NPC Member Joanne Sweeny will be attending Hiroshima Day events on August 6th. The Presbyterian Church USA supports the abolition of nuclear weapons. It is an important day and she invites us all to remember and reflect on our shared history. She carries all of us with her as they attend these events.
Saturday, August 6, 2022:
Hiroshima Day and Susie King Taylor’s Birthday
Co-hosted by Beyond Trident and the Susie King Taylor Women’s Institute and Ecology Center, commemorating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, and the birthday of Susie King Taylor on August 6, 1848.
10:00 AM – Gather at Sugar Mill Tabby Ruins
We will have a short prayer circle to remember the victims of chattel slavery, as represented by the sugar mill ruins, where enslaved people were worked to death to produce sugar profits for their white owners. Anti-colonialists in 1945 immediately recognized that the same white supremacy was at work in the choice of native people’s land to produce the bomb and yellow people of color on whom to drop it.
10:30 AM – Vigil at the Trident Base Stimson Gate
Noon – 12:30 PM: A short sharing circle at First Amendment Park
Readings, poems, prayers, music, art work, etc., relevant to our purposes for the day will be shared.
I will share about my recent trip to New Mexico to attend the July 16th candlelight vigil ceremony for the Tularosa Basin Downwinders of the first nuclear bomb, Trinity detonated 77 years ago. The names of the more than 800 people who suffered and died from the fall out and they and their families have yet to be acknowledged and compensated. Also still born and miscarriages and birth defects increased following the Trinity Bomb. We have poisoned our own people with these terrible weapons.
I also spent time with Petuuche Gilbert, Acoma Pueblo elder. He has traveled to the United Nations and conferences in Vienna addressing the concerns of radioactive contamination from uranium mining and milling on Pueblo and Navajo lands. We toured the areas where huge uranium tailings piles are adjacent to school and communities. And inactive Mt. Taylor uranium mine, less than a quarter mile from a Laguna Pueblo community.
3:30 PM – TOUR OF THE DORCHESTER CENTER and its exhibit of the civil rights activities which occurred there, focusing on Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Cotton, and Septima Clark. Hermina Glass Hill- of Savannah Presbytery and Susie King Taylor Women’s Institute and Ecology Center curated the exhibits and will lead us. We remember that the Voting Rights Act was signed into law on August 6, 1965.
~~~Joanne Sweeney