"MONSTERS IN AMERICA"

 "MONSTERS IN AMERICA"

        Today is All Hallows Eve, which came to be known as Halloween.  Like all such holidays, its origin is murky. It is partially rooted in the idea that October 31, the day before All Saints Day or All Hallows Day, is a time when the spirits of those who have died are allowed to return to earth, for both good and ill.  Hispanic Culture recognizes this in its Day of the Dead on November 1 also.  In the current Halloween story, ghosts of those who have died seem to return only for mischief or malevolence.  It's rare that ghosts return for "goodly" purposes.  Yet,  All Saints Day remembers those who have been witnesses for good, and I want to remember those too.  So, I'll divide my thoughts on these into two parts:  ghosts for good, and ghosts as monsters.  This week, the monsters; next week the good.

        When I was a boy, I had a recurring nightmare in which I was on a train cutting through the countryside, with fields on each side of the train.  As the train passed one barn, I saw a Frankenstein type monster step out of the barn and begin to run towards the train.  I seemed to be the only passenger on the train who was aware of the monster's pursuit of the train - everyone else, including the engineer, was having a happy time as the train meandered its way through the countryside.  The monster was getting closer and closer, and it became clear that he was after me.  Yet no one paid attention to this developing danger.  I wanted the train to speed up so that I could make it safely home to my mother.  The dream always ended in such pursuit - the monster getting closer and closer, and my scramble in trying to get the engineer to speed up the train.

        I was thinking about this dream and about the idea of monsters after I heard about the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  There seems to be a letting loose of monsters, of Frankensteins in American culture.  The Trump presidency, the January 6 attack on Congress, the slowness and even reluctance of Republican leadership to respond to these threats - all seem to point to the loosening of monstrous forces in our time.  To me, it is reminiscent of people pouring into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska in the early 1850's.  Congress decided to allow those two territories to decide on whether they would allow slavery to exist inside their boundaries.  It led to terrible slaughter, a prelude to the Civil War.  Indeed, John Brown honed his skills in the killing fields of Kansas, before he headed to Virginia to seek to ignite a revolt by those held in captivity as slaves.

         Such monstrous forces seem to always exist close to the surface of American life, and in many eras, they break through the surface to seek to dominate life in America.  The late 1870's until early 1900 was a time dominated by the monstrous forces of white supremacy, seeking to put Black people back in the places that white people believed that they belonged.  After white legal and political power was re-established for all to see, lynchings became the monstrous way to enforce it.  Up until 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed, the monsters of neo-slavery held to our Frankenstein power tightly.  Since then those of us classified as "white" have used the criminal injustice system and police power as monstrous forces to keep people of color in the place designated by white people.  

        The attack on Paul Pelosi is a another sign that Frankenstein has stepped out of the barn and is now in pursuit of those who would expand the American idea of equality to include those who have been excluded by the creators of the monstrous forces of injustice, oppression, and white, male supremacy.  The monsters are on the loose.  The results of the November elections (and the denial of those results) will tell us a lot about where we are headed.  

        At this point some 8 days until the election period is over, it looks like the Republicans will take back the House.  If this is the case, a difficult battle will come to the forefront.  If you have not yet voted, please do so before the election period is over - and get your friends and neighbors to vote also.  Abraham Lincoln asked us to move towards our better angels, or "good ghosts" as I would call them. In today's culture, we seem to be moving towards the monstrous side.  Let us move towards the "saints" part of All Hallows rather than towards the monsters.  

"VOTING"

 "VOTING"

        Voting for the midterm elections began last week, and it is helpful to think of the period before November 8 as the time of voting, rather than the usual name of "early voting."  I prefer to think of November 8 not as election day, but rather the end of the period of voting.  That shift in thinking implies to me that voting is so important in the USA that a period of at least 3 weeks is needed for voting, so that everyone who is eligible will have an opportunity to vote.  If you have not voted yet, please take time to do so this week, or at least by November 8.  It is vital in every election, but it is especially important this year, because this may be our last legitimate election, depending on the outcomes. 

        The first time that I was eligible to vote was in 1968, and while I took voting seriously, I chose not to vote in the presidential election between Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon.  I had watched the debacle in Chicago at the Democratic convention that summer, and I was a Eugene McCarthy supporter.  I felt that McCarthy had been mistreated at the convention, and I also felt that justice had been squashed by the police state tactics of Mayor Richard Daley.  The recent movie about the Chicago Seven will give you some of the dynamics of those times, if you do not know them.  After the convention, I joined thousands of others who decided not to vote in protest of the oppressive tactics of the Democrats in Chicago. Richard Nixon was elected President by a narrow margin, and I've always wondered if our disenchantment and refusal to vote gave us one of the most corrupt presidents until Donald Trump.

        The context of the struggles of 1968 are instructive to us in these days.  The Voting Rights Act, passed three years before in 1965, had ended neo-slavery in the South.  Its empowerment of Black  voting was at the heart of the wrestling in Chicago.  The right to vote for Black people - a the 15th Amendment of 1870 - was finally ratified by law in 1965.  The Voting Rights Act took a giant step towards the political empowerment of people whose humanity had been denied in the US Constitution.  My decision not to vote in 1968 looks so much worse in that context - a privileged white man deciding that the blood, sweat, tears, and deaths of so many people over so long a time was not worth enough to vote.  1968 also brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.  It seemed like a time on the brink of chaos, and voting seemed so insignificant to me that year.

        Over the decades, I have seen the importance of voting.  I remember that when my mother was the lead instructor in the school of cosmetology in her local community college, she would not allow her students to come to class on Election Day if they did not have on a "I Have Voted" sticker.  I also note how much our white culture has worked to restrict access to voting since the end of neo-slavery in 1965.  In a terrible decision in 2013, SCOTUS struck down a central enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act.  Ever since then, states around the country have constricted the right to vote again and again, hoping to return us to the vision of the "originalists," those who would limit voting to "white" men of property.

        We are in such a time of retrenchment now.  We see it in the "election deniers," who demean any election results that do not show them or their candidates as the winners of the election.  Donald Trump was the most prominent of these "deniers," but he is not the first nor the last to take this approach.  It has been a theme in American history ever since the Constitution denied the vote to women and defined African-American and Indigenous People as 60% human.  The "originalists" want to take us back to those days, and in many ways that is a main theme of the midterm elections of 2022.  Will we continue to to affirm the idea that all people are created equal and that all American citizens are entitled to vote?  Will we continue to affirm the idea that the people should continue to decide who our political leaders will be?

        We've tried this experimental idea of democracy for only 57 years now, since the end of neo-slavery with the Voting Rights Act.  That Act has already been significantly weakened, but still most of us have the right to vote.  Many candidates in these midterm elections of 2022 want to weaken that Act even more.  These "originalists" understand the power of the vote, and they want to restrict it as much as possible.  Caroline and I have already voted, and I urge you not to reflect my 1968 self in your approach to voting especially this year.  As President Obama put it so succinctly:  "Don't boo - Vote!"  May it be so with us.  If we don't, many of us may lose that fundamental right.

        

        

        

"100 For Oakhurst!"

 "100 For Oakhurst!"

        This past weekend culminated the 100th Anniversary celebration for Oakhurst Presbyterian Church - they have been celebrating on a monthly basis for the past year.  We attended the 100th Anniversary service at Oakhurst yesterday, and it was fun to see old friends there.  The church was founded on September 25,1921, in a tent meeting at the corner of East Lake and Second Avenue in Decatur.  Caroline and I were pastors there for over 30 years, almost one-third of the existence of the church.  Our kids grew up there, and it was a good place for them to be nurtured in the faith and in the multicultural world.

           Oakhurst is a remarkable place, and I want to share a short summary of its history.  If you want a fuller story, see the book that Caroline and I wrote about it: "O Lord, Hold Our Hands: How a Church Thrives in a Multicultural World."  It was a white, mostly working class church in its beginnings and throughout the first 45 years of its history.  It grew to be a church of almost 850 members, but by that time in the early 1960's, changes were underfoot.  Atlanta had decided to go to the Big Leagues in sports teams, so Black housing was taken for stadia for the baseball Atlantans, the football Falcons, and the basketball Hawks,  The people who lived in that housing began to move to the east Atlanta area, which included the Oakhurst neighborhood in Decatur.  White flight in the neighborhood and in the church quickly took place. Oakhurst Presbyterian went from 850 members to 80 members in about 20 years.  It was a demoralizing time for the church.

        During this difficult time, the church had strong leadership from its pastors and its members.  Jack and Joy Morris, Dr. Lawrence Bottoms (the first and only Black Moderator of the former southern Presbyterian Church), Jeanine Wren, and Bruce Gannaway were all remarkable pastoral leaders.  Oakhurst also benefitted from the PCUS consolidating all its denominational offices into one city:  Atlanta.  The Stated Clerk of the denomination, Jim Andrews and his spouse Elizabeth became members at Oakhurst. Other denominational leaders like Evelyn Green joined, giving Oakhurst a sense that it could survive.  The white membership who was left at Oakhurst were very conservative theologically, but they were also tenacious about Oakhurst - they were determined that it would survive, even if it meant inviting the new neighbors in, the neighbors who were Black.  The first Black member joined Oakhurst in 1970.  Atlanta Presbytery provided financial support, paying off the mortgage on the building, and providing financial support for the operating budget for over 30 years.  Some white people stayed, and sone Black people came - enough to form a nucleus for a new church. 

        When Caroline and I came to Oakhurst in 1983, the executive of the Presbytery told us that he would give us two years to show that Oakhurst was viable.  If there were no signs of progress, they would cut off the Presbytery funding.  On one level, that was a big advantage.  We told the elders of the church that there was no time for gradual changes - we had to move towards being a multicultural church as quickly as possible.  Caroline worked on Christian education and community ministry, getting in families with children.  I worked on worship and on opening the doors to Black leadership in the church.  At that point we were a white church with Black members, and we worked to make it a multicultural church with shared leadership in worship style and in church government.

    We lost some white members at first, but eventually the vision began to take hold.  Black people took a chance on the church and on us.  We used art and music and education and sermons to begin to shape a new congregation - in today's language, it would be called a new church development.  We changed the main stained glass window of a white Jesus in the sanctuary to a brown Jesus, and we began to seek publicity throughout the metro Atlanta area.  The plan worked - John Blake of the Atlanta Journal Constitution (now a CNN online columnist) did a full page article on the church.  Christine Callier invited Sylvester Monroe of Time Magazine to join us in a Supper Club discussion of his book on growing up in Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.  He was so impressed with Oakhurst that he wrote a full page article in Time in April, 1995.

    We began to move from trying to survive to the idea that we could thrive.  We ordained an openly gay elder in 2002 (we had ordained another gay person in 1992, bur they were not out yet).  There were many books and studies of the church, and in 2003 Oakhurst Presbyterian was named as one of 300 Outstanding Congregations in the country by a Lilly study.  The church grew, and we had several capital campaigns for the old building.  We were grateful to have been part of such a vital community of faith - as our evangelism slogan described us: "Multicultural, Bible-based, Jesus-centered, Justice-seeking."

    In 1989, the Rev. Joan Salmon Campbell was the first clergy woman ever elected as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church.  She was an African-American preacher from Ohio, and she preached at Oakhurst in September of that year.  In her sermon that day, she shared one of my favorite quotes about Oakhurst:

    "It has been a long, long time since I have worshipped in a congregation quite like this one. I celebrate who you are.  I dare say that you are one of the best kept secrets in the entire denomination, for rarely do I see a congregation so diverse, as you represent so many different kinds of people.  Rarely am I in the midst of God's people who bother to take the time to hear the concerns of the people in the pew, and then intentionally lift them up before the Lord and rejoice.  I thank God for you and for the privilege of being in your midst this morning."

    We give thanks for Oakhurst!

"ON PERCEIVING A NEW WAY"

 “ON PERCEIVING IN A NEW WAY”

After our daughter Susan graduated from Macalester College in 2005, she signed up for Americorps.  She worked for two years in Albuquerque in an arts center, some of whose clients were adults with learning challenges.  She and other colleagues developed arts pieces with these young adults, especially using theater and drama.  Caroline and I went to visit her on several occasions, learning more about the Southwest, which neither of us knew much about.  We would usually stay with a west Tennessee cousin of Caroline’s dad – Bill and Joanne Claybrooke were great hosts to us in those days. Bill had been in the area since he went to work as a photographer for the atomic work at Los Alamos, and he knew all the back roads and places to visit.

  On one of our excursions, Bill took us to the Acoma Pueblo, which was astonishing.  It is a group of Native Americans who live on a mesa high in the New Mexico landscape, and on this Indigenous Peoples Day, I am thinking of them and of our visit to their home.  Acoma Sky City is located on a mesa that is 350 feet high, and it is one of several Acoma towns.  There are about 5,000 people left in the Acoma clan, and they are descendants of the Anaasazi people.  The town that we visited is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America.  Written records date back to 1150 CE, but their oral tradition takes it back to the BCE/CE era divide.  

     While the Acoma people  do limit contact with those classified as “white,” they also recognize the need for cash flow in the community, so they allow tourists to pay for tours and to purchase their incredible art works.  At that time in 2006, there was only one road up to the town, and it was often blocked to public traffic, except for the tour vans.  Like all indigenous people in this country,  their lives have felt the deep sting of invasion by those of us classified as “white.”  They also limit contact with “white” people because they understand the deeply infectious disease of consumerism, which has captured white culture.  This was one of the first insights that I would gain from our visit with them – the resistance to “white” people is not based so much on the arbitrary system of “race.”  It is based on their empirical observation that people in white culture (and those influenced by it) were held captive to the idea of consumption, that the meaning of life is found in using something completely up in order to gain its benefit.

    This observation was tied to the Acoma idea (and the idea of many indigenous people) that beings on the earth, and indeed existence itself, were sacred and to be honored, even when they were used as food and shelter.  They had prayers to use when eating plants and animals, prayers to use when utilizing other parts of earthly beings.  They recognized the fundamental connection between them and all existence, and nowhere was this more clear than in their connection to water.  Their area averaged 7 inches of rainfall per year (Atlanta’s annual average is about 49 inches). To them, water was obviously precious, and they prayed for rain every day. The idea of wasting water, of using water for other than a fundamental human purpose, was not conceivable.  

    They also saw their ancestors in much of the existence of the world that surrounded them – in plants and animals, in rocks and in the few trees nearby, even in the sand and hard dirt.  It was not a question of “to be or not to be,” it was a question of seeing a fundamental connection, a fundamental community of all of life, even all of existence.  I was impressed by this observation and by its power.  In my context of a metro area full of trees (though less so every day, with all the continual development), I’ve thought of their insight in this way:  which perception is more helpful to humanity – to see a tree as the dwelling place of the ancestors, or to see a tree as lumber, as a house to be built.  

    I was also intrigued by a less philosophical tenet that they shared with us.  Maybe it was my Calvinist leanings, but my ears perked up when they discussed the distribution of power in the tribe.  The men held the political power, and as I heard this, I thought “What else is new?  The same old same old.” But, they added, the women own the property rather than the men, with property being passed down in a matrilineal system.  As one of our female guides put it: “When the men make a bad political decision, guess where they won’t be sleeping that night?”  It was an insightful decision on the separation of powers, to keep one another accountable and to emphasize the power of community.

    On this Indigenous Peoples Day, I give thanks for these Acoma and similar approaches to life.  I am well aware of how much we of European descent have vandalized their lives.  Yet, I am also grateful for the gifts that they offer us.  In our days of shrinking resources and the dissolution of community, these insights from people who have existed continuously for at least 1000 years give me hope.  They offer us a different way of perceiving ourselves and perceiving others, a different way of living our lives, a way that emphasizes connection and community, rather than dissolution and individualism.  To use Jesus’ approach about his storytelling and indeed about his life, let us have ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to receive.  

"ELAINE MASSACRE"

 “ELAINE MASSACRE”

I grew up hearing vague stories about the Elaine Race Riot, stories which came from white adults.  They indicated that a few Black folk had been killed in my home county in late September in 1919, because the Black folk did not know their place in a society centered on white supremacy.  Because I was a captive to the idea of white supremacy, I believed them.  As I became a young adult and began to find some freedom from my captivity, I began to doubt the veracity of the stories that I had heard about what was called “the Elaine Race Riot.” It would not be until 2015 that I would learn much more of the full story.  

    Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Institute published a history of lynchings in the USA, especially in the South.  I heard from my longtime friend David Billings about the EJI report:  “It looks like our home county lynched more people than any other county in the country.”  Sure enough, at the top of the list of despicable acts of lynching, there was my home county of Phillips County, Arkansas, where over 230 Black people had been lynched in a white reign of terror over 3 days, from September 30-October 2, 1919.

During the “Red Summer” of 1919, many Black people were lynched because they began to stand up for their human rights.  Black tenant farmers in Phillips County had begun to organize to seek to get higher pay for the cotton that they picked.  They met several times in Black churches that summer, and much of their work was seeking to organize a union to work for better conditions.  On September 29, 1919, they meet in a Black Baptist church in a small community called Hoop Spur, just a few miles north of Elaine, Arkansas.  White deputies came out to break up the meeting, and those deputies fired into the church building.  The Black farmers had expected white violence, so they were somewhat prepared, returning the fire and killing one of the deputies.  The Black farmers drove the deputies away, but the Black farmers were not prepared for what followed.

Mobs of white people gathered in my hometown of Helena, which was the county seat.  They called the return of Black farmers’ fire in response to the white shots fired – they called it an insurrection.  The white people recruited other white people from surrounding towns, and they put out the word to white people in other states.  On that same day, white mobs began killing Black people in unprecedented numbers in Phillips County.  The murdering continued over three days, a reign of terror that killed hundreds of Black people.  Counts of those killed range from 237 (EJI estimate) to 800+, one of the biggest peacetime massacres in American history. 

It was not a “race riot” that killed a few Black people, as I had been told.  It was a “race massacre” that killed hundreds of Black people, carried out 103 years ago in my home county.  Adding great insult to grievous injury, some 120 Black people were arrested for murder and insurrection.  Eventually twelve Black men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death.  Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, and a courageous Black lawyer named Scipio Africanus Jones became advocates for the twelve men wrongly convicted in this case.  Jones became the lead attorney for the men, and it was his vision and endurance and strength that carried the case to the US Supreme Court.  In 1923 in Moore v. Dempsey,  SCOTUS decided to overturn the death verdicts of the black men convicted in the Elaine Massacre.  It was the first time since the Civil War that the Court had overturned a criminal case verdict in a state court decision. 

The Elaine Massacre was horrific and on one level seems far away and long ago.  But, it speaks to contemporary forces.  In 2019 a monument commemorating the victims of the Elaine Massacre was dedicated in Helena across from the Phillips County courthouse, and my friend and colleague Dr. Catherine Meeks was a guest speaker for that dedication.  Caroline and I attended that ceremony, and I wrote about it in my October 7, 2019 blog.  That monument is a reminder of the depth of racism and white supremacy that courses through our arteries and veins as individuals and as communities.  The rise of Trumpism is a stark reminder that this power is vicious and capricious and always dangerous, a stream that flows through American history,  always ready to break out into seditious and deadly violence.  I don’t know if the times in which we live are like the 1850’s, that decade that boiled over into the Civil War, but in these kinds of memories, it sure feels like it.  Find your place and take your stand.