"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!

          

"DAVID STROUPE!"

 “DAVID STROUPE!”

We were grateful and blessed to have our family with us over the Christmas holidays – Susan, David, Erin, Emma and Zoe.  While we were together, we wondered what the holidays would look like in 2024 – would we be able to get together as usual?  If so, what kind of mood would we and the country be in, just after the presidential election of 2024?   

    We have all gone now in different directions – Emma to Paris for a semester abroad; Zoe back to her senior year in high school at Interlocken Arts Academy in Michigan;  David and Erin back to teaching at the University of Utah;  Susan back to all things theater in Baltimore.  Caroline and I will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this summer – mark your calendars now for Saturday, June 22, when we will gather at Hawkins Hall in Legacy Park Decatur to celebrate.

    This week we are celebrating David’s 44th birthday on Wednesday, January 31.  He was born on a snowy night in Norfolk, Virginia, and before he was a year old, we moved to Nashville to be closer to family.  When he was 3, we moved to Decatur in 1983 to be pastors at Oakhurst, and he would have Decatur as his home base until he moved to Houston in 2002.  He has since lived in Seattle (where he got his PhD in science education), in East Lansing, Michigan, where he taught and rose in the field to get tenure and become an associate professor at Michigan State, and be an award winning author.  Just this month we learned that he has been named the winner of a big award for his book  "Growing and Sustaining Student-Centered Science Classrooms".  It is the AACTE Gloria Ladson-Billings Award.  Here's the link if you want to read about it. https://edprepmatters.net/2024/01/university-of-utahs-david-stroupe-to-receive-2024-aacte-gloria-j-ladson-billings-outstanding-book-award/.  He and Erin moved last summer to Salt Lake City, where they are both teaching at the University of Utah. 

    We remember that during his elementary and middle school years, he would learn vocabulary while jumping around the house and making up all kinds of sports games to occupy his body while his mind worked on studies.  He has great hand/eye coordination, and he was a good soccer player in his youthful days.  Indeed, when he was playing on a club soccer team in middle school, his coach came to us to tell us that David had great potential as a soccer player.  He lacked one thing, however – he did not have the competitive, killer instinct.  The coach indicated that he could teach this instinct to David, but he wanted to ask us about it first.  We appreciated the coach coming to us first, and we told him so, but we also indicated that we preferred David’s instincts the way that they were.  We had worked hard to help David develop a compassionate and loving heart, and that would serve him well all his life.  David ended up switching to tennis as a sport – no hitting anybody, no knocking anybody down.

    David still has his compassionate and kind heart, and we give thanks for all his work to develop that and to maintain it in the kind of hard and mean world in which we all live.  He has expanded that kind heart to the world of creatures, and when he would catch fish in a Mississippi pond as a kid, he would throw them back into the pond. And he even likes snakes!  He has dedicated his career to making certain that all students, regardless of income or racial classification, have access to quality public education.  

    So, this week we are giving thanks for our son, David Armour Stroupe, who has brought us so much joy and has taught us so much.   Thank you, David!!!!  Thanks for being who you are!

"DEMONIC FORCES"

“DEMONIC FORCES”

I’ve been preaching lately, using the lectionary gospel readings from the first chapter of Mark.  Mark doesn’t waste any words on the birth of Jesus – he gets right to the point with a short intro of John the Baptizer and then launches into the preaching and healing tour of Jesus.  In his healing work, he encounters many people captured by demonic powers.  I have always been puzzled by this idea of “demonic forces.”  In many cases in the New Testament, the stories seem to imply that these people are mentally ill, but their captivity is seen as being possessed by a harmful, destructive spirit.  Later in Mark 5 (and in Luke 8), Jesus encounters a man possessed by a demonic spirit so powerful that he gives up his identity to the spirit.  

The definition of “demon” is a force that seems to be a malevolent supernatural entity.  I do think that there is something to the mental illness angle of someone’s being possessed by demonic forces, but I also want to consider that there is a deeper and more powerful type of demonic possession.  This kind of possession is communal and difficult to root out, because it is seen as normal, as the way life is, or perhaps the way should be.  I have been possessed by demons, and their power in my life is so strong that there are still moments of such possession.  My first encounter with such a demonic force was in engaging my captivity to racism.  In many ways and for many years, I did not know that I was possessed by the demon of race and white supremacy.  I did not think that I was possessed because I thought that white supremacy was normal, and indeed had been ordained by God.  This connecting of racism to being a demonic power has helped me to understand the reality that is described when the Bible uses concepts like “demons.”

I thought that racism was normal because it had been taught to me by good white people like my family and my church and my segregated school.  It took me a long time to understand that I was captured by a demonic force, a force that told me that people classified as white were superior and that all other racial classifications were inferior.  I have struggled with this demonic force of racism and white supremacy all of my adult life – it took me reaching adulthood before I even realized that I was a captive to this demonic power.  I have written in other places about my journey on this {“While We Run This Race” and “Passionate for Justice,” to name a couple of books), and I will expand on that story in a forthcoming memoir on my mother and me, that I hope will be published this year.  

As I think about this coming year of 2024 and the upcoming presidential election, I’m returning to this elemental way of thinking, that many of us in the USA are captive to demonic powers.  Trump’s hold on the Republicans seems to be a prime example of a demonic force.  I’m not saying that Trump is a demonic force (though one could make a case for it) – rather, I am saying that he has called out some primeval demonic forces that have always flowed through our veins as American people.  He understands the deep captivity to race that lives in the hearts many of us who are classified as white, and he seems to be a master at developing the fears that reside in our collective white hearts.  So, this looks to be a crucial year and crucial election for all of us.

Yet, I don’t want to remain in captivity, and I’m hoping that you don’t either. There are plenty of demonic forces that hold us in captivity: racial classification, gender identity, economic status, materialism – the list is endless.  Jesus comes on the scene in Mark’s gospel, proclaiming an opportunity for beginning to gain liberation from our captivity, to see ourselves and others as children of God, not as children of one of the many categories of the world.  In this scary and crazy year, let us remember that Jesus burst onto the scene with a radical message:  the world belongs to God; we belong to God; we belong to one another.  As we fret about this year, let us remember this message from a Jewish peasant who was given the death penalty by the state of Rome.  Jesus means freedom, as Paul put it in Galatians, and that is what we are offered in this time of captivity.  Let that be a source of hope for us.

It will take a lot of work to begin to find this freedom.  It has taken me a lot of work to begin to find some liberation from my captivities.  In regard to race, I listened to new and different narratives.  I put myself in the presence of people whom I had been taught to fear, and I learned (and continue to learn) so much from them.  I worked for justice and peace and equity, and I continue to do so.  I say this not to praise myself but to seek to be realistic about the kind of work that it takes to seek to find liberation in the midst of our captivities.  And, yes, this could be a grim year, but it could also be a time of beginning to find a new definition and a new way of seeing ourselves and seeing the world around us.  In these days ahead, let us choose the way to life and liberation. 

 

"THE MEANING OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."

 “THE MEANING OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR”

I don’t remember when I first encountered Martin Luther King.  My earliest memories come from my captivity to white supremacy – I understood MLK to be a communist, maybe a con artist duping Black people and some white people, hoping to get big bucks from them.  But, the SCLC actions in Birmingham in 1963 made something stir just a bit in my heart.  Seeing the fire hoses, the police dogs attacking the children – those things made me begin to wonder in my junior year in high school – did I know the whole story? Or was there more to it than I had been taught?

It was in this context that I decided to watch MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington in the last week of August in 1963, just before I began my senior year in high school.  I was astonished – there were 250,000 people there of all colors and walks of life – could all of them be fools, be communists?  And then there was Dr. King and his stunning eloquence and powerful ideas and calls to action.  I knew then that I did not know the entire story, that my captivity to white supremacy had severely limited my imagination.  I was not converted yet, but I knew that I had a lot to learn.  Whenever I think of Martin Luther King, Jr, I think of that sweltering day in August, 1963 when he opened a small window in my heart and my imagination.

Yet, it was not just white folk like me who were moved by Martin Luther King, Jr.  Black folk too were astonished at his courage and his audacity, and I want to return to part of an essay by poet June Jordan to share the perspective of Black people in response to Dr. King.

  This excerpt is from the best essay that I have ever read on King.  If you don’t know her work, please look her up – many of her poems were transformed into songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  She died of breast cancer in 2002.  This sharing is from her essay on Dr. King “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” given as an address at Stanford on King Day in 1987.  It is from her 1993 book of essays “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.”

            “He made big mistakes.  He was not a wonderful administrator.  He did not abstain from whiskey, tobacco, or sex.  He was not a fabulous husband, or father.  He committed adultery.  His apparent attitude towards women was conventional, at best, or strikingly narrow, or mean.  He loved to party: dancing, horsing around, heavyweight southern cuisine, and pretty women.  He did like him a little sugar in his bowl,  He was not a god.

            And I remember listening to WBAI-FM radio in 1963 the way my parents long ago used to listen to AM radio broadcasts of the Joe Louis fights, only I was following the evolution of the Civil Rights Revolution.  I was following the liberation of my life according to the Very Reverend Dr. King.  And when, one afternoon, that fast-talking, panic-stricken newscaster in Birmingham reported the lunging killer police dogs and the atrocious hose water and I could hear my people screaming while the newscaster shouted out the story of my people, there, in Birmingham, who would not quit the streets – when he described how none of that horror of nightsticks or torrential water pressure or mad dogs on the attack could stop the children of Birmingham from coming out again and again to suffer whatever they must for freedom, I remember the positively stunned sensation that engulfed me:  I knew that we winning;  I knew that we would win.

            And before those demonstrations and underneath the melee and after the bleeding and the lockups and the singing and the prayers, there was this magical calm voice leading us, unarmed, into the violence of White America.  And that voice was not the voice of God.  But did it not seem to be the very voice of righteousness?  That voice was not the voice of God.  But does it not, even now, amazingly penetrate/reverberate/illuminate:  a sound, a summoning, somehow divine? That was the voice of a Black man who had himself been clubbed and stabbed and shoved and shot at and jailed and spat upon, and who, repeatedly and repeatedly, dared the utmost power of racist violence to silence him.  That was the voice of a leader who did not tell others to do what he would or could not do:  bodily he gave witness to his faith that the righteous cause of his activity would constitute his safety………

            Almost twenty years ago, Dr. King, standing alone, publicly demanded that England and the United states both act to isolate South Africa through unequivocal severing of financial or any other connection with that heinous regime.  In that same year, Dr. King stood forth, opposed to the war in Vietnam, and thereby suffered the calumny and castigation of his erstwhile peers as well as the hysterical censure of his outright foes. 

             Evaluating America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in our time,” in 1967 Dr. King, with a breadth of determination and rectitude unimaginable even now, undertook the launching of a revolution aimed against that violence, a revolution pitted against America’s inequities, a revolution riveted against an American poverty of the spirit that allowed us to uproot , and decimate, a host of strangers while denying basic necessities to the homeless here at home.”

So, as we celebrate MLK Day and seek ways to honor his witness and life, let us find ways in our time to step into the fray as he did – check out the criminal injustice system; speak out and act out about the continuing power of white supremacy and racism; stand against and march against the slaughter in Gaza; fight against the tide of patriarchy seeking to roll back the gain in women’s rights.  As Dr. King put it in the sermon played at his funeral, let us be known as drum majors for justice.  Let’s honor his life and witness in those ways.