March 31

Olaudah Equiano, John Donne, the Alhambra Decree, and Transgender Day of Visibility

Author

David Barnhart
March 31, 2025

Pilgrim graffiti in the Garden Tomb, an alternative location to the Holy Sepulcher for Christ’s burial spot. Jerusalem. Own photo, 2019.

On this day in 1492, Queen Isabella of Castile ordered 150,000 Muslim and Jewish subjects to convert to Christianity or become exiles. This followed a century of persecution and forced conversions, and would lead eventually to the Spanish Inquisition and the Sephardic Diaspora. There is significant evidence that some of these exiles went to Spanish colonies in North America, and were residents in the United States in California well before Jamestown was established, in contrast to the colonizer mythology of “Westward Expansion” that most of us Americans learn in school. In 2015, Spain began to offer dual citizenship to descendants of those who were expelled. 

Today also marks the death, in 1797, of Olaudah Equiano, who was born in Nigeria, enslaved by human traffickers, ransomed his own freedom, joined the abolitionist movement in England, and wrote an autobiography that helped inspire the British abolition of slave trading. Equiano was inspired and supported in his abolitionist work both by Quakers and the evangelist George Whitfield.  

Today is the feast day of John Donne, English poet and priest, who died on this day in 1631.

Reflection:

One of John Donne’s most famous poems: 

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne

Olaudah Equiano wrote: 

I early accustomed myself to look for the hand of God in the minutest occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality and religion; and in this light every circumstance I have related was to me of importance. After all, what makes any event important, unless by its observation we become better and wiser, and learn 'to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God?' To those who are possessed of this spirit, there is scarcely any book or incident so trifling that does not afford some profit, while to others the experience of ages seems of no use; and even to pour out to them the treasures of wisdom is throwing the jewels of instruction away.

Prayer: God of Life and Death, set all your creatures free. Amen.