years delayed. So this year, it felt like we were back. But what did we get back to?
The war in Ukraine, which has horrified us since early 2022, was suddenly given a back seat when worldwide tragedy unfolded in the Middle East and national tragedy made its shocking but some say inevitable appearance in Maine with the shooting death of 18 people in Lewiston.
It is impossible to reflect on the past year without addressing the catastrophe in Israel and Gaza, a heartbreaking global crisis that has shredded coalitions and community in our country. I have read and thought and talked about this over the weeks since Oct. 7. I have gone to discussion groups and listened to podcasts. My biggest takeaway is I cannot know how I would act, or feel, if I lived in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank, whether I was Jewish, Muslim or Christian.
Too many generous, caring people are at odds But today, in the wake of Oct. 7, they are saying different things, online and to each other. Today, in the aftermath of too much death, they are focused on different tragedies. I am not close enough to the crises unfolding to know where I would stand if I were among them. I can try to put myself in someone else’s shoes, but I never will have lived the violence, or sadness, or fears that have etched someone else’s soul.
When former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was asked in 2008 if he would still oppose the death penalty if his wife were raped, his intellectual response was that, yes, he would continue to oppose capital punishment. Some judged him for this cold reaction. But this was an intellectual response to a theoretical question. Of course, Dukakis couldn’t know what he would feel in reality if his wife were raped.
Our society gives the responsibility of punishment to a court and not to a victim for just this reason. We must acknowledge how little we know about how we ourselves would act. Not just in the Middle East, but everywhere we turn, this admission might help us to stop hating, maybe even stop judging. This is the work of 2024.
By Guy Trammell Jr.
On February 25, 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi filled the unexpired term of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the U.S. Senate. Revels was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. His term lasted until March 13, 1871, just over a year.In 1874, Mississippi elected Blanche K. Bruce to the U.S. Senate, the first African American to serve a full six-year term, 1875 to 1881. He condemned efforts to overturn African American voting rights. Concerning the effects of denying voting rights, he wrote: “The colored man will at once sink back to the status he held in 1865 − free in name but not in fact.”
In 2023, Alabama’s Legislature defied a directive from the U.S. Supreme Court to redraw the state’s congressional districts map so that African Americans, now 26% of Alabama’s population, would have an opportunity to elect two of the state’s seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rep. Terri Sewell of Congressional District 7 is the first African American woman representing Alabama in Congress. A federal court this year hired a special master to create three district maps. The map selected defines a Congressional District 2 that includes 48.7% Black voters. This action created the historically significant possibility of there being a second African American from Alabama in Congress.
In 1894, Josephine Beall Willson, the first Black teacher in Cleveland, Ohio’s school system, organized the National Organization of Afro-American Women to promote Black women’s interests. At the 1895 convention of the National Association of Colored Women, she became the first woman presenting a resolution to establish Negro History Day. Her counsel at the 1896 National Federation of Afro-American Women’s convention caused the Black women’s organizations to merge, forming the National Association of Colored Women. She served as NACW vice president and editor for the “NACW National Notes” magazine. She served as Tuskegee University’s Lady Principal from 1899 to 1902, and because she was part of Booker T. Washington’s inner circle, Bruce Street, one block from Greenwood’s Tuskegee Institute Post Office, was named in her honor.
As a gift to all those who have fought for the right to vote and those who were killed fighting for voting rights, we voters in all 13 District 2 counties should cast our ballots in 2024!