"FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT"

 “FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT”

In the spring of 1951, two Black lawyers were driving from Richmond to Roanoke to investigate and seek to adjudicate complaints about civil rights violations.  On the way they decided to stop in the small Virginia town of Farmville to engage the Black students of Robert Moton High School there.  They had heard that a 16 year old student named Barbara Johns had led a walkout and boycott of their segregated, rundown school until the white school board built another school for them.  The two lawyers were Spottswood Robinson III and Oliver Hill, and they were in charge of Virginia for the NAACP. They felt that the possibilities of taking the case in Farmville were slim and none, because Prince Edward County was known as the most racist place in Virginia.  

Robinson and Hill had just come back from a briefing on the Briggs case in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where the initial complaint was for Black students to get school buses that were equal to those used by white students.  Thurgood Marshall and Robinson were lead attorneys on that case, because Spottswood Robinson III was Marshall’s most valued assistant.  In Farmville, Robinson planned to tell the kids to knock it off, go back to school and to get ready for the legal action in the South Carolina case.  However, Robinson had never met a student like Barbara Johns.  

    He remembered the conversation in this way: “We were going to tell the kids about the Briggs suit, which was about to begin, but a strike in Prince Edward County was something else again. Only these kids turned out to be so well organized, and their morale was so high, we just didn’t have the heart to tell ‘em to break it up.”  That conversation led to many more, and the students agreed to give up their demands for an equal but separate school – they adopted the NAACP approach of seeking to end legal segregation itself.  Spottswood Robinson III would become the lead attorney in this case, and he argued it in front of the US Supreme Court as one of the five cases that became Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas – the case that ended legal segregation in the USA but not neo-slavery.

    Robinson was born in Richmond in 1916, son of a lawyer and a homemaker.  His grandfather Spottswood Robinson had been held as a slave in rural Virginia, but fled slavery and set up shop in Richmond.  Spottswood would be named after him, as Spottswood William Robinson III.  He graduated from Virginia Union University and went to Howard University Law School, where he would study under the visionary Charles Hamilton Houston and be classmates with Thurgood Marshall.  He graduated from there in 1939, being first in his class with the highest scholastic average in the history of the school.  He became a leading strategist of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and he traveled all around the South to see the oppressive conditions that neo-slavery and legal segregation imposed upon people.  Thurgood Marshall talked him into coming on the staff of the NAACP, with the promise being that Hamilton and Marshall were assembling a team that would seek to take down legal segregation and thus end neo-slavery.

    Robinson was a tireless worker in this cause, traveling many places, facing arrest and other dangers in the South, as he and his colleagues built the cases to take down neo-slavery.  In the summer of 1944, Irene Morgan, a resident of Baltimore, asked Robinson and the NAACP to defend her after she was arrested in Saluda, Virginia, on July 16. Contrary to state law, she had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus trip she had taken across state line from Gloucester County to Baltimore. If it could be shown that forcing black passengers to change seats as they traveled into the South interfered with interstate commerce, then a blow might be struck. Adopting the strategy, Robinson defended Morgan both in the local court and in the Virginia Supreme Court, losing as expected in both venues.  SCOTUS took up the case in 1946, and in June they ruled that Virginia’s law was unconstitutional.  It opened the door to the Brown case eight years later.

    Spottswood Robinson III is one of the unheralded heroes of the civil rights movement.  He later was appointed to be a federal judge in DC by President Lyndon Johnson, and in 1966 Johnson appointed him to the Federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit, the same court that recently ruled unanimously that Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity were hogwash.  Robinson served as chief judge of that Appeals Court until his retirement in 1986.  He was the first Black person to serve on that court and also to serve as its chief judge.  He died in 1998, and his life is a powerful example of the dynamic of equality in American life.  That idea is now once again under attack – may we find the resolve and courage of Spottswood Robinson III, so that we can be witnesses in our time.

"SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT"

 “SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT”

I have been thinking a lot about Fulton County DA Fani Willis lately, especially after her fiery testimony on Thursday as the white Trump team tried to taint her and get her dismissed from the Trump election interference case.  She had an unforced error in her love life, but the attempt to discredit her seems to be going nowhere legally.  Unless new evidence pops up, I don’t see the judge disqualifying her because there are no legal grounds to do so.  Still, she’s been buked, and she’s been scorned as a Black woman taking on white men and white supremacy, and it is nothing new.  I want to share the story of another woman who had to fight for her life in the midst of white supremacy. 

    Ella Sheppard was born into slavery in 1851 on Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage plantation in Tennessee and was a direct descendant of Jackson’s brother.  Her enslaved father worked outside the plantation and saved enough money to buy freedom for himself and his family.  His owner, however, would only allow him to buy his freedom, which he did.  Ella’s mother went into great despair and decided to take her own life and that of her daughter.  As Ella’s mother stood on the banks of the Cumberland River getting ready to jump in, she heard a loud voice cry out:

“Don’t do it, Honey! Don’t you see God’s chariot a-comin’ down from Heaven? Let the chariot of the Lord swing low. This child is gonna stand before kings and queens! The Lord would have need of that child.”  The voice came from an elderly Black woman who was also enslaved, and she gently talked the mom out of suicide.  Ella’s father would soon buy Ella’s freedom, but the owner would not allow the freedom of the mother, whom he later sold down South to Mississippi.

Ella’s father decided to get out of the South and moved to Cincinnati, where Ella showed a stunning aptitude for music.  She studied with a white music teacher, who made Ella come in the back door, and Ella could only come at night to receive the lessons.  Her father died of cholera in 1866, and Ella supported the family by working as a maid, singing in public, and teaching music.  After the Civil War ended, she moved back to the Nashville area to teach people freed from slavery.  Recognizing that she needed to hone her teaching skills, she enrolled at Fisk in Nashville.  

At Fisk, she met George White, treasurer of Fisk and music teacher there.  He was tremendously impressed with her and hired her on as an assistant teacher of music at Fisk, which meant she became the first Black faculty at Fisk.  At this time, however, Fisk was desperately in need of funding, and George White decided to form a choir who would tour country to raise money for Fisk.  Ella Sheppard would be his assistant and main organizer.  They recruited other Fisk students, all of whom had previously lived as slaves, and they named themselves the “Fisk Jubilee Singers,” using the Jubilee concept found in Leviticus 25.  They began to tour in 1871, and in their first concerts with white audiences, they sang classical European songs, with a few spirituals thrown in.  They noticed that when they sang spirituals, the audience went wild and gave much more generously.  So, Ella Sheppard chose “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as their initial spiritual, fashioned from the testimony of the elderly Black woman who had saved her life.  She taught the other singers to sing the spirituals, and they became a hit. While they continued to use classical European music, spirituals became their standard singing in the concerts.  

Their touring accomplished at least three things.  They saved Fisk University – donations poured in.  And second, their skill and their humanity stunned white people, who thought that they were inferior as Black people.  Third, they rescued the spirituals as a music and art form – no longer considered the music of inferior people, but rather music which enabled people to survive the horror of slavery. They had to endure all kinds of terrible treatment at the hands of white supremacy, but they prevailed.  As the white supremacist movement grew stronger and more dangerous, the women members often stayed home.  The original group disbanded in 1878, and Ella got married to Rev. George Washington Moore.

Ella also searched for  her mother in Mississippi, as many Black folk did after the Civil War (see Leonard Pitts’ fine novel “Freeman” for the story on these kinds of searches).  Ella brought her mother back to Nashville, where Ella taught many Fisk students and others until her death in 1914.  The Fisk Jubilee Singers were re-started in 1879, and they have been singing ever since – the first HBCU choir in history!  

"BLACK HISTORY AND LENT"

 “BLACK HISTORY AND LENT”

    The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is Valentine’s Day this year – a strange combination of love and ashes, the ashes made all too relevant by all the mass killing and shootings by guns in this country and by the slaughter of the Israelis and the Palestinians in the Middle East.  As I said in this blog space before, we have turned ourselves over to the gun-god Molech (Leviticus 20:1-5), and he requires that we sacrifice our children to him, which we are continuing to do.  We seem to prefer killing over loving.  

            This intersectionality reminds me that Black History Month and Lent almost always overlap on the calendar, and that is appropriate, for the racism that called forth the need for Black History Month is America’s original sin.  The lynch mob that attacked the Capitol in 2021 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 given):

“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.”

"GET ON THE BUS!"

 GET ON THE BUS!

On Sunday, I preached at First Presbyterian Church in Eufala, Alabama.  Our friends Dan and Virginia Hamby retired there in the family house on the lake, and Dan has been supplying at First Church a bit.  He suggested to them to invite me to preach there.  It is the home county of George C. Wallace, and it is the center of the Pulitzer Prize winning  book called “Freedom’s Dominion” by Jefferson Cowie.

I used the lectionary Gospel text and stretched it a bit to form Mark 1:32-45.  It is the story of Jesus healing a person with leprosy, and I couched it in terms of Jesus being on a healing tour, with the big bus pulling up to First Church, Eufala, with “Jesus Saves” on it.  I used racism and white supremacy as the prime metaphor for demonic possession, and I urged the congregants to get on the bus of the healing tour of Jesus.  

  Though I did not use it in the sermon, on the way home, I kept thinking of a blog and a Black History sermon that I had done many years ago, called “Get on the Bus.”  It was about the Rev. Joseph DeLaine of South Carolina, who helped to develop one of the 5 cases that became Brown v. Board of Education.  So in his honor, I’m repeating that blog here from 2017.

“GET ON THE BUS”

            It began as a request for equal treatment under the “separate but equal” clause of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson  Supreme Court decision.  In 1946 (a great year!), in rural Summerton, South Carolina, a group of African-American parents wanted the white school board to purchase school buses for their children to ride to the segregated schools, just as had been bought for the white kids.  The chairman of the school board, a Presbyterian minister named L. B. McCord, indicated that would not fit in the budget. As we all know, Plessy meant separate and unequal.   Reverend McCord underestimated the power of the Spirit and of the Black church.

            At the South Carolina NAACP meeting that year, the Reverend James Hinton, an African Methodist Episcopal pastor asked for witnesses to have courage and to speak up for justice – to emphasize the need for equal treatment in the school bus allotment.  He knew that such a public witness could lead to loss of jobs, violence, and even death, but still he called out:  “Can I get a witness?”  And, he did. The Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine stepped up.  He was an AME minister and was a tentmaker as a principal and teacher at a public school.  Thurgood Marshall met with Rev. DeLaine and others and asked them to get twenty families to sign a petition, asking not only for busses but for desegregated schools as well.  Twenty families!   How could he get that many to sign?

            Rev. DeLaine led the charge for doing this, going door to door to get the signatures.  Many were reluctant to sign up because the oppression and repercussions were so great.  But, finally it worked.  He delivered the petition to Thurgood Marshall in November, 1949.  The first names on the petition were Harry and Liza Briggs, and he was a Navy veteran of WW II.  Though he had fought for his country, he couldn’t get a school bus for his kids. The case became Briggs v. Elliott, and it was merged with four other cases to go before the Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  Both Harry and Liza Briggs lost their jobs as a result. 

            Reverend DeLaine also paid a great price for his activism.  He was fired from his school position, as were his wife and sisters and a niece.  His house was burned to the ground, and night riders fired on him.  He fired back, and then he and his family fled to New York for their lives.  His church was then burned to the ground.  He did not return South until 1971, when he retired, but he got on the bus!  His groundbreaking work and witness led to the Supreme Court decision that made legal segregation illegal. 

            We are not in those times, but it is looking very grim these days.  In these days, let us remember witnesses like Reverend DeLaine, his wife Mattie, Harry and Liza Briggs, and Ida Wells and many others.  They spoke up, they organized, and they fought.  While it took a courageous individual like Joseph DeLaine to step up, he could not do it without a community – that’s why the NAACP wanted twenty families to sign up. Individuals could be oppressed and fired or burn out too easily, but like the Montgomery Bus boycott, this story reminds us that a “whole lot of people is strong.”  Reverend DeLaine started early in 1949, and the case was finally decided in 1954 – a long haul.  Reverend DeLaine and many others were in it for the long haul – they had found their voice, and they stood up and stood out.  May we do the same.  Let's get on the bus!