"SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES"

 “SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES”

In her Magnificat in Luke 1, Mary sings a powerful song when she affirms that she is pregnant with Jesus:  “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked down with favor upon God’s lowly servant.”  I wonder if Jemmina, an enslaved woman from Arkansas, was thinking of those words during her pregnancy as her white supremacist master took her back into slavery.   She was impregnated during the master’s sexual abuse of her.  A son was born in 1863 from that abuse, and she named him Scipio Africanus, after the famous Roman general who defeated Hannibal in 202 CE.  She was hoping for great things from her son, and he delivered.

As I noted last week, the White South always seems to be rising in American history.  During one of the most powerful times of the White South, Scipio Africanus Jones  became a famous lawyer in Arkansas, no matter the racial classification.  He defied odds and hung out his shingle, and his most famous case came in 1919, when he stepped forward to appeal the convictions and the death sentences of the Elaine 12.  In early October of 1919, Black sharecroppers were meeting in a church near Elaine, which is about 20 minutes from my hometown of Helena.  They were meeting to try to find ways to get better prices for the cotton that they grew in neo-slavery times.  White people drove up to the church and fired into it, but the Black farmers were not cowed – they returned the fire.  This led to the death of a white man, and a huge white race riot broke out.  The riot went on for several days, and during this time, at least 235 African-Americans were murdered and lynched.

When US Army troops finally stropped the killing and restored some order, 12 Black men were charged with murder, and 100 other Black people were charged with various other crimes.  All of their actions were done in self-defense, but they were the ones who were arrested!  The Elaine 12 were tried in Helena, with mobs of angry white people roaming the courthouse grounds, all threatening to kill anyone who considered an acquittal for the Elaine 12.  In no great surprise, the jury of all white men returned a guilty verdict for the Elaine 12 – it is said that it took the jury only 20 minutes to decide the verdict.  The men were sentenced to death under this mob atmosphere.  The mobs then wanted to lynch the Elaine 12, but the governor decided to move them to the jail in Little Rock until their death sentences were carried out.

No lawyers, white or Black, were interested in taking their case, and even the NAACP had difficulty finding an attorney.  Breathing in the power of his name, Scipio Africanus Jones responded to the plea from the NAACP and stepped forward to take their case on appeal.  After the sudden death of his white co-counsel George Murphy, Jones  would largely do the work of this case on his own. He received many death threats for taking the case – an African-American fighting for the lives of twelve Black men whose cases looked hopeless.  Jones appealed the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court, but his appeal was denied.  Through many twists and turns, including a visit by Ida B. Wells to the Elaine 12, Jones finally got the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even after all his great work in getting this case to the Supreme Court, the NAACP did not think that Jones could handle the argument before the Court.  Much to his dismay, he was replaced by white attorneys – indeed he was not even allowed in the courtroom when the case was argued before SCOTUS.  He still was central, however.  Because he knew the case backwards and forwards, he wrote most of the brief for the arguments to SCOTUS.  As he noted, his goal was not personal glory – his goal was to spare the lives of the Elaine 12 and even to seek their freedom.

His hard and dedicated work paid off.  In February, 1923, in a 6-2 vote in Moore v. Dempsey, SCOTUS overturned the convictions of the Elaine 12 and remanded them back for a retrial.  It was a turning point in the history of SCOTUS on intervening in state criminal cases.  It changed the nature of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling allowed for federal courts to hear and examine evidence in state criminal cases to ensure that defendants had received due process.  It would take a while longer, but eventually all of the Elaine 12 were freed from prison.

    Not only had Scipio Africanus Jones changed the course of the lives of the Elaine 12 and their families – he also opened the door for an expansion of federal courts to intervene in the state cases of the White South seeking to crush Black defendants.  We’re in discouraging days now, with the White South rising again, but let us be inspired by Scipio Africanus Jones, and by those among us now who are like him.  Let us be counted in their number and find our places in such a parade of witnesses and justice workers.

"WHITE SOUTH RISING"

 “WHITE SOUTH RISING”

When I was growing up in the Arkansas Delta of the Mississippi River, my only friends were classified as white.  I didn’t have Black friends;  I didn’t even know  that was possible.  In those days, we used a saying that reflected our white Southerness:  “Save your Confederate money, boys, the South’s gonna rise again.”   I heard it and I said it.  I think that I even sort of believed it.  In those years after Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the “white” Southern way of life seemed under threat, though it was hard to imagine any big changes coming.  Our imagination was truncated – we had not anticipated the creativity, the courage, and the dedication of the sea of the civil rights movement.

Things did change, but my own individual and communal history remind me that the White South is never far away.  It is never far away because it has been with us since the European beginnings of the nation.  The White South shaped the US Constitution, with slavery allowed to stand (though the word “slavery” is never mentioned in the original Constitution).  The White South shaped the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 – notice that the language of the law shapes our thinking – those escaping from enslavement are not called “human beings” but rather “slaves.”

    It shaped the horrendous SCOTUS decision in 1857 in the Dred and Harriet Scott case, where the Court denied that people classified as “Black” were human beings at all.  Even after the death of over 700,000 people in the Civil War to end slavery, the White South made its comeback to re-establish slavery as “Jim Crow,” or as it should be known – “neo-slavery.”  

The White South tenaciously held on to neo-slavery until the Voting Rights Act dealt it a severe blow in 1965..  The White South was not eradicated in 1965, as many of us thought that it might be.  It has been biding its time and once again establishing its rootedness in American culture.  The White South is rising again. When I use “White South,” I do not mean it as a geographical term, although its base is in the old Confederacy.  The “White South” describes a spiritual force that is taking hold in all parts of the country, a phenomenon that believes in white male supremacy and seeks to enforce it, all the while keeping an eye on the demographics.  My state of Georgia has passed many laws intended to limit the opportunity for voting, with the knowledge that the demographics are pushing us quickly to the time when there will be no majority racial category in the state or in the country.  Eighteen other states have passed such laws, and obviously these are not all in the South.  The voice of the White South spoke in the SCOTUS decision Shelby v. Holder in 2013, which gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.  The White South spoke in the presidential elections of Richard Nixon with his Southern strategy, of Ronald Reagan with his distrust of government, of George W. Bush with his “Don’t Mess with Texas” approach, and of course of Donald Trump with his overt emphasis on white supremacy. 

One main difference so far in the current rise of the White South is that most of the vigilante violence, that made the “Mississippi Plan” of the 1890’s so horrible and powerful – most of that has not been re-ratified -YET.  The guilty verdicts in a south Georgia courtroom for the killers of Ahmaud Arbery tell us that at this point only police violence against Black and Brown people is tolerated.  Let us work to make sure that stays the case, and let us work to end the police violence.

The pressures are rising, however.  The White South violence on the Capitol on January 6 remind us that the life of the White South pulses through us as a people, and that we can never assume that it is over and vanquished.  The election of Donald Trump was a clarion call to the White South raiders, and whether Trump runs in 2024 or not, the White South has heard the call and is responding.  

What can those of us who believe in the idea of equality do?  There are several steps that I’ll be looking at in future blogs, but for now, three steps stand out.  First is recognition – recognize that the White South is rising and that this rise is not an aberration but rather is part of the DNA of American culture.  Remind everyone you meet of this fact.  Second, testify and contact your reps in state legislatures (like mine) that are considering banning the teaching of this kind of American history, banning what they are calling “critical race theory.”  Such a ban would mean that no public school or college can teach what you have read in this blog.

Third, remember that this is fundamentally about voting at this point, so register yourself to vote and make sure that you find ten people who are not registered to vote and get them to register and to vote.  The elections of 2022 are fundamental in slowing this rise of the White South – if their candidates win, there may not be many more viable elections.  

"TALKIN DAISY BATES"

 “TALKIN’ DAISY BATES”

I wrote last week a bit about the story of Daisy Bates and her central part in the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock and indeed in the nation.  I had first learned her name as a cuss word in Arkansas, when I was ten and was still in deep captivity to white supremacy.  It was not until I was a young adult that I began to see her in a very different light – a courageous and determined woman, who nurtured the Little Rock Nine students, all of  whom had to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous white supremacy.  

Because of the brevity of the blog, I was not able to include some of the stories and quotes of those events.  So, I want to include several now, asking us to remember, but also as we watch the White South Rising in our time.  I’ll have more of that Rising next week.  I want to share these stories and quotes to help us find our way to be visionaries and resisters in our time.  

The nine students gathered at the home of Daisy and LC Bates every day in 1957 for nonviolence training and for preparation for entering Central High School.  After they had been driven away from the school by the violence of a white mob, President Dwight Eisenhower finally ordered 1,000 US Army troops from the Screaming Eagles to go to Little Rock to guard the students and to maintain order.  Daisy Bates remembers the arrival of the troops at her house on that first day this way:

“Army jeeps were rolling down Twenty-eighth Street.  Paratroopers quickly jumped out and stood across the width of the street at each end of the block…..The paratrooper in charge of the detail leaped out of the station wagon and started up our driveway.  As he approached, I heard Minniejean say gleefully:  “Oh, look at them, they’re so – so soldierly!  It gives you goose pimples to look at them!.”  And then she added solemnly, “For the first time in my life, I feel like an American citizen.”

The Little Rock Nine were delivered safely that day to Central High, but it would be a long and difficult year.  One of the Nine, Melba Patillo Beals, has written a powerful book on her experience “Warriors Don’t Cry.”  On May 29, 1958, Ernest Green would become the first Black graduate in the South from a previously all-white high school. 

At the center of this whirlwind was Daisy Bates, and her name was spread around the country – for bad in my case, but for good in so many other places.  Indeed, Daisy Bates would be the only woman allowed to speak at the March on Washington in August, 1963 – she broke through that male glass ceiling, as she had broken so many other barriers.   One of the emcees that day was Bayard Rustin, and he introduced her before she spoke.  In his intro, he connected her work with that of the Children’s Campaign in Birmingham in the spring of 1963.  This is how he introduced her:

“Now I want to introduce a woman.  She is important because she started the children’s movement, a movement of young people which culminated in the thousands of children who demonstrated in Birmingham.  You know who I mean, Daisy Bates.”  She gave a short speech:

“Mr. Randolph, friends, the women of this country give our pledge to you, to Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins and all of you fighting for civil liberties—that we will join hands with you as women of this country. Rosa Gregg, Vice President; Dorothy Height, the National Council of Negro Women; and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; the Methodist Church Women, all the women pledge that we will join hands with you. We will kneel-in; we will sit-in until we can eat in any corner in the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-on and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote. This we pledge to the women of America.”

Towards the end of her life in 1999, Daisy Bates was asked about her motivation for stepping up to take leadership in Little Rock and beyond.  She replied:  “If you live as long as I have, and have been recognized for doing anything considered brave or worthy, people will always want to know how you became that person, or where you found the courage to be that person.  I never thought I was doing anything a whole of lot of other people in Little Rock couldn’t have done.  It was just something that had to be done if we expected to make progress.  I was in the position to take the lead on it, and I took it.

As the White South seeks to rise again (and not just in the South), we would all do well to remember the witness and work of Daisy Bates and so many others, and we should seek to find our place in that great cloud of witnesses in our time.

"BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD"

 “BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD”

In the summer of 1957, the Milwaukee Braves (still that awful name!) were on their way to the National League pennant.  I did not cheer for them (my teams were the Chicago White Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals), but I was delighted that they defeated the hated New York Yankees in the World Series.  I was ten years old that summer, when I learned a new “cuss” word.  I’d like to be able to say that it was the first cuss word that I had ever learned, but as a ten year old boy growing up in rural Arkansas, I already knew them all.

The cuss word that I learned that summer was not a four letter word, like many of the other cuss words that I knew.  This new cuss word had five letters – actually it was two words with five letters each.  The cuss word that I learned that summer was “Daisy Bates.”  These words became cuss words for me and for many other “white” people like me in the South because she was a Black woman at the center of the Little Rock school crisis in the fall of 1957.  She was the primary organizer and fixer who worked daily with the Black students who integrated Central High School in 1957 – these students became known as “The Little Rock Nine.”  I had been oblivious to the SCOTUS Brown v. Board of Education decision, to the lynching of Emmett Till, and to the Montgomery bus boycott – all of which were foundational events in the civil rights movement.  The Little Rock school crisis, however, brought the movement close to my home in Helena, Arkansas, and it was my first conscious awareness of the movement.

    Bates was a strong leader and mentor, and her prowess posed a threat to the “white” order of things.  She was seen as the devil incarnate by those of us who were captured by white supremacy.  It would be 20 years before I would come back and revisit Daisy Bates and learn that rather than her being an object of scorn, she should have been a subject of praise and gratitude for her courage and her tenacity and her political skills.  

    She was born in Huttig, Arkansas, a little sawmill town on the Louisiana border.  She never quite knew the year she was born, because when she was an infant, her family was attacked by white men.  Her mother was raped and murdered, and her father was assaulted. He gave her to neighbors Orlee and Susie Smith, and he fled the state.  Daisy was 8 years old when she learned this awful family history.  From that moment on, she burned with a hatred of people classified as “white.”  She married Lucius Bates in 1941, and they moved to Little Rock to founded a Black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press.  She became an editor of the paper, swimming upstream in a male world, much as her journalist predecessor Ida Wells had done.  Bates was determined to use the paper as a tool to fight to gain rights for Black people.  In 1952 she was elected president of the state NAACP, setting the stage for her leadership in the conflict of 1957.

    In the meantime, her adoptive father died, and on his deathbed, he advised her to channel her anger toward more constructive ends.  “Don’t hate white people because they are white,” he said,  “hate the humiliations we are living under in the South….and then try to do something about it, or your hate won’t spell a thing.”  His advice helped to soften her heart and harden her resolve, and it was this advice that sustained her through the rest of her life.

    She would need such inspiration and courage as 1957 approached.  After the Brown v. Board decision in 1954, the Little Rock Board of Education was one of the first in the South to issue a statement indicating that it would comply with the decision.  They announced a plan to gradually desegregate the schools, starting in high school and working down.  It would start at Little Rock’s Central High School, bringing 75 Black students into the 2,000 student high school.  Another important event in this history was the election of a white moderate, Orval Faubus, as governor of Arkansas in 1954.  When he ran for re-election in 1956, he read the political winds and announced his support of the white supremacist position:  no Black kids in schools with white kids.

    Daisy Bates led the state NAACP into federal court to force compliance with Brown v. Board, and the Little Rock school system was ordered to begin the process.  White opposition to this decision and to the school board’s decision to comply was ferocious.  The nine students were chosen by Bates and the NAACP because they were good students and because they had demonstrated that they could handle pressure well.  These are their names:  Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carotta Walls. 

Through many dangers, toils and snares, Daisy and LC Bates led the children, their parents, and the system into compliance with Brown v. Board.  After Governor Faubus reneged on his promise to President Eisenhower to allow the Black students to enter, and after white riots at the school, Eisenhower sent in the U.S. Army to protect the students entering Central High School in Little Rock on September 25, 1957.  It was a rough year, but the Little Rock Nine, who met every day at the Bates’ home to train and to go to school – these nine students made it through and showed us the way.

More on this story next week, but for today, let me say that Daisy Bates is no longer a cuss word for me.  She is now among the pantheon of powerful witnesses and sheroes – may we all learn from her courage and determination and dedication.  The white South is rising again (all over the country), and we will need the courage and vision of Daisy Bates.