"CAROLINE LEACH"

 "CAROLINE LEACH"

We celebrated Caroline’s 79th birthday over the weekend – actually, we started on Thursday, July 2, when granddaughter Emma took us out for lunch at Manuel’s Tavern (Emma had never been there).  We were touched by Emma’s continuing thoughtfulness and now her young adult agency.  We continued the birthday celebration with Inez’s annual party, with great tributes from many people.  We’ll continue it next week with several meals with friends.

Caroline had always been a strong girL and is now a strong woman, having learned those traits from her family and from her long association with the Girl Scouts.  When I met her in Nashville in the early summer of 1973 at Linda and Robin Williams’ wedding, she had already overcome many barriers from individuals and institutions which were always telling her “NO!”  I was intrigued by her story, by her fierce determination, and by her “curvy” looks, as a Knoxville newspaper once described her.  I was so smitten that I moved to Atlanta to complete seminary there at Columbia, and we started dating late that summer.  

One of my early concerns was that at the beginning of our courtship, Caroline indicated that she was not sure that she wanted to get serious about our relationship because she was tired of men disappointing her and trying to control her.  I replied that I would make many mistakes if we continued in our relationship, but that I would definitely not try to control her, and I would try not to disappoint her.  She agreed to continue dating, and we got engaged later that year and got married in May of 1974.  So, we’ve been working on it for 53 years!

We are nearing completion of our book on our pioneering career as a clergy couple (the first in the Presbyterian Church in the United States), and in writing that, we have revisited our journeys, and especially Caroline’s, as she had to fight to make her voice heard and her call as a minister accepted.  Our first church together was St. Columba Presbyterian in Norfolk, Virginia.  It was in a 1500 unit apartment complex of Navy families and other families with little or no income.  Norfolk Presbytery was funding the tiny church (26 members) and the budding community ministry there.  We arrived in May 1975, and we worked hard to grow the church and to develop the community ministry there.

One of our strategies to grow the church and to develop the community ministry was to use the media (print, radio and TV in those days,) and in the fall of 1975, an interview appeared in the Norfolk newspaper (The Virginian-Pilot).  It was entitled “The Rev. Ms. Leach Ministers to Change.”  The reporter, Laura White, had never met a woman minister before, and she was astonished by Caroline’s journey and the depth of her insights.  Here are excerpts from that newspaper article:

“The first week Caroline Leach was at seminary, a student came up to her with a Bible and told her St. Paul said she shouldn’t be there.  In that first week she changed her mind from wanting to be a church’s director of Christian education to wanting to be a minister.  She had never seen a woman minister – and it was not easy becoming one.  The Rev. Ms. Leach was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1973.  In May she and her husband Gibson (Nibs) Stroupe, also a Presbyterian minister, came to the small St. Columba Church with its 26 members.  Both are 28, and they are trying to minister to the residents of the 1,500 unit, low-income Robin Hood Apartments a few hundred feet from the church.Ms. Leach noted: “One of the first things I noticed in seminary was during lectures the professor would say ‘the minister he’ or ‘all mankind,’ or ‘the theology of man.’  I would tell them about it, and they’d either laugh it off or just have bitter anger.”  When she graduated from seminary in 1972, her diploma noted that the seminary was pleased ‘to confer upon him the degree of master of divinity.”

So, I give thanks for Caroline, who has changed and deepened me in so many countless ways. She is now also mother and grandmother in our family and to so many others who are not our blood relatives.  She is a great gift to us all, to the church, and to the larger world.  So, in this week, lift a glass (or a piece of cake) in her honor.

"CHICAGO"

 “CHICAGO”

Towards the end of May, Caroline, Susan, and I met in Chicago for an ancestry trip and a viewing of some of the many sites of Chicago. Susan flew into Chicago from Baltimore, and we all met at O’Hare airport, which was announcing that it was the world’s busiest airport, an assertion that made my ears perk up, because we in the ATL claim to have the busiest airport.  As I later learned, O’Hare has the most flights, while ATL has the most people passing through.  We rented a car and drove on the back roads to our Airbnb in Evanston, Illinois.  We chose that place because it is close to Northwestern, where Caroline was planning to do some research on some of her ancestors who attended Northwestern.  Our place was about a block from Lake Michigan, which is huge – but, it was relatively cool, so we only walked around the beach a bit.

As I wrote in “She Made a Way,” I had traveled to Chicago as a child several times with my mother on the train and on the bus to see her brother and my uncle, Maurice “Bud” Armour.  Caroline and I had been to hotels in Chicago to lead workshops for denominational conferences, but this was the first time that we would encounter the city of Chicago as adults.  As always, we were so grateful to have Susan with us – she is a fearless and skilled navigator.  After we rested up, our first stop was at Wrigley Field on May 24 (my mother’s birthday) to see the Cubs play the Astros.  Our Airbnb was close to a public parking deck where we could park our rental car and catch the “EL” to Wrigley on the Red Line.  As we headed towards Wrigley, at various stops, Cubs fans were piling on the train, and when we asked some of them how we would know we had arrived, they laughed and said “Don’t worry about it – you’ll know.”  And sure enough, the stadium was right off the Addison train stop.  It was such an exciting experience – major league baseball in person at one of baseball’s best stadiums.  Wrigley was filled, and of course, the Cubs lost.

The next day brought a milestone for me.  Prior to our trip I had contacted Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells, asking her to give us a tour of Ida B. sites in Chicago.  The only day that we all could work it out was on Memorial Day, but Michelle was so kind to give us most of the day, showing us around the South side of Chicago, where there are many Ida B. Wells sites.  Wells had moved to Chicago after she had been exiled from the South when Memphians blew up her newspaper offices in response to her definitive study on lynching called “Southern Horrors.”  Michelle took us to the house where Ida B. and her husband Ferdinand Barnett lived, to the street named after Wells in Chicago, to the cemetery where they are buried, and to a great monument to Ida B. on Langley Avenue.  It is called The “Light of Truth Ida B. Wells Monument,” and it was done by renowned sculptor Richard Hunt.  It is made of bronze and marble and is in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side.  It is powerful to see it and to read the selected quotes from Ida B. Wells.  Michelle also introduced us to her brothers, Dan and Dave.  It was their grandmother, Alfreda Duster (daughter of Ida B), who had preserved Ida B’s records and eventually got the autobiography before John Hope Franklin to be published by the University of Chicago Press in 1970.

The next day Caroline and Susan joined cousin Judy Asselmeier at the Northwestern library to do research on Caroline’s maternal grandmother, Mildred Boddy, who had graduated from there in 1915, and Mildred’s father, Samuel Boddy, who graduated in 1885.  Thanks to a great archivist named Kevin Leonard, they found a wonderful treasure trove of info about these ancestors.  Caroline had always known about her great grandparents and grandmother graduating from Northwestern.  As she got older, her interest grew but not much was ever said.  Then when we were cleaning out boxes from the attic at her parents’ house, there was a treasure trove of annuals, pictures, diplomas, graduation invitations and more!  Our trip to Northwestern was really a time to put the “dots together” with her foreparents from the North.

On another day, we crossed over to my side of the family to eat lunch with Uncle Bud’s oldest daughter Bonnie Armour Adams, whom I had known as a child before Bud moved to Chicago in the 1950’s.  Bonnie brought along her daughter Heather and her husband John, and we had a great visit.  The last time that we had seen one another was in 1988, when we all gathered in Byhalia, Mississippi, for Bud’s funeral there.  We had such a good time catching up, and they are thinking about coming down for my 80th birthday celebration on November 21.  Bud was such an important person in my mother’s life, and I was glad to make this reconnection.  As you’ll see in the photo, Heather noted that “double first cousins” Bonnie and Nibs wore the same kind of blue stripe tops!  And, we were glad to learn that they are on the left side of the political spectrum.

We had a great trip to Chicago, connecting with deep and old roots, we had other friends that we wanted to see but ran out of time and energy. and I also remembered all the Black people who had come up Highway 61 from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago in the Great Migrations.  And, as Michelle Duster noted, this important American city was founded by a Black man from Haiti named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.

"FATHER'S DAY"

 

“FATHER’S DAY”

In coming to write about Father’s Day, I have a lot of ambivalence.  Both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have turned into commercial ventures, but since my mother was such a great single parent for me, I’m happy to celebrate Mother’s Day.  For more on that, see my latest book “She Made a Way:  Mother and Me in a Deep South World.” Indeed, statistics show that 20% of American families are headed by single mothers.  

        My relationship to Father’s Day is much more difficult, because I never knew my father – he abandoned me and my mother when I was an infant, and I never heard from him again until I was a young adult.  Indeed, statistics show that 20% of American families are headed by single mothers.  I carried the pain of that abandonment at the center of my heart for a long time, and I want to share a story of that pain.

            I remember the incident so vividly.  It was in the summer of 1963 on the cusp of my senior year in high school.  I would have another vivid occasion in that summer in late August when I surreptitiously listened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, DC, but that is the story for another blog.  This incident was earlier that summer, sometime in July.  I had just returned from a six week science camp at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, a venue made possible because a bridge spanning the Mississippi River at Helena had been opened in 1960.  It would be my first long time away from home, and I was dreading the experience.  Because we did not have a car, our next door neighbors Mr. Mack and Ms. Fannie, drove with my mother to take me to the camp.  I was good at math and science, and the teachers at segregated Central High School had recommended me for the camp and had obtained a scholarship for me.

            During the orientation for the camp, the senior white leadership of the camp proudly pointed out the bullet holes in the Lyceum building where Southern white manhood had resisted the invading federal government, which had “forced” Ole Miss to register one of its state citizens as a student – an African-American named James Meredith – in the previous September, 1962.  I am ashamed to admit that I felt pride at that point in the orientation.  I did well in the science camp, and I thrived in it, so much so that I got my picture taken with an Indian (they were allowed under the race caste system in Mississippi) graduate student who was doing work on vortex flow and its potential for harnessing energy.  That photo and an article on the science camp appeared in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger newspaper, and that brings me back to the incident to which I referred earlier.

            After I returned home from the science camp, a letter came in the mail, addressed to me.  The return address was marked “GP Stroupe, Jackson, Mississippi.”  When I read that return address, my heart leaped – it was a letter from my father, for whom I was named!  I had never received any communication from him at all, in my 16 years of living.  I had so longed for it, and here, finally, was a letter from him.  My heart was pounding, as I opened the envelope and tried to anticipate what my father would now say to me in his first engagement with me.  I opened the letter, and the newspaper article on the science camp fell out – my father was proud of me!  Then, my blood boiled as I read the note, not from my father, but from his second wife, the woman who had taken him from my family.  It said that that they were so proud of me, and oh yes, give the child support check to my mother.  No word from my father – no word from him.  I remember cursing out loud and flinging that letter across the room in anger.  “That ******* couldn’t even bring himself to write me and express his praise for my work.  He had to get his wife to do it.”  

            I would hear nothing else from my father for 9 more years, and even then I met him accidentally – another story for another blog.  So, as I approach Father’s Day, I have even greater ambivalence about it than I had about Memorial Day – at least for Memorial Day, there was some honor involved.  In this case and in this relationship, I felt dishonored and disowned.  For a long time, I felt that my being disowned was my responsibility. I allowed the anger of that summer of 1963 to dissipate back into anxiety, wondering what I had done to force my father not only to leave me but also to ignore me.  Years of therapy and great friends would begin to heal me, and I am grateful to all those who stepped into that breech in my heart.  Thanks to all the men out there who took me in and nurtured me – and there are many!  I honor them this Father’s Day.

            My honoring of Father’s Day also comes from experiencing Wordsworth’s line “The Child Is Father to the Man,” from his poem “My Heart Leaps Up.”  I use it differently than he did, though.  I mean it in the sense that I received a lot of my fathering from being father to our kids David and Susan.  They are a great joy to me, and I have learned a lot about fatherhood from them.  I’ve made many mistakes with them, but through loving them and having them love me, I have felt the redemptive power of fatherhood.  And I’ve sought to repay all those people, who stepped into the breech with me when I needed fathering, by seeking to offer that to others. 

            So, on Father’s Day, let us give thanks for those who gave us fathering love, whether they were our biological fathers or not.  In the best sense, fathers teach sons and daughters what real men are like. Not the immature men who seem to be stuck in adolescence (like the President), but rather men who show us what manhood really is – nurturing, protecting, forgiving, challenging, and most of all, loving.  I’m hoping that all who are reading this have experienced this fathering love from somebody in their lives.  If not, contact me, and we’ll see what we can do!

"JUNETEENTH"

 “JUNETEENTH”

    In 2021, Juneteenth was made a national holiday, thanks to the efforts of many people.  This week many folk will celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation on “Juneteenth,” the name given to the event in Texas, where news of the Proclamation and the Union defeat of the Confederacy did not reach African-Americans held in slavery in Texas until June 19, 1865.  At that time, U.S. General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with 2,000 federal troops and made this General Order #3:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

            Juneteenth has become the most recognized national celebration of the end of legal slavery in the country.  Many other dates could qualify, and some are celebrated:  watch night services in African-American churches on December 31 of each year, similar  to the ones in 1862, right before the Proclamation took effect;  January 31, when the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery passed Congress;  December 6, when the states ratified the 13th Amendment. Yet, Juneteenth has held on for many reasons.  

            Perhaps the biggest reason that Juneteenth has held on is that it expresses both celebration and ambivalence.  Celebration that there was finally some recognition of the humanity and equality of people of African descent.  Ambivalence because there was so much reluctance to get this news to the people of Texas.  The racism that would eviscerate the Union victory over the next 40 years, after the Civil War,  could be seen in the last sentence of Order #3 – though African-Americans had built the wealth of much of America, they were still seen as being “in idleness.”  The order arrived over 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.  As WEB Dubois put it:  “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

The recognition of Juneteenth is a reminder of two of the most powerful forces in American history, forces that are opposed to one another.  One is the idea of equality, and the other is the idea of white supremacy (and the slavery that goes with it).  These have been warring ideas in American history.  The idea of equality – the vision that all human beings are created with equal dignity – is a powerful one in American history.  It was born in Europe, but it found its deepest expression in the colonies of America.  This idea of equality is one of the great and unexpected gifts of the American experience.  It is a revolutionary idea, and it calls out to all structures -  class structures, racial categories,  gender categories – that their time is winding down, that a new way of looking at ourselves and at one another is emerging in the world.  That way is the idea of equality, the idea that we are all created with equal dignity.  That way is the idea that the institutional and structural foundations of society should be reformed to reflect this radical idea.

Yet, as we all are well aware, this powerful gift of equality is always banging up against the idea of white supremacy, which seeks to tell us that those of us classified as “white” that we are superior and are meant to be in control.  We see the power of the idea of white, male supremacy growing now under the Trump administration and in the racist turn of SCOTUS, which recently eviscerated the last remaining vestige of protection from the Voting Rights Act.  As if on cue, Southern states have hurried to redistrict so that they can dilute, and in some cases, end the power of Black voting.

            It is now time to step up, speak up, and act out.  So, on June 19,  find a way to celebrate the great American vision of the fundamental equality of all people.  Find a way to acknowledge how deeply white supremacy still has a hold on our hearts and vision.  Find a way to work against that captivity, as did Frederick Douglass and Abby Kelley and William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells and Anne Braden and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker and many others have done.  Let us join in that parade of witnesses. Let us find ourselves in that Juneteenth parade.

"THE CONTINUING STRUGGLE"

 “THE CONTINUING STRUGGLE”

The presidency of Donald Trump is a continuing nightmare, but as I wrote last week, it is not a aberration.  It is rather a continuance of the Reagan Revolution in response to the movements for justice and equity of the 1960”s+.  Trump is an extreme form of this counter-revolution, and I am hoping that he will implode before he can do too much more damage.

In the meantime, there are several approaches that we can take in order to stay in resistance to this movement.  The first step is TO VOTE.  Thanks to the right-wing SCOTUS, the white supremacists are seeking to rig elections everywhere, but if we turn out in adequate numbers, their machinations can be defeated.  There are primaries going on everywhere, so make sure that you vote in them.  For the November elections, make sure that you are registered to vote and make sure that all your friends, neighbors and colleagues are registered to vote.  We will need a huge turnout in the fall so that Congress can be retaken.  The Trumpster will seek to delay the elections under the guise of national security (that’s what Bill Pulte is now working on), but the states are generally in control of elections, so let’s work on that end too.

The other, more immediate step is to speak up and act out.  This step is critical – do not remain silent or stay on the sidelines, complaining about how bad things are.  Join protests, write elected officials, speak out to the press, engage your friends and neighbors.  Every two weeks, Caroline and I participate in the “Old People’s Protest” in Stone Mountain, and we usually have 40-50 people who turn out in their walkers, canes, and wheelchairs, gathering at a busy intersection to protest the Trumpster actions and presidency.  We were there this past Saturday, and we got lots of honks and waves (and a few middle fingers too).  Find some place to make this kind of public witness – this one was started by several older folk in a senior living residence, and it has grown and grown.  So, find a group to join in expressing public dissent, or start your own.

A third step is to assist in smaller groups who are working for social justice and equity.  There are lots of groups around – if you are not already part of one or more, join in so that they may be bolstered in their work.  Our friend John Vodicka coordinates the Court Watch program in Athens, Georgia, and they have developed a Bail Fund to help people with minor offenses make bail so that they can get out of jail.  You would be surprised at the number of people held in jail because they do not have funds for a $100 bail (or less).  Our friend Mary Catherine Johnson directs New Hope House in Jackson, Georgia, a residence for families to stay while they visit their loved ones on death row in Jackson.  Our friend and co-author Dr. Catherine Meeks directs Turquoise and Lavender Institute for Transformation & Healing, and she is constantly writing and speaking on behalf of justice and equity.  Find ways to support these groups or ones like them.  Or, find them in your locale and begin donating time and money.  

These are dangerous and scary times as the river of white, male supremacy bursts out of its borders and threatens to flood us all with the pollution of racism, sexism, materialism, and militarism.  Let us work on these three steps in order to combat these forces.  As Sweet Honey in the Rock put it their song “Battle for My Life:”  “the white man’s disease is the same across the seas.”  We are in a battle for our lives.  Let us rise up to meet the occasion.

"IS THE REAGAN REVOLUTION NEARING COMPLETION?"

 “IS THE REAGAN REVOLUTION NEARING COMPLETION?”

I’m a little late coming to Imani Perry’s fine book “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation,’ but in reading of her travels South and her reflections on it, I am reminded of how the deep the resistance is to the justice movements of the 1960’s:  movements on race, gender, sexual orientation, class, capitalism, and environmental justice.  And, as Dr. Perry’s book demonstrates, the resistance to these justice movements is not just located in the South – it is a deep part of our national history.  She was born in Alabama, so she knows our language and our approaches to life, but in them, she also sees the depth of white, male supremacy that continues to plague us all as a nation.

As SCOTUS continues to strike down basic civil rights protection, I am taken back to the part of my life where I began to change on these issues:  in the decade of the 1960’s.  One of my friends scoffs at the 60’s, calling it a time of self-indulgence,  the rise of the individual, and the breaking of community in America.  While some of that is true, it was also a time when old ways of oppression and death began to be mitigated, including the thundering resistance to the Vietnam War, and when new communities - more centered on justice - began to form. Whatever one thinks of the 60’s, however, the movements for justice in that decade were strong enough to call forth a powerful counter-revolution, a revolution that got its sea legs under Ronald Reagan’s presidency.  Nixon began it in the 1968 presidential election with his “Southern Strategy,” teaching white males how to re-institute racism without ever mentioning race.  It is a strategy that they have followed ever since.

Nixon’s own personal shortcomings short-circuited this counter-revolution, and this movement would wait on a TV star/actor from California to lead it.  Reagan came into office in 1980, beginning his campaign for the presidency at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the kidnaping and murdering of three civil rights workers in 1964: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.  He never mentioned any of that, but his unspoken message was that he would be the candidate to restore white, male supremacy.  His approach would be that government is the problem, not the solution.  To those white people in the South and beyond who railed at the federal interventions on education, civil rights, and women’s rights, this approach was music to their ears.  In this way, Reagan began a counter-revolution that continues – don’t tell those of us classified as “white” how to live our lives, don’t mess with us.

This revolution has continued to move forward – from the defeat of the Equal Rights Movement to Lee Atwater’s use of Willie Horton to propel George H.W. Bush to the presidency to the ascendance of a right-wing Supreme Court to the invasions of Iraq by the Bush dynasty, to the cuts in public assistance and the growth of prisons under the Clinton administration to the disasters of the W Bush administration to the blasphemy that is the Trump administration.  We should be clear here – the presidency of Donald Trump is not an aberration.  It is rather the culmination of a counter-revolution that began almost 50 years ago, a movement that began in response to the push for justice and equity in the 1960’s.

There are, of course, movements for justice and equity that continue.  The election of Barack Obama as the first African-American President of the United States was a stunning achievement, but it scared many white folks to death, and it led us to Donald Trump as president.  Black Lives Matter, the renewed fight for the ERA, Gay Pride, the fight for preservation of the earth – all these speak of the continuing powerful and deep energy for the idea of liberty and justice for all.  I’ll continue this conversation next week, but for now, I want us to be mindful that Trump is not an aberration.  In many ways, he is the culmination of the Reagan counter-revolution.  And, yes, it will be wonderful if the Democrats can regain control of Congress in November but let us be clear-eyed on this:  the Reagan Revolution will continue.

"MEMORIAL DAY"

 “MEMORIAL DAY”

      According to historian David Blight, Memorial Day was started by formerly ensIaved African-Americans on May 1, 1865, just a few weeks after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.  It happened in Charleston, SC, to honor 257 dead Union soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp.  They dug up the bodies over a two week period and buried them properly, with a processional of many thousands bringing flowers to honor the service of the soldiers who had helped to end slavery.  

         I served my country as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War from 1970-72.  My alternative service was as director of Opportunity House in Nashville, a halfway house for men being released from prison.  It was here that I got my first glimpse of the horror that is the American prison-industrial complex.  It was quite an education for me, and ever since then I have been involved in ministry to those in prison in one form or another.  

         Because of my CO status, Memorial Day is always complicated for me.  I honor the men and women who serve our country in the military.  My adopted father, Gay Wilmore, served in the US army in World War II.  In the midst of my ambivalence about Memorial Day and about nonviolence and the efficacy of violence in service of social justice, I want to give thanks to my father-in-law Herman Leach, to my father, to Charlie Callier, to Bob Wetzel, and to so many others who served our country in WW II.   My mother’s almost fiancé, Bob Buford, was killed in WW II.  I was in seminary and gave up my deferred status in 1970 in order to try to start a movement with others to end deferments for ministers and seminary students.  I never felt that the Vietnam War was anything but a covert attempt to kill and maim people of a different color.  In saying this, I do not intend to demean the Americans who served there – I had two friends killed in that war.  

         My longtime friend John Cole Vodicka also has a complicated history with Memorial Day, but I will save that story for another day.  In his great ministry as a human rights’ advocate and prisoners’ rights advocate, he has found a powerful way to recognize Memorial Day – to honor those Black veterans of World War II who are known to have been lynched in Georgia after they returned home from serving their country.  In 2023 he led a group of 60+ people in remembering these 9 men, some of whom were lynched while still in uniform.  

Here are the names of the 9 Black men who fought for freedom overseas and were lynched in Georgia as a result of their service:  Felix Hall, Willie Lee Davis, George Franks, Curtis Hairston, Maceo Snipes, George Dorsey, Walter Lee Johnson, Joe Nathan Roberts, and Lemuel Penn.  With his permission, I am including John’s remarks at that service.

“Why we are here:

The Memorial Day weekend is a time for all of us to remember the nine known African American WWII veterans who died not in Germany or France or North Africa or Japan or on some remote Pacific Island, but who were lynched by their own countrymen in Georgia. In the United States of America.  

 These nine men enlisted, perhaps with the hope that fighting for America in the “war to destroy fascism and preserve democracy” would earn them respect and human dignity at home—something they’d not experienced in their own country. 

 Instead, these Black soldiers were targeted by white terrorists while they were on active duty or after returning to their homes. White America feared that Black veterans asserting and demanding equality would disrupt the social order built on white supremacy, and that Black soldiers would reject their second-class status in the country’s racial hierarchy.  These nine veterans became a threat to the country’s—and especially the South’s, and Georgia’s—caste system.  Black WWII veterans threatened to upend the myth of racial superiority.  Racial insubordination had to be swiftly and violently crushed. 

 Athens’ Veterans Memorial Plaza sits adjacent to the county’s courthouse. The courthouse, in my estimation, is in many respects the present-day place where Black women and men are routinely and systematically subjugated by a system that believes Black lives don’t matter.”

    Thanks, John, for your witness and courage, and thanks to all who have served (and who now serve) to develop and deepen our commitment to the idea of equality:  that all people are created with equal dignity in God’s eyes.