Sir, – Full marks and congratulations to Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore. His refusal to attend the anniversary dinner of the all male Hibernian Society of Savannah (Home News, March 16th) appropriately represented this nation’s position on gender equality; a pity his predecessors saw no such duty.
What is surprising is that Savannah tolerates this discrimination, given its unusual record on the issue. This most beautiful city, like most southern American cities, thrived in its early days on slave labour. But one of Savannah’s major tourist attractions today is the First African Baptist Church, a famous landmark of the mid-19th century for its place in the Underground Railway, that network of safe houses and secret passages that brought escaping slaves safely to the north. Built by slaves, financed by their slave owners, the church sheltered the escaping slaves in a basement ventilated by a pattern of many small holes in the ceiling, seen from above as supposedly African tribal symbols.The church also now houses a museum of the Underground Railway.
In the 1940s and 1950s, when segregation was not yet a serious political issue, the Savannah chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People successfully organised campaigns to register blacks as voters and integrated blacks into civic employment, including the police force. When the civil rights movement got underway in the 1960s, Savannah implemented and maintained a strategy of peaceful protest. In 1962, Martin Luther King, Jr declared Savannah the most integrated city south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Perhaps Mr Gilmore’s stand will prompt the people of Savannah to look to its history and get the lads in the Hibernian Society to end this form of discrimination, so next year’s invitation to dinner will be acceptable. – Yours, etc,
MARY MAHER,
Annavilla,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.