The video of the New Orleans trip (December 30, 2006-January 6, 2007) is complete and available on DVD. Call or write for a viewing or a copy!
Here are this week's regular meetings:
Tuesday:
12 Noon Peace Studies; 1313 Harney, room 206
3 PM Peace with Justice Internship, MBSC
6:30 PM Tower Room Peace Expo Planning Meeting (students at UNO), (Save the Date for the Peace Expo: April 15)
8 PM Inclusive Spiritual Searchers, Jenkins Room (see below blog for details). whether you’re a conservative or a liberal Christian, Catholic, LDS, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or simply Agnostic—we welcome you as you search for your God with other questioning, spiritually focused young adults.
Wednesday: 6:30 PM Misquoting Jesus, St. Luke UMC, just south of 120th & Dodge. You’re welcome to join us at any session.
Thursday: Ally coordinating group, MBSC
12 Noon Responses to Intimate Partner Violence planning, MBSC, SPO
Tuesday: Jackson Katz on Campus 4 & 7 PM in the Cornhusker Room, MBSC
I invite you to give me a call or write for a meeting time!
Blog: The Real Rosa
Today I spent about an hour walking through the Nebraska Room at Milo Bail Student Center. It’s not a huge room, but it was full of photos, drawings and stories of people—African Americans people. These are the lives of people who have made a difference in America and the African American Community. (The rest of the week, there will be more diversity celebrations, so if you have time, drop in during the noon hour.)
One of the stories we often hear is that of Rosa Parks. She has been described by Garrison Keillor as a woman “who was not an activist. She was just a woman with groceries who was tired.”
Well, there’s more to the story than that. There’s a great book out there “The Impossible Will Take a Little While” by Paul Rogat Loeb. He has this little tidbit to share about Rosa:
By the time Rosa got on that bus, she “had by that time been a civil rights activist for twelve years, was the secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and act not alone but in convert with and on behalf of others. The summer before her arrest, shed’ taken a ten-day workshop and met with an older generation of civil rights activists at the Tennessee labor and civil rights center, Highlander Folk School, which is still going strong today. The first NAACP meeting that Parks attended addressed the issue of lynching, an all-American form of terrorism so accepted in the resp
ectable circles that gentlemen smoking cigars and ladies in the Sunday best allowed photos to be taken of themselves standing in front of black men being burned and hanged. )the pictures can be seen in all their horror at the National Civil Rights Museum, in Memphis.) Out of this black legacy and, more important, the years of struggle to overcome it, came the courage and determination of Parks and people like her—a community of like-minded souls….
Nothing cripples the will like isolation. By the same token, nothing buoys the spirit and fosters hope like the knowledge that others faced equal or greater challenges in the past and continued on to bequeath us a better world. Even in a seemingly losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another, and that person get a third, who could go on to change the world, or at least a small corner of it. Rosa Parks’ husband, Raymond, convinced her to attend her first NAACP meeting, the initial step on a path that brought her to that fateful day on the bus in Montgomery. But who got Raymond Parks involved? And why did that person take the trouble to do so? What experiences shaped their outlook forged their convictions? The links in any chain of influence are too numerous, to complex to trace. But being aware that such chains exist, that we can choose to join them, and that lasting change doesn’t occur in their absence, is one of the primary ways to sustain hope, especially when our actions seem too insignificant to amount to anything.” (p. 7)
Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus did not come by accident; nor did it come in isolation from other people. The story of Rosa Parks on the bus in Montgomery was the story of character and group support: the result of multiple pieces of history, hard work, determination, and the refusal of a group to continue to acquiesce to apartheid in America.
One of the pieces of faith in Christ (as I see it) is the importance of being in connection with other folks who are also on a journey. I agree with Loeb, though, that we need to be linked in a chain of hope for our world.
--Fred
Dr. Fred Richart
Campus Minister at UNO
for United Christian Ministries in Higher Education
(sponsoring churches: United Methodist, United Church
of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and Presbyterian)
frichart@cox.net
cell and office: 402-659-5795
blog is: unocampusministry.blogspot.com
