Fionnuala Moore, a freshman at Santa Fe Prepatory School, performs songs from her musical, The Right to Vote, inside the Roundhouse on Thursday. Photo by Olivia Harlow/The New Mexican
Lights in the Darkness
In the middle of all the horrors in the U.S. Capitol, we need to remember that much more significant events are happening.
Celebrating New Mexico’s vote to ratify the 19th amendment 100 years ago, a fourteen-year-old girl, Fionnuala Moore, stood in the middle of the Capitol rotunda here in Santa Fe and sang, to the assembled legislature, one of the 27 songs she has written for her musical, The Right to Vote. She was wearing suffragist white, as were some of the women listening, and a rendition of the original white, orange and yellow sash proclaiming VOTES FOR WOMEN.
It took us a hundred years and the mostly-forgotten work of many women all over the country—and now we are about to pass, finally, the Equal Rights Amendment. I remember being discouraged when it was defeated in the most recently attempt in the 1980’s, taken down by conservative claims that it would mean unisex bathrooms. Now there are unisex bathrooms everywhere and no one seems particularly dismayed, but that change had to do with practicalities not the ERA.
Moore sang two songs, with an accompanying chorus from her high school: “Prove Myself” and “Revolution.”
“Prove Myself” is a tribute to Alice Paul, Moore’s “favorite suffragist… She had to prove that she was competent enough and brave enough and strong enough” to surmount the difficulties she faced. Moore credited the help of her music teacher, Chris Ishee, and the inspiration of Winifred Conkling’s book, Votes For Women! American Suffragists And the Battle for the Ballot.
The high school Freshman added, “We still have a long way to go.”
Doris Duke, who late in life became somewhat interested in the Feminist Movement, donated a bust of Alice Paul, rescued from a garage, to the library in Newport, Rhode Island. My biography, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke will finally be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on April 7.
There are other important victories, to focus on in this time of national distress. Shining brightly among them is the triumph of The Civil Rights Movement, beginning with the February 1, 1960 Greensboro N.C. lunch counter sit-in at a Woolworth’s by four black students from nearby North Carolina A&T.
Spat on and punched, these young men maintained their commitment to non-violence. The movement soon spread across the south, even when they, rather than their attackers, were arrested by local police.
They had no ally in the white house. President Dwight Eisenhower maintained his silence. And because restrictive voting laws had almost eliminated black voters, they had no political support of the kind Trump is receiving from cowardly Republicans in the Senate.
Thank God for Mitt Romney! I hold no brief for the Mormon Church but it would be interesting to look into their teachings about rectitude and courage…
Here in New Mexico, we are also celebrating a notable fifty-year anniversary, marking the return of their sacred Blue Lake to the Taos pueblo. In 1970, a small group of Taos Pueblo people traveled to Washington to present their case for reclaiming this sacred site along with 75 acres of adjoining land.
They were aided in their effort by several of their Anglo neighbors, including Mabel Dodge Luhan.
This victory energized the emerging Native Rights movement, coinciding with the 19th-month occupation by Natives of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. The notorious prison stood on another of their sacred sites.
The occupation of Alcatraz ended with violence, whereas the Taos victory was done through negotiation, particularly with then-US Representative Manuel Lujan Jr., who wrote, “I will do what my heart tells me to do and I will support this.”
His fellow Republican, Mitt Romney, might say the same thing.
Flashes of brilliance in the darkness.
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