"IBA B. WELLS!"

IDA B. WELLS!

                        I have my 72^nd birthday tomorrow, and I am grateful to be alive and to be in relatively good health – thank you!  I am working with Dr. Catherine Meeks to complete the manuscript for our book “Passionate for Justice,” which is a book about the importance of the life and witness of Ida Wells for our time.  We are meeting this week and rushing to complete the manuscript, which is due to the publisher January 1.  We’d like to get it done before the Christmas holidays really begin, so lift us up in that endeavor.  Catherine was born in Arkansas, as was I, and we grew up in neo-slavery about 50 miles from one another.   We bring a unique perspective to this work on Ida B. Wells – Catherine was raised in a racist atmosphere that sought to tell her that she was inferior because of the color of her skin.  She was also taught that women were inferior, so she received the double curse.  I was raised in that same atmosphere, telling me that I was superior because I was classified as “white” and because I was gendered as male.   Fortunately for her (and for us all), she did not inhale the poisonous air of racism and sexism, though she obviously had to breathe it in.  She was taught to believe it, but she never did.  Unfortunately for me, I not only breathed in these poisons, but I also inhaled them and believed them.  It has taken me so many years to come to terms with this captivity, and indeed, I am still wrestling with it.

            I first encountered Ida B. Wells in 1986, as I was preparing to begin a series of sermons on Black History Month at Oakhurst Presbyterian.  That series was so powerful that we continued it until my retirement in 2017 – we would preach about different people in American history who had been witnesses for racial justice and against the oh-so-powerful current of racism that runs through American history, like the powerful currents that drive the Missisissippi River down from the small overflow stream of Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.  I first read about Ida Wells in Dorothy Sterling’s fine book “Black Foremothers:  Three Lives.”  Wells was born in Marshall County, Mississippi, where all my forebears were also born, so I had an instant connection.  And the breadth and depth and richness of her witness was so stunning, from 1878-1931.  I could not believe that she was so little known at that time.  She has since been rediscovered, and that is great news.   A banner at the Belmont-Paul National Women’s Monument in DC put it so well:  “You can’t spell formidable without Ida B!”

            We’ll be looking at her witness in our book, and I am so grateful to Catherine for being willing to take on this project in the midst of her busy schedule, while working with the Episcopal Church to help them acknowledge and begin to fight the power of racism in their midst.  Ida Wells was fearless, ferocious, formidable, and feminist.  I like this alliteration, but today Wells would likely respond that she was “womanist,” not “feminist,” in order to note the differences and tensions between white women and women of color, especially women classified as “black”.  Of course she knew fear, but she did not allow herself to be dominated by anxiety.  She took herself into places that were scary and dangerous, but “nevertheless, she persisted.”  Such a witness is important for herself and for others.  It was a vision and a power that made her a powerful witness in whatever area she worked.

            Her witness reminds us that in this time, and indeed in any time, we are always called to be to be fearless, ferocious, formidable, and feminist.  “Fearless” because the powers of racism and sexism and materialism and others want us to be dominated by fear, to have anxiety at our core, so that we will be afraid to speak and act on behalf of justice and equity.  “Ferocious” because the powers will roar at us and seek to make us timid in the face of its power.  The witness of Ida Wells echoes to us to remain steadfast in our consciousness and in our work, and whether we will feel as if we are ferocious or not, the world will see us as such.

            “Formidable” because our keeping our integrity and persistence in the face of race and other powers will make us seem much more powerful than we actually may be.  Our culture of white supremacy is not accustomed to people of any racial category standing up and proclaiming a different way.  “Feminist” because Ida Wells’ witness reminds us of the importance of “intersectionality,” the reality that many categories overlap and inform one another in the areas of oppression and liberation.  Wells knew well that it was just as important to free women of all racial categories from male dominance as it was to free those classified as “black” from racial oppression – all included, no one left behind.  This affirmation of women’s rights cost Wells dearly in the work for justice, but she would not yield on this. 

            So, thank you, Ida B. Wells – we look forward to wrestling with you and learning from you!

"A New Wave?"

A NEW WAVE?

            I was disappointed but not greatly surprised that Stacey Abrams barely lost the election for governor of Georgia.  When the primaries were held in Georgia last spring, the Democratic candidates got 50,000 less votes statewide than the Republican candidates.  Stacey had to make up 50,000 votes, and though she ran a fantastic campaign, she just could not do it.  Stacey did ramp it up, though – she received more votes that any state Democrat ever has, and her defeat is testimony to the racism and sexism and voter suppression of the old, white South.  In an ironic twist, the early returns show that more white women voted against Stacey than did white men.

            Stacey Abrams is an impressive candidate, so much so that an op-ed piece in the Washington Post last week suggested that the Democrats name her to be the new Speaker of the House of Representatives.  She brings to mind another African-American candidate who rose quickly on the national stage:  Barack Obama.  She does have an advantage over President Obama at this stage – she has great experience in using political power.   She may run for Senate in Georgia, but I’m hoping that she will run for President in 2020. 

            Whatever Stacey does, we must celebrate that she is part of a new wave of voters around the country.   I am hoping that this is part of a new wave in American electoral politics.  It’s not just that the Democrats took back the House of Representatives – a great relief to act as a check on Donald Trump and his dictatorial tendencies.  It is how they did it, and it is also that they brought along many states with them in seeking to build a party that reflects the need and the desire for justice and equity.   With Muslims and Native Americans and more women and Hispanic and African-Americans elected to Congress, it feels like we are witnessing a shift towards policies that will bring relief to so many of us.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is helping us to see that young people can and will vote and get involved.

            And, it’s not just on the federal level – great gains were made in many states and counties.  In Georgia, the suburbs went for Democrats for the first time in several decades.  That switch helped to elect an African-American Democratic woman in Newt Gingrich’s old seat.  In the Houston area of Texas, all judges elected in Harris County were Democrats for the first time in years and years.   The newly elected attorney general of New York, Letitia James, is the first woman and first African-American to be elected to that position, as well as the first African-American to be elected to statewide office in New York.  Perhaps more importantly, she emphasized that she wants to investigate the Trump Foundation, which has its charter in her state.  Our daughter-in-law Erin Graham is on the East Lansing school board in Michigan, and though she was not up for re-election, she was part of a coalition that helped the Democrats regain power in that state. 

            There are still very ugly realities – Trump seems able to hold his base, and the Senate, which will continue to confirm terrible federal judges, gained votes for Republicans.   Unless John Roberts is worried about being compared to Roger Taney, SCOTUS seems to be firmly entrenched in white, male supremacy.  And, being from the segregation days of white, Southern life, I don’t want to hope too much, because I know that the power of racism and sexism and materialism and militarism and homophobia is deep and wide.  To use Biblical language, we are captive to the power of the prince of the air (Ephesians 2:2), and we are wrestling with structures of power that are deeply entrenched, so that it seems that when we defeat one, many more pop up to contest our struggle for justice and equity.  It will be a long, hard journey. 

            And yet, in this week of Thanksgiving, I am grateful for this movement, for the women and Native Americans, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans and Muslim and white folks who put so much energy into starting a new wave – may it grow stronger into a tsunami for justice and equity.  And, if you are in Georgia and Mississippi, don’t forget to go back to the polls for important run-offs!

"DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY"

DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY

            This month is Native American Month, but tomorrow is also the end of the election time in the USA.  If you voted early, thank you!  If you have not voted, please do so – your future and all of our futures depend upon it.  

            I attended our denomination’s consultation on anti-racism work in October.  This consultation was in response to an overture that our General Assembly passed earlier this year.  It endorsed the idea of the Decade of the Intercultural Church beginning in 2020.  Its central foci will be a celebration of all the cultures that comprise the Presbyterian Church USA and deliberate work on diminishing the power of racism in our 90% Anglo denomination.  We clearly have our work cut out for us. 

            At the October consultation we experienced a very powerful presentation by Native American representatives on the Doctrine of Discovery.  I had heard a bit about this previously, but it struck me very strongly on this occasion.   We began the consultation by noting the native peoples who had lived on the land prior to the Europeans’ arrival. We gave thanks for their witness and their continuing ministry.  We expressed our remorse that Anglo culture had led the way in removing them from their land, and we lamented that some native cultures had been obliterated by the European hunger for cheap land and labor.

            The Doctrine of Discovery was the “official” church and political doctrine that enabled Europeans to steal land and labor from indigenous people all around the world.  In America, it began in U.S. law in 1823 when the US Supreme Court decided in Johnson v. McIntosh that the native Illinois and Piankashaw tribes had no right to sell their land to speculators in Philadelphia and Baltimore, some 50 years after the purchase.  Justice John Marshall wrote for the majority that only the US government had the right to sell native lands, because the “doctrine of discovery” gave land title automatically to European, Christian nations when they “discovered” lands (and people) previously unknown to Europeans.  This was so, even though indigenous people had occupied and used the land for millennia.

            This doctrine did not originate with SCOTUS, however.  It began during the Crusades in 1245 when Pope Innocent IV wrote a paper, which indicated that Christians had property rights to lands occupied by non-Christians, when the Christians “discovered” the land.  This doctrine continued through the centuries, and indeed, Justice Marshall cited a patent case issued in 1497 by King Henry VII to John Cabot, articulating the doctrine of discovery.   This doctrine continues in effect to this day, with the struggle by the Standing Rock Lakota tribe against placing an oil pipeline under the Missouri River being the most famous recent example.   

            Our PCUSA denomination repudiated this doctrine at its General Assembly in St. Louis this summer, and as usual, we were one of the last mainline denominations to do this (Presbyterians were the last mainline denomination to re-unite after the Civil War, waiting until 1983 to do so).  That repudiation included a confession by Presbyterians that we were complicit in the doctrine of discovery, and it also included instructions to begin actions of repair, usually known as reparations.  It also included instructions for all General Assembly groups to begin their meetings with an acknowledgment of whose land the meeting is being held on and a welcome from the indigenous peoples currently living on the land.  If you’d like to read more on these actions, here is a link to the General Assembly action: 
https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doctrine-of-Discovery-Report-to-the-223rd-GA-2018.pdf

            Those of us who are not indigenous peoples must begin our acknowledgment of Native American Month in this way.  I am not seeking guilt here – rather recognition and repentance, to use the first two steps of my list of Seven Steps that we must use to engage the power of racism in our individual and communal lives.  The entire list will be brought into use on this:  recognition, repentance, resistance, resilience, reparation, reconciliation, and recovery.  Especially in this month of November, when we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us recall the indigenous peoples who made European survival possible in the harsh conditions.   The peoples already here did not see the land as the enemy or as possession but rather as partner to be nurtured and celebrated and protected.  May we learn from them in the midst of our drive to get so much stuff that we are destroying the planet for us all.

            Let us non-indigenous people begin this month with recognition.  Our son David taught us about this in 1992, the 500^th anniversary of Columbus bringing the doctrine of discovery to the western hemisphere.  David was a 6^th grade student, and he was given the Good Citizenship Award by DAR (the Daughters of the American Revolution!)  On the day he received the award, he wore a shirt with a slogan, which repudiated the doctrine of discovery – “how could Columbus have discovered America when there were people already living here?”

"REMORSE, ANGER AND ACTION"

REMORSE, ANGER, ACTION

            These are some of my reactions to the events of this past week – pipe bombs mailed out, two African-Americans killed by a white supremacist in Kentucky, eleven people shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the latter ironically named “Tree of Life.”  I am remorseful that it has come to this, that white supremacy has felt emboldened to crawl out from its pit of iniquity and not just speak hatred and racism and anti-Semitism ad sexism, but to act them out in public also.  As a white man, I need to remember that many people in this country live this every day – my white male privilege has kept me shielded from much of these kinds of events.  This past week was not one of those shielding weeks.

            Second, I am angry that my white brothers feel the need to kill and maim and terrorize the “other.”  I am angry that this kind of action is part of the bone marrow of United States history.  What we saw this past week was nothing new – it grew out of the deep reservoir of white supremacy that is in our American DNA.  I’m also angry that our President not only calls this up – he stokes it and revels in it.  His base is reacting to his sermon on white supremacy, just like a call and response.  Though I pray every day that the President will change, I can’t imagine that he will.  He seems to live for this kind of stuff, and his very self-image seems to depend on his having an enemy.   The slaughter in Tree of Life Synagogue is only the latest manifestation of this deep sickness of white supremacy.  And, oh, the guns!  The guns!  How our manhood depends on them!   As the prophet Ezekiel put it:  “the parents have eaten bitter grapes, the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

            The third reaction is the call to action.  We can no longer wonder what is wrong with President Trump.  We must no longer wonder why the Republican Party is so captured by his white supremacy.  We must no longer wonder if there is anything that we can do.  Yes, we must take action.   The midterm election ends in 8 days, so it you have not voted, go do it tomorrow.  Get your friends to do it.  Get your colleagues and friends to do it.  There are simply no more excuses, no more chances.  It’s either stymie Trump and his white supremacists or risk becoming Nazi Germany.  

            After you vote, go get involved somewhere in the political realm.  By “political,” I don’t mean choosing a political party, although that would be fine.  I mean for us to get involved in discerning and changing how power is distributed and used in this country – that’s what “political” means.   I’m committing to working on getting the cannon removed in the Decatur square that celebrates “the Indian wars of 1836.”  Yes, that is the beginning of the Trail of Tears, ordered by a Presbyterian, Democratic President Andrew Jackson.   I’m also going to join a court watch program somewhere in order to be a presence and hopefully a mitigator of the Mass Incarceration program arm of white supremacy.  These may not be your places of engagement, but I hope that you will find some.   All of our lives, especially those lives on the margins – all of our lives depend upon our choices over the next few weeks.  Just remember – RAA – remorse, anger, action. 

"ON VOTING"

“ON VOTING”

            Caroline and I are in Louisville, attending an anti-white supremacy, anti-racism gathering sponsored by our Presbyterian denomination PCUSA, whose headquarters are in Louisville.  I won’t have time to write this week’s blog, but I am posting, with Susan’s permission, our daughter’s fine FaceBook post in 2014 about my mother and her commitment to voting.  I must confess here that I violated our family commitment to voting in my very first year of eligibility in 1968.  I had worked hard for Eugene McCarthy and felt like he was cheated out of the Democratic party’s nomination for President.  So, in my bitterness, I joined many other young, white people in refusing to vote for anyone so that we could protest the corruption of the system.  Does this sound familiar for 2016?  In 1968, I wrote in my friend David Billings’ name for president rather than holding my nose and voting for Hubert Humphrey.  The result was a narrow victory for Richard Nixon.  Nixon’s victory began the long, white male reaction to the civil rights movement and to the women’s movement, which has now culminated (I hope) in the election of Donald Trump.  I chastised myself greatly after that, and I have voted in every election since then.  Here is Susan’s post about my mother and the importance of voting.  As you read it, remember the power that we voters have in our hands, and please don’t be an ass like me and skip voting this fall.

            “Since we are still near Day of the Dead, here is a Voting Day story about my grandma, Mary Stroupe, who died almost exactly 10 years ago: after working for many years as a hairdresser and beautician in Helena, Arkansas, and raising my father as a single mother in the 1950s and 60s, she retired from being a practitioner to teaching at the local community college. The majority of her students were black--men and women who were working toward their beauticians' licenses. My grandma was a product of her time--raised in an entrenched and (to her) unnoticeable segregation that firmly defined which races of people were worth more than others. My father was also raised in this system, but as he came of age, his mind was transformed toward justice, and my grandma, because of her own intelligence, her devotion to my father, and a friendship with a black woman who was her peer and fellow teacher at the community college (Jessie Weston) began to change as well. Grandma was insanely stubborn: a trait which allowed her to be a single mother, and a trait which also served her students in community who would rather conserve the ways of fearful separation than become vulnerable to change. 

            On every election day, my grandma would only let in students who brought proof that they had voted before coming to class. In her early years of doing this, she had students come in saying they were being prevented from voting by election officials. The story goes that Grandma stopped class and led all of her students and her five-feet-on-a-good-day self over to the polling place, demanding of the men blocking the door that her students be let in to vote, as was their constitutional right. They relented, and her students voted.

            So I have my sticker, and I think of my grandma. I also think of my great-grandmother on my mom's side, whom I never knew, but am told that although she did not support women getting the vote in 1920, after the amendment was passed, she voted in every election until her death in 1979. We don't take enfranchisement lightly in this family.”

"THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH...."

“THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH…”

            Caroline and I are on a trip to visit our long-time friends, David Billings and Margery Freeman, in McComb, Mississippi, traveling through Alabama.  Though these were not states when the Constitution was adopted, this is the land of the original “originalists.”  One of the central dynamics of the Constitution was to preserve privileged, white male power.  There is no mention of the rights of women.  African-Americans and Native Americans are deemed to be only 60 % human.

            I thought about this a lot as we visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery.  They are the work of the Equal Justice Initiative and are powerful testimony to the past and current injustice and inequities in American history.   The National Memorial is an artistic rendering of the terror and power of lynching in American history.  Sculptures hang down, representing people lynched.  The initial sculptures are by counties, and there is seemingly no pattern to them.  I kept wanting to put them by states, but it was chaotic and unpatterned.  It took me awhile to allow the art to penetrate my senses.  The purpose of these initial pieces of art is to give us a feeling of chaos, of terror, of inability to know when or where the next lynching is coming.  It is a reminder that for those classified as “black” in US history, lynching is always on the table, no matter the locale, no matter the time, no matter the economic status.  

            I was looking for one particular sculpture, that of Phillips County, Arkansas – my home county.  There, in and around Elaine, Arkansas, over 230 African-American people were lynched in two days’ time, in 1919, the largest number of African-Americans killed in lynchings in US history.  On the second turn, I found it, and it was depressing and sobering and angering and defeating.  Some of my forebears were in on that.  They may not have participated in it.  In fact, I am assuming that they did not, but I do not know.  I never knew the magnitude of the executions, and I never thought to ask my mother or other relatives – it was taboo.  Yet, whether they pulled the triggers or not, they supported it.  Difficult stuff.

            After the initial round of sculptures, we finally came to the state groupings, and there were many more in Arkansas counties than I had previously thought.  For some reason (actually I know the reason), I thought the lynchings were confined to the Deep South east of the Mississippi River and to the River Delta on the Arkansas side where I grew up.  After that, the staff invited us to climb the small incline to view all the monuments.  The purpose of the viewing was to allow the spirits of those people who were lynched to cry out to the perpetrators, and it was a powerful time to listen to the voices.

            Next we went to the Legacy Museum, which proclaimed to us that lynching was still with us, that it had now evolved to DWB, police brutality, mass incarceration, skewed income tax tables and deductions, red-lining, destabilizing of the public school system, and many other forms of the racism that has informed our national heritage since its beginnings.   I was struck by many things in this exhibit – one was the jars of dirt collected from some of the known sights of lynchings.  Another was an announcement in the Hattiesburg paper in June, 1915, that John Hartfield would be lynched the next day – no spontaneous anger here, but rather an announcement of a murder to come.  Many brought picnics to watch, and many sold picture postcards afterward – almost 10,000 people gathered to watch a man murdered.  So, for those who feel that our national love of violence is a new thing, please hear that it is in our marrow and DNA.

            Bryan Stevenson, the person behind these profound exhibits put it this way:  “The opposite of poverty is not wealth.  The opposite of poverty is justice.”  Wherever we are, whatever we are, let us recall these words.  Let us recall the idea of equity and equality that is part of our national heritage, an idea that so often loses out to racism and sexism and materialism.   We have three weeks left to make some small movement back towards equity and equality -  please, please vote, and make sure that your friends, colleagues and neighbors vote.   

 Because this is what looms over us:  for those who think that this is only ancient history, please note that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh join Alioto and Thomas as “originalists” on the Supreme Court, with Roberts now being the swing vote.  That is a scary thought!

            The voices of the people who have been lynched - and who will be lynched – now cry out to us.  Let us hear and act in behalf of their humanity and of our own.  It won’t end with the election, of course, but it will be a start back towards justice. 

"A REAL MAN"

“A REAL MAN”

            Last week I looked at Courageous Mary and her taking some ownership of her sexuality in the Biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus.  As courageous as she was in Luke 1, she still faced the death penalty because she was pregnant by someone other than her fiancé.  Her fate remained in the hands of the patriarchy, of the toxic masculinity system.  Indeed, her fate rested in the hands of one man, her fiancé Joseph.  In this past weekend’s re-affirmation of toxic masculinity in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court justice, let us look at what the Bible tells us about a real man, a non-toxic man.

            We do not have a Biblical account of Mary’s telling Joseph about her being pregnant by someone other than him, and her telling him that the “someone” is not a human being.  Here, Joseph enters the story – not in Luke, interestingly enough.  For Joseph’s point of view, we must turn to Matthew’s Gospel.  Matthew has given us a clue that he may not be totally bound to male domination, because in his genealogy of Jesus, he breaks with patriarchy and lists five women in the genealogy.  And, from the patriarchal point of view, these five women are troublesome – a woman who learns how to survive in the patriarchal world (Tamar), an enterprising and independent businesswoman, (Rahab), a foreign immigrant (Ruth), a woman forced to commit adultery by King David (unnamed in Matthew and called “the wife of Uriah” –Bathsheba was her name), and this courageous young woman named Mary. 

            Joseph comes to present his case, as did Brett Kavanaugh.  Whereas Kavanaugh brought all the signs of toxic masculinity to the table – belligerence, accusations, resentment, threats – Joseph does not.  Make no mistake – Joseph belongs to patriarchy, but his momma and his daddy (and God) have taught him a different slant.  Rather than putting his male resentment at the center, as is his right under patriarchy, he chooses not to call Mary before the elders in order to stone her to death.  He decides to divorce her and “dismiss her quietly.”  “Dismiss her quietly” is the liberal term for the death penalty in slow motion – Mary, disgraced because she sought a bit of control over her sexuality, will likely hit the streets and earn money any way that she can. 

            In Matthew’s account, Joseph is able to present authentic masculinity, not toxic masculinity, to Courageous Mary.   He is able to do this because he was open to perceiving God’s vision for him and for Courageous Mary and for the baby he would claim as his own, Black Jesus.  An angel (unnamed) appears to him in a dream and tells him that rather than dismissing Mary quietly in the realm of toxic masculinity, he should move from the center of life to the margins of life to join Courageous Mary and his child-to-be.  Joseph is a dreamer – he’ll have two more life-saving visions in Matthew (sounding like another dreamer named Joseph in the Hebrew Scriptures).  Perhaps this search for visions is what saves him from the toxic masculinity of Brett Kavanaugh and many others – he could “see” further and deeper than many of us.  So he takes a chance on love and says “yes” to Courageous Mary and to God.  He moves with Mary to the margins, but he uses his masculine power to protect her, not attack her.  Protect her from the elders, protect her from the death penalty, protect her from the government soldiers who search for her baby to kill him. 

            Wonder where black Jesus got his authentic, non-toxic masculinity?  From Courageous Mary, and now from a real man named Joseph.  Want to know what a real man looks like?  Don’t look at Brett Kavanaugh or Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or Lindsay Graham – they are distortions of masculinity, toxic men.  Look at Joseph and at Jesus, and look at others.  I’m hoping that you know some in your life, real men who are nurturing, loving, protecting, willing to be at the margins of patriarchy.  The next step?  Thank the real men in your life, and then plan to vote for candidates on November 6 who are courageous like Mary and Joseph.  We need them in leadership so badly right now!