“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!
I just looked up who the only Supreme Court Justice to dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson was. It was John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911). He famously wrote, “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” I find those words deeply compelling. In this sense, God, too, is “color-blind” — showing no partiality among people.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes Harlan’s story especially striking is that he did not begin as a champion of racial equality. Born into a slaveholding family in Kentucky, he initially opposed emancipation and many of the early Reconstruction policies following the American Civil War. Over time, however, his views changed significantly. Historians point to a combination of factors, including his commitment to the Union, the violent realities of white supremacist terror in the postwar South, and his growing reflection on the meaning of constitutional equality and civil rights.
Rather than saying that witnessing the violence of the Ku Klux Klan alone directly caused his transformation, it would be more historically accurate to say that his moral and political outlook gradually evolved through his experiences and reflections on the injustices he saw around him.