Mother's Day Actually Has a Deep History of Activism

Though the focus of their group is to end U.S. wars and militarism, Codepink partners with coalitions on other issues, like advising Parkland students in their fight against the NRA and supporting activists resisting attempts to end DACA. In recent years women from Mothers Against Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter have come to speak on Mother’s Day, including Reverend Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar Grant, who was shot and killed by an officer on New Year’s Day in 2009.

Johnson wrote in a letter for Codepink in 2015: “We deserve to live in peace, and we deserve justice for the crimes committed against our children. On a day when mothers are supposed to be honored and appreciated, let’s show some love for the moms who are hurting the most.”

Codepink’s plan for 2018 is a celebration of the new Poor People’s Campaign, an initiative led by Reverend William Barber, building on the work of Martin Luther King Jr., to challenge systemic racism, violence, and poverty. It’s important to Evans that Codepink focuses on issues like these on Mother's Day because these are the things many mothers and their children struggle with everywhere. The commercialization of the holiday is frustrating for Evans, just like it was for Anna Jarvis, but for an entirely different reason: She thinks it’s an obvious attempt to distance people from political engagement.

“It was a call to end war, and it turned into commercialism,” she says. “That’s a distraction. A clear way to distract everyone from that fact that women and children pay the greatest price in war.”

Jarvis likely wouldn’t be happy with the efforts of organizers like Evans and Cunningham, or any of the women who have centered Howe’s declaration in their work on Mother's Day. However, her mother might have appreciated the changes they’re demanding: safety, peace, and the opportunity to raise children in a world that wants to see them grow.