David Rosenberg at the 2010 Sudanese Diaspora Summit in Pittsburgh. Photo Courtesy of PDEC
The Darfur Heroes program is a way for the Save Darfur Coalition to honor individuals and groups who have done inspiring and important work in an effort to end the violence in Sudan. This April, Save Darfur Coalition is proud to honor David Rosenberg.
David Rosenberg helped organize “The Way Forward in Darfur and South Sudan,” a Sudanese Diaspora Summit held on March 19 – March 21, 2010 in Pittsburgh. The summit focused on promoting dialogue, a unified Diaspora voice and recommendations on advocacy, capacity building, and the elections in Sudan. David Rosenberg has been a longtime activist in the Sudan movement, and below are his words about his passion for the people of Sudan.
I co-founded the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition (PDEC) in the summer of 2004 after seeing news accounts of the genocide in Darfur. I served as volunteer coordinator of the organization during my last two years as an archivist at the University of Pittsburgh and continued in this role after retiring. Already experienced in other community campaigns, I had been able to bring together diverse constituencies (students, retirees, religious and nonprofit organizations) in signature citywide campaigns which successfully impacted political leaders and media.
PDEC has supported Save Darfur Coalition initiatives in a number of ways. For the “Million Voices” campaign -an initiative to deliver 1 million signed postcards to President Bush demanding his support for a stronger multilateral force to protect Darfuris; PDEC collected more than 15,400 postcards with help from student and religious organizations from Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania and Ohio. PDEC collected an additional 15,000 postcards for the “Be a Voice for Darfur” campaign targeting President Obama, which called for the protection of civilians, sustainable peace, justice for victims, and accountability for perpetrators.
The PDEC cards included 4,704 signatures collected at President Obama’s Inauguration by more than 150 Pittsburghers who were part of the Save Darfur Coalition call to service around the Inauguration and Martin Luther King Day. When actor and activist George Clooney delivered PDEC’s postcards and 235,000 others to President Obama, he urged the president to appoint someone to work on Sudan full-time, an initiative which was influential in the appointment of U.S. Special Envoy Gen. Scott Gration.
In 2008, to underline the magnitude of the Darfur genocide, PDEC conceived the idea of creating professionally printed signs each bearing the name of one of the destroyed villages in Darfur. These signs, representing 610 of more than 3,300 Darfur villages destroyed or severely damaged since 2004, have been carried in marches in Pittsburgh and Washington D.C., displayed on college campuses, and exhibited on Flagstaff Hill in Pittsburgh in sight of the G-20 delegates and world leaders who met in the city in September 2009.
Activists with destroyed villages sign. Photo courtesy of PDEC
David Rosenberg, Ph.D., is the co-founder of the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition and a scholar of the French Wars of Religion. He previously worked on community campaigns which focused on memorializing the Holocaust, racial and religious discrimination, and the right of workers to organize into unions.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Save Darfur Coalition.
Tags: Activist Stories, Darfur Heroes, darfuris, destroyed villages sign, G20, genocide, inauguration, million voices campaign, Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition, postcards campaign, Save Darfur Coalition, Scott Gration
