Common Good Collective

Covenant: Moving from Contract to Commitment, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Civil War Lessons on Reconciliation and Reckoning

At Common Good Collective, we talk frequently about creating structures of belonging. That sounds nice, but it doesn’t happen without being truthful. Sometimes, you have to be able to talk plain, even when it hurts. Our common tables won’t really have places for belonging until we address hurt and harm, and find ways to heal.

Frederick Douglass and Ulysses S. Grant on Reconciliation and Its Pitfalls
by Stephen West

Speaking in New York City in 1878, Frederick Douglass had a warning for white northerners about how they remembered the Civil War. “Good, wise, and generous men at the North,” Douglass observed, “would have us forget and forgive, strew flowers alike and lovingly, on rebel and on loyal graves.”

A group of white veterans had invited Douglass to speak at a ceremony commemorating Decoration Day — the holiday, later known as Memorial Day, for remembrance of the Civil War’s Union dead. In the shadow of Abraham Lincoln’s statue in Union Square, Douglass invoked Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as he tried to arrest the drift of northern opinion and national politics.

“There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget,” Douglass declared. “[W]hile to-day we should have malice toward none, and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”(1)

Bending Our Stories Towards Love

None of us choose our own stories. We are each born into a life given, offered as gift, whatever its hardships. But not choosing does not mean lacking agency. We may not get to choose our stories, but neither must we sit passively and wait for them to determine us. Communities and individuals can bend their stories toward justice, toward life, toward peace, toward love. This is the meaning of freedom.

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

On the Pulse of Morning

Poems echo, bouncing around images and phrases to be repeated over again. This inaugural poem echoes back to the Psalms, and further, back further, into the foundations of the story of earth, into the story of people made to wake and simply, very simply, greet the morning.

On the Pulse of Morning
by Maya Angelou

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.

The Miraculous History of the Black Church

“I look back in wonder at how we got over,” the Black preachers say. And it is a wonder, indeed nothing short of a miracle, that enslaved Africans would hear stories told by their captors and hear in them Good News, as Christians would have it. And then to use that Good News to become the center of the political, economic, educational, and cultural transformation of their communities.

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song will explore the 400-year-old story of the Black church in America, the changing nature of worship spaces, and the men and women who shepherded them from the pulpit, the choir loft, and church pews. This series premieres on Tuesday, February 16th on PBS.

While you wait, journalist Beatrice Alvarez list of twenty-eight documentaries on Black history makers, all streaming for free on the PBS website.

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Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Eight Podcasts to Deepen Your Knowledge of Black History

History is just the practice of the ancient art of storytelling. Some of our best storytellers today use podcasts. There are fewer collective fires to gather around for the telling of stories now, but humans are fundamentally creatures of story. Our suggestion? Listen to one of these with a friend, and talk about it after.

Eight Podcasts to Deepen Your Knowledge of Black History
By Justine Goode

As Americans seek to expand their knowledge of Black history—much of which has long been excluded from textbooks or mainstream conversations about American heroes, thinkers, and revolutionaries—a likely starting point is the New York Times’ 1619 podcast, a seminal examination of the history and lasting legacy of American slavery. It’s an excellent but limited-run podcast, with just six episodes, so it leaves plenty more to learn about Black historical figures, pivotal events in the ongoing fight for civil rights, and the ways America’s past still painfully informs our present.

These eight podcasts illuminate stories from Black history with the same urgency, care, and impact as 1619, and more often than not, bring a deeply personal perspective to national history. We’ve also chosen to highlight episodes that discuss the histories of protests, civil disobedience, uprisings, and people fighting to make change, all of which help to further contextualize our current moment in American history. Thanks to these storytellers, historians, and journalists, learning about Black history has never been more accessible or dynamic.