"SOUTHERN HORRORS"

“SOUTHERN HORRORS”

            Three years ago in February, 2015, my long-time friends David Billings and Margery Freeman e-mailed me a New York Times article of a list of the history of lynchings  in the South from 1877 to 1950.  It was researched and compiled and published by the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama, under the directorship of Bryan Stevenson.  It indicated that there were 3,959 documented victims of racial terror lynchings in those years.  David was sending this to me for several reasons, not the least of which is that the study indicated that our home county (Phillips County, Arkansas) had four times as many lynchings as the next highest county.  This garish statistic was largely due to the fact that at least 237 African-Americans had been killed in the Elaine Race Riot near our hometown of Helena, Arkansas in 1919.

            This past week in Montgomery, the Equal Justice Institute had its grand opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum, including a memorial to these victims of the white supremacy lynchings.  Other good friends, Ed Loring and Murphy Davis, had invited us to attend the opening with them, but to our regret, we were not able to do so.  We will attend soon, and though it will be grim, it will be a very necessary journey for all of us in the USA, especially those of us classified as “white.”  It is essential that we all engage and acknowledge this history, because until we do, we will never understand the continuing depths of all our captivity to the power of race.

            My journey with the Elaine Race Riot is typical of so many of our journeys with this sordid history.  Growing up, I was taught white supremacy by my family and my church and my culture.  As I got into high school, I began to question a bit of it, thanks to some adults who engaged me on it, and thanks to David Billings’ willingness to consider a different narrative with me.  Don’t get me wrong – we were not heroes or advocates on this in high school – it would be several years before a summer in New York City would change our narratives and our perceptions forever.  In high school, however, we began to wonder if we were getting the whole story in our white supremacist narrative.  The Elaine Race Riot was rarely ever mentioned in those days, forgotten and of course not acknowledged as one of the biggest slaughters in American history.   When we did get wind of it, it was always in the context of uppity black people (“n-word” then) having to be put in their place.  For some reason, I assumed that it meant only a few people killed, and I look back now in horror that the small number made it seem OK to me.

            I only really discovered the depths of death and depravity of this lynching in my early study of Ida Wells in the early 1990’s.  I learned that she had come down from Chicago in 1922 (in her first trip back South since 1893) to visit the 12 black men who had been sentenced to death for their attempts to defend themselves and their families in the Elaine Race Riot.  She had written an article for the Chicago Defender about this development, and through her hard work and that of the NAACP, the Supreme Court eventually overturned their convictions.  In the midst of this study, I discovered that the father of one of my high school acquaintances had written an article for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly in 1960, seeking to refute Ida Wells’ charges of lynchings and injustice.  He sought, in the midst of the civil rights upheavals, to justify white supremacy and take us back to the time when that supremacy was accepted by all.   Though I had learned a lot, I was shocked to see that this man, as far as I knew a respected doctor, had sought to justify white supremacy in this way at such a late date.

            It is this strain of thought and discovery that makes the National Memorial for Peace and Justice such a necessary journey for all of us.  This is our history, and we must all acknowledge it and walk through it.  We’ll be going there soon, and I hope that you will be too. Ida Wells published one of the first lists of the lynchings , and she debunked the myth that the lynchings were in response to black male rape of white women.  It was entitled “Southern Horrors:  Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Frederick Douglass wrote the intro to that study,  because even a giant like Douglass had begun to wonder if there were not a kernel of truth in the white supremacist claim about the lasciviousness of black men.  Wells, and now Bryan Stevenson, have helped us to see the stark and difficult truth of lynching about ourselves and about American history:  white terrorism, plain and brutal. 

"HAVING EYES TO SEE"

“HAVING EYES TO SEE”

            In the 1982 movie “ET”,  I remember the young boy Eliot shouting to the government agent Keys:  “He came to me – he came to me!”  Here Eliot was proclaiming that the extra-terrestrial person named “ET” had chosen to appear to him, and that because of that, Eliot had both special knowledge and a special responsibility for taking care of ET and of the message that ET brought.  The proclamation came as the government was taking over ET, and ET was dying.

            I’ve often thought of that conversation whenever I read the 20^th chapter of John where the risen Jesus appears to Mary Magdalena.  Mary comes to the tomb alone, and she sees that the stone has been rolled away from the tomb.  She doesn’t think: “Hallelujah!  Jesus lives again!”  Rather she thinks that the body may have been stolen.  She runs to get the male disciples to help her find the body.  Being the males that they are, Peter and “the disciple whom Jesus loved” have a competitive interlude at the tomb, then they leave.  They don’t find the body of Jesus because he has risen, he is alive.  The men are at the tomb, but the risen Jesus chooses not to appear to them.  I’ve also kept that in mind over these years – Jesus chooses to appear to Mary, not to the men.  She is the primary witness to the Resurrection;  indeed she is the only witness mentioned in all four Gospel accounts:  she is the primary witness.  As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the church has done all it could to discredit her importance, but the truth remains:  Mary Magdalena is the primary witness.

            And, she almost fails.  She does not have eyes to see.  The risen Jesus appears to her and speaks to her and stands right in front of her, but she does not recognize him.  She thinks that he is the caretaker of the cemetery, so it is not that he is a ghost or is not human.  Her perceptual apparatus has been taken over by the power of death, and she is not able to recognize him.  She does come to recognize him, however.  How?  He calls her name: “Mary.”  From that moment, she has eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to receive.  This many-layered text in John tells us that she wants to hold on to Jesus, but he tells her that her task now is not to hold on to him to seek to keep him in the old life that she has known.  Her task now is to become a witness to the new life, to go and tell the other disciples that he is risen and that life is changing.

            As we know, the male disciples do not believe her.  The risen Jesus obviously chose to appear to her and to the other women, and the men cannot abide this.  They wanted to be in the room, or at least in the tomb!  And, in the passage in John that follows Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus, the men are in a room, later named the upper room.  They are afraid and anxious and worried.  My daughter Susan told me of a fine sermon preached by McKenna Lewellen recently at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church on this passage.  It was entitled “Stairwell Gospel,” and she emphasized that Mary was on the stairwell, pounding on the door, telling the male disciples to come on out and celebrate, because Jesus had risen and had appeared to her.  The men, of course, refused to believe her, because God obviously would not entrust such an important message to such an insignificant witness as a woman.

            They do finally come to believe, and then they act like it is their story, not Mary’s.  It is a reminder that those of us in power often miss the risen Jesus because we are so tied and anchored to our way of understanding the world.  God would not possibly choose to bring the truth to those at the margins, to those whom the world says are not worthy or even capable of receiving or handling the truth.  Our political life in the USA now turns on this idea:  white people, and especially white men, are trying to return us to the upper room, where fear and anxiety seem dominant and even central.  The exciting idea of new life, of diverse peoples, of women, of LGBTQ, of all people being welcomed to the center – these seek to be drowned out, even though many people are pounding at the door.  We have been here before in American history, and the votes in the primaries this spring and then in the fall will determine whether we stay locked up in the room in fear and in anger, or whether we will come out of the room and move into the new vision that seeks to be born.  Let us have eyes to see.

"CHOOSING MARY? HOW CONTRARY!"

“CHOOSING MARY?  HOW CONTRARY!”

            In the Christian tradition, it is now the season of the Resurrection, the celebration of Jesus of Nazareth being brought back from the grave, emphasizing the idea that life and love are the final words in the universe, not violence and death.  Whatever one believes about the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, it cannot be denied that the Resurrection was the event that fired the first disciples.  While church tradition has over-emphasized the crucifixion as the central event, it was the Resurrection that brought the scattered and scared and disillusioned women and men disciples back together to become the primary witnesses to a whole new way of life.  Only later did they go back and reflect on the crucifixion.  Without the Resurrection, there would be no church and no witnesses.

            And, who is the primary witness?  If you are unfamiliar with the tradition (and even if you are familiar), you may be surprised to hear that the primary witnesses to the Resurrection are the women disciples, not the men.  And, there is ONE primary witness:  Mary from the town of Magdala, and she is commonly known as Mary Magdalena.  She is the only witness to the Resurrection mentioned in all 4 Gospels, and in the 20^th chapter of John’s Gospel, there is a powerful encounter between the risen Jesus and Mary from Magdala.  We’ll look at that encounter more carefully next week, but for today, I want to ask:  “What happened to Mary Magdalena?”

            Did she become a bishop?  Did she become a leader of the disciples?  Did she become a revered figure in the church tradition?  The answer is that we don’t know what happened to Mary Magdalena.  Though she is THE primary witness to the event that precipitated the church, she was written out of the history of the church for a long while.  Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that she was pushed back to the margins where the patriarchal society, in which Jesus lived, much preferred her to be.  The Gospel writers waste no time on this – right away in Luke, the “mansplaining” (did that term come from Rebecca Solnit?) begins.  When Mary and the other women disciples come to the men to tell them about the Resurrection, Luke 24:11 tells us that the men dismiss the women as hysterical and do not believe them.  Later on, it looks like someone added a verse 12 to try to redeem the men, indicating that Peter goes to the tomb to check it out.  In the earliest written account of the Resurrection in chapter 15 of Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians,  the list of witnesses to the Resurrection omits the women altogether – a quick erasure from the Gospel accounts, which at least indicate that the women, and especially Mary Magdalena, were the primary witnesses.

            The Gnostic gospels that did not make it into the Bible put Mary at a much higher place in the church circle.  In “The Gospel of Mary” she takes leadership and gathers the disciples and helps them to rally and begin to be the witnesses that they were meant to be.  But, the movement to squash the leadership of women in the church won out.  The egalitarian impetus of Jesus of Nazareth is blunted on many levels, including the erasure of the witness and discipleship of women.  For Mary Magdalena, the harshest blow came in 591 CE when Pope Gregory the Great pronounced that Mary Magdalena was a reformed prostitute, and this pronouncement stuck.  Growing up, I envisioned Mary Magdalena as the woman of the streets who anoints Jesus with oil and wipes his feet with her hair in Luke 7, though this woman is not named.  She is named “Mary” in John 12, but there she is clearly the sister of Martha and Lazarus. 

            Pope Gregory’s pronouncement sealed the deal that was already in the making in the male-dominated society.  The powerful witness of Mary Magdalena was reduced to her body and her sexuality.   The recent live televising of “Jesus Christ Superstar” had Mary play a very important part, but again as reformed prostitute and as the lover of Jesus, but she is off to the sidelines  and is not a central leader in the God movement.  In the best-selling “Da Vinci Code,” Mary becomes a central figure again, not as a leader of the church but as the bearer of the Holy Grail, the love child of Jesus and Mary.

            Here is the powerful and revolutionary idea behind those Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, an idea that can’t be suppressed by the mansplaining.  Jesus welcomed women as leaders and witnesses, and although I am certain that it pained the four Gospel writers to include the women as the primary witnesses to the Resurrection, the stories that they had received compelled them to do it.  Or, in the Nibs Stroupe theory, I believe that they were a deliberate contrary witness to the Pauline tradition, which left the women out completely.  Let me say here that I don’t think that Paul was as anti-women as he has often been portrayed, but the tradition that developed in his name certainly was.

            The power of the Resurrection is that it verified that Jesus overcame the domination of violence and death and welcomed all into the God movement, especially those who had been marginalized by society.  More on this next week, but for now, it’s worth repeating:  “Choosing Mary?  How contrary!”

"POWERFUL ESSAY ON MLK"

“POWERFUL ESSAY  ON MLK”

            I don’t usually do this, but for this week’s blog on the 50^th anniversary week of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I want to share excerpts from the best essay that I have ever read on Dr. King.  It is by June Jordan from an essay in 1987entitled “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” from her book “Technical Difficulties:  African-American Notes on the State of the Union,” published in 1993, just after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President.  It was also reprinted in “Some of Us Did Not Die,” published after her death in 2002. If you want to know my own thoughts on the MLK assassination, see my online article for The Atlantic at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/doubting-mlk-during-a-strike-in-memphis/550118/.  Here is the excerpt from June Jordan’s extraordinary essay on MLK:

            “And I remember listening to WBAI-FM radio in 1963…..I was following the liberation of my life according to the Very Reverend Dr. King.   And when, one afternoon, that fast-talking, panic-stricken newscaster in Birmingham reported the lunging killer police dogs and the atrocious hose water and I could hear my people screaming while the newscaster shouted out the story of my people, there, in Birmingham, who would not quit the streets……. I remember the positively stunned sensation that engulfed me:  I knew that we were winning;  I knew that we would win.

            And before those demonstrators and underneath the melee and after the bleeding and the lockups and the singing and the prayers, there was this magical calm voice leading us, unarmed, into the violence of White America.  And that voice was not the voice of God.  But did it not seem to be the very voice of righteousness?  That voice was not the voice of God.  But does it not, even now, amazingly penetrate/reverberate/illuminate:  a sound, a summoning, somehow divine?”

            June Jordan then writes of her inability to follow Dr. King’s mantra of nonviolence, whereby black blood should flow but not the blood of white folks, and then she adds:

            “Nevertheless, and five years later, when I heard the news of Dr. King’s assassination I knew that I had lost my leader:  he could not take me where I did not wish to go but he had taken himself into the valley of death for my sake, and he had earned his way to the uncontested mountaintop as the moral spokesman for all of the powerless and despised and impoverished…….Almost twenty years ago, Dr. King, standing alone, publicly demanded that England and the United States both act to isolate South Africa through unequivocal severing of financial or any connection with that heinous regime.  In that same year, Dr. King stood forth, opposed to the war in Vietnam, and thereby suffered the calumny and castigation of his erstwhile peers as well as the hysterical censure of his outright foes.

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

            He was not a god.  But was he not a prophet and a revolutionary calling for class war against an economic system consecrated to material wealth, a system responding only to grim promptings of brute greed and profit? 

            When that devil’s bullet lodged itself inside the body of Dr. Martin Luther King, he had already begun an astonishing mobilization of poor, Black, white, Latino Americans who had nothing to lose.  They would challenge our government to eliminate exploitative, merciless, and war-mongering policies nationwide, or else “tie up the country” through “means of civil disobedience.”  Dr. King intended to organize those legions into “coercive direct actions” that would make of Babylon a dysfunctional behemoth begging for relief. 

            Is it any wonder he was killed?  He was not a god.  And so, when the news came April 4, 1968, that Dr. King was dead, I thought, I felt, along with millions and millions of other Black Americans, that so was love and so was all goodwill and so was the soul of these United States…..

            And where does all of this place me in respect to the man who was not God?  I am thankful that he lived and that he loved us and that he tried so hard to be and to do good.  I have come to understand and to dedicate myself to the community of his dream, the righteous revolution implied by his ardent reaching for economic and social justice.”

            Thank you, June Jordan, thank you Dr. King – if you have not read this entire essay, please find it and do so.  And let all of us dedicate ourselves to the Beloved Community for which Dr. King lived and died.