The Power That Never Diminishes by Charles Bane, Jr.

Elizabeth Catlett
The Power That Never Diminishes by Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Firmly steering the tiller of an unwieldy boat on a growing wave, sails of the feminist movement are being directed by women who are ever and ever more woke towards a feminism that must define its triumph as the triumph of the Black Woman. In her lies a historic strength rooted in a social gospel.
We cannot go back to a civil rights era where marches and boycotts were directed from church -we are too religiously diverse ( or doubting) for that now - but we can imitate the methods that originated there and which from the pulpit sounded like lightning, or a trumpet calling humanity to pilgrimage.
Here is one undeniable creed: there is no space between the fight for: fair immigration, the safety of transgender persons, the right of a woman to her own body, a country safe from gun violence. All these and more are righteous causes and the keen observer recognizes that in the feminist struggle may lie the hope of achieving them all, for before the Gospels were set to paper, Hebrew sages wrote that Providence “ counts the tears of women.”
A social gospel is still relevant and the sharp among us must look to its practical history even as we describe the light of its victories to gatherings in synagogues and mosques.
Let us recognize Black women as spectacular beings, as are the gender-changed and the deep-eyed behind their veils. But let us add to the arching goals of feminism the qualifier of Black equality to prove the movement’s true worth.
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Charles Bane, Jr. is the author of The Ascent Of Feminist History