"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.  

"WHAT A WEEK!!!"

 “WHAT A WEEK!!!!”

This week of May 17-24 has always been an important one in my life, even before I knew it.  On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was the law of the land.  This ruling firmly and legally established “neo-slavery” that would be king of the USA for almost 60 years. It filled the atmosphere of my boyhood with the authority of white supremacy and racism that so captured my perceptual apparatus.

    Yet, while I was not aware of it because I was only 7 years old, on May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, SCOTUS reversed the Plessy decision and ruled unanimously that legal segregation was no longer lawful because it established inequality as the law of the land.  I don’t remember knowing about that decision until I was somewhere in my college years, but that decision had set off the beginning of a revolution in regard to the legality of white supremacy, declaring that it was no longer the law of the land.  Yesterday marked the 72th anniversary of that landmark decision.  Unfortunately, we have not decided as a nation which decision we want to affirm – the “neo-slavery” Plessy of 1896 or the “created equal” Brown decision of 1954.  The recent SCOTUS decision that further eviscerated the Voting Rights Act makes us now lean back towards the neo-slavery of Plessy.

    Most important to me, however, about this week is that it marks the 52nd wedding anniversary for Caroline and me.  We were married in Ed Loring’s backyard on May 18, 1974 with Ed and Sandy Winter officiating – Sandy had been a long-time mentor of Caroline’s.  Caroline was a campus minister at Georgia Tech at that time, having been ordained as a minister in 1973 (the 21st woman to be ordained in the former southern Presbyterian Church).  I was in my final year at Columbia Seminary, having transferred there from Vanderbilt Divinity School, with a two year hiatus in between while I performed as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.  We had met at the wedding of Robin and Linda Williams in Nashville, Caroline having accompanied her friend Murphy Davis, who was Robin’s cousin.

    It has been quite an adventure, with many milestones along the way.  Even before I graduated from Columbia, we had received a call from St. Columba Presbyterian Church in Norfolk VA, to be the co-pastors at a small church there, which also served as the base for a developing community ministry in a 5000 resident low-income housing complex.  We cut our teeth on urban ministry there, and we were fortunate enough to receive the Women of the Church Birthday Offering in 1978.  That great gift established St. Columba Ministries, which does ministry with those who are poor and especially those who are homeless.  It is still doing ministry today.  

       After our son David was born in Norfolk in 1980, we wanted to get closer to our families in Chattanooga and Arkansas, so we moved to Nashville where I worked on the staff of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons.  I also served as part-time supply pastor at Second Presbyterian while they looked for a fulltime pastor.  Our daughter Susan was born in Nashville on a Sunday morning in 1982.  My time at Second Church convinced me that I wanted to return to the pastorate full time, and in February, 1983, I gladly accepted the call to become the full-time pastor at Oakhurst Presbyterian in Decatur.  Since Susan was still an infant, Caroline stayed home for another year.  She came on staff at Oakhurst in September, 1984, and we shared ministry there until we both retired – Caroline in 2012, and me in 2017.  Whew!  Quite a journey – you’ll hear more one of these days.  We are working on a book about our pioneering and partnering ministry.  If you have any stories or insights, please share them with us.  In the meantime, raise a glass to us this week!

"THIS IS THE AMERICAN STORY"

 “THIS IS THE AMERICAN STORY”

The stunning events of last week remind us that the maintenance of white supremacy IS the American story.  With the SCOTUS 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais to further eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, most of the Southern states wasted no time in seeking to redistrict so that Black people would be deprived of their votes.  It was as if they were all lining up to get a date with a hunky matinee idol.  Then the Virginia Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s voter referendum by a 4-3 vote to redistrict their state, and the white supremacists are cheering it on.  

Though I am hoping that this is not true, it is likely that this is the culminating point of a long period to suppress the votes of Black and Brown people.  When the federal troops pulled out of the South in 1877 in the “Great Compromise,” it pointed to a long slide back into neo-slavery.  The Mississippi Plan of 1890 led the way for all Southern states to strip Black people of their voting rights.  In 1896 SCOTUS decided 8-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was the law of the land, thus codifying neo-slavery for almost 70 years.  It is interesting to note that both the Plessy decision of 1896 and the Callais decision of 2026 came out of the state of Louisiana.  

Neo-slavery (not “Jim Crow,” as it is often called – a misnomer that seeks to soften the blow of reinstituting slavery as much as possible) ruled as a center part of the American story until the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was passed in 1965.  John Roberts came into the Reagan Administration in 1980 as a lawyer determined to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, so that white supremacy could be clearly re-established again.  He led the SCOTUS decision in 2013 in Shelby v. Holder, which was the first major blow to the VRA.  It dismantled the provision of the VRA that required that all election-related changes in the Southern states had to be pre-approved by the Justice Department.  In the current Trumpster Department of Injustice, this might not have mattered, but for almost 50 years, it forced Southern white legislatures to seek some bit of equity as they sought to revive and continue the power of neo-slavery.

Now the floodgates are open for re-establishing neo-slavery, and though it is hard to imagine that being done, we only have to skim the surface of American history to realize that this pattern of establishing and protecting white supremacy IS THE American story.  In the Constitution, Black people and Indigenous people are deemed “three fifths” of a person, so this American story is deep and long and wide.  Women had no right to vote in the Constitution, and it took over 70 years of labor and protest and marching to get that right in the Constitution in the 19th Amendment.  It is hard not to be discouraged in this kind of atmosphere, but we must start where we are – THIS IS THE AMERICAN STORY.  The desire to establish white, male supremacy is at the heart of American history, and whether we have the 19th Amendment or the Voting Rights Act, all of the efforts to move us to codify our ideals of equality and justice and equity fly in the face of this American reality – we want, we believe that white men should be in charge of things.

In these discouraging days, we must remember witnesses like Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery in Mississippi and who lived almost all of her life under the power of neo-slavery.  She refused to accept the definition of herself as unequal because of her racial classification, and she refused to stand down and defer to men of any racial classification because she was a woman.  If you want to know more about her and her relevance, read the book that Dr. Catherine Meeks and I wrote about Wells “Passionate for Justice:  Ida B. Wells as Prophet For Our Time.”  In the midst of raging racism and sexism, she was fearless, ferocious, formidable….Now, we are not Ida B. Wells, but her witness for such a time as this calls on us to find our place in this small but great parade of witnesses who stood for justice, equality, and equity.  

"WHO IS MY MOTHER?"

 “WHO IS MY MOTHER?”

“Who Is My Mother?”  This is a question that Jesus asks in response to those who tell him that his mother and his siblings would like to see him – they are coming to take him home because they think that he has lost his mind with all of his “weird’ ministry and teachings.  He then says that whoever does the will of God is his sibling and his mother.  I’ve always thought that such a response must have hurt his mother’s heart, but she raised him to be a prophet for and to the world.

This complicated approach is appropriate for our current political moment when SCOTUS has voted to force motherhood on every woman who becomes pregnant without doing anything to enforce the “fatherhood” part.  This year’s Mother’s Day is fraught with complexity, and in that manner, I give thanks for my mother, Mary Armour Stroupe.  We had many discussions about a woman’s right to choose in regard to her body, and Mother said:  “I’m opposed to abortion, but I’m even more opposed to forcing women to have babies.”  

My mother saved my life by sticking with me and by showing me the power of love.  I give thanks for her!  Though she did not consider herself a radical, she often demonstrated radical power in her “ordinary” stands in her home of Helena, Arkansas.  One of her friends once told me that the white neighbors considered Mother a radical because she allowed a Black friend and colleague to come in her front door when she came to visit Mother – this was in the 1990’s, not the 1940’s.

Mother also took some stronger communal stands in her work as the lead instructor at the Phillips County Community College School of Cosmetology.  Most of her students were poor, and many of them were Black.  They had heard all their lives that they were not worth much.  Mother sought to teach them not only how to do hair but also to teach them that they were children of God and American citizens.  As elections drew near, she would urge her students to register to vote.  Most of the students did not believe that voting made any difference, so most of them did not heed her advice – most of them also had heard stories of the danger in which Black people put themselves when they voted.

Mother emphasized, however, that the right to vote was fundamental and that her students should not take it lightly.   In a move that would likely not be allowed now, she told her students that if they did not vote on election day, then they would not be allowed into class that day.  If they did not wear an “I have voted” sticker on election day, then they failed the class for the day.  That got their attention, and she ended up with almost 100% voting by her students.  I give thanks to Mother for her nurturing of me and of so many others.  Though she gave birth to one child, she was a mother to hundreds.  If you want to know more of her story (and mine), get my most recent book “She Made A Way: Mother and Me in A Deep South World.”

On this Mother’s Day, I also am remembering all those people who gave me mothering love, both women and men.  Mothering love is rooted in loving and in engagement, not in biology.  One of our good friends, Lorri Mills, died about this time four years go after a long struggle with many illnesses and attacks on her body.  She did not have any biological children, and she always told us that she was not any good with little kids.  But, she gave mothering love to so many people!  We heard from cousins that she was a mentor to them, that she was one of the first women in their family line to go to college.  We heard stories of her urging her women cousins to think of themselves as human beings capable of so much more than they thought.  We witnessed her sharing this approach with so many people at Oakhurst Presbyterian, where she was a member and elder and leader.  She was generous and loving and nurturing – she showed us what the answer to Jesus’ question “Who Is My Mother?’ looked like.

In this time of Mother’s Day, let us give thanks for our biological mothers and for all of those people who have given us patient and demanding, nurturing and ever present, visionary love. I give thanks also for my life partner Caroline Leach, who has offered me and so many others this kind of mothering love.  When Caroline retired in 2012, one of the most moving parts was the 75+ children, youth, and young adults who came forward to give her roses in gratitude for her mothering love for them.  Let us seek to live our lives in this way.  And, if your “mothers” are still around, take time to thank them while you can.

"BATTLE FOR LIFE"

 “BATTLE FOR LIFE”

This week marks the 51st anniversary of the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in what was then South Vietnam in 1975.  It was the final, collapsing ending of the Vietnam War, which cost 58,220 American lives over a ten-year period – two of my friends from Helena were among those lost.   The chaos of the photos associated with the fall of Saigon reminded us of the great chasm that had been opened in American society because of the Vietnam War, a chasm which still permeates our culture.  We gained very little in that war, and we lost, oh so much.  At least the war had been approved by Congress in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August, 1964, the same month that the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were found in shallow graves in Neshoba County, Mississippi.  

Caroline and I were pastors in St. Columba Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, Virginia when Saigon fell.  We had just arrived there as the first clergy couple to serve in a local church in the former Presbyterian Church (US) in the South.  We were not aware that soon several Vietnamese families would be arriving at Robin Hood Apartments, where St. Columba Church was located.  We would get involved with several of those families as they encountered poverty and a new system of family life.  The Vietnam War was also the war which led me to seek conscientious objector status, which I received in the fall of 1970.  I did my alternative service at Opportunity House in Nashville, where I was director of a halfway house for men getting out of prison.  I participated in many protests about the Vietnam War, and I joined millions in those protests.

The Trumpster brought up the Vietnam War last week in talking about his war of choice in Iran.  When he got questions about the length of the Iran war, he noted that it had not nearly been as long as the Vietnam War.  In bringing up the Vietnam War, he also inadvertently reminded many of us that both wars are similar in that there never was any clear motive or objective or even national interest in these wars.  While we were told that the Vietnam War was being fought to protect us from communism, we are being told now that the Iran war is being fought to protect us from a nuclear Iran.  One big difference – with the new technology, we can drop bombs on people without having to use ground troops.  However, like Vietnam, if we want a “victory,” we will need troops on the ground, and if we go there, it will be Vietnam all over again – or, at least the Iraq War all over again.  The Viet Cong were not overwhelmed by our “shock and awe” demonstration of the bombing campaigns, and as we are seeing now, neither are the Iranians.  Let no one hear that I am defending the Iranian government – they are brutal and inhumane.  Yet, they play the long diplomatic game rather than the short, social media game at which we are accustomed in the West.

Like Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam, the Trumpster seems out of his depth with the war in Iran.  It is a war run by political Americans who have never been in a war, and who - because of that – seem to glorify war and the killing culture that it brings.  Like the hubris that brought us down in Vietnam, there is a similar hubris in the Trumpster and in the Secretary of Defense.  Do we have lethal power? Yes.  But will it win us this war? Using Vietnam and Iraq as guides, there is no “winning” this Iran war, and that is why the Trumpster has been so equivocal in his goals on the war.  He did not know what he was getting into, and he does not know what “winning” would look like.  The Vietnam War brought down the great presidency of LBJ, after he had ended neo-slavery in 1965 with the passing of the Voting Rights Act.  Though I am ready for the Iran war to be over, I’m also aware that it may be a turning point in the support for the Trumpster.  As Sweet Honey in the Rock put it in their song “Battle for My Life,”: “Your hunger for war is nothing new, Cowboy.”

The connecting dots are that we believe in the power of death, and we now have a president and a Congress that use this power of death to seek to deepen power and a hold on our hearts.  Let us hear a different song in our battle for life.  And, if you haven’t picked up your implement of resistance which I mentioned a few weeks ago, please do so now.