"WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CANNOT REST"

 “WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CANNOT REST”

Somewhere in the late 1970’s I began experiencing the exceptional singing group “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon.  They introduced me to many people through their singing, including June Jordan, who I’ll write about in Women’s History Month.  This week I want to write about Ella Baker, who is a good bridge from Black History Month to Women’s History Month.  I had vaguely heard of Ella Baker prior to Sweet Honey, but their song “We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest” brought her much more fully into my consciousness.  The song was written by Bernice Johnson Reagon, basing it on a speech that Ella Baker gave in 1964.

Though she has never gotten much credit, Ella Baker was a central part of the civil rights movement in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s.  She was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, the place where Caroline and I had our first ministry.  Her grandfather was a Baptist minister, and she felt called to be a minister also.  The Baptists weren’t ordaining women to be ministers then (and many still don’t now), so Baker set her sights on being a missionary in other countries.  There were no public schools for her past elementary school, so she went to Shaw University in Raleigh for high school and college.  She then went to NYC to teach in order to earn money to be a missionary.

Then the Great Depression hit, and there were no jobs for Black teachers.  Her dream of earning money to be a missionary in another country was shattered.  God had other plans for her, though – in NYC, she began to be a missionary in this country.  She joined the NAACP and began organizing buyer co-ops in Black communities.  She supported herself by waitressing and as an office secretary, a true tentmaker minister.  Her efforts were directed at helping Black people see their common needs and goals in a neo-slavery world.  No matter your class or lightness of your skin, white supremacy was coming for you, and Baker emphasized the need to organize to fight this power.  She had a great gift for organizing, for helping others see their common plights and goals.  This work led her to be ready at a critical moment in American history.

After the Montgomery bus boycott and the SCOTUS decision in 1956 which ended segregation on buses, the leaders in Alabama were fatigued and fearful after home bombings and church bombings.  Leaders in New York had seen Baker’s potential, and they asked her to go South to talk with Martin Luther King and other Black ministers to help them galvanize the Montgomery movement into a Southern and even national movement.  At age 53 Baker came down to help develop this movement.  She and King clashed almost immediately, but she convinced him to start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to export the Montgomery model across the South.  He asked her to direct it for 6 weeks, but she stayed for 2 and ½ years and built it into a mighty force.  When the student sit-ins came in 1960, Baker was sent to help to organize them and to bring them under the SCLC or NAACP fold.  She surprised everyone, however, at the Raleigh Conference when she urged the students to form their own organization.  They did, forming the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Julian Bond among its leaders.  They asked Ella Baker to become its first coordinator, which she did at age 57 for these young students.  She supported herself by working at the Atlanta YWCA.

From there, she and Bob Moses organized the work that would refocus the efforts:  Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.  Out of this came the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, whose leadership included Fannie Lou Hamer and Aaron Henry – the primary organizer for them was Ella Baker.   As the group prepared for the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1964 to challenge the all-white Democratic delegates there, the keynote address was given by Ella Baker.  

She did so much more, continuing her work for civil rights and women’s rights, but I have run out of room.  At a gathering celebrating Ella Baker’s seventy-fifth birthday, Bob Moses called her the “Fundi,” the person in the community who masters a craft with the help of the community and teaches it to other people.

She died in 1986, and I want to close with some of the words to the Sweet Honey in the Rock song, based on her life and work.  Go find the song and more information about this remarkable woman.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes, 

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, 

Is as important as the killing of White men, white mothers’ sons

That which touches me most is that I had a 

Chance to work with people,

Passing on to others, that which was passed on to me

To me young people come first,

They have the courage where we fail,

And if I can but shed some light, 

As they carry us through the gate

The older I get, the better I know 

That the secret of my going on

Is when the reins are in the hands of the young,

Who dare to run against the storm

"WHY BLACK HISTORY MONTH EXISTS"

 “WHY BLACK HISTORY MONTH EXISTS”

In January, 1870, the first Black person elected to the United States Senate arrived in DC to get ready to be sworn in.  His name was Hiram Rhodes Revels, arriving from the state of Mississippi, taking the seat of Senator Jefferson Davis, who had vacated in 1861 to become president of the Confederacy.  Revels’ acceptance into the Senate was no easy matter – a long debate was held in February over whether he could be admitted, with one senator indicating that Revels’ racial classification “brings into prominence, as a practical question of great interest and importance, the issue of his eligibility.”  He was finally sworn in and took his seat, but the debate echoed a fundamental question that continues to plague those classified as “white:”  Can a democracy that includes Black participation (and Brown and Native and Asian) be legitimate?

We are still answering that question raised at the arrival of a Black man to be a US Senator in 1870.  The lynch mob that attacked the Capitol this January 6 sought to overthrow a Senate soon to be presided over by a Black woman, who would also swear in the first Black person ever elected to the U.S. Senate from my state of Georgia.  For all the moaning of many of my siblings classified as “white” about “cancel culture,” it is we ourselves who have been doing that very thing to those classified as “Black,” and to all people classified as “other” in the system of race.  We have sought to cancel and to deny the humanity and the culture of all of those classified as “non-white,” especially those known as “Black.”  

This white desire to cancel Black humanity and Black culture is why Black History Week (and later Month) was created and named.  It was created to affirm the humanity, the culture, and the gifts of those classified as “Black” in the system of race, a system whose very purpose is to cancel the humanity of all those categorized as “non-white.”  Many people helped to create Black History Month, but a Black man born in Virginia, Carter Godwin Woodson, is called the “father of Black history.”  He was born in 1875 to parents who had been held in slavery in Virginia, but who saved and scrimped and bought the land where Woodson was born.  Woodson and his brothers did hard work on his parents’ tobacco farm, but he also went to a Freedman’s Bureau school.  It was there that he found his calling – as he learned to read, a whole new world opened to him, as it does to all of us who learn to read.

After the destruction of Reconstruction in the early 1880’s, there were no Black schools nearby for Woodson to attend, so he moved to Huntingdon, West Virginia, to work in the coal mines and to go to Frederick Douglass High School at age 20.  He graduated and attended Berea College in Kentucky, where he got his degree in 1904  just before the state of Kentucky forced Berea to deny entrance to Black people.  Berea appealed Kentucky’s order to SCOTUS, and in a continuing effort to cancel Black humanity and Black culture, in 1908 SCOTUS upheld the Kentucky law.  

Woodson was undaunted and went into teaching school while he earned his Master’s degree at the University of Chicago and his PhD at Harvard (the second Black person to do so – who was the first?).  In 1915 he and four friends at the Chicago YMCA founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  Their goal in doing this was to affirm the humanity and culture of African-Americans, at a time when the “white” culture was doing all that it could to deny those.  They also developed the Journal of Negro History to publish scholarly studies of Black life and Black history.  Both of those organizations continue to this day because they focused a bright light on the power and life of those classified as “Black.”

In 1926, Woodson and his colleagues started Negro History Week, choosing the dates of February 12-19 because they encompassed the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (2/12) and Frederick Douglass (2/14).  Woodson did not just “pronounce” this celebration – he sent out messengers to all his contacts in the field of education, and several states and the cities of Baltimore and Washington, DC, adopted it.  The idea struggled in the 1940’s but regained strength in the 1960’s, and in 1970 Kent State University changed it to “Black History” and stretched it out to a month.  In 1976 President Gerald Ford proclaimed February as “Black History Month,” and so it has continued.

    Here are the words that Woodson used to describe the need for Black History Month, a need that continues today, not so much because African-Americans have internalized “inferiority,” but because white supremacy is so deeply ingrained in our national culture. (I apologize for the lack of inclusive language here, but I have left the quote as it was):

“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

THE MAN WHO KILLED JIM CROW"

 “THE MAN WHO KILLED JIM CROW”

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.  Ouite 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.  

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.

"TIME TO CHOOSE"

 “TIME TO CHOOSE”

As we begin Black History Month, I want to note the journey of two Southern Black people, Ellen and William Craft,  who were held in slavery in Macon, Georgia, in the 1830’s and 1840’s.  They made a stunning and historic escape from slavery.  Their story should be more widely known for many reasons, but mainly because they kept on choosing freedom when they could have chosen stability and security.  I preached on them in Black History Month in 1988, but their story has stuck with me over these 33 years.

Ellen was light-skinned because she was born from a rape of her mother by the white master.  She adored her mother and stayed close to her, but the master’s wife hated Ellen because she looked so much like her own children.  When Ellen was 11, she was given as a wedding present to the slaveholder’s daughter, who was moving to Macon.  We can only imagine the wrenching parting of Ellen and her mother, her only protector.  In Macon, however, she met William Craft, who was held as a slave but was also an accomplished carpenter.  They fell in love, but neither wanted to get married, since it was illegal for people held as slaves to be married.  In addition, William had seen his entire family – mother, father, sister, brother – sold off to other places.  He did not want to make such loving attachments again.

Their love was powerful, and they celebrated a “slave” marriage – not recognized by the state but recognized by God and by their community.  They made their choice.  William had another proposal:  freedom.  Ellen was afraid – so many tales of torture and maiming for those seeking to escape slavery.  The call of freedom prevailed, and they made another choice:  escape from slavery in December, 1848. They did not take the Underground Railroad – they took the overground railroad, literally, because they devised a bold and scary plan to escape.  They would travel as a “couple,” but Ellen would disguise as a sickly white man going north for medical care with her male slave accompanying her – that would be William.

It was bold because they would always be hidden in plain sight.  They would travel by train and boat, and they would stay in first class hotels where John C. Calhoun stayed.  They were challenged several times, and Ellen who was gentle and reticent by nature, had to learn to act like a dominant white man in control, including treating her beloved husband William, as a slave.  In his great and foundational book from 1872, “Underground Railroad,” conductor William Still has a long section about these bold refugees and their arrival in Philadelphia.  In it he writes of his amazement at these two and their bold plan.  Philly was still too close to the South, however, so they went up to Boston to live.  When Caroline and Susan and I were touring Boston in 2018, we saw the house where they lived.

They had to make several bold decisions in regard to freedom.  They had hoped to gain freedom, to be left alone and to raise a family, but they could not forget the sisters and brothers left in slavery in the South.  So, they agreed to go on Anti-Slavery tours in the North, seeking the abolition of slavery.  Northern audiences were stunned by their story, but even more they were stunned by Ellen Craft.  She was one of the first Black women in the country to speak out against slavery in a public way – at this time, Harriet Tubman was still in chains on the Eastern shore of Maryland, and Sojourner Truth was just beginning her travels.  Ellen’s skin color and her “surprising” intelligence was what astonished the white audiences – she looked and sounded just like one of them.  

Their notoriety was dangerous, and sure enough, after the passage of the heinous Fugitive Slave Act by Congress in 1850, the former “owners” sent slave-catchers to Boston to get them.  With help from Boston allies, they escaped again, this time to England to continue in the anti-slavery work,  in a country which banned slavery.  There they stayed almost 20 years, yet decided to return to the South after the Civil War had ended, facing many terrors.  They chose to leave the relatively safe confines of England and return to their home state of Georgia, to set up a school there for people formerly held as slaves.  They moved to Woodville, near Savannah, to set up their school, and the KKK attacked them again and again.  They held out for many years, until the KKK burned the school to the ground, and they moved to Charleston to continue their work.  Ellen died in 1891 and was buried back on their school ground in Woodville.

    This story is remarkable and complex, and I encourage folk to do more research on them.  Dorothy Sterling has an excellent story of their life and impact in her early book “Black Foremothers.” This month, “Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery and Abolition,” edited by Michelle Commander out of the Schomburg Research Center, will have a long section on this amazing couple, based on William Craft’s own 1860 narrative.  Whether you use these resources or google them, find out more about them.  They are the kinds of folk we need in our days of rage and struggle:  it is time to choose, as they had to do.