Mount Moriah celebrates Mother's Day in Sunday Service with Gifts, Food, and Fellowship. Mother's Day was declared a national holiday in 1914, and throughout its over 100-year history, families have created ways to honor the day and create lasting memories.
Mother’s Day is celebrated across the country every year on the second Sunday in May, but this holiday has special importance to the African American family. In our community, the social, political, and economic struggles of the Black family meant that African American women had to play roles within the home and society that often challenged patriarchal ideas. They were the nurturers who provided care that ranged from cooking to cleaning, helping to establish family rules and serving as disciplinarians, to providing moral and spiritual training for the children in the family. As mothers made these contributions, they also had to make others, including working away from their homes in the kitchens, fields, factories, and stores of whites so they could help contribute economically to the family.
It has been a popular position of some scholars and critics to present African American women as matriarchs, mothers who presumably wanted to control and dominate their households. This is not only a myth but a fabrication that grew out of circumstances largely created by white dominance and institutionalized systemic poverty that forced African American women to be mothers, breadwinners, providers, and protesters.
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“My mother’s love has always been a sustaining force for our family, and one of my greatest joys is seeing her integrity, her compassion, her intelligence reflected in my daughters.”
First Lady Michelle Obama
ABOUT THE COVER
Natasha, a 31-year-old photographer at N Bee Photography, and her 35-year-old cousin Shakeibra both know how blessed they are to still have their 91-year-old great-grandmother, Wilsie, in their lives as adults. Recently, the duo decided to stage a photo shoot to take gorgeous updated family portraits that they can appreciate now and share with future generations later. And speaking of future generations, Shakeibra has a 15-year-old daughter, Kylea, who has four living generations of women up her branch of the family tree — for those silently counting on their fingers, that's five full generations!
To celebrate their rare family dynamic and cap off the fun photo shoot, Shakeibra decided to direct and star in a recreation of a TikTok video she'd seen of another family's four generations. In the video, Kylea appears first, saying "Hi! Mom?" as she waves her mom into the frame before walking away. Shakeibra repeats her daughter's actions, calling her own mom, 55-year-old Debra, into the frame, who then welcomes her 71-year-old mother, Gloria, before Wilsie ends the video with: "Hi! Five generations!"
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