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Black History Month, day 25
Ella Baker, painted here by Robert Shetterly, was working for the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when students inspired by the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in began sitting in at segregated libraries, pools, and parks–as well as restaurants–in protest. Baker asked the SCLC for some start-up funds and put out a call for student leaders at her alma mater, Shaw University. The result was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which, with Baker as one of their key mentors and guides, went on to organize the Freedom Rides, voter registration of people who were penalized harshly for registering (African-American voters often lost their jobs, or were assaulted, for registering), Freedom Schools, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. SNCC’s John Lewis gave one of the most fiery speeches at the 1963 March on Washington, and under Stokely Carmichael’s leadership it led the Black Power movement–and also dismissed the role of the women who had shaped it into such a force. In the meantime, Baker was forming yet another organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund.
She had a genius for empowering others to take action, for leading them by helping them find their own authority. She distrusted reliance on prominent, charismatic leaders, saying, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” As she said of her earlier work developing the Young Negroes’ cooperative league, which aimed to give its members economic power through unity, “The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use.” It often is.
Black History Month, day 23
Who am I kidding. This letter is for everyone: for those who were meant to perish and for those whose innocence is indicted here because it is the “innocence” of those who do not wish to see.
My father and my sweetie both spoke this week of the importance of James Baldwin to them, naming him when I asked people for their favorite African American writers. Now I’ve gotten to a passage in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow quoting from The Fire Next Time, a book I haven’t read since American Lit, in 11th grade. Baldwin is writing to his nephew.
This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it . . . . It is their innocence which constitutes the crime . . . . This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you that you should perish. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being, You were expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity . . . . You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp on reality. But these men are your brothers –your lost younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what it must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off . . . . We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you and, Godspeed. (The Fire Next Time, 5-10)
He wrote that fifty years ago. It’s a drop in the ocean of anti-African bigotry going back before the transatlantic slave trade, but fifty years still seems like a long time to keep our eyes on the prize. A long time to hold on.
Black History Month, day 15
Michelle Alexander’s recent book, The New Jim Crow, picks up the tale told by Slavery By Another Name. As she writes in her eloquent opening paragraph:
Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
She goes on to write, “An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history.” Today’s disenfranchisement of African American men has come about through a system that is formally color-blind: the criminal justice system.
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind [with Jim Crow]. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.
And the new criminals–almost ten times as many as there were before the “war on drugs” was declared–are disproportionately black. Here are some things I thought before I heard Alexander speak last November, and what I now believe to be the truth.
What I thought before: black people use and sell drugs at a rate disproportionate to their numbers in the population. Sure, there’s racism in the criminal justice system, but one reason the prison population is disproportionately black is that African-Americans commit a large percentage of crime.
What I think now: black and white people use and sell drugs at about the same rate. The National Institute of Drug Abuse reports of its studies of secondary-school students: “Contrary to popular assumption, at
all three grade levels African-American students have substantially lower rates of use of most licit and illicit drugs than do Whites. These include any illicit drug use, most of the specific illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.” (Monitoring the Future: National Results on Adolescent Drug Use: Overview of Key Findings, 2006) “Contrary to popular assumption” has to be the biggest understatement of the year. Why was this report not the top story of every newspaper in the country?
What I thought before: the “war on drugs” was declared because drug use was on the rise. It’s misconceived, but we had to do something about all that crack.
What I think now: drug-related crimes were falling when Reagan declared the war on drugs in 1982. The word “crack” was barely known–it certainly was not a media buzzword, or an epidemic of black neighborhoods.
What I thought before: the penal population has gone up somewhat over my lifetime.
What I think now: In the past thirty years, the population in the penal system has not risen gradually or modestly, but rocketed from 300,000 to over 2,000,000.
What I thought before: the United States’s high rate of imprisonment is due at least in part to its having a higher crime rate than other countries.
What I think now: “Between 1960 and 1990 . . . official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period” (7). We don’t have a higher crime rate–we just deal with crime via much higher rates of incarceration.
What I thought before: Racism is present in the criminal justice system, the way it is present everywhere. It’s a problem that concerns me, but calling it the equivalent of Jim Crow is nothing more than a rhetorical flourish.
What I think now: The criminal justice system has been pressed into the service of an agenda that has changed form over the years but has not diminished: the social control of racial minorities, especially African-Americans. The means was once Jim Crow; now it is mass incarceration, which is truly, not just rhetorically, the new Jim Crow.
I’m devouring this book, even though every bite burns going down. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you get a chance to see Michelle Alexander in person, don’t miss it; her presentation was riveting.
Black History Month, day 8
In the Jim Crow obstacle course exhibit, one obstacle is the poll tax. The poll tax in 1949 was $1: $9.05 in today’s dollars.
The stated purpose of the poll tax, in the case of Virginia, was to serve as “an elementary and objective intelligence test.” How so? One who could not come up with the tax lacked the “minimum intelligence for ordering one’s own affairs and participating in those of the state.” The effect, in state after state, was to disqualify black voters in disproportionate numbers.
The Supreme Court, in the decision that struck down the Virginia statute (Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 1966), wrote that the state’s only legitimate interest in controlling who votes is to confirm that the voter is qualified. “Wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications; the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.”
(image in the public domain)
Black History Month, day 4
Tomorrow our service will include centering words from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an African-American, Unitarian poet, essayist, lecturer and activist. She worked on the Underground Railroad and wrote and lectured about abolition, then, after the Civil War, lectured widely through the south to educate and inspire former slaves, as well as promoting Reconstruction. She was also very involved in women’s rights and temperance work. Just looking at her picture makes me wish I could sit in a meeting house and hear what she has to say.
Harper was also a popular novelist and poet. Her poetry is conventional for its day, which is to say it is not to my taste. Nineteenth-century popular poetry was very sentimental. But she used that sentimental format to portray the humanity of slaves: a mother’s heart breaking as she loses her child at auction, the thrilling story of an escape from slavery, etc., supplemented the rational arguments she made on the lecture circuit with the emotional appeal that might open some ears.
This, too, is a conventional lyric with a moral, but I like it:
“The Careless Word”
‘Twas but a word, a careless word,
As thistle-down it seemed as light,
It paused a moment on the air,
Then onward winged its flight.
Another lip caught up the word,
And breathed it with a haughty sneer;
It gathered weight as on it sped,
That careless word, in its career.
Then Rumor caught the flying word,
And busy Gossip gave it weight,
Until that little word became
A vehicle of angry hate.
And then that word was winged with fire,
Its mission was a thing of pain,
For soon it fell like lava-drops
Upon a wildly-tortured brain.
And then another page of life
With burning, scalding tears was blurr’d,
A load of care was heavier made,
It added weight that careless word.
That careless word, O how it scorched
A fainting, bleeding, quivering heart!
‘Twas like a hungry fire that searched
Through every tender, vital part.
How wildly throbbed that aching heart!
Deep agony its fountains stirred!
It calmed–but bitter ashes marked
The pathway of that careless word.
Black History Month, day 3
Another obstacle in the “Jim Crow obstacle course” was driving to the polls. The exhibit said that rumors would circulate on election day that black drivers would all be stopped; they were plausible enough, since harassment by the police and vigilantes was common. It also featured this chilling photo, from Life, showing a Clinton, Tennessee mob harassing black drivers. I believe the photo dates from when twelve black students in Clinton integrated the high school. I always wonder who the people in these pictures are and if they are proud, or ashamed, to show them to their grandchildren now. What must it be like to have one of your cruellest moments recorded in Life Magazine?
I also learned about the Green Book, the guide to where to find gas, lodging, food, and restrooms if you were traveling through places restricted by race–which included plenty of northern sundown towns, not just the Jim Crow South. Of course one would need something like this, but I never thought about all the things people did to accommodate a humiliating and potentially dangerous situation. Mark Knopfler wrote this song about a traveling band of gospel singers–clearly, the issue spoke to him decades later, as it does to me.
The lines “We’re a long way from home, just let’s pay the man and go” are such a concise expression of the weariness of living under daily discrimination.
Black History Month, day 2
Bayard Rustin, born 100 years ago next month, was the most important civil rights leader you might never have heard of. He organized the 1963 March on Washington–the largest protest, at that date, in US history–and in the dozen years that he was a close adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., he had a seismic influence on the nonviolent philosophy King would come to articulate so well. His frankness about being gay got him in trouble with the law (homosexuality was illegal almost everywhere), met with dismay from colleagues who were nervous about their fragile cause being damaged by association with “sex perversion,” and is possibly the reason his name has largely faded from the stories of the civil rights movement. Certainly, being a powerful speaker, he would have been more of a public face of the movement than the behind-the-scenes organizing genius he was, if only he and the movement had not feared that giving prominence to a known gay man would jeopardize it. His legacy is coming into its own at last, however, in time for, and partly thanks to, his centennial.
Rustin (center) before a 1964 demonstration. Photo by New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer.
In Nashville in 1942, Rustin sat down in the front of a bus and refused to move. He was beaten by four cops and taken to the station, where he “discussed pacifism and the philosophy of nonviolence with the assistant district attorney, Benjamin West . . . [and was] allowed to leave without being charged or arrested.” (Curriculum Guide to Brother Outsider) A great Quaker tradition! Five years later, he and 15 other activists took a Journey of Reconciliation by bus through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky “to test the 1946 Supreme Court decision in Morgan v. Virginia, which ruled that segregation is unconstitutional on interstate buses.” The outcome of their being greeted by a mob in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was that a Chapel Hill judge found them guilty of violation of the state’s laws, indulging in a rant about the “Jews from New York” bringing “[their] n*****s with [them] to upset the customs of the South” as he delivered the sentence. What was being tested was not just the Supreme Court’s decision of the year before, but whether states would abide by federal laws protecting citizens, or insist that each state was a law unto itself.
The similarity of Rosa Parks’s action 13 years after Rustin sat in the whites-only section of a Nashville bus, and the similarities between the Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides that followed it by 14 years, were not coincidences. The later activists deliberately modeled their protests on those of Rustin and company. When Rosa Parks was arrested, Rustin was there to advise the Montgomery Improvement Association in the subsequent boycott.
At the time he began getting advice about the boycott from Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., owned a gun and was accepting an armed guard around his home, and had not yet fully committed to keeping the movement nonviolent. Through conversations with Rustin and another Fellowship of Reconciliation activist, Glenn Smiley, King learned about Gandhi’s teachings and the power of nonviolent resistance. What direction would the civil rights movement have taken if he had not accepted the influence of Rustin’s deeply educated pacifism?
Or want to do something more useful for Spirit Day? Here are five things you can do to make it better for LGBT teenagers and non-teenagers.
Sign the Defense of All Families pledge.
Write a letter to the editor saying that, although suicides of LGBT teens are not making the headlines right now, you haven’t forgotten that there’s an epidemic of deadly bullying underway, and urging everyone to ask their Congressperson to co-sponsor H.R.975, the Anti-Bullying and Harassment Act of 2011.
Write your Congressperson, yourself. (It’s easy. Put your zip code in here. “E-mail me” or “Contact form” will be on your representative’s webpage.)
Come out as a supporter of LGBT equality. Tell one person who’s never heard it from you before how you feel.
Find an LGBT youth support center or Gay Straight Alliance near you and send them a check.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is grappling with standing, an unsexy but important question in the Proposition 8 federal case. Namely: the plaintiffs–couples who want to marry and are denied access to marriage–have standing to bring their complaint to the federal courts. But who has standing to defend Proposition 8? One county tried to claim it, and the judges threw that part out.
When they heard the case several weeks ago, the judges asked many interesting questions, and some challenging ones, about the question of standing. One judge was quite sharp in asking whether the governor (then Arnold Schwarzenegger) and attorney general (then Jerry Brown) had effectively vetoed a law by refusing to defend it in court. I thought that was going a little far, but it did get at a good point: if the government of the state won’t defend a law when it is challenged, is that government doing right by the legislators, and by the will of the people?
Years ago, when I was living in Vermont, and the state Supreme Court was tackling the question of whether the state’s equal protection clause mandated marriage equality, I bought a raffle ticket from my county Democratic Party and won a lunch with the state’s attorney general. I knew he was named in the lawsuit, and asked him about the fight. He said frankly that it was one of those cases where plenty of people in his office agreed with the challenge to the law. (He didn’t say his own opinion, and I neither thought it was appropriate to ask him, nor would reveal it here if he had. He paid for the lunch.) But, he said, part of the job description of the state’s attorney general is to represent the state in any lawsuits against it, and since Vermont was the party named in the suit, their role was to take its side.
In that regard, he and his staff were like the defense attorney in a criminal case (this is my extrapolation–he knew the difference between civil and criminal law). Defendants must have representation; their lawyers must do their best to get them acquitted; our justice system depends on it. Switching back to the realm of civil laws and state governments, Vermont had duly passed various laws and it was the attorney general’s job to defend them. If he didn’t, then the people who passed the laws (the legislators) and the people whom they represented (the citizens) were being shortchanged. I don’t know if this is legally compelling, but I find it morally so.
So I ought to look askance at Schwarzenegger and Brown’s refusal to defend Prop 8. I do think it might have been bad strategically, but I don’t think it was morally wrong. Instead, it illuminates one of the major problems with our crazy ballot proposition system: the people, voting on a ballot measure, are a fourth branch of government that has not been fit into the system of checks and balances.
Remember checks and balances? You learned about them in civics, or maybe it was called social studies. We have three branches of government, with different roles, and they check each other. The executive has to abide by the laws set by the legislature. The legislature can’t create any laws that violate the constitution, as interpreted by the judiciary. The judiciary is chosen by the executive, with confirmation by the legislature. Et cetera. Now California has created a fourth branch, but where are the checks and balances?
Plenty of people argued that the state Supreme Court didn’t have the right to cancel out the people’s vote by ruling unconstitutional laws that excluded same-sex couples from marriage. Well, they’re idiots. Of course it did. Ruling on the constitutionality of a law is not only the judiciary’s right, it’s its obligation, and furthermore, in doing so, it is doing its part to uphold the will of the people as well–the will of the people as enshrined in the constitution.
The people then did the only thing they could do to remedy such an injustice, if they thought letting same-sex couples marry is an injustice, which for some reason they did: amend the constitution, in this case via a ballot proposition. Game over. The state Supreme Court might like the amendment or it might not, but there it is, a part of the constitution: marriage is only allowed between one man and one woman. (Of course, this new line contradicts other parts of the constitution, but I won’t even go into that. Nor will I rant about the stupidity of having a constitution be so easily amended–at least not today.)
But here’s the rub. I’ve read many ballot propositions, and some of them build in an immunity to checks and balances. Their text says that if they’re passed, no legislature can overturn them, or only a supermajority can do so. This is absurd. Any act of the legislature can be reversed by a subsequent act of the legislature. They don’t get to say “. . . and neener neener, if you don’t like this, future legislators, too bad.”
Yet that’s what these ballot propositions say: that a direct vote by the people supersedes a vote by the people’s representatives. This just does not work, unless it is part of a carefully calibrated system of checks and balances, such as applies to the other three branches of government.
So if “the people” lack standing, well, we asked for it. If legislation passed by direct vote isn’t subject to the checks of the other branches of government, then it’s a bit much to ask another branch to defend it.
Theologians know the danger of positing a “God of the gaps”–inserting God as an explanation of whatever phenomena we don’t yet understand. The problem with defining God in those terms is that as human knowledge proceeds, God shrinks. God used to be the cause of thunder (and thunder therefore a proof of God’s existence), until we understood what causes thunder. Then God was the cause of rainbows, until Newton came along and explained rainbows. But wait, God still created human beings by fiat–until we saw all the evidence that human beings arose via evolution. None of this means there is no God–just that, if you rely on a “God of the gaps” for your belief, you are standing on an ice floe in warming waters.
The lawyers defending Proposition 8 have a similar problem. Advocates of what people are now calling “traditional marriage” used to say that marriage had to give men rights over women, or it wasn’t marriage. They lost that when women’s right to control their own property and bodies was affirmed. Then came Loving v Virginia and they argued that a crucial purpose of marriage was to preserve the integrity of the races (just look it up!), but the Supreme Court said, no, that’s not what’s essential about marriage–any man and any woman can marry. Then they rested on that for a long time, until people started questioning the difference between a male-female relationship and a female-female or male-male one. “Ah,” the marriage-of-the-gaps people said, “It’s that men and women can procreate, and that’s what marriage is for: protecting procreation.” But so many people have argued the obvious point that we do allow male-female couples to marry who cannot, or state an intention never to, procreate, that they’ve had to change their definition of marriage again. Now, according to Charles Cooper (lead attorney for the Prop 8 defenders in the federal case), it has something to do with protecting people whose sexual relationship could lead to accidental pregnancy.
Of course, this has nothing to do with marriage; instead, they have searched for the one demonstrable difference between hetero and same-sex couples, and declared it the gap that must be filled by marriage. That’s a mighty small gap. I think they’re running out of gaps.
The divine, to many of us, including me, is not an explanation for the supernatural or inexplicable, but a name for the wondrous and good, so we don’t have the problem of our god diminishing as knowledge fills in the gaps. And marriage is not a bludgeon used against undesirable members of society, so we can affirm it for what it is today in our culture: the rights and responsibilities assigned to people who choose to be life companions, for whichever reasons they want, but usually because of mutual affection and the desire to share their lives.
Incidentally, readers of the Bible will note that that definition bears little resemblance to what marriage was in Biblical times and places–and a good thing, too.
Sermons in Stones 
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