"THE UNIVERSAL SOLDIER"

“THE UNIVERSAL SOLDIER”

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 in ending slavery.   

I served my country as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War from 1970-72.  My alternative service was a staff person (and later 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.  I’ll write more on that journey with the CO this fall when I remember my 50^th anniversary of starting it. 

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 have served our country.   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 misguided 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.  

It did make me understand that there is a war machine that loves to create chaos and death and profit.  That machine is obviously not confined to our country – Putin and Kim and Trump all seem cut from the same cloth, all war mongers who never served in the military, reminiscent of the leaders who sent us into the disastrous war in Iraq in 2003.   I also want to thank people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Vernon Dahmer, Elijah Lovejoy, John Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Malcolm X and so many others who have given their lives for our country, even on these shores.  Perhaps the best that I can do with this ambivalence is to turn back to Buffy St. Marie’s song, published in 1964.  She was born as a First nations Cree in Canada, and I remember her powerful writing and voice in bringing “Universal Soldier” to the consciousness of so many of us.  Check out her version online somewhere – here’s one with commentary  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGWsGyNsw00

He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of 31 and he's only 17
He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,
he's fighting for the USA,
and he's fighting for the Russians
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way………

But without him how would Hitler have
condemned him at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war
and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers {sisters} can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war

            Let’s honor those who serve our countries, and let’s honor those who work for justice with equity. 

"FORTY-SIX YEARS!"

“FORTY-SIX YEARS!”

            We gathered on a hot afternoon in May in 1974 in the backyard of Ed Loring in Decatur.  Actually, we had been gathering all day that May 18, as we got the house and the yard ready for our outdoor wedding.  There were plenty of tensions around – several couples attending were having troubles, were already separated or would be divorced soon.  Caroline’s mom wanted us to get married in the home church in Chattanooga, but that church - Central Presbyterian (now closed)- had refused to endorse Caroline’s request to be sponsored as a candidate for ministry.  The reason for the refusal:  women should not be ordained as pastors.  Only later would Caroline find out that she has a host of pastors in her family tree! Momma Martha Leach was none too pleased with our having a “hippie” wedding outside, but at least Caroline was getting married!  At least something was working out.

            We had no money, so we asked folk to bring covered dishes for the wedding meal – we had both grown up in the church, with all those great Wednesday night and Sunday after worship covered dishes.  It worked – we had several hundred people attend, and there was food enough for all.   One added bonus – many people left their dishes (Corningware and such) as wedding gifts, and we are still using some of them today!  We had asked people to give donations to non-profits, whom we suggested (or to those they preferred) instead of giving us gifts. 

The wedding party began at 11 AM, ceremony at 2 (led by Ed and Sandy Winter, mentor of Caroline’s from Chattanooga), and the party continued until at least 11 PM, when we went to bed.  We were blessed to be surrounded by so many friends, family and supporters – my mother and Mary Wetzel drove over from Helena, my college friend Harmon Wray and many others came from my Nashville days, my lifelong friend David Billings and wife Meredith from New Orleans (she made our wedding rings), Caroline’s family from Chattanooga, including her grandmother Sophie Leach from west Tennessee (who had intrigued me with her stories of coming EAST in a covered wagon from Texas to west Tennessee), friends of Caroline’s from that aforementioned Central church, Caroline’s students from her campus ministry at Georgia Tech, Columbia Seminary students, friends from Caroline’s new church Central Presbyterian in Atlanta (they did take her in and approve her, thanks to pastor Randy Taylor, who had six daughters), and feminist friends.

I grew up as an only child, raised by a single mother, so sharing intimate space with Caroline was quite an adjustment – I learned that the world did not revolve around me as an only child.  When we had two children, I was glad that they could learn in a feet-on-the-ground level that the world does not center on them – their sibling was there to remind them of that!  It has been quite a journey in these 46 years – it is such a powerful and difficult blessing to find that someone can get to know you in such an intimate way and still want to be with you!  Wow!

We chose May 18 as our wedding date because Caroline did not want to be a June bride and because it was on a Saturday.  It came right in the middle of my exams at Columbia Seminary, so we had to have a quick honeymoon, and we are so grateful to Erskine and Nan Clarke for providing the apartment in their home in Montreat for that quick turnaround!  While we were there, we went to Asheville (before it was hip), and we toured Thomas Wolfe’s home there and met his brother Fred, who was walking up the sidewalk to the home.  We chose the date before we developed race awareness, and I have since found out that May 18 is also the date in 1896 when Plessy v Ferguson was announced by the US Supreme Court, effectively legalizing neo-slavery for another 58 years until May 17, 1954, gave us Brown v. Board of Education.  So, three powerful events in that trio of days – Plessy, Brown, and our wedding!

"MOTHER'S DAY"

“MOTHER’S DAY”

            I was raised by women in a patriarchal world.  In my childhood days, that used to bother me – why was I the only son whose father had abandoned him?  As I grew into adulthood, I began to shift my perspective.  Why should I allow my father’s absence to dominate me more than my mother’s presence?  Thanks to friends and therapists, I was able to begin to shift from being dominated by my father’s absence to at least a consideration that I ought to be dominated by the love of my mother’s presence.  So, I want to thank my mother and all the mothering women who raised me.    

            My father, for whom I was named, abandoned my mother and me for another woman when I was about a year old.  We lived with an Irish woman in Memphis for awhile, and she kept me when my mother worked as a beauty operator (what they were known as then).  She nicknamed me “Nibs,” using the Irish word for the British aristocracy who believe that they are the center of the world.  Since I was named for my father who had left, “Nibs” stuck.  My mother was still in shock; she was poor; and she was looking for shelter.  Her grandmother’s sister, Bernice Higgins, had recently been widowed, and she needed physical and fiscal companionship in her small home across and down the Mississippi River from Memphis, in a town called Helena, Arkansas.  We moved there sometime during my second year, and it would be my constant and stable home until I got married to Caroline in 1974.  I would come back to it often until my mother’s death in 2004. 

After my father left our family, I would not see him or hear from him again until the fall of 1970, when I was almost 24.  As I indicated, I grew up fatherless in a patriarchal world.  I was raised by women, and though my heart hurt deeply at my father’s abandonment of me – it would take me years to notice that he also abandoned my mother – in my adult years, I have sung the praises of these two women who took me on, who raised me, and who taught me perseverance, humor, and compassion:  Mary Armour Stroupe, my mother, and Bernice Higgins, my great-great aunt, sister of my great-grandmother, who became a grandmother to me.  I called her “Gran.”

            Gran told me stories of our family history, of the Browns and Armours.   She remembered stories of her great-grandfather William Brown, born in 1827.  He was a staunch Presbyterian who used to work in the fields in his religiously prescribed white clothes.  The women in the family had to wash these clothes and make them white again despite the mud and fields.  While she didn’t care for that religious belief of working in white clothes, she did receive his conservative Presbyterianism and joined First Presbyterian Church of Helena, where I was later baptized and raised as a child of God.   Because I grew up in segregation, I knew little about the African-American culture around me.  Indeed I didn’t want to know anything about that culture because I had breathed in the white supremacy of the segregated South.  If I had known more and had accepted white supremacy less, I would have discovered a culture where matrilineal culture was powerful.

            So, today, I want to send up praises of women, especially my mother and my Gran.  Gran was not my primary caregiver, but she was right in the mix.  She was at home for me every day after school until she died of a heart attack at age 79.  My mother was the primary caregiver, and though she worked six days a week in the beauty shop, she seemed to always have time for me after she had walked the mile home from work and had been on her feet all day.  She gave me great care, and I want to say “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” from my anxious heart, a heart that survived and grew compassionate because for all her hard-knock life, she was a compassionate, loving woman. 

            I was talking with our daughter Susan the other day about my mother - “Grandma,” as Susan called her.  I am beginning to think about doing some sort of memoir about my mother and her navigation of all the factors in her life while she was raising me:  the racism that permeated our lives, our poverty that she sought to shield from me, her being a single woman in a patriarchal world, her deep faith, her powerful intelligence and inquisitive mind, her longing to be made whole. When I asked Susan about her primary thoughts about “Grandma,” she replied that she was impressed by Grandma’s agency in a world that told her that she was meaningless and worthless: a woman abandoned by her man, a woman who had to rely on her own intelligence, work and wit to get her (and me and Gran) through rough times,  a woman who would not allow sexism and racism and poverty to define her.  So, I’m thinking about such a work, but as I do, for now, I just want to say “Thank you.” 

"REMEMBERING GAY WILMORE"

“REMEMBERING GAY WILMORE”

            My friend and mentor and adopted father Reverend Dr. Gayraud Wilmore died on April 18 at age 98.  He was tired and ready to go, but like the gospel song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” says it:  “Undertaker, undertaker, undertaker, please drive slow, for that body that you are carrying, Lord, I hate to see him go.”  Gay was a scholar, pastor, activist, teacher, WWII veteran, prolific book and article writer, churchman, and friend and mentor to many.  I’ll focus on my personal engagement with Gay here, but if you want to know more about his history, here is a good link.   https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/wilmore-gayraud-stephen-1921

            He was born in the year when African-Americans in Tulsa were terrorized and lynched, and their wealth was destroyed.  He was born far away in Pennsylvania, but the struggle for justice was a centerpiece of his life.  I first encountered Gay in his powerful book “Black Religion and Black Radicalism,” but one of his hallmark pieces was his co-editing with James Cone a documentary history of black theology.  They were co-founders of the Black Theology movement.  He and Cone were lifelong friends, and I remember Gay’s sorrow at Dr. Cone’s passing in April, 2018.  In a lecture series at Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta in 1999, Dr. Cone had this to say about Gay:  “He is the daddy of Black Theology.  If anyone took risks for Black people, it was Gay Wilmore.  I just want that name to be thought of along with mine.  He was my strongest critic and my best supporter.”  Gay Wilmore and James Cone were among the early leaders in wrestling the control of theology from white males.

            Gay took many risks for Black people, but perhaps his most public one was in approving money from Presbyterian ministers to be sent to the Defense Fund for Angela Davis in 1971, when he was the director of the Presbyterian Committee on Religion and Race.  He was excoriated for that, and eventually left his position and began a career of teaching and writing and mentoring.  I don’t remember when I first met Gay in person, but I remember my first real encounter with him.  After Inez Giles and I had published our book on racism “While We Run This Race,” (Orbis Books) in 1995, Gay led a contingent of folk who met at Oakhurst to talk about the book.  In that engagement I experienced what Dr. Cone had experienced:  Gay was an insightful critic as well as a strong supporter.

            After that, Gay and I co-chaired Presbytery’s Committee to Combat Racism, and we authored a statement adopted by Presbytery in 1997 on the necessity of whites to come out of denial. Gay wrote the original draft of it, and the white opposition to it in our Committee was deep.  I gained even more respect for Gay as I watched him work through that process, without yielding any principles of the statement.  I saw him then in what I would call essential “Gay action:’’ He was gentle but fierce.  Strong, strong, strong, but never denying the humanity of the other.

            He and his partner Lee moved to DC in 2000 to retire and be closer to their children.  We visited him as often as we could after our daughter Susan settled in Baltimore.  He read my blogs faithfully, giving me criticism and support.  In my first year of blogging, I wrote about my pain at the absence of my father in my life.  Gay replied that he would love to be my “adopted” father, and I was delighted.  So, shortly after Father’s Day in 2017, he sent me a formal document “adopting” me.  On our next visit, we shared with him an official certificate – so thank you, Gay!

            After his death, I was looking through some of our correspondence, and I came upon this hand-written note from him in 2018: 

            “Dear Nibs, You have made these closing years, as the century rolls on, of the

            greatest significance to me and to the whole Wilmore family.  Your blogs are

            great!  You never permitted us to be really separated, Nibs, and I thank you

            and the Lord God for that!  You have been a wonderful friend and brother,

            I will be forever grateful….in life and in death.  Love, Gay

            I can think of no greater tribute to give to Gay than the words from Martin Luther King’s sermon “Drum Major Instinct,” preached at Ebenezer two months before his assassination and played at King’s funeral:   “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness.”  Gay was that and so much more, and I join a host of others in saying to him and to God: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”