Latest news with #FrederickDouglass
Irish Independent
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Independent
Only those with ‘strong and enduring connections' to Wexford will have plaques erected in their honour
Due to a 'high level of demand' the Wexford Borough District (WBD) has created a set of procedures and policies for those who wish to have plaques erected in public spaces. Noting that there is often an 'emotive nature' to requests where people are recently deceased, the WBD has stated that there is nonetheless a 'need to ensure that a proliferation of plaques does not detract from the wider amenity and enjoyment of public spaces'. Asking that all proposals be officially submitted in writing, the WBD said a number of criteria need to be met before an application will be considered. 'The person must have been born or lived in the Wexford Borough District or have had strong and/or enduring connections with the Borough district,' it says in its Procedures and Policy Document. 'The person must have made a unique and outstanding contribution to the life or history of the Wexford Borough through outstanding achievement, distinctive service or significant community contributions. 'In the case of an event to be commemorated it must have occurred in the WBD and it will have to have occurred at least 50 years previously, unless it is of extraordinary and long-lasting consequence to the town.' Under the new procedures and policies, applications to commemorate living persons 'will not be considered' and nominees will have to have died at least 20 years previously. While all costs associated with the fabrication and maintenance of the plaques will be borne by the proposer, WBD will undertake to install any plaques. At the May meeting of the WBD, Councillor Tom Forde requested a slight amendment to the document. 'The criteria that they must have been born or have a long-lasting connection to the district, how rigid is that going to be?' he asked. 'We had a campaign to have a plaque of Frederick Douglass erected at the Arts Centre because he visited Wexford during The Famine, there was great interest in it afterwards. Figures like that who weren't born here or have an enduring connection, but were great historical figures, should be honoured.' In addition to that amendment, Cllr Leonard Kelly asked that QR codes become part of any new plaques in the district so that those viewing the plaques could learn more about the figure or event in question.
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Former Harvard president urges people to ‘speak out' against threats to US democracy
A recent former president of Harvard University urged people to 'speak out' in defense of 'foundational threats' to values such as freedom, autonomy and democracy in the US, as those whose deaths for such causes in war were being honored on Memorial Day. Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, also warned on Monday of US constitutional checks and the rule of law being 'at risk' under the current administration, even as Donald Trump issued a fresh threat against the elite university as it seeks to repel his assaults on its independence and funding. 'We are being asked not to charge into … artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which [the US civil war dead] gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?' Faust wrote in a guest opinion essay for the New York Times. She highlighted, in particular, the principles fought and died for by Union soldiers in the US civil war and the roles played by assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and leading Black civil rights leader of the 19th century. 'We must honor these men,' she wrote. Faust, who led Harvard between 2007 and 2018 and still teaches there, did not mention the US president by name but she referred to his position and made a direct link between the civil war and now. Noting that about 2.7 million men, mostly volunteers, in 1861-1865 'took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth', she went on to warn: 'Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires.' Faust said that Lincoln regarded the Confederacy's split from the Union, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery and evade federal government intervention, as a 'direct assault' on government by the majority 'held in restraint' by constitutional checks. 'Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders,' she wrote in her essay. Critics of Trump lament congressional Republicans' acquiescence to the president's expansions of his authority and challenges to constitutional constraints, Democrats' lackluster resistance, and the administration's defiance of court orders over various anti-immigration extremes and partisan firings of federal officials and watchdogs without cause. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly accused Harvard of antisemitism and bias against Jewish students and attacked its efforts towards greater diversity on campus, and the administration has further demanded cooperation with federal immigration authorities, while harnessing federal powers to try to punish the university. Last Friday, Harvard sued prominent government departments and cabinet secretaries for what it said was a 'blatant violation' of the US constitution when the Trump administration announced it would revoke federal permission for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution to enroll international students. A federal judge issued an injunction within hours, temporarily blocking such a ban. Harvard had previously sued in April over what it said was Trump's attempt to 'gain control of academic decision-making' at the university and the administration's threat to review about $9bn in federal funding. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion On Monday, Trump posted on his social media platform: 'I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,' adding: 'What a great investment that would be for the USA.' By Monday afternoon the president had not followed up with action or further explanation or statements. Harvard's current president, Alan Garber, who is Jewish, has called the Trump demands 'illegal' and said the administration was trying 'to control whom we hire and what we teach'. Faust, a historian and research professor at Harvard, who was also its first president to have been raised in the US south, concluded her essay by acknowledging that those who fought in the US civil war did, in fact, save the nation and subsequently gave opportunities to the generations that followed. 'They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future,' she wrote, adding that 'we possess a reciprocal obligation to the past' and that 'we must not squander what they bequeathed to us'.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
We Are Not Being Asked to Run Into Cannon Fire. We Just Need to Speak Up.
Frederick Douglass thought Decoration Day — the original name for Memorial Day — was the nation's most significant holiday. On May 30, 1871, the day's fourth annual observance, he honored the unknown Union dead at Arlington National Cemetery, addressing President Grant, members of his cabinet and a crowd of dignitaries surrounded by graves adorned with spring flowers. The Civil War's losses were still raw, and the presence of the conflict's victorious commander at the Arlington property that was once the home of Robert E. Lee, the recently deceased rebel general, could only have deepened the war's shadow. Yet Douglass worried that the lives and purposes of the approximately 400,000 Northern soldiers who died in the war and even the meaning of the war itself might be forgotten. If the nation did not keep the memory of the conflict alive, he implored, 'I ask in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?' The Union dead must not be honored only for their bravery or their sacrifice, he insisted. It mattered what they died for. It mattered what the nation chose to remember. 'They died for their country. … They died for their country,' Douglass repeated. They had fought against the 'hell-black system of human bondage' and for a nation that embodied 'the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world.' Americans must not forget that this was why the dead had laid down their lives in numbers no one had anticipated or could even have imagined. Decoration Day honored those who had fought for the promise of America — the 'new birth of freedom' that Lincoln envisioned in his Gettysburg Address, delivered to dedicate a soldiers' cemetery while the conflict still raged. Eight years later, Douglass echoed the words of a president who had himself become a casualty of the war. Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers had died to defend and preserve what the president described in 1863 as a nation 'conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.' Douglass devoted the remainder of his life to ensuring those men did not die in vain. Decoration Day gradually assumed a firm place in the calendar of national celebrations. The commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a politically powerful organization of Union veterans, first proclaimed the observance in 1868. By 1890, all the Union states had officially adopted it. In the aftermath of World War I, it came to encompass the dead of all American wars. In 1967 Congress changed its name to Memorial Day, and four years later, as part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moved its date from May 30 to the last Monday of the month, to create a three-day weekend. Somewhere along the way Memorial Day came to be celebrated by many as the start date for summer, a holiday to spend at the beach, not to reflect on history, decorate graves or honor the dead. 'What shall men remember?' Douglass asked. We need this year more than ever to be reminded of the meaning of the day. At a moment of national crisis that is frequently compared to the divisiveness and destructiveness of the Civil War era, we should look anew at the responsibilities Douglass and Lincoln handed down to us. Between 1861 and 1865, some 2.7 million men, almost all volunteers, took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth. Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires. Yet in 1861, ordinary men from even the remotest corners of the Union risked their lives because they believed, as Lincoln articulated for us all, that 'government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.' Lincoln regarded secession as lawless, as a direct assault upon the principle that defined the American nation: the belief in a government of 'a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations.' Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders. The 'new birth of freedom' Lincoln promised in the Gettysburg Address all but faded with the overturning of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white supremacy in the era of Jim Crow. Only a century later, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, did the United States at last fully commit itself to multiracial democracy and the war's emancipationist vision. But even this belated progress is now being reversed with voter suppression efforts, challenges to the 14th Amendment's establishment of birthright citizenship and the evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, most recently with an executive order abandoning the regulations that have been central to its enforcement. The unfinished work of freedom seems to be in full-throttle reverse. Douglass invoked the 'eloquence' of the dead. We should listen to them. As a historian, I have read dozens of these men's letters and diaries, windows into why they fought, into what and whom they loved and what they hoped for at the end of a war they knew they might not survive. Together they did save the Union, the nation that has given me and so many others opportunities that the war-born imperative of ever-expanding freedom has offered. These men made our lives possible. They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future. We possess a reciprocal obligation to the past. We must not squander what they bequeathed to us. This debt and this duty should be at the forefront of our minds this Memorial Day. We must honor these men, their bravery, their sacrifice, and especially their purposes. We are being asked not to charge into a hail of Minié balls and artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Trump's cultural overhaul throttles local arts, humanities programs nationwide
For 60 years, Boston's Museum of African American History has transported people to the past, letting visitors to a 200-year-old meeting house see where abolitionists like Frederick Douglass spoke and walk through halls where young Black soldiers once rallied to fight in the Civil War. But recently, the museum's history programs for schoolchildren were put at risk after the Trump administration canceled its federal grant, saying in a letter that the funding 'no longer serves the interest of the United States.' 'I will forever remember that line,' the museum's director, Dr. Noelle Trent, told CNN.'We were very much embedded into key moments of this country's history. How is that not of interest to the United States and the American people?' The museum had won a $500,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, one of the agencies at the center of President Donald Trump's cultural overhaul, to build its capacity to support school trips and educational programs. Now, the museum is planning for a future without the funds, Trent said. In Washington, Trump has forged ahead with efforts to exert control over which cultural pursuits the government backs, from taking the reins of the Kennedy Center to targeting 'improper ideology' at the Smithsonian. But his administration's push to align federal support with his cultural agenda – and combat what he sees as 'woke' ideology and 'anti-American propaganda'– has extended beyond the nation's capital. It has left museums like the Museum of African American History in Boston as well as libraries, archival projects, arts programs, and film festivals reeling after the IMLS and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities canceled tens of millions of dollars in federal grants. Trump, who has promised to scale back the size of the federal government, has asked Congress to eliminate the agencies. If Congress grants his request, it will amount to an unprecedented gutting of federal support for arts and humanities. The National Endowment for the Arts helps fund everything from free music and theater programs to film festivals and literary magazines. The National Endowment for the Humanities supports research, historic sites, book programs, and museum exhibits. And the IMLS, which Trump deemed 'unnecessary' bureaucracy in March and ordered 'eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,' pays for job training programs, interlibrary loans, and free e-book and audiobook services for libraries in rural areas. Several lawsuits across the country are challenging how the Trump administration is gutting or overhauling the grant programs at IMLS, NEA and NEH. The challengers have prevailed in some of the cases, but the administration is seeking to reverse the rulings against it. The African American history museum in Boston received a letter from IMLS on Wednesday indicating that the agency will adhere to a court order earlier this month from a federal judge in Rhode Island requiring it to reinstate grants. However, the reinstatement of the grant is contingent on an appeal, which is pending, the letter said. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has touted some of the cuts on social media, declaring that NEH grants will be 'merit-based and awarded to non-DEI, pro-America causes' going forward. A lawsuit filed by the American Historical Association and other groups alleges that two DOGE employees 'demanded lists of open NEH grants and then indiscriminately terminated the vast majority of the grants.' Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have long argued that arts and humanities programs shouldn't receive taxpayer money because they have enough financial support from private sources. The Trump administration has already started to redirect federal funding towards cultural initiatives the president backs. A portion of canceled NEH funds will help pay for The National Garden of Heroes, a sculpture garden Trump first floated in 2020. Slated to be completed in time for the nation's 250th anniversary next year, it will feature '250 great individuals from America's past,' according to a release. 'We're going to be honoring our heroes, honoring the greatest people from our country. We're not going to be tearing down. We're going to be building up,' Trump said in February. The IMLS, NEA and NEH did not respond to a request for comment on this story. As the Trump administration shifts its priorities, arts advocates say programming for children is at risk. In Nebraska, String Sprouts, a 'no-to-low-cost' music education program hosted by the Omaha Conservatory of Music, had received an NEA grant for a decade. Now, the group may be forced to scale back the number of classes it offers, according to Neidy Hess, the conservatory communication's manager. In New York, Opera on Tap's Playground Opera program, which immerses students in low-income communities in production and performance, will also have to be dialed back without federal support, co-founder and general director Anne Hiatt told CNN. Meanwhile, the South Dakota Humanities Council lost $950,000, or 73% of its total budget. While it will be able to continue some programming, it may have to stop its Young Reader Program, which provides free books to third-graders, said the council's executive director, Christina Oey. Oey's group is one of the 56 councils across the country that saw their general operating and support grants slashed in April. She said the National Garden of Heroes project won't have the same kind of reach as the programs and events councils put on, particularly in rural communities. 'Yes, a monument is educational. It can provide learning opportunities, but you have to travel to that. I mean, I can attest to that in South Dakota: Mount Rushmore is five and a half hours away from me, right?' she said. 'If you fund the humanities, you also fund programming that can change, that can travel, that can be in your community.' While South Dakota Humanities Council has received some emergency funding from the Mellon Foundation, a private foundation for the arts and humanities, some councils that are more reliant on federal funds say they could close if Congress grants Trump's proposal to gut the NEH. National History Day, a nonprofit that hosts a nationwide competition for students in grades 6-12 to present their own historical research projects, may not have as many participants without federal support, executive director Cathy Gorn said. 'Kids, when they study history effectively, they learn empathy, and we really need a whole lot more of that in this country, in this world,' Gorn said. 'And so, losing this opportunity is a real crisis for American education. For Trent, the museum director in Boston, the impact of the Trump administration is more than federal funding cuts. She said corporate support started drying up after the president took office, a trend she blames partly on his efforts to quash diversity, equity and inclusion programs. When asked why taxpayer dollars should go to museums like the one she leads, Trent said they make communities unique and leave a positive impact on visitors. 'There are places all across this great country, that have really great programs, that have qualitatively changed to peoples lives,' she explained. On a recent trip to the museum, seventh grader Excel Alabi found herself moved by the stories about young people around her age fighting to end slavery in the Civil War. 'They were fighting for us. I think that's really beautiful,' she told CNN. 'When I was starting school, it was just like 'People are going to war to fight for rights.' I didn't know that it was teenagers trying to fight for their families too.' 'It's important for kids to learn history because it's just such a big impact on what we've been through,' she added. 'I think we should face those tough subjects because those tough subjects are the reason why we're here.' CNN's Tierney Sneed and Emily Condon contributed to this report.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Nottoway dishonored my enslaved ancestors. Why I still hated to see it destroyed.
With its 200 windows and 165 doors fashioned by enslaved craftsmen and put in place with enslaved labor, Louisiana's Nottoway Plantation was the South's largest antebellum mansion, or 'big house.' It was also a place that tour guides infamously sold a romanticized and sanitized version of plantation life about, and for generations, those who ran the plantation hosted weddings, graduations and school field trips where Black schoolchildren and their parents often felt diminished and alienated. As The Associated Press has noted, Nottoway 'makes no mention of enslaved former inhabitants on its website.' A fire on Thursday that destroyed Nottoway's big house led to a predictable response. Some Black people posted selfies presumably taken at Nottoway that showed the burning house behind them. People shared memes that added the images of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, uncharacteristically grinning, to photos of the mansion on fire. Other memes showed Black people enjoying an outdoor cookout with the burning house in the background. 'We're very devastated, we're upset, we're sad,' Dan Dyess, a co-owner with his wife of the plantation resort, told The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. 'We put a lot of time, effort and money to developing this property.' Still, after the fire, some voices wryly expressed that all such sites should burn. Simultaneously, some white people wistfully mourned an irreplaceable architectural gem and moment in American — read Southern — grandeur and responded to the celebrations of the fire as an assault on their 'heritage,' the same way many responded in 2017 to the removal of Confederate monuments downriver in New Orleans. I'm not mourning in the same way that those embracing myths of the 'Lost Cause' and the idea of 'moonlight and magnolias' are, but I'm mourning the loss of another opportunity to teach about the history of enslavement. Our material history, including at places such as Nottoway, has messages for us. There are bricks where our ancestors' fingerprints remain, spiritual caches, crystals and sometimes lone cowrie shells reflecting traditional African beliefs. There are signs there of Islamic practices and practices of the early Black church. Even a rat's nest found in Charleston, South Carolina, had much to tell us about the past. It wasn't just a rat's nest; it had been fashioned from the pages from a 19th century speller. In the darkness, hidden from the enslavers' prying eyes, we were learning to read. The destruction of Nottoway isn't a trending story for me. I am a historical interpreter — not a re-enactor — and such places have been the focus of my research. I even wrote my award-winning memoir, 'The Cooking Gene,' tracing my ancestry from Africa to America, from enslavement to emancipation, using the story of African American food combined with the battle over how our history gets told and who gets to tell it. Many plantations, homes and living history sites are tied to colonial and antebellum slavery, both South and North. They have never been cheap to maintain or preserve, hence the need to bring in crowds that spend big. Sanitizing the brutality of slavery and promoting their properties as wedding venues is a way for those who operate such places to increase revenue. But their general refusal to confront the truth of history and balance their messaging, their willingness to bury the experiences of our ancestors underneath white supremacist propaganda, helps explain the glee many felt at Nottoway's destruction. I found it disheartening while doing research for 'The Cooking Gene' that one of my ancestors, Harry Townsend, who was sold as a child from North Carolina through Virginia to Alabama, had a bill of sale and a value for his body on the death of his slaveholder. He had run for freedom, and there was even a receipt for his return by a 'slave catcher.' But there's no record of my ancestor's grave, and most of land where he was enslaved is now underneath a mall. Places such as Nottoway that glorify the buildings that enslaved people built but ignore the pain and suffering those enslaved people experienced contribute to another kind of erasure. The New York Post quotes Dyess as saying, 'My wife and I had nothing to do with slavery but we recognize the wrongness of it. 'We are trying to make this a better place. We don't have any interest in left wing radical stuff. We we need to move forward on a positive note here and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice.' If this fire was a message, it was a wake-up call. There are no perfect answers here. Nottoway could have gone the way of Whitney Plantation, also in Louisiana, which is a museum dedicated to helping visitors understand who the enslaved people were. I've been privileged to cook at Whitney Plantation, which is staffed by brilliant Black interpreters. Nottoway also could have been more like Magnolia Plantation in South Carolina, where my elder and teacher Joseph McGill raises awareness about chattel slavery. It could have been more like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, where, as a consultant and scholar in residence, I learned from generations of people behind the site's African American programming. Coming to terms with what these plantations have meant is a process that takes time and generational commitment. Plantations and sites related to slavery have to have foot traffic and human and financial investment to preserve the evidence of African and African American labor, craft and resistance. Still, they shouldn't exist as mere resorts. We must stand in solidarity with museums (especially Black independent sites), genealogists, scholars, preservationists and descendants who do this recovery work. Their efforts to perform acts of sincere redemption and reconciliation are crucial. We can contribute to a more inclusive and accurate representation of our shared history by supporting such initiatives. This crossroads is the sacred ground where people of many backgrounds can and must meet. I can't think of a more critical time to speak the truth and acknowledge the humanity of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans and the flow of immigrants and others without whom we would not exist. This article was originally published on
