Beheadings are in the news. So is romance. They converge on Valentine’s Day, named for a priest who was beheaded in Rome on February 14, 270.
According to one story (there are several), Emperor Claudius II did not want lovesick soldiers distracted from their duties. Empire first! He issued an edit banning marriage for his conscripts.
Valentine defied the ban, heard hushed vows, laid his holy hands on sweethearts’ heads, performed secret wedding ceremonies, and proclaimed love natural and good.
Discovered, the rebel priest was arrested and sent to prison. He continued to be a thorn in the Emperor’s side by alleviating the suffering of other inmates and healing his jailor’s daughter. Enough was enough. The Emperor ordered Valentine beaten and beheaded.
Eventually, the Roman Empire adapted Christianity and became the Holy Roman Empire. In 496, February 14th was officially declared Saint Valentine’s Day, assimilating the raucous Lupercalia (“Wolf Festival”) celebrated that day … but that’s another story.
THEN AND NOW (IN A NUTSHELL)
We recoil from images of recent beheadings and immolations by ISIL. But President Obama, in his February 5th address at the National Prayer Breakfast, reminded us that, like today’s Muslims, Christians, too, have seen their faith perverted when atrocities were committed in their name.
He was right. Humans everywhere have used inventive and gruesome ways to kill each other — from then to now, in the Old World and New, under the guise of Church, State, or other.
In medieval France, a laborer was paid 48 frances for boiling a “heretic” in oil; in England, boiling the condemned was worth a shilling. In Shakespeare’s day, the severed heads of traitors were displayed at the entrance to London Bridge.
Protestants executed in the Netherlands during the Reformation
Public killings, legal and extralegal, are crowd-pleasers. From hanging young pickpockets in Merrie Olde England to public stonings of “blasphemers” in 21st century Pakistan and “adulterers” in Nigeria, from hanging Quakers in Boston Commons to lynching black men in the American South — crowds gathered to jeer and cheer.
Times change. Venezuela was the first nation to end capital punishment. Most other Central and South American countries followed suit in the 1800s. It took Europe longer, but, since 1994, the Council of Europe has made abolition of the death penalty a condition of membership. South Africa abolished the death penalty in 1995 under Nelson Mandela’s leadership.
Renounced as costly, barbaric, error-prone, and obsolete by most modern nations, the U.S. remains the lone Western democracy in the lineup of the top five nations to condone government-sponsored executions, taking its place beside China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.
100 IDEAS FOR ANTI-DEATH PENALTY ACTIVISTS
In chapter 5 of my book Death Defying: Dismantling the Execution Machinery in 21st Century U.S.A. (see below), I compiled over 100 examples of nonviolent action used in the fight against capital punishment, including: boycotts, fasting, mock executions, motorcades, petitions, picketing, pilgrimages, singing, sit-ins, speak-outs, street theater, vigils…. and lots more. Our creative ideas and actions can inspire further actions.
In the U.S., where executions have gone from public to hidden, high-tech, sterile, bureaucratic affairs, activists worry that executions are out of sight and out of mind. Here are four actions that were intended to challenge the capital punishment business-as-usual routine.
> Banner Project: In the early 20th century, the NAACP led an anti-lynching campaign. Each time news was received that a person had been lynched, they hung a banner outside the NAACP’s NYC office that read, A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY. Decades later, when Rev. Dr. Constance M. Baugh read about this, she was inspired to institute a similar practice at Brooklyn’s Church of Gethsemane (Presbyterian Church USA) to keep the community mindful of capital punishment and, on appropriate days, hung a banner from a 2nd-story window: ONE MORE PERSON WAS EXECUTED TODAY.
> For Whom the Bell Tolls: Sister Dorothy Briggs (1923-2006) began a national ecumenical campaign urging places of worship to toll their bells for two minutes on the evening of an execution anywhere in the U.S.
> Not In My Name: On evenings when an execution was scheduled somewhere in the nation, members of the pacifist-anarchist Living Theatre gathered at Times Square to perform Not In My Name, a street theater play about ending the death penalty’s cycle of violence and revenge. Judith Malina cofounded The Living Theatre with Julian Beck (1925-1985). She and members of the troupe performed the 15-minute protest play at the publication party for my anti-death penalty book in 2003! (In Luba Lukova’s brilliant poster, one person is shown breaking the cycle — an image of hope.)
> International Death Penalty Abolition Day — March 1st is a time to remember the victims of violent crime, their survivors, and those killed by state sanctioned violence and their survivors. Many activists use March 1st as a day for action and education about alternatives to the death penalty. It marks the anniversary of the day in 1847 when Michigan became the first English-speaking territory in the world to officially abolish capital punishment.
With Judith Malina at my book party!
TO GO DEEPER
“U.S. Death Penalty Facts” Amnesty International USA
Death Defying: Dismantling the Execution Machinery in 21st Century U.S.A. by Pam McAllister, Bloomsbury Academic/ Continuum International Publishing Group, NY, 2003
“Pam McAllister’s Capital Punishment Quiz” — Multiple choice consciousness raiser. Answers provided.
“This Day in History: St. Valentine Beheaded” History Channel
The Church of Gethsemane (created by and for incarcerated persons, ex-prisoners, their families, and people who feel called into partnership with the poor and imprisoned) “Walk With Me” is a short documentary about the unique Church of Gethsemane.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL video about recent facts and figures (3:30 minutes)
When Ruth Powell arrived in D.C. in 1941, she was warned not to expect to eat in the downtown area. Raised in a Boston suburb, she had no experience with the Jim Crow South. The warning barely registered. The young student was excited about attending Howard University in the nation’s capital.
One January day in 1943, Ruth and two other coeds ordered hot chocolates at a store on Pennsylvania Avenue. At first, they were refused service. When the three women didn’t move, the police were called. To the women’s surprise, the cops ordered the waitress to bring the hot drinks. The catch came at the end: instead of being charged ten cents each, the drinks were billed at 25 cents. Ruth and her friends protested the overcharge and left the correct amount on the counter. That’s when they were arrested, taken to jail in a police wagon, and held under suspicion of being “subversive agents.”
Good news! One activist can inspire another. Ruth Powell inspired her fellow Howard U. classmate Pauli Murray (1910-1985). A diminutive, cross-dressing, woman-loving, radical black activist ahead of her time, Murray not only imagined the power of a sit-in campaign long before it caught on in the 1960s, but she coined the term “Jane Crow” to describe the varieties of oppression faced by black women, was arrested in the 1940s for not moving to the back of the bus, won the deep respect and friendship of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was a co-founder, with Bayard Rustin, of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and NOW (National Organization for Women), became a lawyer, and, eventually, the first black woman Episcopal priest. In 2012, 27 years after her death, she was named an Episcopal saint.
The following spring, however, the students met with disappointment after initial success at integrating Thompson’s cafeteria, part of a national chain located in downtown D.C., open 24 hours a day.
Like Powell, Edna Griffin (1909-2000) was a New Englander. After graduating from Fisk University in Tennessee, she moved to Iowa in 1947 with her husband, a med student.
# 1: DETERMINED IN DETROIT ~ On a chilly February morning in 1937, one of the worst years of the Great Depression, a union organizer stood in the middle of the Woolworth’s store, blew a whistle, and shouted, “Strike, girls, strike!”
Frank Woolworth, the store’s founder, knew how to turn a profit, the way Walmart does today. He said, “We must have cheap help or we cannot sell cheap goods.”
By all accounts, the week-long occupation was more fun than bother for the young women, many of whom had never spent a night away from home. They formed committees, including a “cheer-up committee” in charge of morale. They played cards, danced, knitted, and made up a song about Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, whose lavish débutante ball in the midst of the Depression had secured the disdain of the strikers:
On another wintry February day, this one in 1981 in Greenock, Scotland, women workers at a Lee Jeans factory learned that the American owners planned to move the plant to Northern Ireland.
Like something out of an action movie, two workers climbed through a skylight, then shinnied down a drainpipe and ran to buy fish, chips, and Irn-Bru, a Scottish soft drink, enough for everyone. Stopped by police as they returned with 240 fish suppers, they explained that the workers were occupying the factory to save their jobs; the cops helped them with the doors.
To raise funds, two women travelled across Scotland speaking to trade unions. Everywhere, they got standing ovations.
Five girls chat about hair on their way downstairs to Sunday school, as if they have all the time in the world. We’re mesmerized by their nonchalance; we know that only one will survive the descent.
And then they came for the People’s Library, our library, the library of the 99%, the Occupy Wall Street library in Zuccotti Park.
Librarians were arrested that night. So were journalists and protesters. Police in riot gear obeying orders of the billionaire mayor, emptied the park.
We worked quietly — accepting donations, sorting, cataloguing, stamping the books (my job), then passing them on to be properly shelved and lent out. Meanwhile, the occupation buzzed around us.
A contingent of seminarians wearing clerical collars stood silently off to one side with signs: “CLERGY — WILLING TO LISTEN.”
After the police raid, there were massive demonstrations, but the occupation of Zuccotti Park was essentially over.
I, too, was reminded of a futuristic, dystopian novel — Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, in which books are banned, incinerated by “firemen.” A few people, in exile, memorize whole books, hoping to retain each sentence until the day books can be legally published and read.
Fahrenheit 451
At Christmas, I waved goodbye to the wreath-draped lions in front of NYC’s Library on Fifth Avenue (a.k.a. “the People’s Palace”) and rode Amtrak to Rochester to visit my sister and her husband. This year, our cousin Erin joined us, driving up from Ohio.
The Nazis smirked at Šimaitė, fussing over a few books. After all, they regularly burned great heaps of books and, in 1941, looted and destroyed the world’s largest library of Jewish learning, the Strashun Library, a landmark in Vilna.
“In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammad was ‘Read!.’” That’s what Alia Muhammad Baqer (Baker) told a reporter for The New York Times.
When bombs began to fall, Baqer organized the library staff and book-loving neighbors. Together, they passed books out of the library, over a wall, and into the restaurant of a friend. They worked until midnight and promised to return in the morning.
