"FIFTY YEARS AND COUNTING"

 “FIFTY YEARS AND COUNTING”

Today’s blog is by Caroline Leach to close out Women’s Herstory Month.

      This year marks the 50th year of my graduation from Columbia Seminary with a Masters of Divinity in 1972.  For some reason some of the guys at Columbia decided I should get a ‘Mistress’ of Divinity---"ha, ha”, they would laugh.  As I think back to the day in September, 1969 when I walked onto campus as a student, I had no idea of the rocky road ahead for me, for the other women there at the time, and for those who came after us.

  My first encounter, thank goodness ,was meeting Dr. Charlie Cousar, Professor of New Testament. I was so glad to see a friendly face.  Charlie’s father had married my parents and baptized me in our home church in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  I remember his father so fondly, as well as the many members of Central church who peopled my life until I came to Seminary.  I especially give thanks for Rev. Joyce Cummings Tucker and Rev. Sandy Winter.   Charlie, of course, was just a teenager when they moved from Chattanooga, but when I saw him at Columbia, he did remember my parents, for which I was grateful since my dad was ‘letting’ his daughter go into the unknown.  Charlie and Betty became a rock in the midst of the storms in which I would find myself during these seminary years and the many years that followed.

      Those who supported me are legion.  However, the journey was mine alone.  It became very clear - very early - that women were not wanted on campus by the majority of the students and by some of the faculty.  The President even asked me  if I had come to find a husband!  By the time he asked me this question after my first year, I was very emphatic that no man there was on my list of potentials and would never be on any list for that distinction.   

  In the 3 years that followed those first steps, I realized that I would have to make my own way.  Even the very few women on campus---there were 5 when I came—could not envision any other way but the way of ‘man’.   I began to find new language for faith and God and for me.  There are many funny and denigrating stories that can be told.  Needless to say, one of the worst was the day in my final year, when the Placement Director called me into his office and said there would be no job interviews for me or any other  graduating women.  Really I thought---"what about these last 3 years, don’t they count for anything?” Final answer---‘No.’.  I, along with the others,  remained invisible and unemployable.

  So, this brings me to another of those who just gained their sainthood.  Rev. Woody McKay died earlier this month.  He was the only one who even spoke with me about a job---I did not call it a “call”---in those last months of panic before graduation.  Woody was the Campus Minister at Georgia Tech.  I had met him at a youth group event at Decatur Presbyterian church during that year.  I went down to visit with him at his office at Tech one afternoon. He told me he had saved $7,000 in his budget, and he was looking for a woman who would minister with the growing number of women on campus---all 500 at that time in 1972.  Would I be interested? “Of course!” was my reply.   Because of his bravery, I had a job and could be ordained!  There is a story about all that as well, but for another time.  Over the years I was so grateful when I would see Woody and be able to tell how again much I appreciated his willingness to give me a chance to practice ministry in this most unusual of places.  He is remembered by many students for his kindness and awful jokes.  I say "Well done good and faithful servant.”

  Fifty years have not passed quickly nor easily for women in ministry.  We have persisted under the worst sort of scrutiny and prejudice, but we have persisted.  We have been viewed as nothing short of witches and upstarts.  But we have been - and we remain – in ministry for those on the margins and the mainlines, saying as often as possible—“You are a child of God and a first class citizen, deserving all the rights and privileges.”  Thanks be to God,  Caroline

  

"ON SAYING WHO YOU ARE: FAITH RINGGOLD"

 “ON SAYING WHO YOU ARE: FAITH RINGGOLD”

A provocative art piece would greet Caroline and me when we were pastors at Oakhurst.  It was a wonderful print of a story quilt by Faith Ringgold.  It hung on the wall facing the church office as you entered the doors near the office.  The print was entitled “Church Picnic,” and it depicted a Black church picnic in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park in 1909.  The quilt had been commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Ringgold had presented it in 1988.  One of our stalwart Oakhurst artists and visionaries, Virginia Gailey, had purchased the print for the church and had it framed for us to hang on that wall.  There is a powerful story behind the quilt, but in this Women’s Herstory Month, I want to concentrate on Faith Ringgold’s story.  I hope that you’ll find this quilt for yourself online and look up its backstory too!  She now has a retrospective exhibit at the New Museum in Manhattan entitled “Faith Ringgold:  American People.”  For more info and a review of this exhibit see the NYT 2/18/22.

Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930 to Andrew Jones and Willi Posey Jones, descendants of working class families who left the South in one of the Great Migrations.  Her mom was a fashion designer, and her father was a remarkable storyteller.  She grew up on the edges of the Harlem Renaissance, and her neighbors included Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes, along with her boyhood friend Sonny Rollins.  At her mother’s feet, she learned the visual arts, using crayons in her youth and learning to sew and use fabric in many creative ways.  At her father’s feet, she learned the power of narrative, to be used in all types of art.  She wanted to be an artist to combine her tradition and her vision.

In 1950 she enrolled at the City College of New York in order to better develop and to major in art.  Much to her dismay, she learned that women were not allowed to major in art – she had to settle for art education.  She did get an unexpected benefit from it – she got a job teaching in public school in New York.  One of her students there was Paula Baldwin, younger sister of James Baldwin.  Ms. Baldwin Whaley would introduce Ringgold to her brother and his writings.  Baldwin would befriend her and mentor her and introduce her to important people in art.  In response to her interest in art, two of the male friends, Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff, would figuratively pat her on the head, reminding her that serious art was a male endeavor.

Faith Ringgold was not deterred by these patriarchal reactions – she marched on into painting, and with inspiration from Baldwin and Jacob Lawrence, she put together a series of paintings entitled “American People Series” in 1963.  It is the series that is the basis for the current exhibit in the New Museum.  This series  depicted American life in relation to the burgeoning civil rights movement.  She focused on these interactions from a female point of view, and this series illustrates the intersectionality of race and gender in her art and in her point of view.  This was her reaction to the racism and sexism which sought to push her to the side:  “No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.”

She decided to add quilting to her artistic repertoire in order to step away from the male dominated Western/European medium of painting.  Long associated with “women’s work,” quilting became a medium for Ringgold to express both her womanist and anti-racist perspective.  Her mother’s help and expertise were part of her collaboration, as she added quilting to her wide range of art, and in 1980, her first story quilt “Echoes of Harlem,” was produced.  As she said: “In 1983, I began writing stories on my quilts s an alternative.  That way, when my quilts were hung up to look at, or photographed for a book, people could still read my stories.”  Her first quilt story was “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”.  It shows Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurant owner and seeks to redeem, as she put it “the most maligned black female stereotype.”

Her artistic creativity seems to know no bounds – she has written 17 children’s books, done sculpture, and she is a performance artist.  She has won numerous awards, is Professor Emeritus from UC San Diego,  and has been arrested  at protests related to racism and sexism and artistic freedom.  Her print “United States of Attica” was a tribute to the people killed in the Attica prison by a police attack.  From crayons to clay, from paints to fabric, from performance to protest, Faith Ringgold has been on the vanguard of visionary leadership.  In this Women’s Herstory Month, check out her artistic work and her continuing prophetic life.  In her words:  “You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it.”

"WATCHERS ON THE WALL"

 “WATCHERS ON THE WALL”

I heard from Michelle Duster this week.  She is a well-known author and human rights activist, as well as being the great-great granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. She is author of the powerful book “Ida B The Queen,” and she wrote one of the Forewords to Dr. Catherine Meeks and my book “Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time.”  Michelle was noting that a federal anti-lynching bill was now the closest it has ever gotten to being passed into law.  It has been passed by both houses of Congress, and it awaits the President’s signature.  We both gave thanks, but we also noted that no federal law against lynching has ever been signed into law in the history of the USA.  Most people are unaware of this lack of a federal law against lynching – it seems like a no-brainer, but the White South has always been a powerful force in American history.

During this Women’s Herstory Month, I want to give thanks for the witness of Ida B. Wells, especially in the context of lynching.  My friend John Cole Vodicka reminded me last week that it was the 130th anniversary of the lynching of 3 Black men in Memphis, one of whom was Ida Wells’ friend, Tom Moss.  It was that 1892 event that set her off on her journalistic career, as she was disgusted with the white explanation that the lynching was the responsibility of the Black men, that their behavior had set it off.  Wells decided to do an investigation of the recent lynchings in the USA, especially in the South.  Using white newspaper sources, she wrote an incendiary report on those lynchings, entitled “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases.”   Why was it incendiary?  It was so explosive because it revealed the truth behind the lynchings:  they were the result of white terrorism, not Black behavior.  Her report was not only figuratively explosive – it also was literally explosive.  White people in Memphis blew up her newspaper office and put a price on her head.  She left the South and did not return for almost 30 years.  When she returned, it was to investigate yet another mass lynching in my home county, Phillips County in Arkansas.

Wells was already an activist before these events, but her report made her a national figure, and for the next 40 years she would investigate, agitate, and activate.  She was a strong fighter for racial justice and for women’s justice – she was “intersectional” before it became a sociology concept.  She would not take a back seat as a person classified as “Black,” and she would not take a back seat as a person classified as “female.”  In our book on Wells and on her meaning for today, Dr. Meeks and I describe her as “fearless, ferocious, formidable, and feminist.”  This year in July marks the 160th anniversary of her birth as an enslaved girl in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Her parents died of yellow fever when she was 16, and she wrestled with her father’s Masonic Lodge colleagues to take guardianship of her younger siblings, and she prevailed.  Her life is full of sheroism, with her share of  troubles and travails, but she did not yield to the forces of racism or sexism, even as they stormed around her.

    As Dr. Meeks points out in our book on Wells, as well as in our discussions with groups on our book, Wells was an ordinary person.  Looking back on it, there is no doubt that hers is an extraordinary life, but our caution is to refrain from making her a saint of social justice, though she certainly is.  We must remember that in many ways, she was just like us - caught up in the whirlwinds and slings and arrows of life, but all the while listening for that voice inside her and outside her, a voice that told her that she was a human being, no matter what the world thought about her.  She found her voice, and we are urged to do the same in our own time and in our own lives.  If you don’t know her story, check out our book or Michelle Duster’s book, or you can go to the source itself, Ida B. Wells’ autobiography “Crusade for Justice,” so lovingly put together by her daughter Alfreda Duster, after Wells’ untimely death in 1931.  The last chapter of that book is entitled “The Price of Liberty,” and Wells begins it with these words:

    “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem to me that notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities, there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservations of our rights…..be alert as the watcher on the wall.”  As we watch SCOTUS move the dial back on women’s rights, as we watch the rise of the White South yet once again, these words of warning from Wells sound out anew – we must be watchers on the wall, to use the Biblical phrase from Isaiah 62.  Let us find our place in that witnessing, as Wells did and continues to do. 

"ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST"

 “ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  Caroline and I used those words from the Ash Wednesday liturgy last week as we led the worship service at a seniors residence on the edge of Decatur.  Ash Wednesday is not a happy day in the liturgical calendar – it begins the season of Lent.  Lent is a time when we are asked  to begin a season of reflection on human mortality, on our brokenness and woundedness.

In this season of Lent in 2022, it is not difficult to imagine human brokenness.  We are not being sad sack, depressing Christians when we ask people to remember our woundedness.  The Russian bombs are falling on Ukraine.  The White South is once again rising in American culture, as it has so many times.  Many of us have lost friends and loved ones to the power of death recently.  The Covid pandemic has made us all feel isolated and overwhelmed and lost.  Our national love of weapons and violence is proving its power, as we see huge rates in homicides and gun violence.  In these days, the season of Lent doesn’t seem so much to be a brief prelude on the way to Easter – it seems more like our permanent state of being in the world in these days.

The tradition of Lent is that we are asked to journey with Jesus to the Cross, and in that journey, we are asked to reflect upon our captivity to various powers which cause us to hurt ourselves, hurt others, and to hurt God.  That captivity usually grows out of our own individual woundedness and of the collective woundedness of us as a culture.   It is that woundedness and that captivity which make us believe that the powers like race and gender and money and redemptive violence can bring us relief, and even bring us meaning.  

In this journey of Lent, we are asked to remember how quickly many of the followers of Jesus fled the scene when he got arrested and especially when he was given the death penalty by Rome.  Only a few of the women disciples stayed with him, and as we enter Women’s Herstory Month, we are asked to remembe that it is the women who have given us the model to follow, not the men.   Jesus came to teach us that it is in love that we find healing for our woundedness and brokenness, not in any of the other categories or fixes of the world.  

    Our first response to this message of love is always a resounding “NO!”  We respond in this way because we are all so threatened by acknowledging our woundedness and the recognition that we all need to love and be loved.  The season of Lent asks us to reflect and act upon this process in the individual and collective human heart, to discern how our pain and our wounds cause us to join the former followers of Jesus who shout out “Crucify him!”

I grew up in  a working class Protestant church, so I was unfamiliar with the traditions of Lent.  Some traditions ask us to give up something for Lent.  Some people give up chocolate; some people give up FaceBook;  some people give up meat.  For this season in 2022, let us give up our captivity to white supremacy.  Let us give up our captivity to sexism.  Let us give up our belief that those who love people of the same gender are inhuman.  Let us give up our belief in that money gives meaning to life.  Let us give up the belief that redemptive violence is possible.  Let us pick one of these captivities and concentrate on its power in our lives in this season of Lent.  That captivity definitely takes us to the Cross.  Perhaps a time of self-reflection on such a captivity can help start us on the road to liberation.

Some traditions emphasize fasting during Lent, and in some Lenten seasons, I have fasted from food one day a week, allowing me to feel a few hunger pangs.  As I think about Lent in this year, I am reminded of one of the lectionary readings for Ash Wednesday.  It is from Chapter 58 of the prophet Isaiah, and the prophet quotes God as sharing this message with us from verses 6-7:

“Is this not the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, 

To undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry

And bring the homeless poor into your house,

When you see those without clothing, to share with them?”

In our fasting in this Lenten season, let us be guided by these suggestions.  Lent reminds us that we are headed to the Cross – there is no way around that.  It also suggests ways that we may begin to find some liberation as we journey there.  May it be so with us in this time of woundedness and brokenness.  May we find healing and passion.