"SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY"

 “SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY”

Recently Caroline and I were up in Virginia, where Caroline was part of a commission honoring our friend the Reverend Mary Jane Winter on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Mary Jane’s ordination as a minister in the PCUSA.  Caroline had been a part of the original Commission of Norfolk Presbytery which had ordained Mary Jane to the ministry as pastor of Franklin Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Virginia in 1976.  Mary Jane was the first woman to be ordained as a minister in that Presbytery, although Caroline had preceded her in the Presbytery when we came to be co-pastors at St. Columba Presbyterian Church in Norfolk.  Caroline had already been ordained as a minister by Atlanta Presbytery in 1973.

We rented an Airbnb in Richmond for the long weekend, and our daughter Susan joined us there for a small vacay.  We drove out to Franklin on Sunday for the celebration, and of course we were cutting it close to be on time.  We passed through Courtland, Virginia, which is the county seat of Southampton County.  As we drove by the county courthouse there, Susan noticed a sign that commemorated Dred Scott being born there.  We didn’t have time to stop, but we made a commitment to stop on the way back.  We all remarked that we knew that Nat Turner was from Southampton County, but we had no idea that Dred Scott was from there.

On the way back, we did stop to note the recent memorials to Nat Turner and to Dred Scott, both of whom had been born into slavery in Southampton County.  Turner learned to read, and he wanted to read the Bible.  In the Bible he found a message of liberation, in the Exodus story and especially from Galatians 5:1: “Freedom is what we have – Christ has set us free.  Stand then as free people, and do not allow yourselves to become slaves again.”  Turner developed a plan to lead an insurrection of enslaved people to overthrow slavery, and he developed his plan with a small group of enslaved people.  He had hoped (and expected) that a large number of enslaved people would join in the revolt.  In August, 1831, he began with the killing of white people, hoping to ignite the rebellion.  His small band of revolutionaries headed towards the armory at Jerusalem (which became Courtland in 1888), but the rebellion lost steam, as few Black people joined, and as white resistance turned fierce and deadly. After hiding out for a couple of months, he was finally caught, tried and executed in 1832.  His revolution struck fear deeply into the white heart, and Virginia and other states passed laws forbidding the teaching of enslaved people to read, as well as their right to assemble and worship on their own.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ was simply too incendiary to allow Black people to have access to it.

Dred Scott became a famous name in the 1850’s, when he and his wife Harriet sued to gain their freedom from slavery in Missouri.  Scott had been enslaved in Southampton County and then forced to go to Alabama with his enslaver to work a farm there.  The farm failed, and he and Harriet were sold to a surgeon in Missouri – Dred Scott ran away for a while but was recaptured and enslaved again.  The surgeon took the Scott family to Illinois for several years, and that state had a law that freed enslaved people who lived there for an extended period of time.  The Scotts sued for their freedom, initially winning in court, but eventually beginning to lose in appeals courts.  The case finally made its way to SCOTUS, which ruled in 1857 by a 7-2 vote that not only were the Scotts still “slaves,” but even worst, they were not human beings worthy of being citizens of the USA, an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney from Kentucky.  This decision caused an uproar all over the country, especially in the abolitionist states.  Freedom for the Scotts was finally won later in 1857, when abolitionists bought them and set them free.  Dred Scott died in 1858, and Harriet died in 1876.  The Dred and Harriet Scott case was one of five major events in the 1850’s that led to the Civil War.  Can you name the other four?  

We were astonished and humbled to find that all this history had come from Black people in Southampton County, Virginia.  But, lest we get too hopeful with this history, as a light rain began to fall that day, we discovered a tall monument about 50 yards behind the Turner/Scott markers.  On the top was a Confederate soldier, and in front of it was a recently installed historical marker extolling the virtues of the Confederates who had fought to preserve their homeland from the invading forces.  These two streams of liberation and oppression still flow in us and through us.  The Trump administration’s desire to obliterate the teaching of the Turner/Scott stories and to re-establish the legitimacy of the Confederacy remind us that this struggle seems eternal in the American heart.  Each of us and each generation will have to decide which side we are on.  The fight is always on – as the old union labor organizing song put it – “there ain’t no neutral there.”

"INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY"

 “INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ DAY”

        When I was growing up on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta, I inhaled the racism that flowed through the physical and psychological air there.  That racism was one of the reasons that I always felt weird about Columbus Day.  Although Americans of Italian heritage had made it into the classification of “white” by my time, that classification had not quite made it down to Helena, Arkansas.  Those of us who were “truly white” (whatever that means) were sure that people of Italian heritage were somewhere in the middle between the exalted category of “white” and the degraded category of Black (most often described by the N-word).

The celebration of Columbus Day was strange to me as a boy – our segregated school system did not recognize many days as national holidays, and Columbus Day was one of the unrecognized ones.  I have since later learned that my feeling of weirdness about Columbus Day was correct – I was just feeling it for the wrong reasons.  As I learned more about American history, it turns out that Columbus Day was a main focus of the savaging of the land and the indigenous peoples of the land by those classified as “white.”  Now it is called “Indigenous Peoples Day,” as it should be.  Though Columbus did not “discover” America, his landing in a place that he thought was India would become the opening for huge exploitation of the native peoples and the land.  

I experienced that once again in downtown Decatur during the years that I have lived here since 1983.  In the Decatur Square, there were two memorials to the power of racism: one was a tall obelisk glorifying the Confederate soldiers who fought to honor and preserve our wonderful Southern homeland.  The other was a cannon from the “Indian Wars” of 1836, which drove the Muskogee (Cree) Indigenous people out of Georgia and Alabama on the Trail of Tears.  These two monuments to white supremacy were erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the first decade of the 20th century – they were part of a movement around the South during that decade to solidify the Lost Cause and negate the real meaning of the Civil War.

We joined in with many groups, including the City of Decatur, Dekalb County, and especially the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights to get these abominational monuments removed.  On June 18, 2020 (the day before Juneteenth), the Confederate monument was removed in the dead of night, and in 2024, it was replaced by a marvelous statue in tribute to John Lewis.  In 2021, the horrible cannon from “the Indian Wars” was removed, and earlier this year, it was replaced by a marker that is depicted in the photograph that accompanies this blog.  There is also an interactive educational component about Indigenous Peoples at nearby Agnes Scott College.

I grew up in territory that had previously been occupied by Cosqui and Pacaha natives of the Hopewell Culture.  I did not know that until I went to college, and I do not remember any markers in Helena that proclaimed that.  There may have been some, and if there were, my lack of memory of them speaks volumes about the racism that I learned in Helena.  There was a marker near my house dedicated to Hernando de Soto, one of the Spanish explorers who crossed the Mississippi River near Helena and held the first Christian worship west of the Mississippi in 1541.  The Delta Cultural Center at Helena now tells the stories of both.

So, on this Indigenous Peoples Day, let us remember the sad and horrible times of genocide and attempted erasure of “Indians” who were here when the Europeans came.  Though partially successful, that erasure has not worked – Native peoples are making concerted efforts to reclaim their heritages and some of their lands.  And, let us find our places in that movement for restorative justice.

"WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY"

 “WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY”

Yesterday was World Communion Sunday, and I have been celebrating it ever since I first took communion in 1958.  It previously was called “Worldwide Communion Sunday,” the name by which I knew it in the 50’s and 60’s.  I’m not sure when or why the name changed, but perhaps “Worldwide Communion Sunday” seemed a bit pretentious and was actually inaccurate – neither Roman Catholics nor Southern Baptist churches recognize it.

In some ways, World Communion Sunday (WCS) seems outdated, a superficial time where for a short moment, we are asked to feel unity in Christ around the Lord’s Table.  It is a unity that is always elusive and usually unrealistic, but still we observe WCS to remember that in Jesus Christ, the dividing walls of hostility have been broken down.  World Communion Sunday is observed on the first Sunday in October, and it emphasizes that we all have dignity and equality because of God’s revelation to us in Jesus Christ.  It officially began in the fall of 1933, started by the Rev. Hugh Thomson Kerr at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.  

Its emphasis on Christian unity and on the power of Christ to unite us was a theme that caught on quickly.  In 1936, the Presbyterian denomination adopted it as one of our recognized holy days.  In 1940 the Federal Council of Churches (predecessor to the National Council of Churches) adopted it for all its member churches, and it has been on the Protestant church calendar ever since.

In my younger years as a minister, I celebrated World Communion Sunday, but I was always skeptical of it.  Although I loved the ideal of unity and sibling-hood that it symbolized, I understood that while we might love the symbolism, we rarely ever lived it.  In my home church in Arkansas, people classified as Black were not allowed to worship or even to enter the building except to cook and clean.  So, there was no possibility of experiencing that unity that World Communion Sunday seeks to express.  For me, WCS had turned into a sentimental symbol with no teeth or bite to it.  We were all one in Christ – so what?

Two things changed my mind, however. First, I learned the history of the development of WCS.  It began in the fall of 1933.  Anyone remember the events of 1933?  Yes, the Great Depression was ravaging the USA and the world, shrinking our spirits and crunching our lives.  Even more ominous was the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany.  He wasted no time in creating a monster state in 1933.  He was appointed chancellor in January, 1933, and by the end of February, the Reichstag Parliament Building had been burned.  This led to the Reichstag Decree, passed by the German Parliament in February – it denied the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of public assembly.  Dachau was opened in March, and in July the Nazi Party became the only legal political party in Germany.  World Communion Sunday was born in this atmosphere, and it served as a strong opposition voice to the racism of the Nazi regime.  World Communion Sunday grew in this atmosphere of racism, oppression and war, and it still stands as a powerful symbol of a different world, a different point of view.

Second, my experience of communion at Oakhurst Presbyterian radically changed my view of WCS.  Through God’s Spirit, we developed a multicultural congregation there, and for a white boy raised on the robbery and racism of neo-slavery, it was a powerful moment to remember and experience the unity of Black and white people sharing in World Communion Sunday.  It was no longer a symbol – it was a visible, lived presence.  By the time that we retired from Oakhurst, there were people from 15 countries worshipping at Oakhurst, and because of this, World Communion Sunday took on a whole different meaning.

Though Trump is not Hitler (I sometimes think that he would like to be), we live in a deeply divided country and in a time of great meanness and resentment.  Perhaps it is time now to recover World Communion Sunday and its original meaning – we are siblings after all, no matter what the world tells us or what we tell ourselves.