David Blight. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon and Schuster, 2018. 912 pages.
Eddie Glaude Jr. Begin Again. Crown Publishing, 2020. 272 pages.
James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. Dial Press: 1963. 128 pages.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. NYU Press, 2010. 372 pages.
Isabel Wilkerson. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Vintage Books, 2011. 640 pages.
David Paul Kuhn. The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2020. 416 pages.
Toni Gilpin. The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland. Haymarket Books. 2020. 425 pages.
Walter Brueggemann. Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture. Westminster John Knox Press. 2013. 112 pages.
Isabel Wilkerson. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House 2020. 496 pages.
“Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of resiliency, or else we succumb to madness or resignation.”
Times seem to require something of us.
I spent spring, as most of you, pacing in my home, trying to avoid Covid and cabin fever.
I had just finished reading, among other things, Frederick Douglass’ biography, of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction — and the Union’s capitulations to expediency and political back-scratching post-Reconstruction — and I realized I had gaps to fill in my inadequate education.
Our congregation leadership approved two weeks’ continuing education time to disappear and read.
So, I began collecting books. First was the book our adult forum was starting — Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for our own, by Eddie Glaude Jr (whence came the quote at the start of this page). I added The Fire Next Time by Baldwin himself. Then, Bill Clinton made a snarky comment at John Lewis’ funeral, which led me down a rabbit hole about Stokely Carmichael and ultimately to Hassan Kwame Jeffries’ history of Carmichael and SNCC — Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. Several weeks earlier I’d seen something about Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, so I ordered that; then Leslie raved about Wilkerson’s newest book, Caste: the origins of our discontents, a comparative of India, American racism and Hitler’s Germany. A random review in the NYT added a thing on the chaos in New York City post-Kent State, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City and the dawn of the white working-class revolution. Then I stumbled upon Toni Gilpin’s history, “The Long Deep Grudge: a story of big capital, radical labor and class war in the American heartland.” Jay mentioned a Brueggemann work, Truth Speaks to Power: the countercultural nature of scripture, so scripture rounded out the list. Surely scripture has something to add.
From Pharaoh’s Egypt to 2020, lingering in the late 1800s, Jim Crow, the early- to mid-1900s; I considered Republicans, Democrats, how republicans became democrats (and vice versa), the Know Nothings, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and the Black Panthers.
I discovered my greatest political appreciations lay with the Communist Party and the Black Panthers. And among them all, I realized that our Republicans and Democrats are the farthest removed from the ways of Jesus. Mainstream as they are.
In these stories, I met Ida Mae Gladney who picked cotton her entire childhood until her family ran in fear to Chicago; George Starling, whose life was in the citrus groves until he escaped to Harlem and became a Pullman Porter on the NY-FL line; Robert Foster of Louisiana, who dreamed of Los Angeles his entire life and found that racism followed wherever he went; John Hulett, who faced death everyday to organize in his county, and then became part of the machine he despised; Annie Bell Scott, Jeff Davis, and others, sharecroppers evicted from the land for trying to register to vote; Roosevelt Thompson, murdered for demanding wages he had earned.
I read of multi-degreed Allison and Elizabeth Davis, death-defying (most literally) black researchers of the Jim Crow south, whose stellar and valuable work would be overshadowed for the ages by lesser work from white researchers with greater assumed credibility and better access to the stories they needed to tell.
I learned that, in the search for the bodies of the three well-known civil rights workers (Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner), countless black bodies were pulled from the Mississippi River.
I read of white violence in every era, terror far beyond anything I thought I knew — physical, emotional, spiritual, legislative, economic, by government, by individuals and mobs — and the ways violence was used to keep people “in their place” for 400 years and counting, that place determined, of course, by white people, many of whom would not then or now consider themselves “white supremacists.” Violence to prevent economic well-being or democratic participation or even escape, as the debt peonage system of sharecropping meant there was always one more year due on the note, no matter how hard you worked, because white people were in charge of the bookkeeping. I read of cops in every era who looked the other way, or contributed to the melee, just as they do now.
And I read the ongoing white denial in Kuhn’s unconvincing assertions that race was not a primary factor in working class rejection of the Democratic party in the 1970s, that Black workers mid-century were near the top of the blue collar wage scale, that white flight wasn’t about race, and that unions were mostly white because all white workers had to pass to their children was a union card.
I also read about church, which didn’t fare much better.
“It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes and hypocrisies of the Christian Church,” wrote Baldwin, himself raised in the church, raised to preach in the church, raised to believe that some kind of salvation comes from church, salvation perhaps equal to being treated as white people are treated — justly, as people of value in the world.
“When I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus…”
The Church doesn’t speak the truth. Imbued with power, embedded with empire, we Christians — especially white Christians — hold perqs and privileges, power of money and position. “The occupants of power are, of necessity, always seeking out versions of truth that are compatible with present power arrangements,” wrote Brueggemann, and we do. Which may shed light on the unconscionable Evangelical support of the Current Occupant. The “mainline” church, to my dismay, dutifully holds the uncontested center line, as if the center line were somehow a yellow brick road to the reign of God. It is not.
White people cling to the myths of American exceptionalism, American individualism, American Christianity, and we fail to notice the reality that is right in front of us: the system that still works as it was developed — as the means of amassing White capital, still on stolen land, still with stolen labor.
We must choose between competing truths, wrote Brueggemann, as he invoked Jesus, Moses, Elisha, Paul and even Marx (surely there were women he could’ve also invoked, alas); we are appropriately faithful when we contest the truth that is told by power, when we subvert the myth that is the national religion, the capitalistic model, the corporate agenda.
Little of this was new information, but reading the Black writers (and their frequent references to South Carolina, the state that brought me up) caused a different anguish than I’ve felt before, for a history I was never taught. Reading this stark history alongside Kuhn’s massive denial required internal conversations. Subversion, I realized, requires simply that we tell a different story — our own and the stories of others.
Telling a different story requires reconsidering the things we treasure, including our national monuments, hence the battle over America’s story and the monuments now under “attack” by us who want our historical tellings to be honest.
Wilkerson in Caste notes the lack of congruity between German disposition of Nazism and the aftermath of Confederate rebellion in our nation’s history. While there are statues across the American South of Robert E Lee, the symbolic head of the Confederacy and the god of the Lost Cause, there are no statues to Nazis anywhere in Germany. After it became apparent that the end was near for Hitler and he killed himself, “his body was unceremoniously dragged to a nearby lot and set afire.” The site of his bunker is not a memorial; it was intentionally paved into a parking lot to dissuade latter day worshippers.
Telling a different story would certainly mean arguing out loud, which I did with Kuhn’s tome, as he tried to make the case that the blue collar move to the GOP wasn’t about race (and he didn’t even mention the “war on drugs” as Nixon’s intentional act to disrupt black communities or the race-baiting Southern Strategy).
Telling the truth would frankly mean challenging the ghost of McCarthy and the (current and former) American robber barons who tell us leftists are evil.
White Americans have not tried very hard to understand what Black Americans feel — and have had nearly zero concern for their material needs or the human desire for dignity and autonomy. We have put them through hell at every turn, from 1619 right up through today’s lunchtime news (that the local university warned folks to be on the lookout for a black man in a red hoodie sought by police — on an university campus with 10 percent black enrollment, in an urban core with perhaps 50 percent black population, WHERE THE SCHOOL COLOR IS RED, putting every black man in the area on high alert and subject to harassment, assault, arrest or worse), and we continue to assign blame for their circumstances on them.
We are ridiculous. We celebrate Lee and Jackson and Davis and Forrest, and Reagan and Nixon and Clinton, among so many others, while vilifying Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, co-opting Martin Luther King, and appropriating John Lewis’ “good trouble” to mean anything we want (like Louisville’s mayor calling for “good trouble,” while outnumbering protesters with police in riot gear; or like a friend who used it the week after Lewis’ funeral to mean trying new recipes) even while we pretend Trump is an anomaly and continue our racist ways.
And our racist ways are incredibly durable, it turns out. Keeping people in their place is the great American pastime, with policing happening in board rooms, HR departments, classrooms, college admissions offices, in churches, in legislatures, in doctors’ offices, and by actual policing — with ever-more-militarized forces in our streets to allay white fears by whatever means necessary. White fears allayed, while, writes Wilkerson, Black people in “each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price, whichever they chose.”
The unrest in our streets, the dis-ease in our churches and communities tell us something is afoot.
“Those who willfully refuse to remember (the past) become moral monsters,” wrote Glaude, and I fear we are already there. Glaude calls for passage of HR 40, formation of a truth and reconciliation commission, a way, he says, to “finally get out in the open all of that gunk that mildews in our national cellar.”
But Glaude decries what Kuhn would surely recommend: the impulse to try to lure Trump voters over to the Biden ticket. “We cannot give in to these people,” Glaude writes. “We know what the result will be, and I cannot watch another generation of black children bear the burden of that choice.”
We don’t often talk that way in church, but this is no time for a so-called “middle way.” These times call for nothing less than turning around, (for which the church conveniently has a word: repentance). Such subversion is really not all that hard, it turns out. It just requires that we tell a different story — our own stories and the stories of others — and that we call a lie a lie.
So, my next work, already begun, is what I’m calling a “memoir of race,” a reflection on my upbringing and awakening (way too late) to realities of racial injustice. I am not writing it to share; I’m writing it as my own attempt at truth, the reconciliation of my life and faith. I invite you to tend to your own, even as we tend the national reckoning.
Moses confronted Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” If we white Christians commiserate with Moses and the Israelites, perhaps it’s because we’ve not yet admitted that we are pharaoh, we are the captors. Perhaps, then, our work needs to be a bit less Moses and a bit more Baldwin: “Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”
Kuhn, though clearly intending something other, asked prophetically: “How do you tell children about a national sickness, or about the way that symbols of one ideal can be subverted to becomes symbols of something entirely different?”
And Baldwin replies: “If you’re scared to death, walk toward it.”
Else we succumb to madness or resignation. Neither is a Jesus-worthy option.