In this devasting, heartbreaking year, we mourn the loss of Civil Rights activist John Lewis and Pauli Murray’s friend Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, titans of the American human rights community. And we mourn the loss of peace, labor, and human rights activist Ray Eurquhart and West End neighborhood advocate Dorcas Bradley from our Durham family.
"Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year,” proclaimed John Lewis, “Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part."
Ours meaning we all have a stake in the fight for dignity and justice. “If you rip away everything, the business of oppression is the business of not respecting one’s personhood,” Pauli Murray said in a 1976 interview, that each person “may stand and feel a sense of dignity and relatedness to other people.”
Pauli Murray called her life-long struggle for human rights a relay race in which she had won a few and lost a few, but thankfully survived to see some of her lost causes found. For Pauli Murray, John Lewis, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an unwavering sense of hope fueled their life-long activism and acted as a pillar they could hold on to. They all understood themselves to be runners in the long relay race toward justice.
It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who said, “Justices continue to think and can change…I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.” The court is not the only American institution with serious blind spots today.
We honor Lewis, Ginsburg, Eurquhart, and Bradley by remembering and soaking up their wisdom. We honor them by picking up the baton and continuing on the justice track, by making sure all are included and no one is left behind.
We honor them by singing their song of hope and by working hard in ways small and large, across our differences and geographies, to support one another, to listen and learn from one another, to stand in solidarity with one another, in this long crusade for a more humane and caring world.