Black Boys Celebrated at Book Festival

by Cynthia M. Pease

Book festival season is well upon us, and they are going online.

Somehow I’ve tapped into book festivals I didn’t even know about, such as the Decatur (GA) Book Festival. It runs through the month of September, and it didn’t take me long to sign up for three very different author interviews.

The first was Saturday morning and featured author Derrick D. Barnes (www.derrickdbarnes.com) and illustrator Gordon C. James (www.gordoncjames.com) and their latest collaboration, I Am Every Good Thing.

As the father of four sons, Mr. Barnes said he wrote I Am Every Good Thing to “tap into all Black boys’ experiences, from the Midwest to the inner city,” and let them know there is nowhere they don’t belong and no dreams they can’t pursue.  “I was thinking about how restricted people were. I wanted Black boys to have a feeling of freedom to go everywhere and be anything.”

Gordon C. James is an illustrator of children’s books as well as a fine arts painter.

Mr. James drew a picture of his son Gabriel for the cover illustration. He too has thought much about the need to let young Black boys be children and to let readers know that they are just like any other children. The book is dedicated to seven unarmed Black boys murdered by adults, in most cases the police, who saw them as threatening rather than as boys.

Among the significant pages and illustrations in the book is one showing a group of boys swimming. There are two factors here: One is the memory of segregated community pools where the pools would be completely drained and “cleansed” after the Black children were in them. The other is the trope that Black people can’t swim.

Of course, in a world where Black boys (and girls, I’m sure) have been restricted in their movements, there were many who couldn’t swim. So the delightful illustration of happy faces taking the plunge includes an older boy wearing floaties. Mr. James said his intention was to show that no one should be ashamed if they’re just learning to swim no matter what their age.

Derrick D. Barnes is the award-winning author of many books for children.

The pair’s earlier book Crown is a poetic sketch about “how great our sons look when they come from the barbershop,” said Mr. Barnes. It shows a very proud and confident young boy sporting his first haircut. He has a look on his face that you would love to see on every child, one of knowing he or she is every bright thing and that the world will give that child the right to prove it.

I can’t tell you exactly why the presentation made me so happy and put peace in my soul. Perhaps it was the generosity of the author and illustrator. Mr. Barnes read I Am Every Good Thing and showed the illustrations as Mr. James worked on a charcoal drawing of a boy. Maybe it was being one of 180 attendees including a diverse group of women (lots of grandmothers) who were sharing their delighted comments in the “chat.” Maybe it was that, even as they talked about uplifting their own precious Black boys, they spoke as if they wanted to uplift me and the rest of the audience somehow by showing us how society should and can be.

The pair is currently working on a novel with the tentative title Do It for the People, about Black athletes who have protested injustice. Mr. Barnes also has a book coming out next June about Tommy Smith, one of the two Olympians in the iconic photograph showing their firsts raised.

Both men have worked with other authors and other illustrators, so do check out their websites. If you live in Charlotte, NC, where they both live, you can probably find them presenting at a library there. Otherwise, go to the Boston Book Festival website (www.bostonbookfest.org) and check out when their appearance will be in October.

The National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress, is also coming up from September 25 to 27; go to the LoC for more information.

Father of the Underground Railroad

You don’t have to read far into William Still’s The Underground Railroad to see exploded the myth that white folks freed the slaves.

Yes, white abolitionists helped the cause enormously after escaped slaves had made the first harrowing step toward freedom. And who else but white abolitionists could have gotten the Empancipation passed.

BUT – and this is a very large BUT – Still’s meticulous narratives that he recorded as escaped slaves passed through his Philadelphia office are a testament to the urgency and agency of enslaved people themselves to gain their freedom and the risks they took to do so.

This man, this William Still, who coined the term Underground Railroad, started as a janitor for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia and eventually became its chief clerk and also chairman of the Vigilant Committee of the Pennsylvania Underground Railroad.

I had no idea that The Underground Railroad Records ran to more than 1,000 pages, but it makes sense as 1,000 narratives and letters are represented in its pages. It can be difficult to read because so many of those escaped had to leave children, spouses, parents, and siblings behind.

William Still’s own birth family is a case in point. His parents were enslaved on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, out of which came also the sainted Harriet Tubman. His father, Levin Steel, was able to buy his freedom and make his way to New Jersey. His mother, Sidney, escaped with the four oldest children, but they were caught and returned to enslavement. She tried again, this time just bring two daughters and leaving her sons behind. Those sons were sold down to Mississippi and eventually to Alabama, where the younger son died in bondage.

William was born free in New Jersey when his father changed their surname to Still. Sidney changed her name to Charity. Years later, when William was working for the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, he interviewed an escaped slave named Peter. Peter was his oldest brother. It took numerous hazardous attempts to escape; he was caught and returned to slavery several times. Even after a successful escape, he returned to Alabama to try to free his wife. That too took several attempts and cost the life of a white man named Seth Concklin who had actually gotten Peter’s wife and children as far as Vincennes, Indiana, before they were all caught. Concklin’s body was found in a river chained and beaten.

The ways in which enslaved people managed to free themselves are as diverse and canny as the people themselves. Many were able to buy passage on a steamboat but were forced to hide in the engine area for days on end. People found themselves wedged into a small, hot, fetid, noisy area and just when they thought they couldn’t endure more, learned that a storm had caused the boat to go off-course and it would take longer than expected.

One of the most famous escapes, about which children’s books have been written, is that of Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself to Philadelphia. With the aid of a friend he was packed up in a crate and off he went. He didn’t think he’d survive it, but he did.

And of course there is that woman named Harriet, who returned to Maryland over and over again and brought 60 people out of their captivity. Anyone who went with her had to be unimaginably brave because she made it clear that if someone didn’t want to continue, they would die by her own gun. She couldn’t afford to have anyone caught and tortured into revealing information about her network.

William Still left a remarkable legacy, not only in his narratives, but also through his children with his wife Letitia. Caroline Matilda Still was one of the African-American women doctors I the country. William Wilberforce Still became a prominent lawyer. Robert George Still was a journalist, and Frances Ellen Still was an educator.

William Still lobbied for eight years to successfully desegregate Philadelphia’s public transportation. He organized a YMCA for Black children, participated in the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a founding member of a church, and helped establish a mission school.

When he died in 1902 at the age of 81, The New York Times hailed him as the Father of the Underground Railroad.

Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who was hanged by the Nazis for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, has been much on my mind since we learned in 2018 of concentration camps for Immigrants.

In the last six months, I have often whispered his name when learning of new depredations by the administration that have cost more than 150,000 American lives. Since the end of May, of course, Bonhoeffer has been on my mind daily.

Last night, I embarked on a four-month study of Christian Ethics and Racism offered by Bexley Seabury Theological Seminary and using as a main text Reggie Williams’s book, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. Though written in 2014, it has much to teach us today.

Dr. Williams’s thesis is that Bonhoeffer would never have been hanged at Flossburg Prison in April 1945 if not for his meeting Black Jesus in the culture of Harlem and particularly at the Abyssinian Baptist Temple under the tutelage of the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. Harlem is a short walk up the street from Union Theological Seminary, where Bonhoeffer was a Sloane scholar in 1930-31.

I’ve read some of Bonhoeffer’s books over the years and waded through a very long biography by Eric Metaxas. If not for Dr. Williams, though, I would not know that before Bonhoeffer’s experiences in Harlem, he himself had begun to take on the nationalist fervor of post-World War I Germany.

For example, writes Dr. Williams, ”Bonhoeffer’s third lecture [to ex-pat Germans in Spain] , entitled ‘Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,’ emphasized German patriotic discipleship, with Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on loyalty to the superior German peoples, or Vὅlker:”

Then he quotes Bonhoeffer himself: “Should not a Volk experiencing God’s call on its own life in its own youth and in its own strength, should not such a people be allowed to follow that call, even if it disregards the lives of other people?” The emphasis is mine.

To say this was a shock to me is putting it mildly. How was it that years of book study groups and a 1,000+-page biography never mentioned this?

When I’d calmed down, I thought of the parallels of Germany in that era with the Confederate States post-Civil War. Germany was in a shambles after World War I. Instead of searching its national conscience to reflect on its own responsibility and what it had reaped from its own bellicosity, though, the country doubled down on its nationalism. Nationalism is based on looking out for number one and to hell with the “other.” With the rise of uber-nationalism in the form of Hitler and the Nazi Party, the majority of German citizens were easily persuaded that the others in their midst, the Jews, the Romas, the gays, the developmentally disabled, could be erased from the Fatherland.

Since the South had already decided that those they had enslaved were subhuman, it wasn’t difficult for people to be reconciled to the now freed slaves being lynched after the First Reconstruction failed. Even the “well-meaning whites” that Howard Thurman describes in The Luminous Darkness weren’t moved to go outside of the pattern of Jim Crow laws. Tragically, the Great Migration unveiled the hidden bigotry of the North and so up to this present day we see physical and cultural lynchings in all parts of the country.

Learning about Black Jesus transformed Bonhoeffer’s earlier theology from one that sees God as favoring certain groups of people to a God who, by the Cross and by the Incarnation, endows all people with the mystical body of the Christ. A suffering Black Jesus is the Cosmic Christ that calls out to suffering people of all faiths and traditions or no faith at all. The incarnational Jesus of the Gospels reaches out only to the oppressed and/or marginalized, really. He does not minister to the Pharisees or the other elites, but to the peasants held in thrall by Caesar’s yoke.

It was the Black Jesus that opened Bonhoeffer’s eyes to the pure evil of Hitler’s progression to the Final Solution. To say that what he had learned also brought him to a place where he would face the fires of Hell to rid the world of that pure evil may seem an anomaly, but we know that it did.

Harlem’s Black Jesus gave Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators the strength to draw a line in the sand.

Hmmmm.

Note: The featured image is a painting by Harlem Renaissance painter William H. Johnson

My John Lewis

Though I use the word “my,” this is not about me but about the extraordinary human being John Lewis was.

When I first went to the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, I was more than excited to see that Mr. Lewis would be one of the featured authors because March #1 came out that year.

My sister had been going for years when the Festival was held on the Mall. This was the first year it would be held in the Walter Washington Conference Center.

I posted on Facebook that I was determined to meet Mr. Lewis. Sally, my sister, laughed and said, “Do you know how many people there will be at this event? There’s no chance you’ll meet him.”

I didn’t exactly stalk him, but I made sure I would be scoping out the area around the ballroom where he would be speaking at least a half-hour before hand.

As I trotted up the final staircase, I just happened to look to my right and there was Mr. Lewis surrounded by young people from his district!

I joined them, trying to fit in despite my having at least 40 years on any of them and, in most cases, being much shorter than anyone else – except Mr. Lewis.

I finally made my move and threw my cellphone to one of the young people and asked them to take a picture of me and Mr. Lewis. By then I had no idea what to say to him, until I blurted out, “Mr. Lewis, I thank God for the day you were born!”

With a sort of sigh, he threw his arms around me and hugged me in the most beautiful embrace. I would say I had been touched by an angel, but in fact, according to Time Magazine, I was being hugged by a saint.

The magazine called Mr. Lewis a living saint in the 1960s. It was not a casual comment in an article, but a carefully thought-out homage to a very young man in his 20s. Can you imagine having to live up to that? And yet he did.

Recently, on my once-a-week return from the grocery store, I noticed a billboard with giant figures of meerkats. It was an advertisement for a pest control company. My very first reaction was to say aloud to myself, “They’re not the pests; we are.” How much destruction and violence and horror have we humans brought to this beautiful creation that the Bible says we are stewards of? Genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” hate crimes, out-of-control wars and human-caused famines, babies in cages, the crimes of humankind are so many.

And yet. And yet, there is John Lewis. There is Elijah Cummings. There is CT Vivian and MLK Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer and Oskar Schindler and Elie Wiesel and Abraham Heschel and Howard Thurman and more who spent their lives, and risked their lives, to show us that yes, there are better angels of our natures out there.

I heard historian Jon Meacham, who wrote a biography of Mr. Lewis, say twice over the weekend that, though he could not agree with him, Mr. Lewis truly believed that God’s kingdom could come on earth as it is in heaven. Since Jesus told us this was so, many Christians still don’t believe it. It’s only in recent years that I began to understand the profundity of what Jesus said and to believe it with my whole heart.

Mr. Lewis’s extraordinary life was a living out of the desire to bring the Kingdom of God to earth. As people contemplate who will carry the torch farther, I say it is up to each and every one of us to fight the good fight every day to bring God’s commonwealth of peace and freedom to our fragile island home, this blue marble that spins around the sun.

To repeat Mr. Lewis’s words, “If not now, when?”

Breath of Life or Death?

Three years ago, I preached on Pentecost Sunday at my church.

In the week preceding that Sunday, a terrorist attack in London wounded or killed some 35 people; at least 90 women and children died in a terrorist attack in Kabul and several more killed at a funeral; two men were stabbed to death by a white supremacist in Oregon for defending young Muslim women, and African-American college student Richard Collins III was fatally stabbed by a white supremacist on his college campus.

And once again, in the week before Pentecost, George Floyd’s breath was quite literally taken from him in a brazen murder committed by police.

Many commentators have noted the tragic relationship between those who are dying of COVID-19 who cannot breathe and Mr. Floyd’s death by asphyxiation. The vast majority of the nearly 110,000 citizens who have died would not have died if not for the criminally inept non-action of the so-called president. Mr. Floyd need not have died either, but for the criminally inept policing of the Minneapolis police.

For many priests and pastors, the other tragic irony is that Pentecost is a celebration of the giving of holy breath to the disciples, which turned them into apostles.

And even more ironic, tongues of flame appeared above their heads in the room in which they had been hiding. This emboldened Peter to address the crowd who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Shavuot, and as he did, everyone in the crowd, no matter what language they spoke, could HEAR and UNDERSTAND each other.

In the Greek, the Holy Spirit is called “pneuma,” which literally means breath. It came in the form of a great wind, which rushed through the dwelling, clearing away the disciples’ fear and anxiety about when the advocate that Jesus had promised was going to come.

In our 2020 case, wind created by military helicopters hovering over protestors brought down branches that hit some of them and drowned out their pleas for understanding that black lives matter.

It also deafened the cowardly General Mark Milley, who strutted around Washington, DC, in his fatigues checking on his “soldiers” when, in effect, martial law was imposed on the city this week. Of all people, he should have known best about Posse Comitatis Law, which forbids the US Army and Air Force from acts of war on US soil.

And here is yet another tragic irony in this most devastating week. The Law of Posse Comitatis was signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878, supposedly at the “end of Reconstruction.” In fact, Reconstruction was nipped in the bud because the law gave an easy out to secessionist states from having to be held accountable for slavery and the post-Civil War uprising of vigilante groups not just limited to the Ku Klux Klan. President US Grant had allowed a military presence in the South and had virtually destroyed the Klan and its ilk. Hayes was elected as Southerners who had signed the oath of allegiance to the Union were regaining political offices and influence.

So a law that helped to re-create the Ku Klux Klan and other “night riders” and ushered in the Jim Crow era, which still has not ended, is now being breached to quell the descendants of those newly freed people who were in effect re-enslaved when Reconstruction failed.

For Christians, Pentecost symbolizes a holding to account of those in the Jesus Movement to follow  Jesus’s words and actions to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth by raising up the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, binding the wounds of the soul-sick and the physically sick, and living in communion with one another by acknowledging all of us as brothers and sisters.

But on the day after Pentecost, the wannabe dictator in the White House declared war on all of us and then defaced a church by going into, taking a Bible and using it for a photo opportunity.

Lamentation for George Floyd

White men and women have thought of black bodies for centuries as something they can do what they will with.

Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the 13^th Amendment nor the Voting Rights Act nor the institution of a category of felonies called hate crimes has changed this.

Black bodies have only been good for making wealth off of or using as scapegoats for white rage.

How long, O Lord, how long?

The murder of George Floyd was committed in plain sight; the four cops knew exactly what they are were doing. They intended to kill him and they did, right out in public. How can we breathe when he couldn’t?

How long, O Lord, how long?

I fear the pandemic of white supremacy more, a great, great deal more, than I fear COVID-19, though for black bodies, both are methods of genocide.

How long, O Lord, how long?

I woke up today with such a weight of anger, grief, and despair that I could barely move. Prayer time didn’t help. All I wanted to do was post to white policeman, “Keep your fucking hands off black bodies.”

How long, O Lord, how long?

The list of names has gotten so long, we could fill a Vietnam Memorial with them. George, Amadou, Philando, Oscar, Jamal, John, Sandra, Ahmaud, Breona, Emmet, Jordan, Eric, Jimmie Lee, and hundreds of others whose names are recorded at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

This list doesn’t even include the thousands of black bodies who have been killed or neglected in prisons.

How long, O Lord, how long?

When Saul sent men to kill David, David wrote Psalm 59 in lament. When I read verses 1-7 now, I hear the voices of all the black bodies crying from their graves.

59 Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;
protect me from those who rise up against me;

²  deliver me from those who work evil,
and save me from bloodthirsty men.

³  For behold, they lie in wait for my life;
fierce men stir up strife against me.
For no transgression or sin of mine, O LORD, 

⁴  for no fault of mine, they run and make ready.
Awake, come to meet me, and see!

⁵  You,  LORD God of hosts, are God of Israel.
Rouse yourself to punish all the nations;
spare none of those who treacherously plot evil.

⁶  Each evening they come back,
howling like dogs
and prowling about the city.

Cruelty Has Always Been the Point

I have a friend who has said many times over the past four years that, for Donald Trump, the cruelty of his actions is the point.

I’ve agreed with her. With his most recent heinous actions, I have come to realize that this makes him an All-American President. Since white Europeans first stepped onto these shores, cruelty has always been the point.

We’ve come up with a lot of euphemisms – exploration, discovery, religious freedom – but those are excuses.

From outright genocide of indigenous peoples to kidnapping human beings in order to enslave them to broken treaties to “Indian schools” to Jim Crow and lynching to voter suppression to mass incarceration to murder of young African-American men and women to disappearances of indigenous women, cruelty has always been the point in the building of what we call the United States of America.

When Imperialism went big time under Theodore Roosevelt, new methods of cruelty were perpetrated upon human beings in their own sovereign countries. The unleashing of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the horror to a new level. Concentration camps for children separated from their parents are the latest manifestation of cruelty, which was stated early on in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. There is nothing that has not been done in this country or in this country’s name that can’t be compared with anything that another country has done against the US.

Trump is the first President who hasn’t cloaked his cruelty; it’s right out there for all to see, and he has surrounded himself with people who protect and defend him either because they agree with him or haven’t the guts to risk losing their jobs.

I will never forget the days after White Supremacists hijacked Charlottesville, VA, spewing filth and committing murder along the way. White liberals were crying out, “This is not who we are!” African-American activists cried back, “This is exactly who we are.” I first came across it in a tweet from Bree Newsome, the woman who climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina Statehouse and took down the Confederate flag. Her words had such a ring of truth that the impact of what she said caused a visceral reaction in me.

I had hoped to end with some comforting words, but they would seem blasphemous in such a perilous time. If we manage to get rid of the mad man at the head of state, we will have to start at ground zero to remake this country into the one that all of those who have been oppressed by it deserve. A plan for reparations and restoration of land will need to be made. We will need a court of truth and reconciliation such as South Africa had when apartheid ended. I see no other way forward.

 

 

William Parker and the Christiana Riot of 1851

It is fascinating to me how the Divine conspires to lead me on a path that takes me to related interests.

I’m taking a course on Movement Theology through the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary. The Kairos Center’s director is the Rev. Liz Theoharis, who is also co-leader with the Rev. William J. Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign. I saw them both in New Hampshire recently at a march and rally.

The course is free and can be taken through Zoom, and it very obviously contains all the themes of the Poor People’s Campaign.

In this week’s reading is part of the Narrative of William Parker. He was an enslaved orphan in Maryland, frustratingly close to free states. He saw friends’ families split up by being sold away and was determined that would not happen to him. At the age of 19 or so (he never knew his exact age), William and his brother made a break for Pennsylvania. Traveling northeast, they spent many nights hiding from patrols. Even after reaching York, they and other fugitives had to beware of slaveowners and bounty hunters who, because of the federal Fugitive Slave Law, could go into a free state with impunity and kidnap back those making their way to freedom. William pushed farther northeast nearer to Philadelphia, where the Underground Railroad flourished.

William had met Frederick Douglass when both were still enslaved and now got to hear and be further inspired by the great man. William Lloyd Garretson was also influential on the young William Parker, and he formed a band of the newly free that did all it could to disrupt the kidnappings and defy the Fugitive Slave Law. They were not afraid to fight back.

He settled in Christiana, about halfway between Philadelphia and Lancaster in an area where there were Quaker allies. Still, Maryland’s nearness to Pennsylvania was always a factor in marauding slaver-takers being in the area.

Parker and his band were involved in many skirmishes to keep refugees, and themselves, from being kidnapped. The most notorious such took place at his home in Christiana, where he had living with him an enslaved man who had worked on the plantation of one Edward Gorsuch in Maryland.

In September 1851, Gorsuch had himself and his sons and friends deputized to be able to arrest the refugee and bring him back. The posse was given information that the man they were looking for was hiding in William’s house and surrounded the house at daybreak. Gorsuch and a ruthless kidnapper named Kline made themselves known to Parker and a parley ensued in which Parker told them that if they entered his house, they would not leave it again.

Within two hours, William’s band of men and other neighbors, including two Quakers, confronted Gorsuch’s posse and a shoot-out occurred that left Gorsuch dead and one of his sons severely wounded. It is said that the Christiana incident put an end to slaveholders trying to enact the Fugitive Slave Law in Pennsylvania.

Nevertheless, William and his wife and children made their ways separately to Toronto and thence to the Buxton Settlement near Chatham, where many other formerly enslaved people had settled.

As for Edward Gorsuch, there is a website called Officer Down Memorial Page. One page honors him for his “sacrifice,” i.e., getting killed while trying to kidnap a black man he had enslaved. From 2010 to 2015, seven memorial statements were left on his entry on the website thanking him for his service. All are anonymous, though one notes it was left by someone who works for the Border Patrol. Since there is no information about why he was considered an officer of the law, for two days, so it would be interesting to know whether the people who made the comments have any idea who he really was.

When I saw the name “Gorsuch,” I immediately thought of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose appointment to SCOTUS came after Mitch McConnell ensured that Merrick Garland’s appointment would never happen.

Neil Gorsuch grew up in Colorado, far from Maryland, and I could find no definitive connection between them. However, Libertarian blogger Will Griff posited in 2017 that the two must be connected because of the unusual name.

And while Gorsuch’s entry on the ODMP page says that his “watch” ended in 1851 (i.e. his death occurred), I think it is much important to note that William Parker’s much longer and heroic watch ended in 1891 at the apparent age of 70 at his home in Canada.

He Was Blinded, But Justice Was Not Blind

If you read the New York Times’ 1619 Project, you would have seen an old photograph of Sergeant Isaac Woodard and his mother taken in 1946.

The sunglasses Sergeant Woodard is wearing will lead you to believe that he is blind, even before you read the caption.

Within five hours of returning stateside from WWII, Sergeant Woodard was beaten by Police Chief Lynnwood Shull of Batesburg, SC, and then blinded by the chief’s forcing his blackjack into each of the sergeant’s eyes.

His crime? He asked the bus driver if he could get off at the next stop to use the bathroom. The bus driver cursed him and he cursed the driver back.

Sergeant Woodard never did receive judicial justice for the beating despite three trials over several years. He was, however, the match that lit the flame that would lead in a direct line to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Judge Waring

Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring focuses mainly on Judge Waring’s evolution from fair, decent federal judge in South Carolina to fiery civil rights proponent.

However, had Sergeant Woodard not told a bus driver on a fateful night in 1946, “I am a man, just like you!”, that evolution might never have happened.

Walter White, executive director of the NAACP at the time, heard about Sergeant Waring’s beating and was determined to bring it to the widest public attention possible. He enlisted the aid of Orson Welles, who did a radio show about it that drew widespread outrage in the North. Woody Guthrie wrote a song called “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” It was one of the few cases where a lynching victim (remember, lynching did not require ropes, but was any act of violence toward an African-American) actually survived.

A show trial had been held locally that of course exonerated Shull. President Truman learned about the beating and was concerned, but until White personally described it to the President, Truman had no idea of the outrages that were being committed in the South. He pressed his Justice Department to hold a federal trial.

Though the FBI had investigated the beating, it was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the local agents could have cared less. The federal prosecutors also did not want to be involved and the prosecutor in charge of the trial was half-hearted at best and negligent at worst. Politicians and elected officials in South Carolina were outraged that the federal government was getting involved and did their best to stop it.

They didn’t stop it, but with an all-white jury and a lackluster prosecution, Shull was found not guilty.

Judge Waring presided over the trial and was dismayed by its outcome. Around the same time, he divorced his wife and remarried. His second wife was a Northerner. Waring had been at best a gradualist, believing that fairer treatment of African-Americans was something to work toward in the future. By the time more cases of racial inequality came to his court, he and his wife began seriously studying the whole history and present state of civil rights, and he was soon considered an activist judge.

Among cases that came before him and brought him the wrath of his fellow South Carolinians was one that involved the state’s Democratic Party disallowing African-Americans to vote in primaries without signing a pledge that they would not thereby consider themselves equal to whites.

The country at that time was still using the SCOTUS precedent of Plessy vs. Ferguson in civil rights cases. This was the argument that schools, public accommodations, etc. were to be “separate but equal” for African-Americans. We know that in fact, everything was separate AND UNEQUAL.

Judge Waring began seeking out civil rights cases to advance on his docket that would challenge using Plessy v. Ferguson and move on to segregation itself being unequal.  His first attempt was in a case regarding the unequal pay of teachers in African-American schools compared with white schools. His second attempt was in a case regarding the poor conditions of the African-American schools. The prosecution was blindsided, however, by the school district’s raising a bond to update the African-American schools rather than integrate the students in the white schools.

It was Briggs v. Elliott that was the landmark case connected directly to Brown and was consolidated in Brown. Thurgood Marshall prosecuted the case for the NAACP before a three-judge panel that included Judge Waring. Though the case was lost, Judge Waring’s dissenting opinion established the “Per Se” argument, that segregation in and of itself was per se unequal. The case was eventually consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education.

Briggs v. Elliott also was the first time that sociologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s research was introduced for the prosecution. That research showed that African-American children’s developmental status was harmed by segregation. They used black and white dolls and asked children which doll was “good” and which doll was “bad.” The majority of black children chose the white doll as “good,”  indicating that they had internalized the oppression of segregation and racism.

All of the plaintiffs in Waring’s civil right cases faced the backlash of losing jobs, being threatened, and other reprisals. After a cross was burned on their lawn, rocks thrown through their windows, and innumerable threats, the Warings themselves left South Carolina and moved to New York City. The Warings had become social pariahs in Charleston because of their friendships with the NAACP’s  Walter White and Thurgood Marshall; in New York, they met and earned the admiration of many other civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The judge retired but edited opinions and arguments for civil rights trials.

Author Richard Gergel is also a judge and also known for his civil rights activism in South Carolina. He is best known for being the presiding judge in Dylann Roof’s trial for the murder of nine blessed souls at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston. His book is compelling and dense with facts of the state of civil rights during this period.

What happened to Sergeant Woodard? In the immediate time after he was blinded, he received no training in how to navigate life. His Army pension did not include disability payments because  he had already been demobbed. His wife left him and he was forced to move to the Bronx to live with his parents.

The NAACP did much to help him, raising funds by taking him on a speaking tour.  He received half of the proceeds. Some of that money was invested in an annuity for him and some was used, unwisely, to buy a multi-family rental property where he and his family could live and also receive an income. That property was taken by the state of New York by eminent domain in the 1950s to build new housing.

Sergeant Woodard fought for and was finally granted full disability payments from the Army. He was finally able to buy a home for his aging parents, the cousin who was his caregiver, and two sons from a relationship. He owned a business and professed in his later years that he was a happy, contented man. He died in 1992.

Let there be no mistake: This is not a story about “white saviors.” If any savior is to be found, it is Sergeant Woodard for standing up for himself, enduring grueling trials in a debilitated physical state, and being the source of Judge Waring’s and President Truman’s epiphanies that racial justice was not something that should wait for an undetermined time in the future; the time had come. Indeed, it was long overdue.

The sad realization at the end of the book is that racial justice is still overdue, and I’ve no doubt that underscoring this tragic fact was part of Judge Gergel’s motivation in writing Unexampled Courage.

Racism is a white problem, and only by white people educating themselves and putting themselves in positions where such epiphanies as Judge Waring had can be experienced will racism be overcome.

May it be so.

 

Not Who We Are, But Who We Might Be

I learned the lesson well after the Charlottesville fascist gathering that left Heather Heyer dead.

Many people’s responses on social media and in person was, “This is not who we are!”

I think it was Bree Newsome, the intrepid activist who took down the Confederate Flag at the South Carolina Statehouse, who first said, “This is exactly who you are, America, and any African-American can tell you that.”

And of course, she was right, and white America has continued to prove it.

One of the things that impressed me most about the four Congresswomen whom Trump attacked was the last thing each said in her response.

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley each said they were working to make America a place that everyone, no exceptions, deserves to inhabit.

Not the America we once were, because we never were a non-racist country. Not the America that should be great again, because that means the white supremacist America that has led us to this turning point.

An America that cares about all its people, whether they were born here or not.

An America that makes reparations for the heinous crimes committed against indigenous and enslaved human beings.

An America that embraces all colors, all religions, and all ethnicities.

An America that teaches its children the truth about its past and its plans for the present and its hopes for the future.

An America that hews to a moral budget as created by the Poor Peoples Campaign and truly reflects what we value.

An America that doesn’t blame the victimized for the situations that immoral policies have put them in.

An America that the Declaration of Independence and the prologue to the Constitution dreamed of, but has never been able to get right because of all those excluded from its promises.

An America that emphasizes community and interconnectedness over rugged individualism and ensuring the rights of all over Manifest Destiny and exceptionalism.

An America that listens more to the dreamers and visionaries and prophets in its midst as to the moguls and nabobs of corporations.

An America that allows people to apply for asylum, acknowledging that this is international law, not a privilege granted by the Department of Justice.

An America that lives by Micah 6:8, “He has told you, O man, what is good: Love mercy, act justly, and walk humbly with your God” rather than greed and the obsession of being a “superpower.”

An America we the people deserve.