"JUNETEENTH"

“JUNETEENTH”

            In his fine biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight notes a truly awful meeting that President Lincoln had with a small group of black ministers in DC on August 14, 1862.  Lincoln had called the meeting to “discuss” the colonization movement, the desire of white people to end the “slavery” problem by “enticing” (forcing) African-Americans to leave the country.  Lincoln basically lectured the ministers and urged them to support colonization.  The ministers demurred and said that they would get back to him on it.  Frederick Douglass and many others were not so nice – they blasted Lincoln on this.

            Lincoln was already thinking about the Emancipation Proclamation, and it is not clear why he had this meeting and said many awful things about people of African descent.  Or, actually it is clear.  Lincoln, for all his leadership powers and vision, was still captured by the racism that has infected America since its European beginnings.  He did not see a way for black people and white people to live together as equals.  This has not changed for most of us who are classified as “white” – for a contemporary version of it, see Derrick Bell’s “Faces at the Bottom of the Well:  The Permanence of Racism.” It has a parable of extra-terrestrials coming to our world, offering solutions for all the world’s problems – all they ask in return is for all black people to be exported from the world into their spaceships.

            Yet, circumstances of the Civil War got to Lincoln.  The bloody battle of Antietam gave him a small opening, and on September 22, 1862, he issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all those held as slaves in the Confederacy as of January 1, 1863, if the Civil War was not over by then.  It also authorized black men to sign up to fight for the Union side in the War.  Frederick Douglass began to see a shift in Lincoln, and he welcomed the Proclamation.  It was a long wait until January 1, and as Blight puts it, “For Douglass, his family and the entire abolitionist community, the fall of 1862 was a sleepless watch night that lasted three months.” 

January 1 came, and the Proclamation went into effect, though it would take the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg and the beginning of the march to Atlanta to turn the tide.

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

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

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

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

            So, this Wednesday, find a way to celebrate the great American vision of the fundamental equality of all people.  Find a way to acknowledge how deeply white supremacy still has a hold on our hearts and vision.  Find a way to work against that captivity, as did Frederick Douglass and Abby Kelley and William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells and Alice Paul and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker and many others have done.  Let us find our voice.

"Father's Day"

“FATHER’S DAY”

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

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

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

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

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

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

"PRIDE MONTH"

“PRIDE MONTH”

            This month of June has come to be known as “Pride Month.”  It started as Gay Pride Month, and then it went to LGBTQ Month, and now it has settled into being “Pride Month.”   Though as a Calvinist, I am a bit squeamish when it comes to affirming “pride,” I understand this to be something else than puffed-up ego.  This is a month of celebrating the gift of God’s creation of people whose sexuality and sexual orientation is different than heterosexuality.  In the last decade we have all become aware that there are many permutations of sexuality, and the old norm of heterosexuality is beginning to be expanded to include many other orientations.  We are also recognizing how much oppression and shaming there is of people of alternate sexualities.  “Pride Month” is a time for all people to affirm that there are a

variety of sexual orientations, and we are all asked to give thanks for God’s gift of sexuality in our lives, no matter what the culture tells us, or what we tell ourselves.

            The month of June was chosen as “Pride Month” because it was the month in which the Stonewall Uprising was held in New York in 1969.  So, yes, this month will be the 50^th Anniversary of that event on Christopher Street in New York, and there will be huge celebrations there.  The Stonewall Uprising refers to spontaneous and violent riots and rebellion by the LGBT community in response to the police harassment of them.  The match that lit the fire was a police raid at the Stonewall Inn bar on June 28, 1969.  Stonewall was a gathering place for gay men, lesbians and transgender folks, and in the early morning hours of that night, police raided the bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.  Rather than allowing themselves to passively be arrested for their sexuality, the LGBT community rose up in protest that night and for several nights following.  It was a time when those in the LGBT community sought to regain and to re-affirm their God-given sexual selves and to let the heterosexual world know that they would no longer slink back in hiding.  They would claim themselves and would seek to force themselves into the consciousness of the world.

            I was not aware of the Stonewall Uprisings in 1969.  All I remember about that summer was that I was working for Operation Breadbasket in Nashville, seeking to influence mostly white merchants in black neighborhoods to offer quality food at decent prices and to pay their black workers decent wages.  I had made significant progress on the power of racism in my life, and I was beginning to seek to shift on the power of patriarchy, but I was not on the radar on LGBTQ life.  My other main memory of that summer is being stuck in JFK airport on the way to a seminarians’ conference in New Hampshire – it was the day after Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon ( July 20, 1969 – another 50^th anniversary this year).  I heard him quip his famous lines many, many times that day, and that’s a story for a blog in July on that anniversary.  In regard to questions of sexual orientation, I was a good “liberal” in 1969.   I was into “live and let live,” but I did not understand the depths of oppression and the self-hatred that such oppression often caused.  I still thought that there was something a bit “abnormal” about people who were attracted to other people of the same gender category, but I had learned enough about myself in regard to race and gender to recognize that there might be more to the story.   At that point, though, it was an “oughtness” with me and not a passion.

            My life changed on this in 1976 in Norfolk, Virginia, where Caroline and I were co-pastors in a small church in a low-income apartment complex.  We recruited people from all over the city to seek to assist in the ministries there.  One of those people was a married, heterosexual woman, who embodied the faith and sought to live it out.  I have met very few people in the church who were as compassionate and as competent as she was.  So, soon after she had joined the church, we asked her to allow us to nominate her to be an elder of the church.  When I called her to ask her about that, she said that she wanted to come talk with me.  She came in to see me, and she indicated that while she wanted to say “yes,” she could not, because she was a lesbian.  My mind and heart went “Wow!”  Her sharing revealed to me how captured my imagination was – I would never have thought of her as a woman attracted to women.  Though the phrase has been overused, she did blow my mind.  And she did convert me – my misgivings on the issues of sexuality largely disappeared that day – if she was not worthy, none of us were.  I surprised myself when I told her: “If you’re willing to put your name in, we are certainly willing to support you.”  She was, and she was elected an elder, and she has been stunning people like me ever since.  We began ordaining people regardless of sexual orientation since 1978, some 41 years ago, and I credit her willingness to be who she was and to engage me on it.

            So, in this Pride month, let us celebrate God’s gift of sexuality in all its complexity and power.  I’ve thought about this a lot, and my conclusion is that God doesn’t really care about who’s loving whom – all God cares about is faithfulness and loving and justice and compassion.  Thanks to those Stonewall uprisers and thanks to those willing to engage those of us captured by heterosexuality.  May we hear God’s voice in this month of Pride.