September 13, 2001
In 2001, the Barnard Center for Research on Women invited Sister Helen Prejean to open the year’s programming with the second lecture in our newly inaugurated “Women Seeking Justice” series. Sister Helen, a tireless activist working toward the worldwide abolition of capital punishment, and, most famously, author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the U.S., seemed to us to embody the idea of a woman seeking justice, one who could help us to continue our public conversation on incarceration. When we scheduled the lecture for September 13, 2001, we at the Center had no idea of the importance that the date would take on. But, having Sister Helen on campus just two days after the attacks of September 11th provided a crucial step toward healing for the Barnard students and faculty, as well as for those community members who attended the lecture.
With regard to the death penalty, Sister Helen believes in taking seriously the ramifications of violence, while also advocating that violence is not met with more destruction. No message could have been more relevant as the Barnard community, and indeed the United States, struggled to come to terms with the extent of the violence on September 11th and a sense of appropriate responses. Sister Helen reminded us that there are many ways to respond to violence, including murderous violence. She also provided a message of hope that even when facing systems and cycles of violence that seem intractable, we can act to change the world for the better. In the question and answer session, a student came to the microphone who was simply overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems in the world she now found herself facing. Sister Helen reminded her that she as a student alone did not have to address these problems in their entirety, but rather she needed to find “one thing” that she could do to make a difference. Sister Helen had not intended to become a world-renowned opponent of the death penalty, but had instead taken up the single act of writing to a prisoner on death row. It was this small action on behalf of a better world that had started the chain of events leading to her book, the film based on Dead Man Walking and her organizing to end the death penalty. If this young Barnard student would just take up one thing to address the problems of our world, it could lead to a lifetime of action. Today, we are nearly six years away from this moment in time, but the issues that Sister Helen addresses, the ravage of the death penalty and the question of how to respond to all forms of violence, are perhaps even more insistent now than they were then. So, we offer this lecture as part of S&F Online in the hope that it might continue to inspire us to take up “just one thing” to make our world a better, less violent place.
