Rights & Rituals
By Dora Muhammad, Faith in Public Life
Black Women and Our Diaspora of Sanctuary
From henceforth there would be some interest, some originality, some pride in being Negro, to turn oneself towards Africa, the cradle of the Negro, to remember a common origin. From these new ideas, new words, have come the revealing terms: Afro-American, Afro-Latin. – Jeanne (Jane) Nardal, “Black Internationalism” (1928)
During my senior year in high school, my mother welcomed an unexpected guest knocking on our door late one night. A classmate had run away from Manhattan and showed up on our Bronx doorstep. I immediately hugged her, feeling her anxiety and hopelessness, imagining all the scary things at night she may have seen, heard or passed on her train ride and walk from the station as she made her way to our home. My embrace of her at a time of her sheer vulnerability meant more than providing a place for her to stay.
Incredibly, instead of this natural human instinct of an embrace, the U.S. extends contempt to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who show up on the doorstep of our borders. Instead of making a way, our asylum court system is a sluggish travail along a rocky incline toward an unnecessarily complicated pathway to citizenship.
“[I]t is not enough for us to walk in step with the world, for the work of man is only just beginning,” wrote Aime Césaire in his journals of homecoming. “It remains to conquer all, the violence entrenched in the recess of his passion, and no race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength, and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.” Xenophobia stoked by theologies of scarcity and philosophies of violence have erased possibilities of making space for others in this country.
Within the recent rising clamor against the disturbing policies envisioned by Project 2025, I readily contest the lack of humanity in the declaration that mass immigration sweeps and deportations would be an immediate priority of the Republican presidential ticket pushing this agenda.
Césaire would have contended that the lack of concern for the condition of the undocumented codified in immigration policies echoes the brand of white European imperialism and colonialism that exploited Africa, India and the Middle East, dehumanized populations, and even tolerated Nazism for a time—”absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
The shame is that castigated asylum seekers and immigrants coming from Central America have been fleeing crippling poverty heightened by massacres, torture, rape, executions, and wars that are the crop of U.S. seeds of despotism planted by banks seeking to control international markets. Privately financing authoritarian regime change and the economic destabilization of countries paved the way for the U.S. to install government puppets for business enterprises who upheld their power with brutal violence that the U.S. overlooked publicly.
This living legacy of inhumanity is upheld in the predatory practices of ICE in partnership with other law enforcement to hunt those who do care and criminalize their compassion. Despite federal law designations of houses of worship as sites of sanctuary where they can provide shelter and services to the undocumented, law enforcement agencies continue to act with impunity, camping outside, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting people emerging from meetings.
These fear-mongering tactics have not tamped civil defiance of unjust immigration policy, comparable to the spirit of the Underground Railroad. Nevertheless, “Black churches have been slow to enter the sanctuary program because the black community has its own problems,” observed the leadership of Cross Lutheran Church, an historically Black congregation in Milwaukee in 1983. During the era of the 80’s birth of the sanctuary movement, they publicly decided to shelter a Guatemalan refugee, referencing how “Black Christians have a long history of relating to the exiles and outcasts.”
The roots of their decision in the Christian duty to help those in need stretches back to the sentiments of the civil rights movement in the sixties that drove immigration reform beyond race and national origin. These cultural links for justice are bonds that have defined the Diaspora as far back as the Nardal sisters who hosted Sunday salons for Black scholars and artists from the America, Africa, and the Caribbean living in Paris. Deeper than forging unity within the Francophone Black community in the 1920s, these Black women originated the philosophical grounding of the Negritude concept and the subsequent Negritude movement.
History, facilitated by the male leadership who grew in prominence within the Negritude movement, has obscured the brilliance and impact of their contribution of the seminal framework that laid the foundation of Pan-Africanist thought to the socio-political chant of “Black is beautiful.” This beauty of Diaspora is sustained in the connectivity across geographies that continues to curate global consciousness and community today.
I witnessed this inspiring connectivity in 2006, as a young editor in Chicago covering a press conference held in the sanctuary of Adalberto United Methodist Church by a delegation of 30 Black ministers to declare their unconditional support for Elvira Arellano, a Mexican-born migrant who sought sanctuary in the humble Westside church about a month before the date of her deportation ordered by Homeland Security.
“In these cases, we must follow God’s law,” insisted Pastor Albert Tyson III, president of Clergy Speaks Interdenominational, the largest interdenominational organization of clergy in the city. “We are in solidarity spiritually with this church; and that all of our churches, as well as this one, are sanctuaries to keep families together.”
I spent a few hours with her at her dinner table the night before the deportation was to be executed. I was moved by the neighborhood children present with their parents throughout the day to support her and her seven-year-old son Saul. A beautiful banner spread across the church’s front entrance displayed colorful handprints of nearly 50 children who dipped their palms in paint to impress upon the white cloth. Much like the embrace of my high school friend, this small act of little hands had big impact.
Children have an innate sense of the sacrifices of the adults around them, though they may not understand all the complexities. The journey of undocumented parents like Elvira desiring a better future for their children is like “being shattered over and over again and reassembling yourself over continents and calamities” as described by Antonio Michael Downing in “Saga Boy – My Life of Blackness and Belonging.”
As a second-generation immigrant, my sensitivity springs from a deep reservoir of the collective storytelling of those who journeyed as migrants to this country, Canada and the UK. I am reaching into this reservoir of memories as I pen “Little Coolie Girl – The Nuances of Growing Up Indo-Caribbean American” from my memories, finding them inextricably intertwined with the experiences of the Caribbean matriarchy that runs along my lineage as they journey across continents with the highest hopes for the next generation even as they clung to memories of home to recreate it on new soil.
Sanctuary sites would not be needed if policies and practices helped others make new homes. It is not impossible but it must be intentional but finding yourself on a stranger or even a friend’s doorstep can be isolating and dreadful. I remember when a young Bangladeshi family moved into the basement floor of a brownstone at the end of our street when I was in elementary school. The children didn’t attend school, and a wonder existed between us. I would see their faces peeking out above the curb as I walked home from school. I ventured over one afternoon to speak to them and discovered that they didn’t speak a word of English. I had no Bengali words to share yet they invited me into their home to the shock of their mother.
We would sit in the comfort of cultural accord, listening to music and watching soap operas. I would read books to help them learn English. Eventually their sense of safety increased, and they ventured out to play with me in the streets, but only up to the gates of our house. Other children would gather on our end of the block to play with them, until one day we were surprised to see them waiting in our school’s playground on the other end of the block after the school bell dismissal. The sanctuary we carried within ourselves and shared with them, they carried forward on their own as they recreated home for themselves. We should all make it a practice to bring sanctuary with us wherever we go and share it with others whenever the moment calls it forward.
I have been invited by the Morning Meditations team at Metropolitan AME in D.C. to lead a week of meditations in September. A few of my clergy friends will join me during the week of the 23rd to share reflections on sanctuary in advance of World Day of Migrants and Refugees, which will be observed this year on September 29. I invite you to join us on Zoom from 7- 7:15 AM by dialing in 929-205-6099, 97875446720.
Dora is the founder of The AWARE Project (Advocacy for Women’s Activism, Rights and Empowerment). She serves as Faith in Public Life’s Senior Director of Coalitions and Campaigns and the Institute of Caribbean Studies’ Ambassador to Women.
