Please realize that we will not be having meetings during the three months of Summer --- June, July and August.

Check back in September to see what we have planned for the next season of our meetings.

This year has been a great one for the STRF. We have lots of new members who are working to grow their personal resonses to Racism, using our environment of loving conversation to deepen our understanding of Racism and ourselves. Next year could be even better! Peruse the postings from this year to get some idea of what we are about.

We will be having our annual Celebration for Juneteenth on Tuesday June 14th at 6:30 PM at Park Hill United Methodist Church.

It has long been our tradition of using our TC Race Group monthly meeting in June to celebrate Juneteenth with good food and good company.

Please note that we will start the June pot luck at 6:30 PM, a half hour earlier than usual.

If you are new to the TC Race Group, you may not know that Juneteenth is the annual celebration of how and when folks in Texas found out about the emancipation of the slaves, about their own freedom from slavery. Juneteenth commemorates June 18 and 19, 1865. June 18 is the day Union General Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves. That was three years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in Washington by Lincoln, and over two years after it was supposed to go into effect.

For our celebration, we will have a "sponsored" pot luck. We are arranging to provide generous servings of fried catfish and spareribs. We are asking that each of you who are coming will bring along some complementary dishes to serve.

Alas, we also have to ask that you contribute a donation to cover the costs. Our suggestion is that you donate $10 if you can afford it. Please don't let it stop you from coming if you cannot. Donate what your can; we want you to come!

Won't You Please sign-up by a return email. Tell us how many guests you are bringing, and what dish you are going to bring in one of the categories below:

Veggie Side. Bread, Salad, Drinks (non-alcoholic). Vegetarian main dish (for vegetarian folks), Dessert

We have already signed-up 32 folks at our meeting last week, with promises of a good assortment of things from the catagories. So, if you were one of those, you don't have to sing-up again. This notice is for all our folks who did not sign-up at the May meeting.

We will take care of the extras like ice, cups and plates, napkins, knifes and forks.

One final note: we want you to come! If you somehow forgot about RSVP'ng to this message until the last minute, come anyway.

 

Applying Critical Lessons Learned from the Reconstruction Era

During our time together next week, we welcome Facing History and Ourselves’ Senior Program Associate, Heather Frazier, who will guide us through an examination of the progress made during the Reconstruction Era and the patterns of retrenchment that occurred following this time of social, political, and economic change. We will consider questions such as, “Is backlash inevitable in a time of great change? What are the roles of hatred, fear, and the loss of power in inspiring actions that thwart change?”

As historian David Blight argues: “Every revolution we have causes a counter-revolution.” Indeed, the unprecedented period of interracial democracy that occurred after the passage of Radical Reconstruction policies also touched off a determined, violent backlash in the South. He likewise suggests that the ways in which white Northerners imagined African Americans had a profound impact on public support for Reconstruction in the South. Did white Northerners imagine freedpeople as diligent workers and students, responsible voters and lawmakers? Or did they imagine freedpeople as inherently lazy, dependent, childlike, violent, and dangerous? In the enormous number of Reconstruction-era images, black Americans were depicted in all of these contradictory ways. Therefore, similar to today, the conflict over the meaning of freedom and equality for African Americans was fought not only in voting booths and statehouses; it was also fought in the pages of newspapers, other media and the “court of public opinion”.

Few would deny that this history has been poorly and insufficiently understood. And yet, perspectives on the past implicitly and explicitly impact how we understand the present. Re-examining the era of Reconstruction is a perfect entry into understanding the growing political and social backlash as we near the end of the Obama Administration.

In addition, we want to invite Second Tuesday folk who recently attended the White Privilege Conference in Philadelphia to share some insights they gained from the weekend with us.

 

Our next meeting is next week on Tuesday April 12th at 7 PM at the Park Hill United Methodist Church at Montview Blvd and Glencoe St. in Denver. We will be meeting upstairs in the Sanctuary Parlour.

Won't you please join us!.

Finding a Language to Talk about Race

It can be very difficult to discuss a topic when you do not know the terms and a vocabulary associated with it. Many Americans are missing a robust vocabulary about race and equity. This leads to extreme discomfort in talking about race, an avoidance of such conversations, and a very limited ability to understand and recognize its relevance and impact. It has been said that Eskimos have over 50 words to describe snow. But if you grow up in a warm climate your snow vocabulary will be quite limited by comparison, as will your ability to see variations.

The American culture has its roots in using race and separation to maintain power and make political decisions. Our April discussion will explore a wide variety of terms that will help us be “on the same page” and be more informed when we have discussions about racial equity

The Second Tuesday Race Forum meets on the second Tuesday of most months at the Park Hill United Methodist Church at Montview Blvd and Glencoe St. in Denver. Here is a link to a map on Google: http://goo.gl/maps/sSc86

If you are not on our mailing list and would like to be, please email us and we will add you to our list.

Our March meeting is on the 8th at  7 PM as usual, downstairs in the Youth Lounge this month again.

This will be a powerful and emotinal meeting, so we hope many of you can come.

A Legacy of Lynching

Our guest for March is Karen Branan, author of the new book The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth. She has spent nearly 20 years researching the lynching in 1912 of a black woman and three black men, all of them innocent, sanctioned by the county sheriff, her great-grandfather. Her research revealed that she was also related to one of the four who were murdered that day.

Branan will share her family story and her own journey to understanding how this form of terrorism, designed to reinforce and protect the system of white supremacy, set the stage for many of the problems that persist to this day.

Karen Branan is a veteran journalist who has written for newspapers, magazines, stage and television for almost 50 years. Her work has appeared in Life, Mother Jones, Ms., Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Today’s Health, Learning, Parents, Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and on PBS, CBS, ABC, CBC, BBC, and CNN.