"A KNOCK AT MIDNIGHT"

 “A KNOCK AT MIDNIGHT”

I have been watching the Georgia legislature (and other state legislatures) with some fear and anxiety over the past few weeks, as the Republican-controlled bodies try to limit and suppress the vote for future elections.  This effort comes after the stunning upsets in Georgia in the Presidential and Senatorial elections in recent months.  Though they learned from their 1890’s ancestors and never mentioned “race” in the proposed laws, it is clear that their intent is to limit the voting opportunities for Black and Brown people in Georgia and around the country.

I have had some fear about this, but I was also feeling better because I am aware of how skillful Stacey Abrams is, and how much of her approach she has taught to others.  There might be some vote suppression, but I was feeling some confidence that Stacey and her cohorts would handle it, would still turn out the vote.  Then the massacre of last week happened in Atlanta, and I was reminded of how the voter suppression happened in the South in the 1890’s.  Not surprisingly, it was known as “The Mississippi Plan,” and it combined seemingly benign election laws with overt violence to suppress and repress the Black vote in the 1890’s.  And it worked – there was a tremendous drop-off in voting by Black people between 1885 and 1900, so much so that it seemed that the 15th Amendment was completely forgotten and ignored.

I do not think that the killer in the massacre in Atlanta last week had voter suppression on his mind when he did the killing, but he certainly had racism and misogyny in his heart and in his mind.  It is not too many steps from this week’s killings to that connection, however.   We saw that connection on January 6, when the insurrectionists were using violence to attempt voter suppression of the most disturbing order.  The violence of this past week and that of January 6 were the order of the day and the year in the decade of Black voter suppression in the 1890’s.  Those of us who are classified as “white” in these days should see this as a wake-up call, if we have not already heard it.  White men intend to keep power in our hands, and our history indicates that we will use any means necessary to do that and to express that, whether it is voting laws that cut back on absentee ballots, or whether it is shooting Asian people down in their places of business, whether it is storming the Capitol, or lynching people.

    In the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Martin Luther King, Jr. received a threatening phone call about midnight, telling him to get his family out of the house, saying that they were coming to bomb his house.  It was not the first threatening call that he had received, and it would not be his  last.  He debated over whether to wake up Coretta and the children and leave the house, but he decided to sit down at the kitchen table because he was so exhausted.  He prayed to God to keep them safe, and he confessed to God that he was at the end of his rope.  As he prayed, he received an answer:  “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice!  Stand up for the truth.  And I will be with you to the end of the world.  I will never leave you alone.”  He was comforted, and he went back to bed.  The house was not bombed that night, but it was bombed a few nights later.  No one was hurt, and King persisted in his justice ministry for 12 more years until he was assassinated.

King later used this incident as the basis for his sermon “A Knock at Midnight, in which he exhorts us to stay strong, to stay vigilant,  to work for justice.  We are in such a time now.   We are hearing knocks at midnight all around us, and it is our turn to step up and step out for justice and equity.  We have not yet seen the concentration of violence that happened in the 1890’s to suppress the votes of Black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous people, but we are hearing knocks at midnight about the possibilities of it.  Let us work on our legislatures, let us work on ourselves, let us work on society so that we may push back the repressive wave that seems to be coming.  It is a knock at midnight.