"RIDING INTO THE ARMY OF THE PATRIARCHY IN HOLY WEEK"

 “RIDING INTO THE ARMY OF THE PATRIARCHY IN HOLY WEEK”

Caroline and I received the Spring issue of Ms. Magazine late last week, and on the cover was a photo of Trump’s paramilitary, largely unregulated police.  They are often called “ICE Agents,” but they are basically Trump’s personal, national federalized police, to be used at his discretion, wherever he wants to send them.  On its cover, Ms. Magazine had the best name for them that I have seen: “The Army of the Patriarchy.”  And, indeed, that is what they are.  They are the army of the patriarchal vision as Trump wants it and sees it:  a return to the complete dominance of white, male supremacy.  The establishment of this army of the patriarchy is why Trump has so far refused to support an end to the TSA mess:  he wants no regulation of his personal patriarchal army.  It is the stuff of dictators and empire.  They will be appearing in many places for the rest of the year, especially at the polling places in November.

This week is Holy Week, Christianity’s alternative to the stuff of Empire.  Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, hoping against hope that those who uphold the Roman Empire will catch a glimpse of a different view of the world, a different view of themselves and of other human beings, a different view than the Army of the Patriarchy. It begins with a time of high hopes. 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, the Empire is watching.  The Roman governor Pontus Pilate has brought a garrison of soldiers into Jerusalem to make certain that those who would oppose the Empire are quickly squashed.

Jesus enters Jerusalem with a sense of possibility, but the Army of the Patriarchy is waiting for him, just as it waits for us now in Trumpworld.  The powers of domination will not yield easily, and if necessary, they will kill a few “domestic terrorists” in order to keep the visions and the hearts tied down to Empire.  Jesus rides on to the Cross, to his death – he is killed because he is offering an alternative vision to that of Empire, a vision that promises justice and equity and mercy.  Holy Week is a sobering week, especially this year, because it retells our story as humanity in captive to the powers of death and destruction and violence.

    Holy Week shows us the drama of our lives – we long for love, but we believe in death.  We want to believe in this Jesus of Nazareth, but the world seems so much with us, a world dominated by corrupt and egotistical leaders, by the Army of the Patriarchy in a world that believes in the power of violence and death.  Holy Week walks us squarely into the midst of this struggle – no fading away here, no sentimentality allowed.  Holy Week looks squarely at one of the most difficult truths of our lives:  we long for love, but we believe in death.  Holy Week asks us to sit with this uncomfortable truth this week – to think about our visions lost or visions diminished, about our hopes being dashed, to think about our compromises that make us gradually lose hold of our dreams and hopes.  Holy Week asks us to stay with that process in our own lives and in the life of the world.

    There is some good news to be found somewhere in here, but for now, the Army of the Patriarchy is on the march.  Jesus faces it straight up, and his execution reminds us of the cost of such resistance, of the cost of believing in justice and equity in an Empire built on violence and death.  It’s not the end of the story, but it is part of the story:  where is the Army of the Patriarchy marching in my heart and in your heart?

"WOMEN'S HERSTORY MONTH - A DEEPER AND LONGER VISION"

 “WOMEN’S HERSTORY MONTH - A DEEPER AND LONGER VISION”

In the middle of February, Caroline and I made a long weekend trip to see Susan in Baltimore.  She was directing a play in Bethesda, and we wanted to see it.  We rented an Airbnb in Silver Spring to use as a base for the play. The first thing that we noticed was that there was snow everywhere (except the roads), and the roads had been cleared by plowing the snow and placing it in what became tall, grey piles of snow/ice.  I saw more snow on the ground there than I have in the last three winters in the ATL – one of the main reasons that we continue to live in the South.

Besides having a great visit with Susan, our main purpose for the trip was to experience the performance of the play that she was directing.  It was entitled “Silent Sky,” written by Susan’s former classmate at Decatur High, Lauren Gunderson.  Lauren is a well-known playwright, known for centering her plays on the stories of strong women. Often she is the most produced playwright of the year in the USA, and this play did not disappoint.  The play centered on early women astronomers in the USA, centering on a “computer” known as Henrietta Leavitt.  If you are familiar with the movie “Hidden Figures” (and if you are not, go find it immediately), you will recall that people who did long and tedious math work were often called “computers.”  They are tasked with difficult mathematical work, and many times women were the ones doing this work, with only pencil and paper (and later, adding machines).

Henrietta Leavitt was born in Massachusetts in 1868, and early on demonstrated a high level of both mathematical ability and mathematical insights.  Her minister father encouraged her pursuits, and she graduated from Radcliffe College ( because Harvard did not accept women at that time.)  After graduation she found a job at the Harvard College Observatory, and her job was to do math work related to the distances of the stars from Earth and from other stars.  She quickly demonstrated a profound ability to see deeper and further into methods of how to measure the distances between stars.  “Silent Sky” is a play about her struggles as an aspiring astronomer in the midst of the patriarchal demand that she be only a computer, who would just do the calculations requested and demanded by the male astronomers.  “Don’t try to give us your insights, because you don’t have any,” was the usual refrain.

But, she did have extraordinary insights, and though I understand very few of them, the play depicted her stubborn persistence to a commitment to truth and to the capabilities of women in science, especially in astronomy.  Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast astronomical distances led to a shift in the understanding of the scale and nature of the universe.  This work led her to discover the relation between brightness and the positions of the stars.  She worked with Cepheid variables (no, I don’t know what those are – go look it up), and her insight helped her to develop the first standard way to measure the distance between stars and especially between galaxies.  This came to be known as Leavitt’s Law, and it paved the way for our current understanding of an expanding universe.  This is far beyond my understanding, but I do appreciate my granddaughter Zoe’s philosophical (and theological) question on this.  “If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?”  But, at the time, her thinking was revolutionary – she posited that there were many galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and most male astronomers scoffed at her thinking.

Leavitt tragically died of stomach cancer in 1921 at age 53, a great loss to her own self and to the scientific community.  Edwin Hubble would come along a few years later and use Leavitt’s Law to begin his own calculations, leading to an acceptance of Leavitt’s insight that there are galaxies beyond the Milky Way and that the universe is expanding.  Since he was a man, his theories were accepted in the astronomy community, but he always gave Leavitt the credit that she was due, suggesting that she should have won a Nobel Prize for her work.   He remembered her and gave thanks for her, but our patriarchal mindset wiped out her memory and her work.  Kudos to Lauren Gunderson and others who have revived her memory and made it come alive.

And, of course, this is what Women’s Herstory Month is about – captured by the demonic power of patriarchy and sexism, we cannot even imagine a person like Henrietta Leavitt.  Women’s Herstory Month gives us the opportunity to recover some of the remarkable human beings who have led us and deepened our lives, and in many cases, saved us.  Let us remember them and savor them in this Women’s Herstory Month.

"THE RESISTANCE TO EQUALITY"

 “THE RESISTANCE TO EQUALITY”

Writing about the Trumpster in Women’s History Month may seem like an oxymoron (and he is that, minus the “oxy”), but his election and terms as President represent the deep resistance to equality for women that runs through American history and world history.  There were several factors that led to Trump’s re-election as President, including Joe Biden’s tragic decision to run again after the headwinds of the 2022 midterm elections, and the spiraling inflation that roared as we recovered from Covid.  But, no factor was stronger in Trump’s re-election (or original election in 2016, for that matter) than his signals that he was running to build on his original platform of white, male supremacy.  From his legal convictions on sexual harassment to his lewd comments about women in his first presidential campaign, Trump has demonstrated a contempt for women and a commitment to keep male supremacy proud and strong.

Let us not think, however, that Trump is an anomaly – his voice echoes the voice of people of all races and classes, a voice indicating that women should step back, keep quiet, and serve men.  We’ve known it in our family as well as in society.  Caroline and I are nearing completion of a book that we are writing on our pioneering work as a clergy couple in the Presbyterian Church.  We each took a chapter to write a bit of background on our individual stories. Caroline remarked on how painful it was to look back and remember how devalued and dismissed she had felt as a woman seeking ordination as a minister in the early 1970’s.  She often was dismissed by male dinosaurs but also by seemingly enlightened males who felt that the ministry was not for women.  I was blessed to know Caroline’s paternal grandmother, Sophie Leach, who was born in 1882.  I remember us asking her about women getting the vote in the 19th Amendment in 1920.  Sophie responded that she did not think that women should get the right to vote, but once they did, she voted in every election just to show the men that women could do it.  

As I wrote last week, I was raised by strong women – my pseudo-grandmother Bernice Higgins (whom we called “Gran”- and actually, she was my great-grandmother’s sister) - and by my mother Mary Stroupe.  My mother had moved in with Gran, who was a widow by that time, after my father had abandoned my mother and me for another woman.  Though there were strong men on the periphery of our lives, our household was headed and managed by women.  Despite the presence and influence of these strong women in my formative years, I still breathed in the poison of patriarchy, of male supremacy.  I never sat down and chose male supremacy – it rather chose me.  That poisonous atmosphere of male supremacy is passed from one generation to another – it is the “power of the prince of the air,” to use St. Paul’s powerful metaphor from the second chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians.  I breathed in patriarchy like I breathed in racism.  I don’t know what I would have chosen, if I had a choice, but in my defense, I did not have a choice in my formative years.

In the early days of the feminist movement, I remember my mother’s resistance to it.  I was a young adult by then, and I had begun to change my thinking and my imagination on the issues of equality and justice for women.  I remember engaging my mother on the women’s movement, and I noted that she was one of the strong, independent women who had laid the groundwork for my ability to be converted from my captivity to the idea of male supremacy.  Since I was her beloved son speaking, she begrudgingly acknowledged that these “new” women might have some valid points in their push for equality for women.  Then we both met Caroline Leach, who blew the doors off our resistance.

So, let us make no mistake here in these Trumpster years.  Though women have made much progress, the resistance to gender equality remains deep and powerful.  Unfortunately, that resistance will remain with us after the Trumpster has gone to his place in the lower chambers.  We may have all kinds of levels of thoughts on the idea of women’s equality, but let us dedicate ourselves and renew our commitment to working for the idea that all people, including women (especially women) are created with equal dignity.  As Sweet Honey in the Rock put it so well in the “Ella’s Song,” based on the remarkable life of Ella Baker, “we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it’s won.”  There are many captives to male supremacy out there – let’s work to help all of us find some liberation.

"LENT AND WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH"

 “LENT AND WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH”

I have always been intrigued that Women’s History Month (and Black History Month) often intersect with the season of Lent.  Lent is a 40-day period before Easter in which we are asked to consider our captivity to the powers and to seek ways to find some measure of liberation from our captivity.  As my friend and co-author Dr. Catherine Meeks puts it: “Be a half shade braver today.” In Lent, we are asked to make that step into a bit more of bravery, as we walk with Jesus to the Cross.  Whether you are a Christian believer or not, the journey to the Cross is a reminder of our deep captivity to the powers of fear, violence, and death.  Currently no one personifies that more than the Trumpster, but more of that next week.

This week, I want to consider our captivity to male supremacy, to the idea that men are superior to women, that women should take many steps back and let the men lead, because men are the superior gender.  Women’s History Month is a time to think about that deep captivity.  Even though I was raised by strong women – my mother and my surrogate grandmother Gran – I still breathed in that foul air of male superiority, believing that men were superior and should be in charge of everything.  Even though I had a powerful example of a woman in charge of life – my mother, Mary Stroupe (for her story, see my book “She Made A Way”) – I still could not appropriate that model.  It is an example of how the powers and principalities work – they capture our imaginations and make us unable to see a different world, indeed the world that God intends.

I began to loosen the hold of patriarchy and male supremacy on my heart as I became a young adult, but I would not fully engage it until I met the powerhouse named Caroline Leach.  She was so much like my mother – strong, independent bowing to no man – but being a different generation than my mother, she had the language and the fierceness to be a strong advocate for equal rights for women.  I was attracted to her for so many reasons, but this fierceness and this commitment to equal rights was a strong magnetic force for me.  And we got married a year later (still going after almost 52 years!). So, I am thankful to all the strong women who have modeled for me and have engaged me on this issue of equal rights for women.

I was reminded of this vein of equal rights for women when we visited the National Archives in DC with our daughter Susan (another strong woman who has taught me so much about the battle for equal rights for women).  Some of you may not be aware that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has now been ratified by 38 states, meeting the requirement for becoming an amendment to the Constitution.  Proposed in 1923 by Alice Paul and finally passed by Congress in 1972, it was ratified by 35 states (3 short of the 38 needed) by 1979.  It sat there for almost 40 years until momentum picked up again, with Nevada ratifying it in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020.  Before he left office in 2020, President Biden pronounced that it was now the law of the land.  Given these circumstances, why hasn’t it become part of the Constitution?  The power of male supremacy is still the obstacle.  In order for an amendment to become part of the Constitution, the lead archivist at the National Archives must pronounce that it has been ratified.  So far, this has not happened with the ERA, and during our visit at the National Archives, we asked several docents if we could speak to the archivist about approving the ERA, but of course, they demurred on it and said that we would need to make an appointment.  But we are hoping that just those few approaches could poke some consciences.

If you’d like to do your part on this, contact the National Archivist at inquire@nara.gov or public.affairs@nara.gov or postal mail at

National Archives and Records Administration

700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20408

Contact your Congressperson too!

    We are in a battle for our lives on this, so let’s find ways to speak up and act up on behalf of equal rights for women.  Your ancestors and your grandchildren will give you thanks and praise for it.  Do it for Women’s History Month!

"WHAT WOULD IDA B. WELLS DO?"

 “WHAT WOULD IDA B. WELLS DO?”

Ida B. Wells serves as a powerful bridge person between Black History Month and Women’s History Month.  She was dedicated to working on equity and justice for Black people, but she was equally dedicated to working for those same rights for women, especially Black women.  I described her in “Passionate for Justice” as “fearless, ferocious, formidable, and a feminist.”  Nowadays, she would correct me to say that she was a “womanist,” but the image still holds – she went where very few dared to tread, whether they were male or female.

Last week we left off with Wells’ getting ready to head back South after almost thirty years of exile.  She was forced out of Memphis in 1893, then married and raised a family in Chicago, traveled to England a couple of times to preach against neo-slavery and for rights for Black people, helped to found the NAACP,  worked for the right to vote for women, including the famous march in Washington in 1913, confronted President Woodrow Wilson on his support for neo-slavery, opened a settlement house in Chicago for Black people migrating up from the South.  And now, in 1920, she was making a huge decision to return South to Arkansas to investigate the white slaughter of over 230 Black people in my home of Phillips County.

After the Elaine Massacre in the fall of 1919, twelve Black men had been tried in my hometown of Helena, Arkansas, on charges of murder, stemming from the slaughter of 237+ Black people in that Massacre.  Yes, this development is  unimaginable, but not surprising in this bloody red decade and in the rising tide of neo-slavery and white supremacy.  They were convicted and sentenced to death.  Because the white mobs were still thirsty for Black blood, the Governor of Arkansas had them transferred to a jail in Little Rock, so as to protect them from lynching until they could be executed by the state – part of this protection came from a back channel order from President Woodrow Wilson, who was worried about the optics.  

Wells decided that she needed to investigate this massacre further, and when one of the men sentenced to death wrote to her, asking her to seek to intervene, she felt that God was calling her back South.  She took a train to Little Rock from Chicago, and then she visited the men in jail.  Because she still had a price on her head in the South, she went to visit them in disguise.  She found them overwhelmed, depressed, and certain that they would be executed.  Having seen and lived a lot in the heart of these issues, Ida B. decided that they needed a sermon, and she took to preaching.  She identified herself and then began to preach.  Here is an excerpt from that “sermon,” taken from her autobiography “Crusade for Justice:”

“I have been listening to you for nearly two hours.  You have talked and sung 

and prayed about dying, and forgiving your enemies, and of feeling that you 

are going to be received in the New Jerusalem because your God knows that 

you are innocent of the offense for which you expect to be executed.  But why 

don’t you pray to live and ask to be freed?  The God you serve is the God of 

Paul and Silas, who opened their prison gates, and if you have all the faith 

you say you have, you ought to believe that God will open your prison doors 

too……..Quit talking about about dying…..dying is the last thing you ought to 

even think about, much less talk about.  Pray to live and believe you are going 

to get out.”  (Crusade, p. 403)

Wells backed up her tough talk by publishing a definitive account of the Elaine Massacre entitled “The Arkansas Race Riot.”  She joined with Arkansas lawyer Scipio Africanus Jones and the NAACP to beat the drums on the case, and thanks to the efforts of Lawyer Jones, the case made it to the US Supreme Court in 1923, where SCOTUS overwhelmingly voted to overturn the case because it hinged on the jury being afraid of the mobs assembled inside and outside the courtroom in Helena.  The Elaine Twelve were eventually freed, and a small bit of justice was done.  Wells had no small part in this development, and later that year, one of the twelve men who had been sentenced to death came to Chicago to thank her for her coverage of the situation and for her inspiring them in that Arkansas prison, saying:“we never talked about dying any more, but did as she told us, and now every last one of us is out and enjoying his freedom.”

In these crazy and scary days, let us find some of that determination and courage and truth-telling that propelled Ida B. Wells.  We will need it to get us through these terrible times.  When we are wondering and wandering in the wilderness of this time in American culture, let this be our guiding light: “What would Ida B. Wells do?”

"ALWAYS IDA B. WELLS"

 “ALWAYS IDA B. WELLS”

To close out Black History Month, I want to revisit one of my favorite people in American history – the fantastic Ida B. Wells.  I first met her in a book “Black Foremothers” by Dorothy Sterling, when I read it in 1985 to get ready to preach on Black History Month at Oakhurst.  I was stunned to read about her – several things struck me.  First, I thought that I knew a fair amount about Black History, but I had never heard of her, despite all her witnessing and accomplishments for justice and equity.  But, she was little known in American history. Thanks to her daughter, Alfreda Duster, and to the rest of her family, especially her great-granddaughter Michelle Duster, Ida B. is much better known now.  Her daughter Alfreda Duster collected Ida B.’s journals and writings and molded them into a manuscript called “Crusade for Justice,” and began to seek a publisher.  It would be 1970 before she convinced John Hope Franklin to include “Crusade for Justice” in a series published by the University of Chicago.

Second, I was also stunned to learn that Ida B. Wells was born in the same county in Mississippi as all my mother’s forebears – Marshall County in northwest Mississippi.  Mother was born in Byhalia in 1919, and Ida B. was born into slavery in 1862 in Holly Springs.  Wells and my mother were the same type of women – short, fierce, and strong.  Whereas my mother never became an official social activist like Ida B. did, she made her statements on the issues of the day.  (For more on that journey, see my book “She Made a Way: Mother and Me in a Deep South World,” published in 2024).  These geographical and spiritual connections to Ida B. Wells motivated me to research Wells and dedicate myself to helping to make her more widely known.  Indeed, Dr. Catherine Meeks and I wrote a book on Wells and her influence in today’s world called “Passionate For Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet For Our Time,” published in 2019.  

In studying Wells and her life and witness, I discovered one more strong connection between her and my geography.  In 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) published a study of lynchings in America, especially in the South.  Right after the study came out, I got an e-mail from my long-time Helena friend David Billings (whose own memoir “Deep Denial” is powerful on these issues also).  In the e-mail, David indicated that Helena and Phillips County topped the list for localities that had killed the most Black people in lynchings.  The EJI study indicated that at least 230 Black people had been killed in a rampage of white violence in a three day massacre in early fall, 1919 in Elaine and Helena.  I had heard about the “Elaine Race Riot” as I grew up in Philips County, but I had accepted the narrative that Black folk had started it, and that the white violence in response had killed only a few Black men.  It was done to keep Black people in their place.

The reality is much different, as several studies have shown.  The “Elaine Massacre,” - as it came to be known - began when white sheriff’s deputies tried to stop a meeting of Black tenant farmers, who were seeking to organize to protect their cotton prices.  Everyone was armed, and though historians dispute over who fired first, my own sense is that the deputies fired first.  The wounding and killing of people on both sides ignited a white firestorm of violence.  For three days, armed white mobs roamed throughout Phillips County, killing whatever Black people they could find.  The US Army was called in to quell the massacre, but they ended up killing more Black people.  

    When the racist bloodlust calmed down, at least 237 Black people had been murdered, one of the worst mass killings in American history – in my home county. Investigations began, and to no one’s surprise, the Black people were blamed for the white violence.  Over 120 Black people were charged and convicted in the investigation, and twelve of them were sentenced to death.  Two modern books stand out as sources on this – “Blood in Their Eyes” by Grif Stockley and “On the Laps of Gods” by Robert Whitaker.”  I also discovered an article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly "The Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot of 1919," by Dr. J. W. Butts and Dorothy James, published in the Spring issue, 1961.  It was written by the parent of a high school classmate of mine.  It was an effort to “whitewash” the violence of the Elaine Massacre, and it also sought to discredit a study done by Ida B. Wells on the Massacre.

    Because of the horrific nature of the massacre, Wells decided to come back South from her exile (returning after almost 30 years of exile after her newspaper offices had been burned in Memphis in 1893).  She interviewed victims of the Massacre and published a foundational study entitled “The Arkansas Race Riot.”  Yet, she also did much more, and next week we’ll look at her study and her witness.  Her courage and her investigative powers provide us with a commodity that seems to be in such short supply these days:  hope.  As the Reverend Jesse Jackson put it so well: “Keep Hope Alive!”

"THE MAN WHO STOPPED NEO-SLAVERY"

 “THE MAN WHO STOPPED NEO-SLAVERY”

There were so many people involved in the fight to end Jim Crow, or neo-slavery, as I prefer to call it.  The phase of neo-slavery that built up and menaced us all from 1866 finally ended 100 years later in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Act.  We are now in a time when we are wrestling with the “new Jim Crow,” and as we seek to find our way in this Black History Month, I want to lift up one giant who has largely been forgotten, but whose life and witness shows us a path for our time.   Those who knew him and who remember him often call him “the man who killed Jim Crow.”

His name was Charles Hamilton Houston, and he was born in Washington, DC, in September, 1895, seven months after the death of Frederick Douglass, in the same year that Ida Wells got married, in the same month that Booker T. Washington gave his “surrender” speech in Atlanta, and eight months before the heinous SCOTUS decision “Plessy v. Ferguson” which gave legal status to neo-slavery.  Quite a run of time!  His father was a lawyer in DC, and his grandfather had escaped from slavery in Kentucky and had become a conductor on the Underground Railroad.  He was an outstanding student and went to Amherst and graduated summa cum laude in 1915.

He joined his father’s law firm, but when World War I came along, Houston joined the army to fight for democracy, or so he thought.  His experience of racism and segregation in the US army deepened his commitment to ending neo-slavery.  This is what he wrote about it: “The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in me dying for a world controlled by white people.  I made up my mind that if I got through this war, I would study law and use my life fighting for people who could not strike back.”  

He did make it through the war and kept his vow.  He entered Harvard Law School in 1920 and became the first Black student elected to the Harvard Law Review.  After graduation, he joined his father’s law firm in DC and taught part-time at Howard University Law School.  In 1929, the new president of Howard, Mordecai Johnson, recruited him to become dean of the Law School, with the intent of changing life in America.  Hamilton transformed the Law School from a part-time, non-accredited institution to a powerful, accredited law school which became the centerpiece of civil rights litigation, annually producing a strong group of lawyers rigorously trained to fight for equal justice under the law.  He had three main steps to end neo-slavery:  to develop that cadre of well-trained and dedicated Black lawyers, to build a broad base of support in Black communities for this work, and to litigate against neo-slavery and segregation in courts.  

He had many powerful students, but his most famous was Thurgood Marshall.  He trained Marshall to become the giant that he became.  Marshall had this to say about Hamilton: “He was hard crust…He used to tell us that doctors could bury their mistakes, but lawyers couldn’t.  And he’d drive home that we would be competing not only with white lawyers but really well-trained white lawyers, so there just wasn’t any point in crying in our beers about being Negroes.”  Hamilton didn’t just teach it – he lived it.  He later joined the NAACP as special counsel and recruited Marshall to be his top assistant.  They traveled the South together to get a first-hand look at the conditions that they would be litigating, with their lives in danger in every town. 

He had heart disease, and all the stress and work began to weaken his heart. His doctors told him to cut back or just go back to teaching, but he was dedicated to the cause.  He and Marshall joined forces to win important federal cases in Maryland, Missouri, and Oklahoma.  His heart continued to fail, and he had to step down from the NAACP work, with Marshall taking his place.  He died in 1950, four years before one of the powerful fruits of his labor would be litigated before the Supreme Court:  Brown v. Board of Education.  Though he was not with them, it was Charles Houston’s lawyers and Charles Houston’s strategy that brought them to victory in the Brown case.  It was one of the towering labors that led to the end of neo-slavery in 1965.  

At Houston’s funeral in 1950, William Hastie, the first Black man ever appointed as a federal appellate judge, had these words to say about Houston: “He guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship.  He was truly the Moses of that journey.  He lived to see us close to the promised land of full equality under the law, closer that even he had dared hope when he set out on that journey, and so much closer than would have been possible without his genius and his leadership.”

In this Black History Month, remember this pioneer – if you’ve never heard of him, look up more about him.  If you know about him, celebrate his work.  And, in a time of the new neo-slavery, the new Jim Crow, let us find our place in that great cloud of witnesses, working with inspiration from people like Charles Hamilton Houston and Ida B. Wells, working towards a time when the idea that all people are created equal will bear fruit for all of us.  Unfortunately, as we are now seeing in the Trumpster, Hamilton did not kill neo-slavery, but he put a mighty stop to it for 70 years.  Now, it’s our turn to pick up that mantle, as Elisha picked it up from the great prophet Elijah.