"DIVERGING ROADS - BILLY GRAHAM AND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."

“DIVERGING ROADS - BILLY GRAHAM AND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."

            There is no small irony that Billy Graham died in the 50^th anniversary year of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.  They both came into the public eye in the 1950’s.  King was reluctantly dragged out of the comfort and relative quietness of a prestigious church pulpit into the life of pubic activism and eloquence that, in hindsight, he seemed destined for.  Graham burst onto the public scene in a pattern reminiscent to modern times – William Randolph Hearst loved Graham’s anti-communism and saw him as a vehicle for winning over the masses.  Hearst’s media power sent Graham’s star soaring in the popular imagination. 

            They were both religious giants in America in the 20^th century.  Both had a strong sense that America had a great religious destiny.  In his most famous speech, King lifted up the unfulfilled promise of America in his “I Have A Dream Speech,” calling out white America to live up to our tenets of equality and freedom for all. Graham emphasized over and over again that America was God’s chosen nation.  He also emphasized that the goal of the religious life and of religious institutions was to proclaim the necessity of individuals to claim Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. 

            Here, to use Robert Frost’s famous metaphor, their two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and they took differing routes.  King continued to call America out, calling out our better selves, calling us to re-imagine ourselves as a nation that seeks to live out the true meaning of the idea that all people are created equal.  His strong commitment to non-violence got him in trouble with everybody, and the deep resistance that he encountered among the power structures began to shift him to add the ideas of justice and equity to the ideals of equality and freedom.   When he spoke out against the Vietnam War in 1967,  the powers on all sides were stunned.  And, when he began to organize the Poor Peoples Campaign to talk about economic injustice, the powers decided that it was enough, that he was too dangerous.  It is no surprise that of the many opportunities to assassinate him, the occasion came when he was in Memphis, not to assist in voting rights but in raising the wages and working conditions of people who were garbage collectors.   Though we have sanitized him and have made him a saint on MLK holiday, the reality of King’s life at its end was reflected in J. Edgar Hoover’s assessment of him:  one of the most dangerous men in America.

            Graham, meanwhile, stuck with the idea that all God cares about is what happens to individuals when they die.  His strong emphasis on claiming Jesus Christ as Savior had little to do with our lives here on earth.  It rather had to do with what our eternal status would be.  In sticking with this emphasis, Graham became an easy captive of the powers and of the long-held American belief that religion is an individual, not a communal, matter.   This approach to religion is what enabled white people to call ourselves Christians and hold people as slaves.  It is what enables us to allow our children to be shot down in schools because what we truly worship as a community is not the God of Jesus Christ but the gun-god Molech who demands child sacrifice.   Though Graham did not lay the foundation of this individualistic religion – it has a deep root in American history – he did add some strong floors to it.  He thus became an easy tool for Presidents to trot out, especially Richard Nixon.  As far as I am aware,  in contrast to the One he claimed as Lord and Savior, Graham never opposed the unjust and senseless war in Vietnam.  Graham’s refusal to engage communal issues of justice and equity in his approach to Jesus and even American history made him a beloved icon in American religious history.  It also helped to build the current religious right which is such a mean and powerful machine in our time.

            As I listened to the accolades pour in for Graham last week, I was struck by a clip of an TV interview in which Graham was asked who he’d like to preach at his funeral.  He replied that he’d like to do it, that he’d like to have a tape of one of his sermons played for his eulogy.  I thought that this stood in stark contrast to MLK’s words from one of his best sermons “Drum Major Instinct,” given 2 months to the day before he was assassinated.  In it, he indicated that he asked whoever would preach over his death not to take too long, but he would ask that they say that he did try to be right on the war question, that he did try to feed the hungry, that he did try to love and serve humanity. 

            I began with irony, and I’ll end with it here – I don’t know who will preach for Graham’s funeral, but for Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta, after Ralph Abernathy gave a powerful sermon,  Coretta Scott King chose to have “The Drum Major Instinct” played as the final eulogy for the life of a great man.   

"BLACK HISTORY AND LENT"

“BLACK HISTORY AND LENT”

            The season of Lent began on Valentine’s Day – a strange combination of love and ashes, the ashes made all too relevant by the killing floor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.  As I said in this blog space before, we have turned ourselves over the gun-god Molech (Leviticus 20:1-5), and he requires that we sacrifice our children to him, which we are continuing to do.  Perhaps this mass shooting will make a difference, but I’ll be really (and pleasantly) surprised if it does.  The next hope on the horizon are the 2018 elections, so register to vote, and question your friends and colleagues to make sure that they are.

            This intersectionality reminds me that Black History Month and Lent almost always overlap on the calendar, and that is appropriate, for the racism that called forth the need for Black History Month is America’s original sin.  We saw the movie “MudBound” the other night, and it was powerful.  It did end on a redemptive note, but set in the Mississippi mud of the Delta right after World War II, it did remind me of my growing up in Arkansas as the next generation after this one. The mud, the racism, the struggles – all these spoke to me of my captivity to the power of race.  I had a restless sleep the night after I watched it.

            The movie focused on the return of two men from World War II – one was African-American, and one was Anglo.  Though they did not know one another prior to the war, they bonded over their shared experiences.   The African-American character, Ronsel Jackson, displayed the attitude that many black soldiers exhibited when they returned from World War II – they would no longer accept the “neo-slavery” that continued to prevail in the South.  They had fought for freedom and equality in the war, and they would not accept the inequality that continued in this country when they returned.  These veterans formed the foundation for the civil rights movement that burst out in the 1950’s.  Their leadership and courage and determination made the civil rights movement possible.

            One such veteran was Amzie Moore of Cleveland, Mississippi.  His grandfather had been held in slavery, and Amzie Moore had thought that white folks held the power because they were supposed to have it.  World War II taught him that people of different racial categories were all human beings.  He returned from the war determined to help change things in Mississippi and the South. He was a federal postal worker, and that gave him some job security as he began the work of equality and equity.

            He joined Medgar Evers in the state NAACP chapter, and he helped to recruit people in the Delta, including Fannie Lou Hamer.  It was dangerous work, and Bayard Rustin, who would later organize the 1963 March on Washington, told Moore that he was either very brave or very stupid.  Moore replied that he didn’t think that he was either one, but he was determined to work for justice.  He met the legendary Bob Moses in a meeting in Atlanta in 1960, and he encouraged Moses to bring the SNCC organizers and students to Mississippi, which Moses and others eventually did, leading to the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.  Moore and other veterans formed the basis for the logistics of this campaign and many others, and his home in Cleveland became a “safe” house.  Those who stayed with him formed a “who’s who” of the movement:  Bob Moses, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, Stokely Carmichael, Andy Young, Jesse Jackson, and many others.  Look him up and celebrate his life and witness!

            “MudBound” called out Amzie Moore for me, but it also called me out on another level.  As I saw the movie unfold before me, I thought to myself:  “In those days, I did not believe that African-Americans had an interior life, that they were not human beings like me.”  Though I gave up that way of thinking many years ago, “MudBound” brought back my captivity to me in stark fashion.  The movie did a fine job of portraying two families, one black and one white, intertwined with the complexity of a changing racial landscape.  It is these kinds of things and attitudes that we are asked to examine in the season of Lent – why we choose racism (and so many other powers) over the love of God, why we had rather execute Jesus than be transformed by his love.  Let’s look in those scary places in Lent.

'BLACK HISTORY MONTH - DEUTERONOMY 23:15"

“BLACK HISTORY MONTH - DEUTERONOMY 23:15”

            In January, 1993, we had the privilege at Oakhurst of having a convicted felon preach in Sunday worship.   He had just been elected Moderator of our denomination’s General Assembly the summer before, and many people grumbled that we now had a criminal as our Moderator.  His name is John Fife, and his crime?  He had helped people escape from torture and slavery and execution. He had helped to transport people from El Salvador and Guatemala into this country and into Canada, through his church network in Arizona.  His conviction was later overturned, but we were proud to have him in our pulpit, because he and many others were part of a long tradition in the USA known as the Underground Railroad. 

            I had never heard the verse that is the title of this week’s blog before 2000.  I sort of knew Deuteronomy, but it is mostly laws, so I had not paid attention to this verse until it leaped out to me from the title page of a book entitled “The Underground Railroad.”  I was not surprised that I had never learned this verse in Sunday school as I grew up.  I had learned a lot of verses and stories, but this was not one of them.  The verse in the King James Version that I first encountered it is: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant that has escaped from his master unto thee.”  In modern English, it is “Slaves who have escaped to you from their owners shall not be given back to them.”

            I encountered this verse on the title page of the book published by William Still in 1872, and even in 2000 when I first saw it, I was incredulous.  I thought that it was some “liberal” manipulation of the text, even though I agreed with its sentiments.  If that was in the Bible, why had I never heard of it?   I looked it up, and yep, there it was, plain as day, no manipulation, no twisted text.  It only took a moment to realize why I had never heard of it in Sunday school – I was raised and taught by people who lived in neo-slavery, who continued to benefit from the legacy of slavery and neo-slavery (which ended in 1965).  Still, I could not believe that those who said that they took the Bible literally had never promoted this verse.

            William Still was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia.  He had been born in freedom in New Jersey to a woman who had escaped slavery but had to leave some of her children behind.  He helped hundreds, if not thousands, of people escaping slavery.  People fleeing slavery came through Philadelphia daily, often coming up the Delaware River or on foot from nearby Maryland.  It was the route that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman took.  Indeed Harriet Tubman stayed with Still and often dropped off passengers on the way up.  Later the great Ida Wells would stay at Still’s home also as she worked in her anti-lynching campaign – so he had two of the greatest women of the 19^th century in his home!  William Still was assisted by the fact that even after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the state of Pennsylvania had declared that people of African heritage on its soil were free people, and it put them in direct conflict with the Fugitive Slave Act.

            Unlike many on the Underground Railroad, Still kept notes and records.  It was a dangerous thing to do because they contained the names of contacts and could do great harm if confiscated.  William Still hid them well, because he wanted future generations to now of the bravery of so many people.  He published the notes in 1872 as “The Underground Railroad,” and it is basically the words and stories of people escaping slavery.   It is one of the primary sources for a history of the Underground Railroad (UR).  He was deemed a hero for his work on the UR, but he always made it clear that the brave ones were the people escaping slavery, not the conductors.  Indeed, he said that the conductors were only doing what they should have been doing.  But, I say “thanks to William Still and so many others.”  May we pick up the mantle of William Still and Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells and John Fife and Amzie Moore and Daisy Bates – more to come on Moore and Bates later!

'YOU CAN'T SPELL FORMIDABLE WITHOUT IDA B"

“YOU CAN’T SPELL FORMIDABLE WITHOUT “IDA B”

            The phrase in the title of this blog is a line from a banner in the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in DC that Caroline and visited in December.  In this wonderful old house dedicated to the recognition of the equality of and equity for women, there was a banner about Ida B. Wells.  The short history of Ida B. Wells began with that line:  you can’t spell “formidable” without ida b.   And they are correct – Ida B. Wells was a powerful foremother in the struggles for equality for people of African descent and for women.  I always begin any thoughts about Black History Month with her.  She was formidable, but she did not begin that way.

            She was born into slavery in July, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  She grew up in the era of Reconstruction, when she began to hear that the idea of equality applied to her as an African-American and to her as a woman.  She grew up with the idea that she was somebody, and she learned it through her family and her church and African-American community.  The bold experiment of Reconstruction was always under attack, and it did not last long, but it took root in her heart, in her vision of herself, and in her idea of what American life should be.  She fought for this vision all of her life.

             She lost both her parents to the yellow fever epidemic in 1878.  She refused to allow her siblings to be farmed out to others, so she managed the raising of the family.   At age 16, she had to grow up and take on her family and the world.  She would be in this stance for the rest of her life, barely 5 feet tall, seen as inferior as a woman, and struggling to survive financially for the first 30 years of her life.  Yet she had this fierceness about her, a drive and an expectation of being treated as a real person and a citizen.  She would need it, because the rest of her life would be a “battle for her life,” as Sweet Honey in the Rock once put it in a song.  And, she would lose most of the battles.

            There are many examples of this fierce dedication to equity and justice.  Here’s the story of one of them.  In 1875 in its last significant law for civil rights until 1957, the U. S. Congress passed an act that forbade segregation on public accommodations.  It came two years before the Tilden-Hayes compromise which gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in exchange for all federal troops being pulled out of the South to officially end Reconstruction.  In 1883, the US Supreme Court ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, and the floodgates of segregation and re-enslavement were open fully.  In the spring of 1884, Ida Wells followed her usual pattern of purchasing a seat in the ladies car on the train on a trip out of Memphis.  After the train had pulled out, the conductor came to collect the tickets and then informed her that she would have to move to the car reserved for black people.  71 years before Rosa Parks, she refused to give up her seat, and when he grabbed her and tried to pull her up from her seat, she bit his hand and braced herself not to move – no nonviolent resistance for her.  He went to get male reinforcements, and it took three men to throw her off the train.

            Undeterred, she took the railroad to court under Tennessee law, and the judge who heard the case was a former Union soldier.  He ruled in her favor and awarded her $500 in damages.  She was thrilled with the victory, but it was short-lived.  The railroad appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, and in 1887, they overturned the verdict.  Ida Wells was crestfallen and wrote in her diary on April 11:

“I had hoped for such great things from my suit for my people generally.  I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice.  I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now if it were possible would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them.”

            Fortunately for her and for us, she would re-gather her courage and her vision, and over the next 44 years would be a fierce and dedicated leader for justice and equity.  She brings many values to us in our time, especially in a discouraging time when the forces of white male domination have regained their strength.  2018 is obviously a huge year for all of us, and as we think about our future and our actions, let us remember Ida B. Wells and seek to live in her energy and vision.