Cause for Hope

If any of you are like me, you get discouraged sometimes by the daily rush of bad news in the media. Sometimes it feels like we are going backwards in the struggle for social justice. But humanity is making progress. To shore up your battered hopes, I have decided to share some of the section of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) Newsletter called “Apologies/Reparations” which offers “a compendium of recent reports dealing with apologies and reparations around the world.” May the good news of reconciliation be a salve to your soul.

“The Church of England, two centuries after profiting from the venture, has apologized to the descendants of its victims for its role in the global slave trade, which involved running a Caribbean island (Barbados) sugar plantation and branding the blacks who worked on it. A further instance cited in the apology was a $23,000 payment made to the Bishop of Exeter in compensation for the loss of 665 slaves after Barbados emancipated them in 1833. (Wash. Post, 2/11/06)”

“South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford signed a bill to add the name of former Senator Strom Thurmond’s biracial daughter – Essie Mae Washington-Williams – to the list of his children engraved on his monument. (NY Times, 6/29/04)”

“The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic religious order in Ireland, apologized unconditionally for the ‘physical and emotional trauma’ its nuns inflicted on children raised in its orphanages and schools. A 1966 television documentary that exposed the extent of abuse at one of the Dublin orphanages in the 1950s and 1960s prompted an earlier public apology, but the most recent statement went further, noting that abuse survivors had dismissed the earlier apology as conditional and incomplete. (NY Times, 5/6/04)”

There are more, but if you refuse to sign up for the PRRAC newsletter, you'll simply have to put up with my slow meting out of good news. I'd hate to run out.