(now Myanmar) named U Thant, was unknown. But he would lead the United Nations with grace and skill during a decade of worldwide strife.
The son of a wealthy landowner and merchant, Thant was educated at the prestigious National High School in his native land and went on to study at University College in Rangoon. Upon graduation, he returned to teach at his alma mater and was appointed headmaster when he was only twenty-five. During his years as a school administrator, he became actively involved in Burma’s struggle for independence from Great Britain. He struck up a working acquaintance and then friendship with U Nu, who became the first prime minister of independent Burma in 1947. Once in office, Nu assigned Thant to several government posts before appointing him Burma’s permanent delegate to the United Nations in 1957.
Thant once said that as a Buddhist, he was “trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance.” His quiet manner and unassailable integrity gave him the authority to navigate tangled political crises during his tenure as UN Secretary-General. He was instrumental in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and in ending the first civil war in the Congo (1960–1966). He opposed the apartheid policy of South Africa and, frustrated by the hawkish posture of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration toward Vietnam, unsuccessfully tried to engage Washington and Hanoi in peace talks. He was also a guiding force in helping establish UN environmental and development programs.
One of the convictions that guided U Thant’s leadership of the UN was his belief that a different kind of war needed to be fought, one that was waged nonviolently for secure and peaceful coexistence rather than conquest. “Two world wars were fought to make the world safe for democracy,” he told the General Assembly in 1964. “Today we have to wage a war on all fronts. This war has to be waged in peace time, but it has to be waged as energetically and with as much total national effort as in times of war. The war we have to wage today has only one goal, and that is to make the world safe for diversity. The concept of peaceful coexistence has been criticized by many who do not see the need to make the world safe for diversity. I wonder if they have ever paused to ask themselves the question: What is the alternative to coexistence?” In many ways, the search for peaceful coexistence was the ruling principle of U Thant’s public life.
23 January
María Julia Hernández
30 January 1939—30 March 2007
Remembering the Slain
In the feature film Romero about the life and martyrdom of El Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, there’s a poignant scene in which the relatives of “disappeared” victims of death squads line up to look at hundreds of photographs of corpses to see if their missing loved ones are among them. They dread finding them—but they need to know what happened to them. And if they discover that their loved ones are among the slain, they want justice.
The scene isn’t a cinematic invention. María Julia Hernández actually compiled a photographic encyclopedia of the victims of the civil war in El Salvador that claimed some seventy-five thousand lives between 1978 and 1992. Death squads and military units loyal to the ruling junta kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed thousands of ordinary people whom they suspected of loyalty to the leftist guerrillas defying the government. For their part, the guerrillas also carried out kidnappings and killings of people whom they thought loyal to the government. Every morning maimed corpses could be found on the streets of San Salvador, dumped overnight by right-wing death squads or leftist guerillas. Often their faces were burned with battery acid to delay identification of them.
After he became archbishop in 1977, Óscar Romero asked Hernández, then a law professor at the University of Central America, to help him document the atrocities. Romero was murdered three years later, and Hernández herself received regular death threats during the next decade; she began each day by praying, “Well, God, will I see you today, or will you leave me a bit longer, fighting?” But she persevered in her advocacy for the disappeared and the slain, eventually putting together a catalogue of the dead that contained several thousand photos. She was the first to break the news about the 1981 El Mozote Massacre in which nearly eight hundred peasant men, women, and children were abused and slaughtered by government forces. Eight years later, she was one of the lead investigators of the murder of six Jesuit priests at the university where she once taught. As the Human Rights Officer for the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Salvador, she pestered the government to investigate these and other murders and to prosecute those responsible. When the civil war ended in 1991, Hernández hoped that justice would finally be served. But the government issued a general amnesty for all participants in the long conflict. Hernández, undeterred, campaigned to overturn the amnesty.
Her dedication to chronicling human rights abuses in El Salvador and seeking justice for victims was unshakable. An intensely religious woman, Hernández never married, lived simply, and worked out of a sparse office decorated with a photograph of Romero, a man whom she loved and admired. She once described her vocation as a “mission to help the Salvadorian people, who live in a defenseless and precarious state. I know that, from a religious point of view, defending human rights is also a labor of evangelism because it is the defense of human dignity, of men and women in the image of God. It is a choice of love, a choice of faith. I shall never give up.”
24 January
Absalom Jones
6 November 1746—13 February 1818
To Arise Out of the Dust
The vestry of Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church decided that it was time to act. One of the few integrated churches in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, St. George’s black membership had increased many times over thanks to the active evangelization of two black parishioners, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. So in November 1787, an alarmed vestry voted to require black members to sit in the church balcony during worship services. When Jones heard about the decision, he knew he had to defy it. On the following Sunday, he sat in the front pew of the church and was promptly thrown out. He and Allen left the church, taking most of the black parishioners with them, and founded the Free African Society (FAS).
The FAS was intended to be both an alternative nondenominational gathering of black worshippers and a relief society that offered aid financial assistance to freed slaves. Jones knew something about slavery. Born in bondage in Delaware, he was sold to a Philadelphia shopkeeper when he was sixteen. He learned to read and write by attending the night school for blacks run by Quaker Anthony Benezet and eventually managed to purchase his freedom as well as that of his wife.
In 1794, FAS members established themselves as the First African Church of Philadelphia and voted to affiliate with an official denomination. Jones and his followers decided to go with the Episcopal Church, while Allen and his followers opted for the Methodist one. Jones and his people were accepted by the Episcopal diocese—their congregation was renamed the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas—and Jones was ordained a deacon in 1795. Nine years later, he became the first black Episcopal priest, and he ministered to St. Thomas until his death.
From the very beginning, the congregation of St. Thomas, under Jones’s leadership, was defiant of slavery and racial discrimination. One of the church’s founding documents records the determination of its members “to arise out of the dust and shake ourselves, and throw off that servile fear, that the habit of oppression and bondage trained us up in.” Jones’s sermons regularly denounced slavery as a sin, urged slave owners to free their human chattel, and tried to persuade lawmakers to offer protection for runaway slaves looking to find freedom north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But Jones carried on his crusade against slavery outside of the church as well. Working with his old friend Richard Allen, he lobbied against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, a law that stripped fleeing slaves of basic human rights; petitioned Congress in 1800 to
