"WHAT A WEEK!!!"

 “WHAT A WEEK!!!!”

This week of May 17-24 has always been an important one in my life, even before I knew it.  On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was the law of the land.  This ruling firmly and legally established “neo-slavery” that would be king of the USA for almost 60 years. It filled the atmosphere of my boyhood with the authority of white supremacy and racism that so captured my perceptual apparatus.

    Yet, while I was not aware of it because I was only 7 years old, on May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, SCOTUS reversed the Plessy decision and ruled unanimously that legal segregation was no longer lawful because it established inequality as the law of the land.  I don’t remember knowing about that decision until I was somewhere in my college years, but that decision had set off the beginning of a revolution in regard to the legality of white supremacy, declaring that it was no longer the law of the land.  Yesterday marked the 72th anniversary of that landmark decision.  Unfortunately, we have not decided as a nation which decision we want to affirm – the “neo-slavery” Plessy of 1896 or the “created equal” Brown decision of 1954.  The recent SCOTUS decision that further eviscerated the Voting Rights Act makes us now lean back towards the neo-slavery of Plessy.

    Most important to me, however, about this week is that it marks the 52nd wedding anniversary for Caroline and me.  We were married in Ed Loring’s backyard on May 18, 1974 with Ed and Sandy Winter officiating – Sandy had been a long-time mentor of Caroline’s.  Caroline was a campus minister at Georgia Tech at that time, having been ordained as a minister in 1973 (the 21st woman to be ordained in the former southern Presbyterian Church).  I was in my final year at Columbia Seminary, having transferred there from Vanderbilt Divinity School, with a two year hiatus in between while I performed as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.  We had met at the wedding of Robin and Linda Williams in Nashville, Caroline having accompanied her friend Murphy Davis, who was Robin’s cousin.

    It has been quite an adventure, with many milestones along the way.  Even before I graduated from Columbia, we had received a call from St. Columba Presbyterian Church in Norfolk VA, to be the co-pastors at a small church there, which also served as the base for a developing community ministry in a 5000 resident low-income housing complex.  We cut our teeth on urban ministry there, and we were fortunate enough to receive the Women of the Church Birthday Offering in 1978.  That great gift established St. Columba Ministries, which does ministry with those who are poor and especially those who are homeless.  It is still doing ministry today.  

       After our son David was born in Norfolk in 1980, we wanted to get closer to our families in Chattanooga and Arkansas, so we moved to Nashville where I worked on the staff of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons.  I also served as part-time supply pastor at Second Presbyterian while they looked for a fulltime pastor.  Our daughter Susan was born in Nashville on a Sunday morning in 1982.  My time at Second Church convinced me that I wanted to return to the pastorate full time, and in February, 1983, I gladly accepted the call to become the full-time pastor at Oakhurst Presbyterian in Decatur.  Since Susan was still an infant, Caroline stayed home for another year.  She came on staff at Oakhurst in September, 1984, and we shared ministry there until we both retired – Caroline in 2012, and me in 2017.  Whew!  Quite a journey – you’ll hear more one of these days.  We are working on a book about our pioneering and partnering ministry.  If you have any stories or insights, please share them with us.  In the meantime, raise a glass to us this week!

"THIS IS THE AMERICAN STORY"

 “THIS IS THE AMERICAN STORY”

The stunning events of last week remind us that the maintenance of white supremacy IS the American story.  With the SCOTUS 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais to further eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, most of the Southern states wasted no time in seeking to redistrict so that Black people would be deprived of their votes.  It was as if they were all lining up to get a date with a hunky matinee idol.  Then the Virginia Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s voter referendum by a 4-3 vote to redistrict their state, and the white supremacists are cheering it on.  

Though I am hoping that this is not true, it is likely that this is the culminating point of a long period to suppress the votes of Black and Brown people.  When the federal troops pulled out of the South in 1877 in the “Great Compromise,” it pointed to a long slide back into neo-slavery.  The Mississippi Plan of 1890 led the way for all Southern states to strip Black people of their voting rights.  In 1896 SCOTUS decided 8-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was the law of the land, thus codifying neo-slavery for almost 70 years.  It is interesting to note that both the Plessy decision of 1896 and the Callais decision of 2026 came out of the state of Louisiana.  

Neo-slavery (not “Jim Crow,” as it is often called – a misnomer that seeks to soften the blow of reinstituting slavery as much as possible) ruled as a center part of the American story until the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was passed in 1965.  John Roberts came into the Reagan Administration in 1980 as a lawyer determined to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, so that white supremacy could be clearly re-established again.  He led the SCOTUS decision in 2013 in Shelby v. Holder, which was the first major blow to the VRA.  It dismantled the provision of the VRA that required that all election-related changes in the Southern states had to be pre-approved by the Justice Department.  In the current Trumpster Department of Injustice, this might not have mattered, but for almost 50 years, it forced Southern white legislatures to seek some bit of equity as they sought to revive and continue the power of neo-slavery.

Now the floodgates are open for re-establishing neo-slavery, and though it is hard to imagine that being done, we only have to skim the surface of American history to realize that this pattern of establishing and protecting white supremacy IS THE American story.  In the Constitution, Black people and Indigenous people are deemed “three fifths” of a person, so this American story is deep and long and wide.  Women had no right to vote in the Constitution, and it took over 70 years of labor and protest and marching to get that right in the Constitution in the 19th Amendment.  It is hard not to be discouraged in this kind of atmosphere, but we must start where we are – THIS IS THE AMERICAN STORY.  The desire to establish white, male supremacy is at the heart of American history, and whether we have the 19th Amendment or the Voting Rights Act, all of the efforts to move us to codify our ideals of equality and justice and equity fly in the face of this American reality – we want, we believe that white men should be in charge of things.

In these discouraging days, we must remember witnesses like Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery in Mississippi and who lived almost all of her life under the power of neo-slavery.  She refused to accept the definition of herself as unequal because of her racial classification, and she refused to stand down and defer to men of any racial classification because she was a woman.  If you want to know more about her and her relevance, read the book that Dr. Catherine Meeks and I wrote about Wells “Passionate for Justice:  Ida B. Wells as Prophet For Our Time.”  In the midst of raging racism and sexism, she was fearless, ferocious, formidable….Now, we are not Ida B. Wells, but her witness for such a time as this calls on us to find our place in this small but great parade of witnesses who stood for justice, equality, and equity.  

"WHO IS MY MOTHER?"

 “WHO IS MY MOTHER?”

“Who Is My Mother?”  This is a question that Jesus asks in response to those who tell him that his mother and his siblings would like to see him – they are coming to take him home because they think that he has lost his mind with all of his “weird’ ministry and teachings.  He then says that whoever does the will of God is his sibling and his mother.  I’ve always thought that such a response must have hurt his mother’s heart, but she raised him to be a prophet for and to the world.

This complicated approach is appropriate for our current political moment when SCOTUS has voted to force motherhood on every woman who becomes pregnant without doing anything to enforce the “fatherhood” part.  This year’s Mother’s Day is fraught with complexity, and in that manner, I give thanks for my mother, Mary Armour Stroupe.  We had many discussions about a woman’s right to choose in regard to her body, and Mother said:  “I’m opposed to abortion, but I’m even more opposed to forcing women to have babies.”  

My mother saved my life by sticking with me and by showing me the power of love.  I give thanks for her!  Though she did not consider herself a radical, she often demonstrated radical power in her “ordinary” stands in her home of Helena, Arkansas.  One of her friends once told me that the white neighbors considered Mother a radical because she allowed a Black friend and colleague to come in her front door when she came to visit Mother – this was in the 1990’s, not the 1940’s.

Mother also took some stronger communal stands in her work as the lead instructor at the Phillips County Community College School of Cosmetology.  Most of her students were poor, and many of them were Black.  They had heard all their lives that they were not worth much.  Mother sought to teach them not only how to do hair but also to teach them that they were children of God and American citizens.  As elections drew near, she would urge her students to register to vote.  Most of the students did not believe that voting made any difference, so most of them did not heed her advice – most of them also had heard stories of the danger in which Black people put themselves when they voted.

Mother emphasized, however, that the right to vote was fundamental and that her students should not take it lightly.   In a move that would likely not be allowed now, she told her students that if they did not vote on election day, then they would not be allowed into class that day.  If they did not wear an “I have voted” sticker on election day, then they failed the class for the day.  That got their attention, and she ended up with almost 100% voting by her students.  I give thanks to Mother for her nurturing of me and of so many others.  Though she gave birth to one child, she was a mother to hundreds.  If you want to know more of her story (and mine), get my most recent book “She Made A Way: Mother and Me in A Deep South World.”

On this Mother’s Day, I also am remembering all those people who gave me mothering love, both women and men.  Mothering love is rooted in loving and in engagement, not in biology.  One of our good friends, Lorri Mills, died about this time four years go after a long struggle with many illnesses and attacks on her body.  She did not have any biological children, and she always told us that she was not any good with little kids.  But, she gave mothering love to so many people!  We heard from cousins that she was a mentor to them, that she was one of the first women in their family line to go to college.  We heard stories of her urging her women cousins to think of themselves as human beings capable of so much more than they thought.  We witnessed her sharing this approach with so many people at Oakhurst Presbyterian, where she was a member and elder and leader.  She was generous and loving and nurturing – she showed us what the answer to Jesus’ question “Who Is My Mother?’ looked like.

In this time of Mother’s Day, let us give thanks for our biological mothers and for all of those people who have given us patient and demanding, nurturing and ever present, visionary love. I give thanks also for my life partner Caroline Leach, who has offered me and so many others this kind of mothering love.  When Caroline retired in 2012, one of the most moving parts was the 75+ children, youth, and young adults who came forward to give her roses in gratitude for her mothering love for them.  Let us seek to live our lives in this way.  And, if your “mothers” are still around, take time to thank them while you can.