"EARTH DAY, 2024"

 “EARTH DAY, 2024”

This year marks the 54th anniversary of the official beginning of Earth Day.  I remember when Earth Day was officially recognized in 1970.  It had been semi-officially started in 1969 by Iowa native and later Californian John McConnell.  Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin got it going nationally by calling for a country-wide teach-in on the environment on April, 22, 1970, using the model of the teach-ins against the Vietnam war.  It caught on, and I remember that Caroline and I started observing it in worship in our church in Norfolk in 1976.  As we all know now, we are at a crucial point in the earth’s life, and many think  that it is already too late.  I prefer to think that we still have a chance, and in that mindset, I’m sharing a poem by Wendell Berry that will help us shift our way of thinking about the earth and its creatures, including ourselves.  

The Heron

By Wendell Berry

While the summer’s growth kept me

anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river

where it flowed, faithful to its way,

beneath the slope where my household

has taken its laborious stand.

I could not reach it even in dreams.

But one morning at the summer’s end

I remember it again, as though its being

lifts into mind in undeniable flood,

and I carry my boat down through the fog,

over the rocks, and set out.

I go easy and silent, and the warblers

appear among the leaves of the willows,

their flight like gold thread

quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.

And I go on until I see crouched

on a dead branch sticking out of the water

a heron—so still that I believe

he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.

And then I see the articulation of a feather

and living eye, a brilliance I receive

beyond my power to make, as he

receives in his great patience

the river’s providence. And then I see

that I am seen. Still, as I keep,

I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.

Suddenly I know I have passed across

to a shore where I do not live.

"THE LOST CAUSE IS NEVER LOST IN AMERICAN HISTORY."

 “THE LOST CAUSE IS NEVER LOST IN AMERICAN HISTORY”

Yesterday marked the 159th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.  Today marks the opening of the first criminal trial of a former President, Donald Trump.  These two events are part of many streams that flow into the river of the struggle between equality and white supremacy in American history.  In 1865, Holy Week began with the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox on Palm Sunday,  and it ended with the murder of Lincoln on Good Friday.  

The Civil War ended with the hope of the idea of equality gaining some traction in our history, but those who believed in white supremacy began almost immediately to work for a re-interpretation of the Civil War, naming it the “War Between the States.” Black Codes were instituted in the South, seeking to re-establish slavery by another name.  Radical Republicans established a time of Reconstruction, seeking to enshrine the idea of equality in the institutions of the South (and the North, which is where the problems escalated).  There were fierce battles, especially in the South, in the period of Reconstruction, and eventually in 1877, white supremacy won out.  

    By 1890 the idea of equality had been “buked and scorned,” with the rubric being the racist idea that people classified as “Black” were not able to handle power, that they were not yet ready for equality (would they ever be?).  For more info on this period, see Eric Foner’s “Reconstruction,” David Blight’s “Race and Reunion,”  the NYT “1619 Project,” and a booklet that I wrote in 1996 called “A Twice Told Tale: Race in America.”

By the end of the 19th century, white supremacy had been re-established as the spirit and law of the land, with SCOTUS putting the finishing touches on it in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal.”  Many call it the Jim Crow era, but I prefer Doug Blackmon’s idea of “neo-slavery,” because that’s what I lived and experienced growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the segregated South of the Mississippi River Delta.  Through a long struggle and witness, through courageous actions of many people, especially those classified as “Black,”  a new revolution began, culminating in the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.  These two laws effectively ended neo-slavery in the South.

Yet, like the reaction to Reconstruction, the powerful idea of white supremacy did not yield to the end of neo-slavery, because the roots of white supremacy are deep and complex in American history.  Nikole-Hannah Jones wrote a fine article on this in NYT Magazine of March 17, and she called it the whitewashing of the civil rights movement.  Here is the link to that article. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/magazine/civil-rights-affirmative-action-colorblind.html.   While it is a fine article, she leaves out two important pieces:  Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy of 1968 and 1972, and the rise of George Wallace as a viable presidential candidate in1972.  Both of these white men understood the power of the grievances of white people in regard to race, even though the system of race was designed to favor those of us who are classified as “white.”  Nixon pitched his campaign to the white Southernness that is in all of us classified as “white” in the USA.  Wallace was even less subtle than Nixon:  the USA belongs to white people.

Donald Trump understands this force also, and he has made it a centerpiece of his campaign – the grievance of white people, especially men, is a driving force for Trump and his base.  Part of its appeal is the coming change in demographics in USA:  the time is coming soon when there will be no majority racial group in the country.  This inevitable demographic tidal wave makes those of us who are classified as “white” exceedingly anxious.  Who will we be if our “whiteness” doesn’t grant automatic status.  Part of the appeal is that it flows out of the long and persistent strain of white racism in American history – it is deeply rooted and doubly difficult to eradicate.

The jury selection for the Trump trial has begun, and it is part of a fascinating and scary storyline in current American history.  Can the wannabe dictator survive the substantial criminal cases against him and move back to power?  It will be up to us to insist that Donald Trump never gets close to the Oval office again.  

"SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX AND THE BEGINNING OF THE LOST CAUSE"

 “SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX AND THE BEGINNING OF THE LOST CAUSE”

One hundred and fifty-nine years ago tomorrow was the surrender of Confederate forces to the Union army at Appomattox, to end the Civil War.  Joshua Chamberlain was a professor at Bowdoin College in Maine when he volunteered for the Union army in 1862.  He fought in many famous battles in the Civil War, including Gettysburg, where he led his Maine soldiers in a defense of the Union position at Little Round Top, forcing the Confederate army back and leading to the Union victory at Gettysburg.  He kept a diary during the War, and he has a very powerful account of the surrender of the at Appomattox, which took place on April 9, Palm Sunday. Here is an excerpt from that diary about the surrender at Appomattox;

     "Ah, but it was a most impressive sight, a most striking picture, to see that whole army in motion to lay down the symbols of war and strife, that army which had fought for four terrible years after a fashion but infrequently known in war.

At such a time and under such conditions I thought it eminently fitting to show some token of our feeling, and I therefore instructed my subordinate officers to come to the position of 'salute' in the manual of arms as each body of the Confederates passed before us.

      When General Gordon came opposite me I had the bugle blown and the entire line came to 'attention,' preparatory to executing this movement of the manual successively and by regiments as Gordon's columns should pass before our front, each in turn.  The General was riding in advance of his troops, his chin drooped to his breast, downhearted and dejected in appearance almost beyond description. 

     By word of mouth General Gordon sent back orders to the rear that his own troops take the same position of the manual in the march past as did our line. That was done, and a truly imposing sight was the mutual salutation and farewell.  At a distance of possibly twelve feet from our line, the Confederates halted and turned face towards us. Their lines were formed with the greatest care, with every officer in his appointed position, and thereupon began the formality of surrender.

    Gordon, at the head of the marching column, outdoes us in courtesy. He was riding with downcast eyes and more than pensive look; but at this clatter of arms he raises his eyes and instantly catching the significance, wheels his horse with that superb grace of which he is master, drops the point of his sword to his stirrup, gives a command, at which the great Confederate ensign following him is dipped and his decimated brigades, as they reach our right, respond to the 'carry.' All the while on our part not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion of man, but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead. 

      "Bayonets were affixed to muskets, arms stacked, and cartridge boxes unslung and hung upon the stacks. Then, slowly and with a reluctance that was appealingly pathetic, the torn and tattered battleflags were either leaned against the stacks or laid upon the ground. The emotion of the conquered soldiery was really sad to witness. Some of the men who had carried and followed those ragged standards through the four long years of strife, rushed, regardless of all discipline, from the ranks, bent about their old flags, and pressed them to their lips with burning tears.

     And it can well be imagined, too, that there was no lack of emotion on our side, but the Union men were held steady in their lines, without the least show of demonstration by word or by motion. There was, though, a twitching of the muscles of their faces, and, be it said, their battle-bronzed cheeks were not altogether dry. Our men felt the import of the occasion, and realized fully how they would have been affected if defeat and surrender had been their lot after such a fearful struggle.

     Nearly an entire day was necessary for that vast parade to pass. About 27,000 stands of arms were laid down, with something like a hundred battleflags; cartridges were destroyed, and the arms loaded on cars and sent off to Wilmington.  Every token of armed hostility was laid aside by the defeated men. No officer surrendered his side arms or horse, if private property, only Confederate property being required, according to the terms of surrender, dated April 9, 1865, and stating that all arms, artillery, and public property were to be packed and stacked and turned over to the officer duly appointed to receive them.”

Chamberlain’s moving account of honor to honor reminds us of the “brother against brother” of the Civil War.  But, it also begins to cloak the Civil War in romantic white myth, a myth that would morph into the beginning of the Lost Cause.  Five days later it would begin with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth in a conspiracy to win back the Confederacy.

That Lost Cause is being revived again in the MAGA movement, a 21st century version of the continuing struggle in American history to deny the power of slavery and to maintain white supremacy.  This year’s elections in November will tell us whether we will return to 1877, when the Confederacy was reinvented, or to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act sought to diminish the power of the Confederacy.   More on this next week, but for now, let us remember this week of April 9-14, 1865, and let us think on its meaning for our time.

"HAVING EYES TO SEE"

 “HAVING EYES TO SEE”

Our kids David and Susan used to love having egg hunts at our house during the Easter season.  Sometimes they would last for two weeks or so, with all of us taking turns hiding the eggs –  we were not using real eggs at that point!  One of the fun parts of the game was seeking to hide the eggs in plain sight, just hidden enough not to be obvious, but visible if the seeker had eyes to see.  “Having eyes to see” became one of our mantras about the egg hunts, but also about life – our orientation towards a particular subject often determined what we were able to see.

In this week of Resurrection, I always think first of the Gospel of John, where the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth begin in chapter 20.  Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb alone, coming to anoint the dead body of Jesus.  She is the only disciple named in all four Gospels who comes to the tomb of Jesus.  As she approaches the tomb, she sees that the stone has been rolled away, and her first thought is not: “Hallelujah!  Jesus has risen from the dead.” No, her first thought is that the body of Jesus has been stolen, and she is in great despair.  She runs to get some of the male disciples to help her, and Peter and “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (commonly known as John) race to the tomb to see what has happened.  They go into the tomb and see that the body is gone, but then they leave Mary alone by herself at the tomb.

Mary is weeping over the situation, but she steps into the tomb.  There she sees two men who ask her why she is crying.  She tells them that the body of Jesus has been stolen, and she does not know where it is. Then she turns to see another person in the tomb – it is the risen Jesus, but she does not recognize him.  She assumes that he is the caretaker of the cemetery, and they have a short conversation about the disappearance of Jesus’ body.  I’ve always been intrigued that Mary cannot recognize the risen Jesus standing right in front of her – she does not have eyes to see!

Why doesn’t she recognize him?  She has traveled with him and worked with him for months and months, but now she does not recognize him at such an important time.  It is not like he looks like a ghost – she sees that he is a human being, and indeed thinks that he is the caretaker.  There are many reasons given for this lack of recognition, but my thought is that she is so captured by the power of death, that she cannot even see the risen Jesus standing right in front of her.  Her perceptual apparatus tells her that Jesus is dead, and she sticks with that.  I know that process in my own journey.  Though I “saw” Black people every day when I was growing up, I was a young adult before I had my eyes opened and saw that they were human beings like me.  Prior to that, I did not have eyes to see.

When does Mary recognize the risen Jesus?  When he calls her name: “Mary.” Then her eyes are opened, and she hears from Jesus that she will be the first preacher:  “Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them what you have seen.”  Mary does this – she tells them: “I have seen the Lord!”  Mary has eyes to see, but her colleagues do not.  Luke’s account in chapter 24 lets us know that the male disciples think that her testimony is nonsense, and she is dismissed.  The dismissal continues a long history of the testimony of women being discounted by men, but Mary (and Jesus) prevail, and the men come around too.

    We should note that the two male disciples are at the tomb with Mary, but Jesus chooses not to appear to them.  They leave, and Mary is left alone at the tomb.  It is then that Jesus chooses to appear to Mary – he CHOOSES not to appear to the men, but he CHOOSES to appear to one at the margins, a disciple named Mary.  We must always keep this fundamental aspect of the Resurrection story in front of us – the Risen Jesus chooses to announce his Resurrection at the margins of life.  The gritty and uncomfortable work of his earthly ministry continues in his resurrection – at the margins of life. 

    As we think about the Resurrection of Jesus this week, let us remember that he appears to a woman, to a witness on the margins of life.  Indeed, in all four of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, it is the women who carry the water – it is the women who become the primary witnesses to the Resurrection.  If we want to see the risen Jesus, we must go the margins of life, because that is where Jesus did his ministry and then lived in his Resurrected life.  There we will have the opportunity to hear our names called, and we will be given the gift of sight for the kindom of God.

"THE COMPETING VISIONS OF HOLY WEEK"

 “THE COMPETING VISIONS OF HOLY WEEK”

“Ride On, King Jesus, no one can hinder us!”  This adapted line from the African-American spiritual tells us so much about Holy Week.  I used to love it when the Sanctuary Mass Choir, led by Ms. Joann Price, sang this anthem during the Lent and Easter season, and always at funerals.  It is a powerful song, so if you haven’t heard it lately, find it online and be lifted up.

Jesus does ride on in Holy Week, which began yesterday, and which takes us through his execution on Friday and resurrection on Sunday.  Whether you are a believer or not, take time this week to notice the dynamics of the story of Holy Week.  Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and he knows that this is the time when his vision must take hold – this is the critical week.  His followers are fired up, and why shouldn’t they be – he has healed their bodies and their spirits; he has fed the hungry; he has cured the sick; and he has given them a new vision of life and how to live their lives.  This is it – this year, Jerusalem!

Part of the fervor comes from the time of the Jewish calendar – it is the season of Passover, the commemoration of God’s defeat of Pharoah, a defeat that brought the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt and into the liberation of the wilderness.  Part of the Seder meal for Passover has the phrase “Next year, Jerusalem!”  And, as Jesus enters Jerusalem on a jackass to celebrate Passover, his followers are ecstatic – the hated Romans will be overthrown, and the corrupt religious leaders of Judaism will be replaced with compassionate and righteous leaders.  “Ride On, King Jesus!”   But, Rome is watching.

  While Jesus and his followers parade into Jerusalem from the north, another parade is entering from the west.  It is a Roman parade, led by Governor Pontus Pilate, bringing a garrison of Roman soldiers into Jerusalem at the time of Passover.  Their purpose is a display of power, to warn those pilgrims who come to celebrate Passover.  Their parade is impressive – calvary on powerful horses, infantry soldiers armed to the teeth, flag-bearers displaying the banners of the Roman Empire, the golden poles with the Roman eagles atop them.  Trumpets blaring, drums beating, an imperial demonstration of might and power, all designed to send a message to the Jewish folk who celebrate Passover:  “Pay Attention- remember who is in charge!  Celebrate your religious holiday all that you want, but remember that Rome is in charge, not the God of Jesus. Pay attention or risk imprisonment or death.  No liberation talk allowed here!”

    Jesus leads a parade based in love, justice, compassion, and healing.  Pontus Pilate leads a parade based in violence and domination and death – two competing visions of life.  We will see that drama played out in Holy Week.  The disciples began with hope and excitement and determination, but the power of Rome shrinks their hearts and their vision and their resolve.  By the end of the week, they too are crying out “Crucify him!”  All the male disciples desert Jesus when he is arrested, although Peter seeks to go a little way with Jesus – but he too fades away quickly.  Only the women disciples remain faithful to Jesus, and as we wonder whether women should hold power in the church, we should recall who stayed with Jesus and who the primary witnesses were.

Holy Week reminds us of the struggles in our hearts also.  We are longing for love, but we are believing in death.  We so desperately want to believe in the vision of love and justice and compassion, but the powers of the world roar at us or bedazzle us, and we fall in line.  For those of us able to hold out a little bit, as Peter did, the powers wear us down – we turn our hearts over to money, to racial classification, to redemptive violence, to gender identity, to class, to nation, to the Trumpdemic, to any number of other powers who compete for our devotion.  We seek to resist these powers, but they are so pervasive and so invasive, that we often yield, as did Peter.  We may not holler out “Crucify him!”, but we do say “Ride on, King Jesus?  Yeah, just ride on out of here, so we can get on with our lives.” We come to agree that Jesus deserves the death penalty.

The drama of Holy Week reminds us of the hopes and failures of our lives – we long for love, but we believe in death.  We know that is not the end of the drama of Holy Week, but for this week, seek to stay with it.  The stories in Luke’s Gospel from chapters 19-23 are a good companion, so check them out.  Let us acknowledge this struggle in our hearts between these two competing visions, and let us seek to be like those women disciples – choose love over death, choose compassion over redemptive violence, and seek to find our way to life, even in the midst of death. 

"WHAT DOES A WOMAN DO WITH A PHI BETA KAPPA KEY?"

 “WHAT DOES A WOMAN DO WITH A PHI BETA KAPPA KEY”

This question was asked of our friend Joyce Tucker, as she appeared before the Committee on Examinations of Atlanta Presbytery for ordination as a pastor in the late 1970’s.  The inquisitor was a prominent male minister on the Committee.  Her dossier indicated that she had graduated from Duke and was welcomed into the Phi Beta Kappa Club there because of her outstanding academic work.  She could not respond as she would have liked to this question, because that committee had the power to determine whether or not she would be accepted for ordination.  She was eventually certified for ordination by the Committee.

That question was just one of thousands of questions and rejections of women as leaders and pastors in the Presbyterian Church.  This year marks the 60th anniversary of the ordination of women as pastors in the PCUS, the former southern Presbyterian Church.  The Presbyterian Church split over slavery in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War, and we were the last mainline denomination to reunite, doing so at a special worship service in Atlanta in 1983.  The former “Northern” (but really-the-rest-of-the-country) UPCUSA church had voted to ordain women as pastors in 1956, and first woman ordained as a pastor was Margaret Towner that same year.

There had been many discussions and attempts to approve ordination for women in these branches of the Presbyterian church.  In 1916 the PCUS had approved ordination of women to be deacons, and the UPCUSA had done it in 1922.  The UPCUSA had approved ordaining women as ruling elders in 1930, but the PCUS would not take it that far.  In the 1950’s the southern Presbyterians began to work for allowing women to be ordained as pastors.  The PCUS governing body sent a recommendation to ordain women as pastors in 1956, but it failed to get a majority of presbyteries to approve it, losing 44-39.  In 1963, the governing body again recommended approval of women’s ordination, and in 1964, the presbyteries agreed by a vote 53-27.  It became church policy, and the shift became an article in  the New York Times.

The first woman to be ordained in the former PCUS was Dr. Rachel Henderlite, who was the daughter of a pastor and who had a PhD. In ethics from Yale, under H. Richard Niebuhr.  She had taught for a considerable amount of time at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, when she learned that her salary was not equal to that of the male faculty members. She worked hard for that equity, and her work became well known.  She was approached by some male ministers in Hanover Presbytery, where Richmond was located, asking her to seek to become the first woman to be ordained in the former PCUS.  She agreed, and after some struggles with the Presbytery, she was approved for ordination.  She was ordained at interracial All Souls Presbyterian Church in Richmond on December 12, 1965. She indicated that for many years she received a postcard annually from a male minister in South Carolina, reminding her that she had broken Biblical law by becoming a minister and that as a result, she would rot in hell.

There are many stories like Dr. Henderlite’s, including Caroline’s (she was ordained in 1973 by Atlanta Presbytery after many machinations).  A lot of southern churches paid no heed to the policy that allowed the ordination of women to church office of deacon, elder, or pastor.  My home church was one of those, and in the late 1970’s, the women members, including my mother, made a push for women to be ordained as elders.  The clerk of the Session and the pastor were opposed to the ordination of women, but at the congregational meeting, some women nominated the daughter of one of the wealthiest members of the church to be an elder.  When the pastor refused to accept the nomination, the wealthy father spoke up and indicated his displeasure at his daughter being rejected.  The pastor then allowed the daughter’s name to be placed in nomination, and as planned by the women, she then declined the nomination. But, the door had been opened for Maud Cain Howe to be nominated.  She was nominated and elected to be the first woman elder at the 125 year old church.  

    Maybe that’s what a woman does with a Phi Beta Kappa key does – she uses it to unlock doors for folk, doors that men have locked to keep people out.  We are grateful for the tenacity, creativity and determination of so many women and men, who have worked and cajoled and marched and sat in and testified to the fact that God shows no partiality.  May we find our place in this great cloud of witnesses.

“WE ARE EACH OTHER – THE WORK OF SONYA CLARK”

 “WE ARE EACH OTHER – THE WORK OF SONYA CLARK”

Caroline and I were blessed to be able to attend the High Museum of Art’s exhibit of Sonya Clark’s textile work on its last weekend in town in mid-February.  I’m not much on textile art (one of my many shortcomings), but this was a stunning exhibit, and I want to lift her witness as part of Women’s History Month. She was born in 1967, and this is what she said about her heritage:

"I was born in Washington DC to a psychiatrist from Trinidad and a nurse from Jamaica. I gained an appreciation for craft and the value of the handmade from my maternal grandmother who was a professional tailor. Many of my family members taught me the value of a well-told story and so it is that I value the stories held in objects.”

The title of her exhibit at the High was “We Are Each Other.”  She was inspired by a Gwendolyn Brooks poem “Paul Robeson” (1970) which closes with, “we are each other’s harvest/we are each other’s business/we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”  The emphasis of the exhibit was that in our age of extreme individualism, we all belong to one another, and we all are collaborations of many folks.  In one interview, she noted that she herself was the result of a collaboration of her parents, hopefully for more than twenty minutes, as she put it.  Her themes of collaboration and interaction and engaging our diversities were powerfully demonstrated in the High’s exhibit.

Clark’s work is no sentimental hope that we all should just get along.  Her work invites the observer to participate in her art work and to develop the collaboration as we go.  Because of space limitations, I’ve chosen five projects that crossed many boundaries with a deep amount of integrity.  The High exhibit began with her “Beaded Prayers Project,” begun in 1998, in which found objects were woven, glued, tied, into a larger background.  I counted 135 of these panels, most of which have been made by observers and participants in Ms. Clark’s art work.  It is an ever-expanding work, in which people are asked to acknowledge their roots, note their pain, and look to the future.

Second was a wall hanging of Madame C.J. Walker, the first African-American woman millionaire, having made her fortune through selling products for Black women’s hair.  The wall hanging was made entirely of plastic hair combs – combs that are used to shape and beautify Black’s women’s hair.  The hanging was huge, and as we got closer to it, we noted that various parts of the combs were missing, the newly shaped pieces fashioned together to make up the portrait of Madame Walker.  Black women’s hair has long been a central focus of the struggle against racism’s desire to demean and diminish the humanity of those classified as “Black” in our culture.  The need and the desire to straighten Black women’s hair so that it looks like white women’s hair is still a powerful force in American culture.

Clark took on this power of white supremacy to seek to dictate Black humanity and beauty in her Hair Craft Project.  She and fellow artists noted the power and the resonance of the curliness of Black people’s hair, and Clark worked to note that this power was not only symbolic but also inspiring.  She and other artists noted the many curls of Black hair, and they developed a new language, using the curly turns of Black hair as the basis for a new alphabet for Black people.  The exhibit at the High had examples of the new alphabet and included sentences in the new language.  This project itself will take a lot more work, but it is all built on Clark’s idea of collaboration.

The last two parts of the exhibit that I want to note relate to the continuing power of the Confederacy and white supremacy.  Clark notes the stubborn tenacity of white supremacy in American culture, and she offers two approaches to it.  The first is the “Unraveling Project,” in which the participants are asked to reflect on the continuing power of the Confederacy and white supremacy in our country.  She seeks help in unraveling particular Confederate battle flags, and she notes that in this work, many of the flags are very difficult to unravel – a reality and a metaphor for the difficult work of overcoming and dismantling racism. 

I could go on and on about her work, but I want to finish on the one that touched me the most.  Ms. Clark indicated that she had been to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and while she was there, she saw an exhibit with Abraham Lincoln’s top hat.  Right beside it was a tea towel used by Robert E. Lee when he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, thus bringing an end to the Civil War.  The tea towel was white linen with a subtle red stripe at the bottom, and the tea towels that were at Appomattox were cut up and distributed to various soldiers on that day of surrender.  Clark wondered aloud (though she knew the answer) why that tea towel had not become the symbol of the Confederacy rather than the battle flag.  She wants to make the Confederate tea towel much better known, and she made a huge hanging of the towels woven together.  She also encouraged us attendees to make our own Confederate tea towels and asked us to help make this the symbol of the Confederacy.  Maybe Donald Trump’s supporters will use the tea towel symbol when they storm the next government building.

Sonya Clark is a stunning and remarkable artist – if you don’t know her work (which I did not), look her up and learn from her powerful insights and provocative art.  She teaches at Amherst, and we are all the better off for her artistic vision and work.

"SHOULD JOE GO?"

 “SHOULD JOE GO?”

I am thinking and worrying about the Presidential election in November.  I started to name this blog “Joe Should Go,” but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that.  The time is running short, but if President Biden wanted to step down as the Democratic front-runner, there is still a small window left.  Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election at the end of March of 1968.  That did not turn out well for the Democrats, but Bobby Kennedy was on the rise until his assassination in June of that year, and I believe that he would have beaten Nixon had he not been killed.  There are a lot of parallels between 1968 and 2024 – a sitting President whom many in his own party have great doubts about their chances for re-election; the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which turned into a disaster for the Democrats, as Mayor Richard Daley manhandled the anti-war demonstrators; and a scary Republican candidate.

Up until the Michigan presidential primary, I was feeling OK about President Biden’s chances to defeat Trump.  Michigan was the first presidential primary with significant urban centers, and for me that meant that it was a key reflection of what we might see in November.  The numbers in Michigan were not good for Biden beating Trump.  There were the noteworthy “uncommitted” voters  totaling over 101,000 in the Democratic primary, many of them a protest vote against Biden’s failure to uphold human values in the war in Gaza.  

    More disturbing to me, however, were the vote totals in the primaries.  Some 768,000+ voted in the Democratic primary, and Biden won over 80% of those.  But, over 1,102,000 people voted in the Republican primary, meaning that 334,000 more people in Michigan voted for Republicans than for Democrats.  Indeed, Trump received almost as many votes as all the Democratic candidates combined.  I recognize that the Republican primary was more contested than the Democratic, but the vote differential is staggering to me.  It means that many Democratic voters stayed home for the primary, and while they may not stay home in November for the general election, making up 334,000 votes is a tall order in such a swing state. 

    I’m thinking that Joe should go.  There are strong Democratic candidates waiting in the wings – Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams, Gavin Newsom, to name a few.  The time is exceedingly short, but with Trump’s legal troubles, there is much more of an open window for new Democratic candidates. Obviously, none of them will step in unless Biden steps out.  Every time that I see President Biden on tv, he looks more and more frail.  He has done a good job as President, but he is simply too old to run for a second term.  If he stays in the race and gets the nomination, I will work hard for him and vote for him, but I do not believe that he can beat Trump, given what the Michigan results look like. 

     I feel today as I felt when President Biden announced for re-election on April 24 last year– he is too old to run for re-election.  As Trump’s legal woes mount (and his age is showing too,), there is a good chance for a Democrat not named President Biden to win the presidency.  And, given the nature of Trump’s self-delusional narcissism, it is absolutely imperative that he not return to the Presidency.  I’m guessing that is why Governor Nikki Haley is staying in the race, figuring and hoping that Trump’s legal troubles will do him in before the election in November.  And, I do not think that President Biden can beat Haley, if she were the Republican nominee.  The New York election interference Trump trial at the end of this month will tell us a lot, but with all the delays, none of those are a given before the election.

So, I believe that President Biden still has time to bow out of the Presidential election, but only a few weeks.  As I wrote in an earlier blog at the beginning of the year, this year of 2024 will be one of the most chaotic and most consequential of many in recent history.  We have a lot of events left to occur and to digest, but I do believe that Joe should go.

"FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT"

 “FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT”

In the spring of 1951, two Black lawyers were driving from Richmond to Roanoke to investigate and seek to adjudicate complaints about civil rights violations.  On the way they decided to stop in the small Virginia town of Farmville to engage the Black students of Robert Moton High School there.  They had heard that a 16 year old student named Barbara Johns had led a walkout and boycott of their segregated, rundown school until the white school board built another school for them.  The two lawyers were Spottswood Robinson III and Oliver Hill, and they were in charge of Virginia for the NAACP. They felt that the possibilities of taking the case in Farmville were slim and none, because Prince Edward County was known as the most racist place in Virginia.  

Robinson and Hill had just come back from a briefing on the Briggs case in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where the initial complaint was for Black students to get school buses that were equal to those used by white students.  Thurgood Marshall and Robinson were lead attorneys on that case, because Spottswood Robinson III was Marshall’s most valued assistant.  In Farmville, Robinson planned to tell the kids to knock it off, go back to school and to get ready for the legal action in the South Carolina case.  However, Robinson had never met a student like Barbara Johns.  

    He remembered the conversation in this way: “We were going to tell the kids about the Briggs suit, which was about to begin, but a strike in Prince Edward County was something else again. Only these kids turned out to be so well organized, and their morale was so high, we just didn’t have the heart to tell ‘em to break it up.”  That conversation led to many more, and the students agreed to give up their demands for an equal but separate school – they adopted the NAACP approach of seeking to end legal segregation itself.  Spottswood Robinson III would become the lead attorney in this case, and he argued it in front of the US Supreme Court as one of the five cases that became Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas – the case that ended legal segregation in the USA but not neo-slavery.

    Robinson was born in Richmond in 1916, son of a lawyer and a homemaker.  His grandfather Spottswood Robinson had been held as a slave in rural Virginia, but fled slavery and set up shop in Richmond.  Spottswood would be named after him, as Spottswood William Robinson III.  He graduated from Virginia Union University and went to Howard University Law School, where he would study under the visionary Charles Hamilton Houston and be classmates with Thurgood Marshall.  He graduated from there in 1939, being first in his class with the highest scholastic average in the history of the school.  He became a leading strategist of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and he traveled all around the South to see the oppressive conditions that neo-slavery and legal segregation imposed upon people.  Thurgood Marshall talked him into coming on the staff of the NAACP, with the promise being that Hamilton and Marshall were assembling a team that would seek to take down legal segregation and thus end neo-slavery.

    Robinson was a tireless worker in this cause, traveling many places, facing arrest and other dangers in the South, as he and his colleagues built the cases to take down neo-slavery.  In the summer of 1944, Irene Morgan, a resident of Baltimore, asked Robinson and the NAACP to defend her after she was arrested in Saluda, Virginia, on July 16. Contrary to state law, she had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus trip she had taken across state line from Gloucester County to Baltimore. If it could be shown that forcing black passengers to change seats as they traveled into the South interfered with interstate commerce, then a blow might be struck. Adopting the strategy, Robinson defended Morgan both in the local court and in the Virginia Supreme Court, losing as expected in both venues.  SCOTUS took up the case in 1946, and in June they ruled that Virginia’s law was unconstitutional.  It opened the door to the Brown case eight years later.

    Spottswood Robinson III is one of the unheralded heroes of the civil rights movement.  He later was appointed to be a federal judge in DC by President Lyndon Johnson, and in 1966 Johnson appointed him to the Federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit, the same court that recently ruled unanimously that Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity were hogwash.  Robinson served as chief judge of that Appeals Court until his retirement in 1986.  He was the first Black person to serve on that court and also to serve as its chief judge.  He died in 1998, and his life is a powerful example of the dynamic of equality in American life.  That idea is now once again under attack – may we find the resolve and courage of Spottswood Robinson III, so that we can be witnesses in our time.

"SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT"

 “SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT”

I have been thinking a lot about Fulton County DA Fani Willis lately, especially after her fiery testimony on Thursday as the white Trump team tried to taint her and get her dismissed from the Trump election interference case.  She had an unforced error in her love life, but the attempt to discredit her seems to be going nowhere legally.  Unless new evidence pops up, I don’t see the judge disqualifying her because there are no legal grounds to do so.  Still, she’s been buked, and she’s been scorned as a Black woman taking on white men and white supremacy, and it is nothing new.  I want to share the story of another woman who had to fight for her life in the midst of white supremacy. 

    Ella Sheppard was born into slavery in 1851 on Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage plantation in Tennessee and was a direct descendant of Jackson’s brother.  Her enslaved father worked outside the plantation and saved enough money to buy freedom for himself and his family.  His owner, however, would only allow him to buy his freedom, which he did.  Ella’s mother went into great despair and decided to take her own life and that of her daughter.  As Ella’s mother stood on the banks of the Cumberland River getting ready to jump in, she heard a loud voice cry out:

“Don’t do it, Honey! Don’t you see God’s chariot a-comin’ down from Heaven? Let the chariot of the Lord swing low. This child is gonna stand before kings and queens! The Lord would have need of that child.”  The voice came from an elderly Black woman who was also enslaved, and she gently talked the mom out of suicide.  Ella’s father would soon buy Ella’s freedom, but the owner would not allow the freedom of the mother, whom he later sold down South to Mississippi.

Ella’s father decided to get out of the South and moved to Cincinnati, where Ella showed a stunning aptitude for music.  She studied with a white music teacher, who made Ella come in the back door, and Ella could only come at night to receive the lessons.  Her father died of cholera in 1866, and Ella supported the family by working as a maid, singing in public, and teaching music.  After the Civil War ended, she moved back to the Nashville area to teach people freed from slavery.  Recognizing that she needed to hone her teaching skills, she enrolled at Fisk in Nashville.  

At Fisk, she met George White, treasurer of Fisk and music teacher there.  He was tremendously impressed with her and hired her on as an assistant teacher of music at Fisk, which meant she became the first Black faculty at Fisk.  At this time, however, Fisk was desperately in need of funding, and George White decided to form a choir who would tour country to raise money for Fisk.  Ella Sheppard would be his assistant and main organizer.  They recruited other Fisk students, all of whom had previously lived as slaves, and they named themselves the “Fisk Jubilee Singers,” using the Jubilee concept found in Leviticus 25.  They began to tour in 1871, and in their first concerts with white audiences, they sang classical European songs, with a few spirituals thrown in.  They noticed that when they sang spirituals, the audience went wild and gave much more generously.  So, Ella Sheppard chose “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as their initial spiritual, fashioned from the testimony of the elderly Black woman who had saved her life.  She taught the other singers to sing the spirituals, and they became a hit. While they continued to use classical European music, spirituals became their standard singing in the concerts.  

Their touring accomplished at least three things.  They saved Fisk University – donations poured in.  And second, their skill and their humanity stunned white people, who thought that they were inferior as Black people.  Third, they rescued the spirituals as a music and art form – no longer considered the music of inferior people, but rather music which enabled people to survive the horror of slavery. They had to endure all kinds of terrible treatment at the hands of white supremacy, but they prevailed.  As the white supremacist movement grew stronger and more dangerous, the women members often stayed home.  The original group disbanded in 1878, and Ella got married to Rev. George Washington Moore.

Ella also searched for  her mother in Mississippi, as many Black folk did after the Civil War (see Leonard Pitts’ fine novel “Freeman” for the story on these kinds of searches).  Ella brought her mother back to Nashville, where Ella taught many Fisk students and others until her death in 1914.  The Fisk Jubilee Singers were re-started in 1879, and they have been singing ever since – the first HBCU choir in history!  

"BLACK HISTORY AND LENT"

 “BLACK HISTORY AND LENT”

    The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is Valentine’s Day this year – a strange combination of love and ashes, the ashes made all too relevant by all the mass killing and shootings by guns in this country and by the slaughter of the Israelis and the Palestinians in the Middle East.  As I said in this blog space before, we have turned ourselves over to the gun-god Molech (Leviticus 20:1-5), and he requires that we sacrifice our children to him, which we are continuing to do.  We seem to prefer killing over loving.  

            This intersectionality reminds me that Black History Month and Lent almost always overlap on the calendar, and that is appropriate, for the racism that called forth the need for Black History Month is America’s original sin.  The lynch mob that attacked the Capitol in 2021 sought to overthrow a Senate soon to be presided over by a Black woman, who would also swear in the first Black person ever elected to the U.S. Senate from my state of Georgia.  For all the moaning of many of my siblings classified as “white” about “cancel culture,” it is we ourselves who have been doing that very thing to those classified as “Black,” and to all people classified as “other” in the system of race.  We have sought to cancel and to deny the humanity and the culture of all of those classified as “non-white,” especially those known as “Black.”

   This white desire to cancel Black humanity and Black culture is why Black History Week (and later Month) was created and named.  It was created to affirm the humanity, the culture, and the gifts of those classified as “Black” in the system of race, a system whose very purpose is to cancel the humanity of all those categorized as “non-white.”  Many people helped to create Black History Month, but a Black man born in Virginia, Carter Godwin Woodson, is called the “father of Black history.”  He was born in 1875 to parents who had been held in slavery in Virginia, but who saved and scrimped and bought the land where Woodson was born.  Woodson and his brothers did hard work on his parents’ tobacco farm, but he also went to a Freedman’s Bureau school.  It was there that he found his calling – as he learned to read, a whole new world opened to him, as it does to all of us who learn to read.

After the destruction of Reconstruction in the early 1880’s, there were no Black schools nearby for Woodson to attend, so he moved to Huntingdon, West Virginia, to work in the coal mines and to go to Frederick Douglass High School at age 20.  He graduated and attended Berea College in Kentucky, where he got his degree in 1904  just before the state of Kentucky forced Berea to deny entrance to Black people.  Berea appealed Kentucky’s order to SCOTUS, and in a continuing effort to cancel Black humanity and Black culture, in 1908 SCOTUS upheld the Kentucky law.  

Woodson was undaunted and went into teaching school while he earned his Master’s degree at the University of Chicago and his PhD at Harvard (the second Black person to do so – who was the first?).  In 1915 he and four friends at the Chicago YMCA founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  Their goal in doing this was to affirm the humanity and culture of African-Americans, at a time when the “white” culture was doing all that it could to deny those.  They also developed the Journal of Negro History to publish scholarly studies of Black life and Black history.  Both of those organizations continue to this day because they focused a bright light on the power and life of those classified as “Black.”

In 1926, Woodson and his colleagues started Negro History Week, choosing the dates of February 12-19 because they encompassed the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (2/12) and Frederick Douglass (2/14).  Woodson did not just “pronounce” this celebration – he sent out messengers to all his contacts in the field of education, and several states and the cities of Baltimore and Washington, DC, adopted it.  The idea struggled in the 1940’s but regained strength in the 1960’s, and in 1970 Kent State University changed it to “Black History” and stretched it out to a month.  In 1976 President Gerald Ford proclaimed February as “Black History Month,” and so it has continued.

    Here are the words that Woodson used to describe the need for Black History Month, a need that continues today, not so much because African-Americans have internalized “inferiority,” but because white supremacy is so deeply ingrained in our national culture. (I apologize for the lack of inclusive language here, but I have left the quote as it was given):

“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

"GET ON THE BUS!"

 GET ON THE BUS!

On Sunday, I preached at First Presbyterian Church in Eufala, Alabama.  Our friends Dan and Virginia Hamby retired there in the family house on the lake, and Dan has been supplying at First Church a bit.  He suggested to them to invite me to preach there.  It is the home county of George C. Wallace, and it is the center of the Pulitzer Prize winning  book called “Freedom’s Dominion” by Jefferson Cowie.

I used the lectionary Gospel text and stretched it a bit to form Mark 1:32-45.  It is the story of Jesus healing a person with leprosy, and I couched it in terms of Jesus being on a healing tour, with the big bus pulling up to First Church, Eufala, with “Jesus Saves” on it.  I used racism and white supremacy as the prime metaphor for demonic possession, and I urged the congregants to get on the bus of the healing tour of Jesus.  

  Though I did not use it in the sermon, on the way home, I kept thinking of a blog and a Black History sermon that I had done many years ago, called “Get on the Bus.”  It was about the Rev. Joseph DeLaine of South Carolina, who helped to develop one of the 5 cases that became Brown v. Board of Education.  So in his honor, I’m repeating that blog here from 2017.

“GET ON THE BUS”

            It began as a request for equal treatment under the “separate but equal” clause of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson  Supreme Court decision.  In 1946 (a great year!), in rural Summerton, South Carolina, a group of African-American parents wanted the white school board to purchase school buses for their children to ride to the segregated schools, just as had been bought for the white kids.  The chairman of the school board, a Presbyterian minister named L. B. McCord, indicated that would not fit in the budget. As we all know, Plessy meant separate and unequal.   Reverend McCord underestimated the power of the Spirit and of the Black church.

            At the South Carolina NAACP meeting that year, the Reverend James Hinton, an African Methodist Episcopal pastor asked for witnesses to have courage and to speak up for justice – to emphasize the need for equal treatment in the school bus allotment.  He knew that such a public witness could lead to loss of jobs, violence, and even death, but still he called out:  “Can I get a witness?”  And, he did. The Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine stepped up.  He was an AME minister and was a tentmaker as a principal and teacher at a public school.  Thurgood Marshall met with Rev. DeLaine and others and asked them to get twenty families to sign a petition, asking not only for busses but for desegregated schools as well.  Twenty families!   How could he get that many to sign?

            Rev. DeLaine led the charge for doing this, going door to door to get the signatures.  Many were reluctant to sign up because the oppression and repercussions were so great.  But, finally it worked.  He delivered the petition to Thurgood Marshall in November, 1949.  The first names on the petition were Harry and Liza Briggs, and he was a Navy veteran of WW II.  Though he had fought for his country, he couldn’t get a school bus for his kids. The case became Briggs v. Elliott, and it was merged with four other cases to go before the Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  Both Harry and Liza Briggs lost their jobs as a result. 

            Reverend DeLaine also paid a great price for his activism.  He was fired from his school position, as were his wife and sisters and a niece.  His house was burned to the ground, and night riders fired on him.  He fired back, and then he and his family fled to New York for their lives.  His church was then burned to the ground.  He did not return South until 1971, when he retired, but he got on the bus!  His groundbreaking work and witness led to the Supreme Court decision that made legal segregation illegal. 

            We are not in those times, but it is looking very grim these days.  In these days, let us remember witnesses like Reverend DeLaine, his wife Mattie, Harry and Liza Briggs, and Ida Wells and many others.  They spoke up, they organized, and they fought.  While it took a courageous individual like Joseph DeLaine to step up, he could not do it without a community – that’s why the NAACP wanted twenty families to sign up. Individuals could be oppressed and fired or burn out too easily, but like the Montgomery Bus boycott, this story reminds us that a “whole lot of people is strong.”  Reverend DeLaine started early in 1949, and the case was finally decided in 1954 – a long haul.  Reverend DeLaine and many others were in it for the long haul – they had found their voice, and they stood up and stood out.  May we do the same.  Let's get on the bus!

          

"DAVID STROUPE!"

 “DAVID STROUPE!”

We were grateful and blessed to have our family with us over the Christmas holidays – Susan, David, Erin, Emma and Zoe.  While we were together, we wondered what the holidays would look like in 2024 – would we be able to get together as usual?  If so, what kind of mood would we and the country be in, just after the presidential election of 2024?   

    We have all gone now in different directions – Emma to Paris for a semester abroad; Zoe back to her senior year in high school at Interlocken Arts Academy in Michigan;  David and Erin back to teaching at the University of Utah;  Susan back to all things theater in Baltimore.  Caroline and I will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this summer – mark your calendars now for Saturday, June 22, when we will gather at Hawkins Hall in Legacy Park Decatur to celebrate.

    This week we are celebrating David’s 44th birthday on Wednesday, January 31.  He was born on a snowy night in Norfolk, Virginia, and before he was a year old, we moved to Nashville to be closer to family.  When he was 3, we moved to Decatur in 1983 to be pastors at Oakhurst, and he would have Decatur as his home base until he moved to Houston in 2002.  He has since lived in Seattle (where he got his PhD in science education), in East Lansing, Michigan, where he taught and rose in the field to get tenure and become an associate professor at Michigan State, and be an award winning author.  Just this month we learned that he has been named the winner of a big award for his book  "Growing and Sustaining Student-Centered Science Classrooms".  It is the AACTE Gloria Ladson-Billings Award.  Here's the link if you want to read about it. https://edprepmatters.net/2024/01/university-of-utahs-david-stroupe-to-receive-2024-aacte-gloria-j-ladson-billings-outstanding-book-award/.  He and Erin moved last summer to Salt Lake City, where they are both teaching at the University of Utah. 

    We remember that during his elementary and middle school years, he would learn vocabulary while jumping around the house and making up all kinds of sports games to occupy his body while his mind worked on studies.  He has great hand/eye coordination, and he was a good soccer player in his youthful days.  Indeed, when he was playing on a club soccer team in middle school, his coach came to us to tell us that David had great potential as a soccer player.  He lacked one thing, however – he did not have the competitive, killer instinct.  The coach indicated that he could teach this instinct to David, but he wanted to ask us about it first.  We appreciated the coach coming to us first, and we told him so, but we also indicated that we preferred David’s instincts the way that they were.  We had worked hard to help David develop a compassionate and loving heart, and that would serve him well all his life.  David ended up switching to tennis as a sport – no hitting anybody, no knocking anybody down.

    David still has his compassionate and kind heart, and we give thanks for all his work to develop that and to maintain it in the kind of hard and mean world in which we all live.  He has expanded that kind heart to the world of creatures, and when he would catch fish in a Mississippi pond as a kid, he would throw them back into the pond. And he even likes snakes!  He has dedicated his career to making certain that all students, regardless of income or racial classification, have access to quality public education.  

    So, this week we are giving thanks for our son, David Armour Stroupe, who has brought us so much joy and has taught us so much.   Thank you, David!!!!  Thanks for being who you are!

"DEMONIC FORCES"

“DEMONIC FORCES”

I’ve been preaching lately, using the lectionary gospel readings from the first chapter of Mark.  Mark doesn’t waste any words on the birth of Jesus – he gets right to the point with a short intro of John the Baptizer and then launches into the preaching and healing tour of Jesus.  In his healing work, he encounters many people captured by demonic powers.  I have always been puzzled by this idea of “demonic forces.”  In many cases in the New Testament, the stories seem to imply that these people are mentally ill, but their captivity is seen as being possessed by a harmful, destructive spirit.  Later in Mark 5 (and in Luke 8), Jesus encounters a man possessed by a demonic spirit so powerful that he gives up his identity to the spirit.  

The definition of “demon” is a force that seems to be a malevolent supernatural entity.  I do think that there is something to the mental illness angle of someone’s being possessed by demonic forces, but I also want to consider that there is a deeper and more powerful type of demonic possession.  This kind of possession is communal and difficult to root out, because it is seen as normal, as the way life is, or perhaps the way should be.  I have been possessed by demons, and their power in my life is so strong that there are still moments of such possession.  My first encounter with such a demonic force was in engaging my captivity to racism.  In many ways and for many years, I did not know that I was possessed by the demon of race and white supremacy.  I did not think that I was possessed because I thought that white supremacy was normal, and indeed had been ordained by God.  This connecting of racism to being a demonic power has helped me to understand the reality that is described when the Bible uses concepts like “demons.”

I thought that racism was normal because it had been taught to me by good white people like my family and my church and my segregated school.  It took me a long time to understand that I was captured by a demonic force, a force that told me that people classified as white were superior and that all other racial classifications were inferior.  I have struggled with this demonic force of racism and white supremacy all of my adult life – it took me reaching adulthood before I even realized that I was a captive to this demonic power.  I have written in other places about my journey on this {“While We Run This Race” and “Passionate for Justice,” to name a couple of books), and I will expand on that story in a forthcoming memoir on my mother and me, that I hope will be published this year.  

As I think about this coming year of 2024 and the upcoming presidential election, I’m returning to this elemental way of thinking, that many of us in the USA are captive to demonic powers.  Trump’s hold on the Republicans seems to be a prime example of a demonic force.  I’m not saying that Trump is a demonic force (though one could make a case for it) – rather, I am saying that he has called out some primeval demonic forces that have always flowed through our veins as American people.  He understands the deep captivity to race that lives in the hearts many of us who are classified as white, and he seems to be a master at developing the fears that reside in our collective white hearts.  So, this looks to be a crucial year and crucial election for all of us.

Yet, I don’t want to remain in captivity, and I’m hoping that you don’t either. There are plenty of demonic forces that hold us in captivity: racial classification, gender identity, economic status, materialism – the list is endless.  Jesus comes on the scene in Mark’s gospel, proclaiming an opportunity for beginning to gain liberation from our captivity, to see ourselves and others as children of God, not as children of one of the many categories of the world.  In this scary and crazy year, let us remember that Jesus burst onto the scene with a radical message:  the world belongs to God; we belong to God; we belong to one another.  As we fret about this year, let us remember this message from a Jewish peasant who was given the death penalty by the state of Rome.  Jesus means freedom, as Paul put it in Galatians, and that is what we are offered in this time of captivity.  Let that be a source of hope for us.

It will take a lot of work to begin to find this freedom.  It has taken me a lot of work to begin to find some liberation from my captivities.  In regard to race, I listened to new and different narratives.  I put myself in the presence of people whom I had been taught to fear, and I learned (and continue to learn) so much from them.  I worked for justice and peace and equity, and I continue to do so.  I say this not to praise myself but to seek to be realistic about the kind of work that it takes to seek to find liberation in the midst of our captivities.  And, yes, this could be a grim year, but it could also be a time of beginning to find a new definition and a new way of seeing ourselves and seeing the world around us.  In these days ahead, let us choose the way to life and liberation. 

 

"THE MEANING OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."

 “THE MEANING OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR”

I don’t remember when I first encountered Martin Luther King.  My earliest memories come from my captivity to white supremacy – I understood MLK to be a communist, maybe a con artist duping Black people and some white people, hoping to get big bucks from them.  But, the SCLC actions in Birmingham in 1963 made something stir just a bit in my heart.  Seeing the fire hoses, the police dogs attacking the children – those things made me begin to wonder in my junior year in high school – did I know the whole story? Or was there more to it than I had been taught?

It was in this context that I decided to watch MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington in the last week of August in 1963, just before I began my senior year in high school.  I was astonished – there were 250,000 people there of all colors and walks of life – could all of them be fools, be communists?  And then there was Dr. King and his stunning eloquence and powerful ideas and calls to action.  I knew then that I did not know the entire story, that my captivity to white supremacy had severely limited my imagination.  I was not converted yet, but I knew that I had a lot to learn.  Whenever I think of Martin Luther King, Jr, I think of that sweltering day in August, 1963 when he opened a small window in my heart and my imagination.

Yet, it was not just white folk like me who were moved by Martin Luther King, Jr.  Black folk too were astonished at his courage and his audacity, and I want to return to part of an essay by poet June Jordan to share the perspective of Black people in response to Dr. King.

  This excerpt is from the best essay that I have ever read on King.  If you don’t know her work, please look her up – many of her poems were transformed into songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  She died of breast cancer in 2002.  This sharing is from her essay on Dr. King “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” given as an address at Stanford on King Day in 1987.  It is from her 1993 book of essays “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.”

            “He made big mistakes.  He was not a wonderful administrator.  He did not abstain from whiskey, tobacco, or sex.  He was not a fabulous husband, or father.  He committed adultery.  His apparent attitude towards women was conventional, at best, or strikingly narrow, or mean.  He loved to party: dancing, horsing around, heavyweight southern cuisine, and pretty women.  He did like him a little sugar in his bowl,  He was not a god.

            And I remember listening to WBAI-FM radio in 1963 the way my parents long ago used to listen to AM radio broadcasts of the Joe Louis fights, only I was following the evolution of the Civil Rights Revolution.  I was following the liberation of my life according to the Very Reverend Dr. King.  And when, one afternoon, that fast-talking, panic-stricken newscaster in Birmingham reported the lunging killer police dogs and the atrocious hose water and I could hear my people screaming while the newscaster shouted out the story of my people, there, in Birmingham, who would not quit the streets – when he described how none of that horror of nightsticks or torrential water pressure or mad dogs on the attack could stop the children of Birmingham from coming out again and again to suffer whatever they must for freedom, I remember the positively stunned sensation that engulfed me:  I knew that we winning;  I knew that we would win.

            And before those demonstrations and underneath the melee and after the bleeding and the lockups and the singing and the prayers, there was this magical calm voice leading us, unarmed, into the violence of White America.  And that voice was not the voice of God.  But did it not seem to be the very voice of righteousness?  That voice was not the voice of God.  But does it not, even now, amazingly penetrate/reverberate/illuminate:  a sound, a summoning, somehow divine? That was the voice of a Black man who had himself been clubbed and stabbed and shoved and shot at and jailed and spat upon, and who, repeatedly and repeatedly, dared the utmost power of racist violence to silence him.  That was the voice of a leader who did not tell others to do what he would or could not do:  bodily he gave witness to his faith that the righteous cause of his activity would constitute his safety………

            Almost twenty years ago, Dr. King, standing alone, publicly demanded that England and the United states both act to isolate South Africa through unequivocal severing of financial or any other connection with that heinous regime.  In that same year, Dr. King stood forth, opposed to the war in Vietnam, and thereby suffered the calumny and castigation of his erstwhile peers as well as the hysterical censure of his outright foes. 

             Evaluating America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in our time,” in 1967 Dr. King, with a breadth of determination and rectitude unimaginable even now, undertook the launching of a revolution aimed against that violence, a revolution pitted against America’s inequities, a revolution riveted against an American poverty of the spirit that allowed us to uproot , and decimate, a host of strangers while denying basic necessities to the homeless here at home.”

So, as we celebrate MLK Day and seek ways to honor his witness and life, let us find ways in our time to step into the fray as he did – check out the criminal injustice system; speak out and act out about the continuing power of white supremacy and racism; stand against and march against the slaughter in Gaza; fight against the tide of patriarchy seeking to roll back the gain in women’s rights.  As Dr. King put it in the sermon played at his funeral, let us be known as drum majors for justice.  Let’s honor his life and witness in those ways.

"SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM"

 “SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM”

     Christmastide ended in the West on Saturday, January 6, a date which the church has traditionally named as Epiphany, to celebrate the arrival of the magi to worship the baby Jesus.  That story in Matthew 2 is filled with intrigue and slyness and violence.  The magi arrive in Jerusalem, announcing (undiplomatically) to King Herod that they are searching for the baby born to be king of the Jewish people.  Herod is greatly troubled but gets advice from his prophets that the baby is to be born in Bethlehem.  He tells the magi that he wants to worship the baby too, and he asks that they inform him where the baby is, so that he can come and pay homage.  The magi have eyes to see and hearts to discern, however, so they return home by another way after they have found Jesus.

    Herod is infuriated at this slight and at his lack of intelligence gathering, so he sends soldiers to slaughter the boys of Bethlehem.  In the meantime, Joseph has also had a vision and has taken his family to Egypt to escape the carnage, much as many other Palestinian families are now seeking to do in the midst of the Israeli bombardment.  The Christmas story doesn’t end on a sweet, sentimental note – it ends with the slaughter of the baby boys of Bethlehem – this story lives in the same world that we do.

      I’m grateful to be alive and in relatively good health as we begin this new year of 2024.  We had a great visit with Susan and with David and his family over the holidays.  Susan has returned to Baltimore, with David and Erin going back to Salt Lake City.  Emma will spend this semester abroad in Paris (tough duty), and Zoe is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy.  So, I have plenty to give me an attitude of gratitude, but I’m also feeling anxious and depressed about 2024, with its political campaigns and its elections.  I wish that President Biden had decided not to run for a second term – he has had a great presidency, but he seems frailer by the day.  And the Trumpster is looming – he is a scary man, and with Biden’s frailty, there is a distinct possibility that he could win the Presidency. I’m still holding out a faint hope that Biden will recognize the error of his decision and step down to allow the next generation to step up.  

    I’m beginning to think that this year is resembling 1968, when Lyndon Johnson’s presidency collapsed early that year, and he announced in March that he would not run for re-election that year.  That opened up a maelstrom of craziness and chaos and violence, with Martin Luther King Jr being assassinated on April 4, and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy being assassinated two months later.  It ended up with Richard Nixon being elected President.  I was a young man then – indeed it was my first year to vote.  Because I felt that the Democrats had cheated Eugene McCarthy out of the nomination and because of the police violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year, I joined thousands of other young people who decided not to vote, thus giving the election to Nixon.  

    Although I have seen the error of my ways, I fear that the same thing may happen this year with this generation of young people.  I hope that I am wrong, but I have this growing feeling that this may be a disastrous year for our country, and that puts me in the mood to hear and think about William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 at the end of World War 1, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, in the midst of a growing crisis in Europe, and as Red Summer was growing in America.  His poem catches my mood at the beginning of this new year, so I’ll close with it:

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?