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November 10
James Hood, Samuel Gridley Howe, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Tryphena and Tryphosa
David Barnhart
November 10, 2025
Wine cap mushrooms, 2025. Own photo.
On this day in 1898, a white supremacist insurrection in Wilmington, North Carolina began against the democratically-elected biracial city government. This event, like the destruction of Tulsa and Rosewood, has largely been erased or forgotten from the curriculum of American history and must be remembered to resist our current slide toward white supremacy and fascism.
Today is also the birthday of James Hood, in 1942. He, along with Vivian Malone, were the first African-American students at the University of Alabama, but were briefly blocked by Governor George Wallace. He would eventually return to earn a Ph.D. from the University in 1997.
Today is also the birthday, in 1801, of Samuel Gridley Howe, physician and prominent abolitionist, supporter of women’s suffrage, and advocate for disabled persons and their education. He was also married to the suffragist Julia Ward Howe.
Today also marks the martyrdom of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the corrupt alliance of Nigeria’s dictatorship with the oil company Dutch Royal Shell. Remember his name—and who murdered him—every time you fill up your car with gasoline. We remembered him and his campaign of nonviolence resistance and education on his birthday on October 10.
Today is the feast day of Tryphena and Tryphosa, two women church leaders at Iconium mentioned in Romans 16:12. Little is known of them except the attribution that they learned from Saint Paul and Saint Thecla, another woman saint who was viewed by the early church as Paul’s equal.
Reflection:
Regarding charitable work, Samuel Gridley Howe said,
"Meaning well is only half our duty; thinking right is the other, and equally important, half,"
Although I shared Ken Saro-Wiwa’s words on October 10, I think they bear repeating:
“The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely x-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved in shaping its present and its future.”
and
“In this country [England], writers write to entertain, they raise questions of individual existence...but for a Nigerian writer in my position you can't go into that. Literature has to be combative. You cannot have art for art's sake. This art must do something to transform the lives of a community, of a nation. And for that reason, literature has a different purpose altogether in that sort of society...The stories that I tell must have a different sort of purpose from the artist in the Western world...and art, in that instance, becomes so meaningful both to the artist and to the consumers of that art, because you do not just depend on them to read your books, you even have to live a life that they can emulate.”
Prayer: God of liberation and justice, the fight to tell the truth and do justice anywhere is also a fight everywhere. Let your people move and act in solidarity with each other. Amen.