'THE REST OF THE STORY - 50 YEARS OUT"

 

“THE REST OF THE STORY – 50 YEARS OUT”

I dropped out of Vanderbilt Divinity School at the end of May, 1970, and I joined the faculty of the Roses Creek Folk School, near LaFollette, Tennessee, for the summer.  It was an experimental idea based on the Danish model of folk schools, where people with formal education joined with locally educated people to develop one another and learn from one another.  In this case, it was college and graduate students joining with Appalachian Mountain people.  During the summer, I continued to wrestle with my options:  conscientious objector (CO), prison, or flight to Canada.  None of them were good options.  I did not think that I would survive prison, and my Southern rootedness would not allow me to imagine life in Canada, uprooted forever from my family and community.  So, I decided to seek CO status and serve the country in that capacity rather than going to kill people in Vietnam.

In September, 1970, I joined with my long-time Helena friend, David Billings, also in seminary, and several other seminarians, in informing our draft boards that we were giving up our 4-F draft exemptions and would seek alternative service as COs.  As I indicated last week, we were hoping to challenge the draft exemptions of ministers and seminary students – in doing so we had hoped to get churches to rise up against the war.  We learned, however, that not enough of us were doing these actions, and that the draft boards were only too glad to add more fodder to the grist mill of young men sent over to fight in an immoral war.  David and I both applied for CO status with our local draft board in Helena, Arkansas.  

I moved back to Helena to live with my mother, while I began to look for alternative service positions.  I had heard from CO counselors that it would be much better for me to find a position rather than allowing the draft board to assign me somewhere.  The draft board would still have to approve it, but I was told that they usually did because they already had their hands full with meeting quotas to send young men to fight in the war.   I checked into several places in Arkansas, but they were based in rural areas, and although I grew up in a small town, I could not see myself serving in such areas, especially given the hostility that I knew that I would find there with my CO status.  

I got a call from Don Beisswenger in late September, telling me that he had been talking with Father Jim Zralek in Nashville.  Jim was a Catholic priest in east Nashville, and he was very interested in prison ministry.  He wanted to start a halfway house in Nashville for men getting out of state prisons, and he was looking for a staff person who could direct such a venture at a cheap cost.  Don had recommended me for the job, and he wanted to know if I were interested in it.  My first reaction was that while I had rejected going to prison as an alternative to serving in the war, now I would be going in and out of prisons.  I said “yes,” and called Father Zralek, and he hired me over the phone.  I went to Nashville to start working there at Opportunity House as its first director.  I was waiting on the Helena draft board to respond to my request for the CO status.  

In the meantime, I was ordered to report for the physical for service in the army, but since I had applied for the CO status, I skipped it.  My mother called me to tell me that I had made the local paper with this headline:  “Two are sought,” and the article read in part:  “One man failed to show up yesterday at the local Draft Board to go to Memphis for induction, and another failed to appear for his pre-induction exams….Failing to report was Gibson Stroupe.  Both are asked to contact the Draft Board at once.”   I contacted the draft board to let them know that I would go to the Nashville draft board, but I never did it.  I wondered if the MP’s were coming for me, but I figured that they had bigger fish to fry.  

In late October, I heard from the draft board that my application for service as a CO had been approved and that my work at Opportunity House had also been approved.  My good friend David Billings was turned down by the draft board, however.  Much later I found out why from one of my mother’s friends, who had been on that draft board.  He indicated that all of them knew that I was always going to be a minister, so it was within the bounds that I would be a CO.  David, however, had a bad reputation in high school, so the friend indicated that they knew that he was just trying to get out of the draft.  As we all scrambled to assist him, he was almost drafted, but in the meantime, he was convicted of “malicious mischief” on trumped up charges (that word “trumped” has added meaning now) related to racial justice issues.  He was given probation and exiled from Mississippi for 5 years.  But, it was a felony, and his status as a felon made him ineligible for the draft!  I have written about this case in previous blog (June 11, 2018 – check it out if you want to know more of his story), but it made me think how arbitrary the draft was, and how many young men had been sent to their deaths because of such capriciousness – some of them who were killed were my friends.

The work at Opportunity House changed my life.  I got a first hand look at another system that ground up people:  the prison system, based on arresting and convicting and incarcerating people with no financial resources, especially people of color.  It was not quite the prison-industrial complex that it has become today, but the same root issues were there – poorer people and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) used as fodder  to make us all feel better and to keep control over those who feel the weight of injustice and inequity all their lives.  In my two years at Opportunity House, we never had anyone come through who had any material resources – those kinds of folk never made it into the state prison. From then on, I had a different view of race and of prisons, and I’ve tried to live out of that calling for justice and equity ever since.