In order to create the Call to Observance, we talked at length about what a call was. A call might be a way to get attention, or express a feeling. Calls could also be collective or institutional as in a call to prayer. We could be called to do something, as in being called to jury duty. Our call to remembrance was all of these. We realized that we weren’t think-ing of history in a scholarly sense, but in the sense of living together into a future organized around justice, freedom, and a full life for all. To get to that full life for all, we needed to see where we were located—the time and place in which we existed.
The National Organizing Committee gathered partners and friends in New York with an invitation to write a Call to Observance. We said "In preparation for Remembering Jamestown Week (October 12-18th, 2019), please help us invite the nation to prepare for and observe this solemn anniversary. We need an invitation that will speak to our many communities, recognizing that the long arm of slavery still haunts us today, and inviting each to consider the ways in which their own history is part of this."
Below is the call we made to the nation.
The National Organizing Committee gathered partners and friends in New York with an invitation to write a Call to Observance. We said "In preparation for Remembering Jamestown Week (October 12-18th, 2019), please help us invite the nation to prepare for and observe this solemn anniversary. We need an invitation that will speak to our many communities, recognizing that the long arm of slavery still haunts us today, and inviting each to consider the ways in which their own history is part of this."
Below is the call we made to the nation.
We call on everyone to prepare observances for the 400th Anniversary of the arrival in 1619 at Jamestown of the first Africans to be sold into bondage. These Africans were the first of millions that followed as slaves to work on plantations established on land stolen from the indigenous peoples of the continent.
Colonialism and slavery were soon codified into laws promoting inequality and legitimating oppression and terror. These laws and the practices they encouraged were and remain formidable barriers against efforts by Native Americans, African Americans, poor whites, and numerous other groups, to unite against the dispossession and occupation of lands, and exploitative and oppressive life and work conditions.
Some hundred years after the beginning of the trade in humans, principles that explicitly and emphatically contradicted structures of inequality and dehumanization were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Years later, however, the Constitution would advance one of the most pernicious accountings of human worth by asserting that slaves counted as only 3/5’s of a person. The contradictions and hypocrisy evident in the founding documents is manifest today as an elaborate network of social, economic, political and spiritual divisions that reproduce ever more elaborate forms of inequality.
This accounting of personhood established in the Constitution diminishes the humanity of vast groups of people while elevating others to the status of “natural” supremacy. This ledger of worth and legitimacy constrains all our lives, including the lives of oppressors, for it is spiritually impoverished and forecloses the building of diverse, caring, joyful, and free communities.
We need desperately to link arms in radical equality.
Starting now, we can renew and strengthen the long struggle for full emancipation, equity, and justice by coming together to remember the events at Jamestown and the pernicious and persistent devaluing of persons that has been a central structure of U.S. history. We need to unify, account for the past, and assume the rights and responsibility of the future for all if we are to meet the challenges ahead. These challenges include climate change, decaying physical infrastructure, rapidly evolving jobs, underperforming schools, uneven access to health care, and a lack of affordable housing.
We call on everyone to prepare observances for the 400th Anniversary of Jamestown. We do this to denounce structures of inequality.
We do this to foreground our fundamental and unconditional equality. We remember and in doing so we refuse to participate in and reproduce structures of dehumanization, exploitation, oppression, and inequity.
Colonialism and slavery were soon codified into laws promoting inequality and legitimating oppression and terror. These laws and the practices they encouraged were and remain formidable barriers against efforts by Native Americans, African Americans, poor whites, and numerous other groups, to unite against the dispossession and occupation of lands, and exploitative and oppressive life and work conditions.
Some hundred years after the beginning of the trade in humans, principles that explicitly and emphatically contradicted structures of inequality and dehumanization were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Years later, however, the Constitution would advance one of the most pernicious accountings of human worth by asserting that slaves counted as only 3/5’s of a person. The contradictions and hypocrisy evident in the founding documents is manifest today as an elaborate network of social, economic, political and spiritual divisions that reproduce ever more elaborate forms of inequality.
This accounting of personhood established in the Constitution diminishes the humanity of vast groups of people while elevating others to the status of “natural” supremacy. This ledger of worth and legitimacy constrains all our lives, including the lives of oppressors, for it is spiritually impoverished and forecloses the building of diverse, caring, joyful, and free communities.
We need desperately to link arms in radical equality.
Starting now, we can renew and strengthen the long struggle for full emancipation, equity, and justice by coming together to remember the events at Jamestown and the pernicious and persistent devaluing of persons that has been a central structure of U.S. history. We need to unify, account for the past, and assume the rights and responsibility of the future for all if we are to meet the challenges ahead. These challenges include climate change, decaying physical infrastructure, rapidly evolving jobs, underperforming schools, uneven access to health care, and a lack of affordable housing.
We call on everyone to prepare observances for the 400th Anniversary of Jamestown. We do this to denounce structures of inequality.
We do this to foreground our fundamental and unconditional equality. We remember and in doing so we refuse to participate in and reproduce structures of dehumanization, exploitation, oppression, and inequity.
Learn more about how we developed this project through the events we held to develop and refine our call to observance.
Not only did we call on the nation to observe in 2019; we created resources for communities and organizations to learn about our history and local places and create a more just future.
