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.

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.

Benjamin Lay: Abolition’s Prophet

When I hear people try to excuse historical acts of racism by saying, “That’s how people were then,” I get apoplectic. I think of people who throughout history have clearly demonstrated they knew right from wrong, no matter what the prevailing society was like.

Now I have another weapon in my arsenal: Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) of Abington Township, PA.

Thanks to Marcus Rediker, the general public can know more about this fierce warrior for emancipation through his book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became First Revolutionary Abolitionist.

In 1738, Benjamin Lay walked 20 miles to attend the annual Quaker’s Philadelphia meeting, according to Mr. Rediker. Keep in mind that it wasn’t until 1758 that the Quakers outlawed slave-holding among the brethren. Lay carried with him a hollowed-out book containing an animal bladder filled with red pokeberry juice. When it came his turn to speak,

“Throwing the overcoat aside, he spoke his prophecy: ‘Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.’ He raised the book above his head and plunged the sword through it. . . .He then splattered (the red juice) on the heads and bodies of the slave keepers.”

He was expelled from the meeting.

Lay was not a single-issue prophet, though. It wasn’t just his views on emancipation that caused people to disparage him. He truly believed and tried to bring forth a Utopia where everyone was equal and would live simply by growing their own food and making their own clothes and respecting nature. He himself lived in a cave, subsisting only on fruits and vegetables because of his belief in animal rights, and he refused to use anything that existed because of slave labor.

Mr. Rediker posits that Lay isn’t well known today because was not a “gentleman saint” like William Wilberforce, who led the British abolition movement. Lay was “wild and confrontational, militant and uncompromising.” Sounds like a great many prophets.

Being a little person as well as having a hunched back made people think he was “deformed in both body and mind.” It could be that his own “otherness” contributed to his strong feelings about slavery, but it is obvious that his main inspiration is from his understanding of Scripture and what was revealed to him.

According to Joe Lockard of the Antislavery Literature Project at Arizona State University, Lay also was known to perform what might be considered “guerilla” street theater to try to get people to confront the evil of slavery. He even kidnapped a fellow Quaker’s son to show the pain that enslaved families endured when slave-holders broke those families up.

The one book that Lay wrote, which was published by Benjamin Franklin, is available online at:  https://antislavery.eserver.org/religious/allslavekeepersfinal/allslavekeepersfinal The book is titled All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. It looks as if it will take some effort to read, but may be well worth the fortitude to understand Benjamin Lay’s devotion to the cause.

Lay must have felt well vindicated when the Society of Friends in Philadelphia did decide to discipline and/or turn slave-holders out of the community. He died a year later.

Mr. Rediker’s book is available in audible form as well as hard-cover and paperback. He is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film “Ghosts of Amistad” (Tony Buba, director), about the popular memory of the Amistad rebellion of 1839 in contemporary Sierra Leone.

An essay from his book appeared in The New York Times last year and the last paragraph is relevant to our times:

“In his time Lay may have been the most radical person on the planet. He helps us to understand what was politically and morally possible in the first half of the 18^th century – and what may be possible now. It is more than we think.”

Published At Last – Barracoon

Can you imagine being known as the last living African kidnapped by slavers and brought to the US 50 years after the outlawing of the slave trade?

Zora Neale Hurston, novelist, playwright, essayist, and anthropologist, did try to imagine, and her curiosity drove her to patiently tease out of Oluale Kossola (slave name Cudjo Lewis), the story of his ordeal.  When she first met Kossola and told him what she was hoping to learn, he said, “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and somebody say and callee my name and somebody sayn ‘Yeah, I know Kossola’,”

Part of the sadness of Hurston’s book, Barracoon, is that it was never published until this year, when it is so unlikely that anyone in West Africa would remember Kossola’s name. Several publishers refused it when she finished her last draft in the 1930s.

Kossola was a member of a sub-group of the West African Yoruba tribe. The US banned the slave trade in 1808, but people found a way to continue to smuggle enslaved people through the Middle Passage. A major supplier of slaves was the king of Dahomey, who acquired wealth and political dominance through the trade. Kidnapped Africans were held in bondage in barracoons (Spanish for barracks) along the coast, and Ouida (or Whydah) in Dahomey was a major shipping point.

It was there that, in 1860, Timothy Meaher and William Foster sailed the Clotilda to bring 110 lost souls to the “New World.” The 19-year-old Kossola had been captured in a raid on Bante; his family and most of the citizens were slaughtered outright. The young men were yoked and brought to the barracoons of Ouida.

Though Kossola at first expressed joy that Hurston wanted to know his story, in 1927 when she traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to meet him, he was often reluctant to talk to her. He was 86 years old, but his grief at never having been able to go home was still upon him. Some days she would bring peaches and watermelon as bait to get him to sit down with her; other days he would just ignore her presence and continue to garden or pursue other hobbies while she waited patiently.

Her persistence paid off. Reading Barracoon, one feels as if one knows this elderly man who has undergone so much pain, outliving his beloved wife and his sons and daughter. His voice is rendered perfectly, and you can hear him saying “you unnerstand me,” his oft-used interjection.

After emancipation, the Clotilda slaves had no way to earn the money to go home. And home didn’t exist anymore, though they couldn’t have known that. When they were kidnapped, their rest of their entire tribe was killed, and there was no Bante anymore.

So they re-created their home where they were, calling it Africatown (now Plateau). It was meant to be a place for only those born in Africa, but because of intermarriage among slaves there were many black people who were born in the United States as well. Renting land from their former owner until they could buy it, 11 families “created a community that embodied the ethos and traditions of their homeland,” writes editor Deborah G. Plant in her afterword.

Thank goodness this book has finally been published! Most memoirs of formerly enslaved people were born into the “peculiar institution.” To hear firsthand from someone who was actually born in Africa 200 years after the first enslaved people were brought here is to learn more about the horrible mechanics of slavery and how one little band of people created their own homeland in Alabama.

It also teaches about the persistence of memory and the longing for that place called home. This should be an important part of our national conversation about dismantling racism. I have recently seen people who consider themselves “progressive” basically say that African-Americans today have no right to say they are victims of slavery.

Yet, knowing one is descended from people who knew no other home than a slaveowner’s plantation does cause soul damage. Knowing that one’s ancestors were considered sub-human does cause psychic damage. Knowing that the whole history of white supremacy gives white people today a feeling that they the right to trample on the freedoms of African-Americans – whether they’re having a barbecue or mowing someone’s lawn or waiting for someone outside a store – yes, that is victimization. We can’t stop it until we own it

A Map of the World

As a bumbling, stumbling out-of-control toddler lurches his way across the world, knocking alliances and good will into the trash bin and trying to redraw the map of the world, people wonder how he can still be followed by any sane person, let alone be shown homage by the majority of the one group that’s supposed to keep him in check.

A quote from Oscar Wilde came to mind this week and I was introduced to another from Thoreau by my Facebook friend Christopher. I see similarities in them and also a diagnosis of what is wrong with those who continue to enable a narcissistic, greedy wannabe dictator.

Years ago, I saw a play by David Hare called “A Map of the World.” Hated the play but loved the title’s allusion: “Any map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.” Oscar Wilde

Then this from Thoreau: “Friends . . . they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.”

Both quotes are about vision and how one sees oneself in relation to the world. First, a person has to have a vision of the map of the world and then acknowledge the billions of other co-inhabitants of what the Book of Common Prayer calls “this fragile earth, our island home.”

How do people grow up thinking that they are the only people on earth who deserve any rights, any privileges, any chance of a fulfilling life? How do they grow up never, ever thinking about the needs of anyone else other than their closed community?

How is their curiosity so suppressed that they don’t ever wonder what it’s like to be an African kidnapped from her homeland and brought to a strange country where she must work and possibly (probably) be raped by someone who thinks he “owns” her?

How is their imagination so stifled that they cannot imagine what it was like to be a Vietnamese or Laotian or Cambodian peasant and suddenly find you’re the “enemy” to airplanes that drop bombs and napalm on your or murder you just because you happen to live where the “enemy” lives?

How did they never develop any sense of empathy that would allow them to imagine having their children kidnapped by the very people they thought would help them?

While “utopia” literally means “nowhere” (from Greek, uo – not and topos – place), it was coined by Sir Thomas More to mean a place where all are equal in social status, in economic status, and in political status, a Garden of Eden if you will. More himself, we know now, cared little for the equality of women, whom he scorned, and married only so that he wouldn’t burn in hell for having sexual thoughts and desires.

Still, More’s notion of Utopia lives on, and Wilde’s concern was that our map of the world ought to include a vision for that perfect place. Being gay, and being therefore a criminal who was sent to prison for being gay, Wilde would have had a vested interest in a place where homosexuality was not a crime.

So should we, and let’s include color of skin, religion, language, and ability in there.

As for Thoreau’s beautiful sentiment, shouldn’t we extend cherishing others’ hopes and being kind to other peoples’ dreams to everyone on this planet? Why limit our empathy? Who are we to say that anyone else should not have hopes that we respect and dreams that we do not trample on?

Only willful and determined and carefully cultivated ignorance could possibly account for people to think they are supreme and that anyone not like them is not to be regarded equally. By “ignorance,” I mean ignoring everyone else who does not look, act, or talk like them.

If their ignorance wasn’t so destructive, I might look for excuses why white supremacists grew up without a map of the world or the empathy to cherish other peoples’ hopes and dreams. But that ignorance is evil and deadly, and there is no excuse for it.

 

 

The Cross & The Lynching Tree

I didn’t know anything about James H. Cone until the day he died, April 28, 2018.

I was at a “Dismantling Racism” training in Georgia. His name was on the syllabus. When I went online at the end of the training, the first thing I saw was Dr. Cone’s obituary.

I subsequently learned that he was considered one of the fathers of Black Liberation Theology. It was recommended to me that I read his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011).

As the title suggests, Dr. Cone makes the case that “until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

Others have written about the nexus between Christianity and the avid way in which the oppressors’ religion was taken up by slaves. But Dr. Cone is the first I have come across to directly identify the broken body of a lynched person with the broken Christ on the cross.

He says that the cross has always been central to African-American worship because “the cross inverts the world’s value system” when it turns death into hope. Death doesn’t have the last word.

Enslaved blacks seized on the transcendent power of the cross; the cross is God’s critique of white supremacy, he claims.

This may seem like cold comfort at first, but for people whose lives were made to seem meaningless, the cross gave meaning to life and promised a life after death. And it did give hope. Dr. Cone quotes Richard Wright as saying, “Our churches are where we dip our tired bodies in cool springs of hope.”

Dr. Cone gives a long chapter to discussing how black artists were often able to make the connection between the cross and the lynching tree better than theologians and pastors. The blues were another way to transcend suffering, he says, and the poets, particularly Countee Cullen, who wrote about the “Black Christ” recrucified are many (see a portion of the poem below). He also writes about the famed Billy Holiday song “Strange Fruit,” written ironically by the Jewish Abel Meeropol many years before the Holocaust. Mr. Meeropol and his wife were the couple who adopted the orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

A long chapter is given to the most famous theologian of the lynching era, Reinhold Niebuhr, who was well-known as a social justice activist but who never spoke out personally or theologically about the sin of lynching. Many white supporters of equal status for blacks still used the argument at the time that “their day would come.” Martin Luther King Jr. would later say, “It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure.”

Of course, a whole system of theology cannot be explained in a one- or two-page blog. I hope to give readers a curiosity to read The Cross and the Lynching Tree for themselves. But as Dr. Cone says, “Though we are not fully free and the dream not fully realized, yet we are not what we used to be and not what we will be. . .We continue to seek an ultimate meaning that cannot be expressed in rational historical language and that cannot be denied by white supremacy.”

 

In Harriet’s Footsteps

Well, sort of.

We know that Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in Dorchester County, MD in 1849 at the age of 27; she later returned to lead many more enslaved people out of bondage.

What we often don’t know is exactly where things happened because these were enslaved people we’re talking about. Even Frederick Douglass’s exact birthplace near Easton, MD is unknown.

This is good to know before you follow the Harriet Tubman Byway on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Whether the Eastern Shore counties are truly trying to atone for the sin of slavery in their parts, or whether the name of Harriet Tubman is a tourist draw, it is sobering to be in the area where the fearless little woman was such a thorn in the white enslavers’ sides.

The Harriet Tubman National Park area is not a sop to tourism. It has been in the works for many years and was supposed to have been finished by now. The latest projected opening date is spring 2017.

My sister and I did most of the 125-mile Byway, which makes a huge circle unless you go to the end near the Delaware border. I had downloaded and put onto CD the free audio guide, which much enhanced the experience. The narrator and actors set the mood wonderfully, even though many of the stops on the Byway were guesstimates of where something might have happened or were “something like” something to do with Harriet Tubman.

We stayed in Cambridge, where the Byway begins, and went first to the Harriet Tubman Museum. The museum is a grass-roots project that is in need of money to help expand the exhibits and its hours (12 to 3 pm). Even so, the tiny storefront has a very good video about Harriet Tubman, murals of her painted by a descendant,, a large collection of children’s books about her, and memorabilia (yes, I got the T-shirt).

During the drive, we saw a one-room schoolhouse, the Stanley Institute, that had been built by black parents after the Civil War for their children and that was used until as late as the 1960s, when Maryland’s schools were desegregated.

We saw Parsons Creek, originally a canal built by enslaved people for Joseph Stewart to float lumber out to the bay to ships. Lumbering was a major business here. Harriet Tubman’s father, Ben Ross, worked for Stewart and so did Harriet. It is said that she learned her outdoor and navigational skills during this time. It is also possibly how she became so strong, as she had been a frail child.

We saw the Tuckahoe Neck Quaker meetinghouse, a center of Underground Railroad activity in Caroline County.

We saw the site of another of Harriet’s enslavers, Edward Brodess, in the town of Bucktown. Though she had several enslavers through the years, it was from Brodess’s farm that she escaped.

We saw the restored Bucktown Village Store, at which Harriet got caught in the crossfire and was hit in the head by a two-pound weight that a white man was throwing at his slave. It has been recorded that after this time, Harriet began having visions. This hearkens back to the experience of Julian of Norwich, who began having visions and messages from God after a serious illness.

We saw a restored cabin built by a free black man, James Webb. His enslaved wife and four children were allowed to live here with him. Basically one room with a sleeping loft, it must have seemed like a castle at the time to Mrs. Webb.

We were very disappointed not to be able to see the William Still Family Interpretive Center, supposedly located at a 4H Park in Denton, MD. We drove and walked around the 4H Park but couldn’t even find a sign referring to William Still. His name comes up often in the Underground Railroad literature. A free black man, he lived in Philadelphia and was a major conductor on the railroad. His meticulous records helped him publish The Underground Railroad in 1871. That detailed work of the more than 1,000 escapees who passed through his station includes firsthand narratives and is still helping scholars’ research today.

A most poignant note about Mr. Still is that in 1850 his own lost brother, Peter, was one of the men he was assisting. Peter had been sold into slavery in Alabama years before.

Despite the disappointments, though, I’m so glad to have been able to follow Harriet Tubman’s footsteps and will certainly be returning when the National Park in her honor opens. I can’t even express how much I admire this woman, who went on to spy for the Union Army, be involved in the women’s suffrage movement, and opened her home to elderly blacks in Auburn, NY. It seems fitting to end with her own words:

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

The Moral Universe – A Sermon for Bloody Sunday, March 8, 2015

I take as my text Exodus: The Ten Commandments

God of wilderness and water, your Son was baptized and tempted as we are. Guide us through this season, that we may not avoid struggle, but open ourselves to blessing, through the cleansing depths of repentance and the heaven-rending words of the Spirit. Amen.

“Heaven-rending words of the Spirit.” For Moses and the Israelites, God’s voice coming out of a thunderstorm saying, “YOU SHALL NOT MURDER,” must indeed have been heaven-rending. Down through the millennia since that literally earth-shaking event, we have been reminded again and again, “YOU SHALL NOT MURDER.” And the response of God’s people has been, of course we won’t murder, since you tell us not to. We believe in you and we want to follow your commandments.

Then Jesus came and turned the commandment upside down; “I give you a new commandment,” he told His disciples the night before His own murder, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone shall know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

And once again, for two thousand years followers of Jesus have said, of course we love one another because we believe in you and we want to follow your commandments.

Did we no longer murder? Did we, in fact, love one another, even as Jesus loves us? Or did we continue to murder, not only killing the physical bodies of others, but also killing the spiritual lives of those who didn’t fit into our society.

I hope that everyone knows that this weekend marks the 50^th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, when hundreds of African-Americans were savagely and with impunity beaten by law enforcement officials and their deputized racist thugs for trying to cross a bridge and walk to the state capital in Montgomery.

What irony that that bridge was named for a Confederate general who, during Reconstruction, became grand wizard of a Ku Klux Klan klavern.

Congressman John Lewis and Amelia Boynton, survivors of Bloody Sunday, were on that bridge yesterday with the President. Both were severely injured in 1965; the now 97-year-old Amelia Boynton left for dead until an unknown person carried her to safety and an aid station. Mr. Lewis, 25 years old at the time, was already a survivor of many beatings during efforts to integrate lunch counters and bus stations and then, on March 7, 1965, as a leader of the march, one of the first to be attacked, his skull was fractured.

Though set in the context of the struggle for voting rights for African Americans, the immediate motivation for the march was the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 27-year-old church deacon in Marion, Alabama, who was engaged in a peaceful protest when state troopers attacked. Jimmie and his mother and his grandfather ran in Mack’s Café, hoping to get out of the maelstrom. Two or three troopers stormed the café, threw Jimmie’s grandfather to the floor and started hitting his mother. Jimmie intervened. He was unarmed. He was shot. He died several days later.

Would that we were celebrating this weekend the end of such acts by those who call themselves Christians against people who do not fit into their idea of what society should be.

Would that the Voting Rights Act that came out of Bloody Sunday stood today in its original form instead of having every important nuance removed from it almost a year ago.

Would that Selma has not been reenacted again and again in the last 50 years, yet without liberating legislation arising out of it.

Would that people of faith really believed in the commandment, YOU SHALL NOT MURDER, and that white Christians really followed Jesus’ commandment to love one another even as Jesus loves us.

One hopes, no, I know that you don’t have to be a Christian to believe this is wrong. If we only believed this was wrong because we are Christians, we would be very weak Christians indeed. You don’t have to be a Christian to know right from wrong.

But, if we claim to be Christians, then we claim each and every day that we love one another. When we wake up and when we go to bed and every moment in between, we tacitly say that we believe that we should love one another; that we believe Jesus when He told us to heal, to feed, to cloth, to sustain, to nourish body and soul of all those whom society marginalizes.

Yet we have allowed the outrages of history to be committed in our Christian names. The first enslaved Africans were brought to this country in the early 17^th century by white Christians. They were sold to white Christians. They were owned by white Christians. They were brutalized by white Christians. They tilled the soil of white Christian plantations and picked the cotton of white Christian fields. After Emancipation, they were tortured and lynched by white Christians, denied economic rights by white Christians, denied housing rights by white Christians and, ultimately, denied life by white Christians.

(At this point, I showed pictures of Jimmy Lee Jackson, George Stinney, Viola Liuzzo, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, and Trayvon Martin.)

The details in the report that came out of Ferguson this week are not peculiar just to Ferguson. Ferguson is a microcosm of cities and towns North and South, East and West, where such abuses are happening.

Did you know that right here in Berkshire County, confederate flag decals are appearing on trucks? Someone is putting them on children’s lockers at Monument Mountain and in other schools in the county.

All of my church life, I have been told that Lent is a time to resist temptation, as Jesus resisted temptation in the wilderness. But what, I have to ask myself, does my not having potato chips for 40 days do for the good of the world? I was also told, in my early catechism, that every time I lied or did not obey my parents or fought with my siblings (these were the stock sins) that Jesus’ cross became heavier. I was never taught to think of myself as a part of history, about collective guilt and collective responsibility and being part of atonement and repentance for the sins of all mankind. Shouldn’t this be as important a part of Lent as giving up meat or not watching TV. Would it not be more worth our while to think of our collective roles in the oppression of a huge population of our country, to ask God for forgiveness for the collective sins of the white race, and to show true repentance by take an active part in righting the wrongs of history?

Implied with the commandment YOU SHALL NOT MURDER is the commandment to do what one can to prevent murder. Implicit with the commandment to love one another as Jesus love us is the commandment to fight against whatever denies that love to another. We cannot obey one commandment without obeying the other.

If we are Christians, then we simply MUST be part of the Beloved Community that early civil rights leaders envisioned. We MUST join hands with everyone who would work to undo the systemic, institutionalized racism that still exists in our country and walk where we have to again and again and again until we do, truly, show that we are Christians by our love.

I chose the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the song of the day because before Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics we know today, the hymn was an homage to John Brown. Frederick Douglass called John Brown the only white man he’d ever met who really saw no difference between himself and a black man. During the Civil War, African-American contrabands who sought the safely of Union regiments starting humming a song about John Brown. The lyrics were made up as they went along, but the melody and the sentiment spread like wildfire among the African-Americans and then to Union soldiers. “His truth” referred to John Brown’s truth that a nation that enslaved people was a nation without a soul. Julia Ward Howe transformed the informal homage into a hymn that captures the thunderstorm out of which God spoke to the Israelites. YOU SHALL NOT MURDER. Amen.

Thomas Wiggins, Musical Prodigy

Jeffrey Renard Allen’s book Song of the Shank is an imagined life of a real person, the 19th-century musical prodigy Thomas Wiggins. It’s a slow-going book, not to be read at a gallop; much of it is stream of conscious, and there are times when it is not clear whose consciousness is streaming.

What makes the book important are the underlying metaphors Mr. Allen engages that depict the different kinds of slavery and imprisonment in which people can be held, mentally, physically, spiritually.
Why should we care about a long-ago musical prodigy? Well, Thomas was African-American, and that alone might make him stand out. In addition, he was born to a slave couple. If that’s not enough to whet the appetite, Thomas was blind and severely autistic.

 The unvarnished facts of his life, written about by Deirdre O’Connell in The Ballad of Blind Tom as well as on her website devoted to him, are these:

Thomas’s parents, Charity and Domingo, were slaves belonging to a Georgia man named Wiley Jones. Tom was born in 1848, blind and with severe developmental disabilities. According to Ms. O’Connell, Jones did not want to support a useless body and planned to sell the family off one by one. The chances of Tom’s being bought were slim to none, and there was a great likelihood that he would die of neglect.

Tom’s mother asked a neighboring slave owner, General James Bethune, to buy the whole family; on the day of the auction, he did this and life changed for the Wiggins family as well as for the Bethunes.

Without sight, Tom’s senses focused on sound. He had an ability to imitate any sound he heard. He would sneak into the Bethunes’ house and bang on the piano, fascinated by the different notes. He spent a lot of time in the woods, learning nature’s music. General Bethune eventually saw the musical potential of this odd child and brought him into his home to learn to play the piano as well as to learn manners and deportment.

Under the General’s management, Blind Tom, as he became known, performed throughout the state from the age of about 6. When he was eight, traveling showman Perry Oliver became his manager. By advertising his charge as little better than a beast, Oliver was able to boost audiences’ reactions to Tom’s mastery at the piano.

Oliver introduced Tom to many experiences and might seem like the perfect manager if we forget who Tom was and where he came from. Oliver brought Tom to Washington, DC, during the time when the country was in its first spasms of break-up after Abraham Lincoln’s nomination to the Presidency. Hearing the voices in Congress debating abolition and secession, Tom’s mimic abilities allowed him to repeat on stage what he had heard, to audiences’ great delight. After hearing Stephen Douglas at a rally, Tom not only brought his speech to life on stage, but also the cheers and heckling of the audience. Oliver scheduled Tom to perform at benefit concerts for the Confederate cause, and Tom became the first African-American to perform in the White House when President Buchanan invited him there.

After the Civil War began, Tom started composing; at the age of 15 he produced “The Battle of Manassas” (Bull Run), reproducing perfectly the sounds of marching feet, drum and fife, and muskets’ and cannons’ roar. It became famous, and the South believed it was an anthem in the rebel cause.

Tom eventually became a world-renowned phenomenon; Mark Twain and Willa Cather were fans. As might be expected, though, he was still a slave. When not performing, he was locked in hotel rooms. The vast amounts of money his concerts took in were never seen by him or his family, from whom he was entirely estranged. General Bethune’s son had taken over as guardian, and he lived sumptuously on Tom’s earnings. When he died, neither his wife Eliza nor Tom were left anything. Eliza found Charity and brought her to New York to engage in a legal battle for Bethune Jr.’s money; they won the suit, but Eliza dismissed Charity back to the South and she never saw Tom again.

Tom died at the age of 60 from a stroke and was buried in Brooklyn in an unmarked grave. Reportedly a Bethune daughter had his body disinterred and reburied in Georgia, but this has been disputed. There are two plaques for Thomas Wiggins, one in Brooklyn at Evergreen Cemetery and one in Columbus, Georgia.

Song of the Shank goes underneath all of these facts to present a different way to look at Tom’s life, as well as Charity’s and even Eliza’s. Tom as a toddler was accident prone, and Mr. Allen’s book suggests that these were not really accidents. How did Tom become dunked upside down in a barrel of water, nearly drowning? Were the bruises on his arms and legs a natural result of childhood tumbling or willfully inflicted? Was Tom really born blind, or in his autistic obsessive behavior scratch his own eyeballs to a point where severe infection set in? (I have worked with an autistic man who would bite his own hand to the point of having permanent teeth marks on it; when told “no,” he would beat his face and head.) This self-mutilation suggests that Tom did not want to see the reality of his life, his slavery, and deliberately took away the sense of sight so that he could put all his hope into the sounds of music.

Mr. Allen’s book also suggests that, because Tom did not know what being born black meant, and because he lived with the Bethunes, he became imprisoned in the evil of racism himself. He could tell “niggers” by touch and smell, and disdained them. When reunited with his mother, who despite now being free is in her own prison of guilt about letting Tom be taken away from her, his first instinct is to reject her. He hasn’t the concept of “mother” or “family” any more than he has of right and wrong. As he ages, he becomes overweight, selfish, and demanding, pampered yet locked into rooms.
The novel also introduces free blacks and now-free slaves. One Dr. Wire, the pastor and head of a Home for African Orphans on an island off New York, feels guilt that he has never suffered the way the freed slaves on the island have. How does he pastor to them when he has not experienced what they have been through? How does he pastor to the black soldiers who, after the Civil War, have encamped on Central Park because their service has now been forgotten and unrewarded?

And what about those freed slaves? How does someone who for most of their lives has done and said and often thought only what they were told to become their own person, a free person? What do you do with this freedom when you are looked down upon even by Northern Negroes? How do you begin to understand the wider world – American issues relating to Russia and China and England and France – when you never knew these places existed? How to comprehend it all?

Song of the Shank asks many, many difficult questions. Do we need to ask ourselves, let alone answer, such questions in the 21st century? Yes, says a reviewer in The New York Times. It is our history, and we have still not come to terms with it. We now living, white and black, are imprisoned by our history, and we won’t leave that prison until we look the ramifications of slavery squarely in the face. Books such as Song of the Shank can help us do that.