Monday, March 25, 2024

"THE COMPETING VISIONS OF HOLY WEEK"

 “THE COMPETING VISIONS OF HOLY WEEK”

“Ride On, King Jesus, no one can hinder us!”  This adapted line from the African-American spiritual tells us so much about Holy Week.  I used to love it when the Sanctuary Mass Choir, led by Ms. Joann Price, sang this anthem during the Lent and Easter season, and always at funerals.  It is a powerful song, so if you haven’t heard it lately, find it online and be lifted up.

Jesus does ride on in Holy Week, which began yesterday, and which takes us through his execution on Friday and resurrection on Sunday.  Whether you are a believer or not, take time this week to notice the dynamics of the story of Holy Week.  Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and he knows that this is the time when his vision must take hold – this is the critical week.  His followers are fired up, and why shouldn’t they be – he has healed their bodies and their spirits; he has fed the hungry; he has cured the sick; and he has given them a new vision of life and how to live their lives.  This is it – this year, Jerusalem!

Part of the fervor comes from the time of the Jewish calendar – it is the season of Passover, the commemoration of God’s defeat of Pharoah, a defeat that brought the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt and into the liberation of the wilderness.  Part of the Seder meal for Passover has the phrase “Next year, Jerusalem!”  And, as Jesus enters Jerusalem on a jackass to celebrate Passover, his followers are ecstatic – the hated Romans will be overthrown, and the corrupt religious leaders of Judaism will be replaced with compassionate and righteous leaders.  “Ride On, King Jesus!”   But, Rome is watching.

  While Jesus and his followers parade into Jerusalem from the north, another parade is entering from the west.  It is a Roman parade, led by Governor Pontus Pilate, bringing a garrison of Roman soldiers into Jerusalem at the time of Passover.  Their purpose is a display of power, to warn those pilgrims who come to celebrate Passover.  Their parade is impressive – calvary on powerful horses, infantry soldiers armed to the teeth, flag-bearers displaying the banners of the Roman Empire, the golden poles with the Roman eagles atop them.  Trumpets blaring, drums beating, an imperial demonstration of might and power, all designed to send a message to the Jewish folk who celebrate Passover:  “Pay Attention- remember who is in charge!  Celebrate your religious holiday all that you want, but remember that Rome is in charge, not the God of Jesus. Pay attention or risk imprisonment or death.  No liberation talk allowed here!”

    Jesus leads a parade based in love, justice, compassion, and healing.  Pontus Pilate leads a parade based in violence and domination and death – two competing visions of life.  We will see that drama played out in Holy Week.  The disciples began with hope and excitement and determination, but the power of Rome shrinks their hearts and their vision and their resolve.  By the end of the week, they too are crying out “Crucify him!”  All the male disciples desert Jesus when he is arrested, although Peter seeks to go a little way with Jesus – but he too fades away quickly.  Only the women disciples remain faithful to Jesus, and as we wonder whether women should hold power in the church, we should recall who stayed with Jesus and who the primary witnesses were.

Holy Week reminds us of the struggles in our hearts also.  We are longing for love, but we are believing in death.  We so desperately want to believe in the vision of love and justice and compassion, but the powers of the world roar at us or bedazzle us, and we fall in line.  For those of us able to hold out a little bit, as Peter did, the powers wear us down – we turn our hearts over to money, to racial classification, to redemptive violence, to gender identity, to class, to nation, to the Trumpdemic, to any number of other powers who compete for our devotion.  We seek to resist these powers, but they are so pervasive and so invasive, that we often yield, as did Peter.  We may not holler out “Crucify him!”, but we do say “Ride on, King Jesus?  Yeah, just ride on out of here, so we can get on with our lives.” We come to agree that Jesus deserves the death penalty.

The drama of Holy Week reminds us of the hopes and failures of our lives – we long for love, but we believe in death.  We know that is not the end of the drama of Holy Week, but for this week, seek to stay with it.  The stories in Luke’s Gospel from chapters 19-23 are a good companion, so check them out.  Let us acknowledge this struggle in our hearts between these two competing visions, and let us seek to be like those women disciples – choose love over death, choose compassion over redemptive violence, and seek to find our way to life, even in the midst of death. 


Monday, March 18, 2024

"WHAT DOES A WOMAN DO WITH A PHI BETA KAPPA KEY?"

 “WHAT DOES A WOMAN DO WITH A PHI BETA KAPPA KEY”

This question was asked of our friend Joyce Tucker, as she appeared before the Committee on Examinations of Atlanta Presbytery for ordination as a pastor in the late 1970’s.  The inquisitor was a prominent male minister on the Committee.  Her dossier indicated that she had graduated from Duke and was welcomed into the Phi Beta Kappa Club there because of her outstanding academic work.  She could not respond as she would have liked to this question, because that committee had the power to determine whether or not she would be accepted for ordination.  She was eventually certified for ordination by the Committee.

That question was just one of thousands of questions and rejections of women as leaders and pastors in the Presbyterian Church.  This year marks the 60th anniversary of the ordination of women as pastors in the PCUS, the former southern Presbyterian Church.  The Presbyterian Church split over slavery in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War, and we were the last mainline denomination to reunite, doing so at a special worship service in Atlanta in 1983.  The former “Northern” (but really-the-rest-of-the-country) UPCUSA church had voted to ordain women as pastors in 1956, and first woman ordained as a pastor was Margaret Towner that same year.

There had been many discussions and attempts to approve ordination for women in these branches of the Presbyterian church.  In 1916 the PCUS had approved ordination of women to be deacons, and the UPCUSA had done it in 1922.  The UPCUSA had approved ordaining women as ruling elders in 1930, but the PCUS would not take it that far.  In the 1950’s the southern Presbyterians began to work for allowing women to be ordained as pastors.  The PCUS governing body sent a recommendation to ordain women as pastors in 1956, but it failed to get a majority of presbyteries to approve it, losing 44-39.  In 1963, the governing body again recommended approval of women’s ordination, and in 1964, the presbyteries agreed by a vote 53-27.  It became church policy, and the shift became an article in  the New York Times.

The first woman to be ordained in the former PCUS was Dr. Rachel Henderlite, who was the daughter of a pastor and who had a PhD. In ethics from Yale, under H. Richard Niebuhr.  She had taught for a considerable amount of time at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, when she learned that her salary was not equal to that of the male faculty members. She worked hard for that equity, and her work became well known.  She was approached by some male ministers in Hanover Presbytery, where Richmond was located, asking her to seek to become the first woman to be ordained in the former PCUS.  She agreed, and after some struggles with the Presbytery, she was approved for ordination.  She was ordained at interracial All Souls Presbyterian Church in Richmond on December 12, 1965. She indicated that for many years she received a postcard annually from a male minister in South Carolina, reminding her that she had broken Biblical law by becoming a minister and that as a result, she would rot in hell.

There are many stories like Dr. Henderlite’s, including Caroline’s (she was ordained in 1973 by Atlanta Presbytery after many machinations).  A lot of southern churches paid no heed to the policy that allowed the ordination of women to church office of deacon, elder, or pastor.  My home church was one of those, and in the late 1970’s, the women members, including my mother, made a push for women to be ordained as elders.  The clerk of the Session and the pastor were opposed to the ordination of women, but at the congregational meeting, some women nominated the daughter of one of the wealthiest members of the church to be an elder.  When the pastor refused to accept the nomination, the wealthy father spoke up and indicated his displeasure at his daughter being rejected.  The pastor then allowed the daughter’s name to be placed in nomination, and as planned by the women, she then declined the nomination. But, the door had been opened for Maud Cain Howe to be nominated.  She was nominated and elected to be the first woman elder at the 125 year old church.  

    Maybe that’s what a woman does with a Phi Beta Kappa key does – she uses it to unlock doors for folk, doors that men have locked to keep people out.  We are grateful for the tenacity, creativity and determination of so many women and men, who have worked and cajoled and marched and sat in and testified to the fact that God shows no partiality.  May we find our place in this great cloud of witnesses.


Monday, March 11, 2024

“WE ARE EACH OTHER – THE WORK OF SONYA CLARK”

 “WE ARE EACH OTHER – THE WORK OF SONYA CLARK”

Caroline and I were blessed to be able to attend the High Museum of Art’s exhibit of Sonya Clark’s textile work on its last weekend in town in mid-February.  I’m not much on textile art (one of my many shortcomings), but this was a stunning exhibit, and I want to lift her witness as part of Women’s History Month. She was born in 1967, and this is what she said about her heritage:

"I was born in Washington DC to a psychiatrist from Trinidad and a nurse from Jamaica. I gained an appreciation for craft and the value of the handmade from my maternal grandmother who was a professional tailor. Many of my family members taught me the value of a well-told story and so it is that I value the stories held in objects.”

The title of her exhibit at the High was “We Are Each Other.”  She was inspired by a Gwendolyn Brooks poem “Paul Robeson” (1970) which closes with, “we are each other’s harvest/we are each other’s business/we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”  The emphasis of the exhibit was that in our age of extreme individualism, we all belong to one another, and we all are collaborations of many folks.  In one interview, she noted that she herself was the result of a collaboration of her parents, hopefully for more than twenty minutes, as she put it.  Her themes of collaboration and interaction and engaging our diversities were powerfully demonstrated in the High’s exhibit.

Clark’s work is no sentimental hope that we all should just get along.  Her work invites the observer to participate in her art work and to develop the collaboration as we go.  Because of space limitations, I’ve chosen five projects that crossed many boundaries with a deep amount of integrity.  The High exhibit began with her “Beaded Prayers Project,” begun in 1998, in which found objects were woven, glued, tied, into a larger background.  I counted 135 of these panels, most of which have been made by observers and participants in Ms. Clark’s art work.  It is an ever-expanding work, in which people are asked to acknowledge their roots, note their pain, and look to the future.

Second was a wall hanging of Madame C.J. Walker, the first African-American woman millionaire, having made her fortune through selling products for Black women’s hair.  The wall hanging was made entirely of plastic hair combs – combs that are used to shape and beautify Black’s women’s hair.  The hanging was huge, and as we got closer to it, we noted that various parts of the combs were missing, the newly shaped pieces fashioned together to make up the portrait of Madame Walker.  Black women’s hair has long been a central focus of the struggle against racism’s desire to demean and diminish the humanity of those classified as “Black” in our culture.  The need and the desire to straighten Black women’s hair so that it looks like white women’s hair is still a powerful force in American culture.

Clark took on this power of white supremacy to seek to dictate Black humanity and beauty in her Hair Craft Project.  She and fellow artists noted the power and the resonance of the curliness of Black people’s hair, and Clark worked to note that this power was not only symbolic but also inspiring.  She and other artists noted the many curls of Black hair, and they developed a new language, using the curly turns of Black hair as the basis for a new alphabet for Black people.  The exhibit at the High had examples of the new alphabet and included sentences in the new language.  This project itself will take a lot more work, but it is all built on Clark’s idea of collaboration.

The last two parts of the exhibit that I want to note relate to the continuing power of the Confederacy and white supremacy.  Clark notes the stubborn tenacity of white supremacy in American culture, and she offers two approaches to it.  The first is the “Unraveling Project,” in which the participants are asked to reflect on the continuing power of the Confederacy and white supremacy in our country.  She seeks help in unraveling particular Confederate battle flags, and she notes that in this work, many of the flags are very difficult to unravel – a reality and a metaphor for the difficult work of overcoming and dismantling racism. 

I could go on and on about her work, but I want to finish on the one that touched me the most.  Ms. Clark indicated that she had been to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and while she was there, she saw an exhibit with Abraham Lincoln’s top hat.  Right beside it was a tea towel used by Robert E. Lee when he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, thus bringing an end to the Civil War.  The tea towel was white linen with a subtle red stripe at the bottom, and the tea towels that were at Appomattox were cut up and distributed to various soldiers on that day of surrender.  Clark wondered aloud (though she knew the answer) why that tea towel had not become the symbol of the Confederacy rather than the battle flag.  She wants to make the Confederate tea towel much better known, and she made a huge hanging of the towels woven together.  She also encouraged us attendees to make our own Confederate tea towels and asked us to help make this the symbol of the Confederacy.  Maybe Donald Trump’s supporters will use the tea towel symbol when they storm the next government building.

Sonya Clark is a stunning and remarkable artist – if you don’t know her work (which I did not), look her up and learn from her powerful insights and provocative art.  She teaches at Amherst, and we are all the better off for her artistic vision and work.


Monday, March 4, 2024

"SHOULD JOE GO?"

 “SHOULD JOE GO?”

I am thinking and worrying about the Presidential election in November.  I started to name this blog “Joe Should Go,” but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that.  The time is running short, but if President Biden wanted to step down as the Democratic front-runner, there is still a small window left.  Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election at the end of March of 1968.  That did not turn out well for the Democrats, but Bobby Kennedy was on the rise until his assassination in June of that year, and I believe that he would have beaten Nixon had he not been killed.  There are a lot of parallels between 1968 and 2024 – a sitting President whom many in his own party have great doubts about their chances for re-election; the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which turned into a disaster for the Democrats, as Mayor Richard Daley manhandled the anti-war demonstrators; and a scary Republican candidate.

Up until the Michigan presidential primary, I was feeling OK about President Biden’s chances to defeat Trump.  Michigan was the first presidential primary with significant urban centers, and for me that meant that it was a key reflection of what we might see in November.  The numbers in Michigan were not good for Biden beating Trump.  There were the noteworthy “uncommitted” voters  totaling over 101,000 in the Democratic primary, many of them a protest vote against Biden’s failure to uphold human values in the war in Gaza.  

    More disturbing to me, however, were the vote totals in the primaries.  Some 768,000+ voted in the Democratic primary, and Biden won over 80% of those.  But, over 1,102,000 people voted in the Republican primary, meaning that 334,000 more people in Michigan voted for Republicans than for Democrats.  Indeed, Trump received almost as many votes as all the Democratic candidates combined.  I recognize that the Republican primary was more contested than the Democratic, but the vote differential is staggering to me.  It means that many Democratic voters stayed home for the primary, and while they may not stay home in November for the general election, making up 334,000 votes is a tall order in such a swing state. 

    I’m thinking that Joe should go.  There are strong Democratic candidates waiting in the wings – Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams, Gavin Newsom, to name a few.  The time is exceedingly short, but with Trump’s legal troubles, there is much more of an open window for new Democratic candidates. Obviously, none of them will step in unless Biden steps out.  Every time that I see President Biden on tv, he looks more and more frail.  He has done a good job as President, but he is simply too old to run for a second term.  If he stays in the race and gets the nomination, I will work hard for him and vote for him, but I do not believe that he can beat Trump, given what the Michigan results look like. 

     I feel today as I felt when President Biden announced for re-election on April 24 last year– he is too old to run for re-election.  As Trump’s legal woes mount (and his age is showing too,), there is a good chance for a Democrat not named President Biden to win the presidency.  And, given the nature of Trump’s self-delusional narcissism, it is absolutely imperative that he not return to the Presidency.  I’m guessing that is why Governor Nikki Haley is staying in the race, figuring and hoping that Trump’s legal troubles will do him in before the election in November.  And, I do not think that President Biden can beat Haley, if she were the Republican nominee.  The New York election interference Trump trial at the end of this month will tell us a lot, but with all the delays, none of those are a given before the election.

So, I believe that President Biden still has time to bow out of the Presidential election, but only a few weeks.  As I wrote in an earlier blog at the beginning of the year, this year of 2024 will be one of the most chaotic and most consequential of many in recent history.  We have a lot of events left to occur and to digest, but I do believe that Joe should go.


Monday, February 26, 2024

"FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT"

 “FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT”

In the spring of 1951, two Black lawyers were driving from Richmond to Roanoke to investigate and seek to adjudicate complaints about civil rights violations.  On the way they decided to stop in the small Virginia town of Farmville to engage the Black students of Robert Moton High School there.  They had heard that a 16 year old student named Barbara Johns had led a walkout and boycott of their segregated, rundown school until the white school board built another school for them.  The two lawyers were Spottswood Robinson III and Oliver Hill, and they were in charge of Virginia for the NAACP. They felt that the possibilities of taking the case in Farmville were slim and none, because Prince Edward County was known as the most racist place in Virginia.  

Robinson and Hill had just come back from a briefing on the Briggs case in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where the initial complaint was for Black students to get school buses that were equal to those used by white students.  Thurgood Marshall and Robinson were lead attorneys on that case, because Spottswood Robinson III was Marshall’s most valued assistant.  In Farmville, Robinson planned to tell the kids to knock it off, go back to school and to get ready for the legal action in the South Carolina case.  However, Robinson had never met a student like Barbara Johns.  

    He remembered the conversation in this way: “We were going to tell the kids about the Briggs suit, which was about to begin, but a strike in Prince Edward County was something else again. Only these kids turned out to be so well organized, and their morale was so high, we just didn’t have the heart to tell ‘em to break it up.”  That conversation led to many more, and the students agreed to give up their demands for an equal but separate school – they adopted the NAACP approach of seeking to end legal segregation itself.  Spottswood Robinson III would become the lead attorney in this case, and he argued it in front of the US Supreme Court as one of the five cases that became Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas – the case that ended legal segregation in the USA but not neo-slavery.

    Robinson was born in Richmond in 1916, son of a lawyer and a homemaker.  His grandfather Spottswood Robinson had been held as a slave in rural Virginia, but fled slavery and set up shop in Richmond.  Spottswood would be named after him, as Spottswood William Robinson III.  He graduated from Virginia Union University and went to Howard University Law School, where he would study under the visionary Charles Hamilton Houston and be classmates with Thurgood Marshall.  He graduated from there in 1939, being first in his class with the highest scholastic average in the history of the school.  He became a leading strategist of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and he traveled all around the South to see the oppressive conditions that neo-slavery and legal segregation imposed upon people.  Thurgood Marshall talked him into coming on the staff of the NAACP, with the promise being that Hamilton and Marshall were assembling a team that would seek to take down legal segregation and thus end neo-slavery.

    Robinson was a tireless worker in this cause, traveling many places, facing arrest and other dangers in the South, as he and his colleagues built the cases to take down neo-slavery.  In the summer of 1944, Irene Morgan, a resident of Baltimore, asked Robinson and the NAACP to defend her after she was arrested in Saluda, Virginia, on July 16. Contrary to state law, she had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus trip she had taken across state line from Gloucester County to Baltimore. If it could be shown that forcing black passengers to change seats as they traveled into the South interfered with interstate commerce, then a blow might be struck. Adopting the strategy, Robinson defended Morgan both in the local court and in the Virginia Supreme Court, losing as expected in both venues.  SCOTUS took up the case in 1946, and in June they ruled that Virginia’s law was unconstitutional.  It opened the door to the Brown case eight years later.

    Spottswood Robinson III is one of the unheralded heroes of the civil rights movement.  He later was appointed to be a federal judge in DC by President Lyndon Johnson, and in 1966 Johnson appointed him to the Federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit, the same court that recently ruled unanimously that Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity were hogwash.  Robinson served as chief judge of that Appeals Court until his retirement in 1986.  He was the first Black person to serve on that court and also to serve as its chief judge.  He died in 1998, and his life is a powerful example of the dynamic of equality in American life.  That idea is now once again under attack – may we find the resolve and courage of Spottswood Robinson III, so that we can be witnesses in our time.


Monday, February 19, 2024

"SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT"

 “SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT”

I have been thinking a lot about Fulton County DA Fani Willis lately, especially after her fiery testimony on Thursday as the white Trump team tried to taint her and get her dismissed from the Trump election interference case.  She had an unforced error in her love life, but the attempt to discredit her seems to be going nowhere legally.  Unless new evidence pops up, I don’t see the judge disqualifying her because there are no legal grounds to do so.  Still, she’s been buked, and she’s been scorned as a Black woman taking on white men and white supremacy, and it is nothing new.  I want to share the story of another woman who had to fight for her life in the midst of white supremacy. 

    Ella Sheppard was born into slavery in 1851 on Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage plantation in Tennessee and was a direct descendant of Jackson’s brother.  Her enslaved father worked outside the plantation and saved enough money to buy freedom for himself and his family.  His owner, however, would only allow him to buy his freedom, which he did.  Ella’s mother went into great despair and decided to take her own life and that of her daughter.  As Ella’s mother stood on the banks of the Cumberland River getting ready to jump in, she heard a loud voice cry out:

“Don’t do it, Honey! Don’t you see God’s chariot a-comin’ down from Heaven? Let the chariot of the Lord swing low. This child is gonna stand before kings and queens! The Lord would have need of that child.”  The voice came from an elderly Black woman who was also enslaved, and she gently talked the mom out of suicide.  Ella’s father would soon buy Ella’s freedom, but the owner would not allow the freedom of the mother, whom he later sold down South to Mississippi.

Ella’s father decided to get out of the South and moved to Cincinnati, where Ella showed a stunning aptitude for music.  She studied with a white music teacher, who made Ella come in the back door, and Ella could only come at night to receive the lessons.  Her father died of cholera in 1866, and Ella supported the family by working as a maid, singing in public, and teaching music.  After the Civil War ended, she moved back to the Nashville area to teach people freed from slavery.  Recognizing that she needed to hone her teaching skills, she enrolled at Fisk in Nashville.  

At Fisk, she met George White, treasurer of Fisk and music teacher there.  He was tremendously impressed with her and hired her on as an assistant teacher of music at Fisk, which meant she became the first Black faculty at Fisk.  At this time, however, Fisk was desperately in need of funding, and George White decided to form a choir who would tour country to raise money for Fisk.  Ella Sheppard would be his assistant and main organizer.  They recruited other Fisk students, all of whom had previously lived as slaves, and they named themselves the “Fisk Jubilee Singers,” using the Jubilee concept found in Leviticus 25.  They began to tour in 1871, and in their first concerts with white audiences, they sang classical European songs, with a few spirituals thrown in.  They noticed that when they sang spirituals, the audience went wild and gave much more generously.  So, Ella Sheppard chose “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as their initial spiritual, fashioned from the testimony of the elderly Black woman who had saved her life.  She taught the other singers to sing the spirituals, and they became a hit. While they continued to use classical European music, spirituals became their standard singing in the concerts.  

Their touring accomplished at least three things.  They saved Fisk University – donations poured in.  And second, their skill and their humanity stunned white people, who thought that they were inferior as Black people.  Third, they rescued the spirituals as a music and art form – no longer considered the music of inferior people, but rather music which enabled people to survive the horror of slavery. They had to endure all kinds of terrible treatment at the hands of white supremacy, but they prevailed.  As the white supremacist movement grew stronger and more dangerous, the women members often stayed home.  The original group disbanded in 1878, and Ella got married to Rev. George Washington Moore.

Ella also searched for  her mother in Mississippi, as many Black folk did after the Civil War (see Leonard Pitts’ fine novel “Freeman” for the story on these kinds of searches).  Ella brought her mother back to Nashville, where Ella taught many Fisk students and others until her death in 1914.  The Fisk Jubilee Singers were re-started in 1879, and they have been singing ever since – the first HBCU choir in history!  


Monday, February 12, 2024

"BLACK HISTORY AND LENT"

 “BLACK HISTORY AND LENT”

    The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is Valentine’s Day this year – a strange combination of love and ashes, the ashes made all too relevant by all the mass killing and shootings by guns in this country and by the slaughter of the Israelis and the Palestinians in the Middle East.  As I said in this blog space before, we have turned ourselves over to the gun-god Molech (Leviticus 20:1-5), and he requires that we sacrifice our children to him, which we are continuing to do.  We seem to prefer killing over loving.  

            This intersectionality reminds me that Black History Month and Lent almost always overlap on the calendar, and that is appropriate, for the racism that called forth the need for Black History Month is America’s original sin.  The lynch mob that attacked the Capitol in 2021 sought to overthrow a Senate soon to be presided over by a Black woman, who would also swear in the first Black person ever elected to the U.S. Senate from my state of Georgia.  For all the moaning of many of my siblings classified as “white” about “cancel culture,” it is we ourselves who have been doing that very thing to those classified as “Black,” and to all people classified as “other” in the system of race.  We have sought to cancel and to deny the humanity and the culture of all of those classified as “non-white,” especially those known as “Black.”

   This white desire to cancel Black humanity and Black culture is why Black History Week (and later Month) was created and named.  It was created to affirm the humanity, the culture, and the gifts of those classified as “Black” in the system of race, a system whose very purpose is to cancel the humanity of all those categorized as “non-white.”  Many people helped to create Black History Month, but a Black man born in Virginia, Carter Godwin Woodson, is called the “father of Black history.”  He was born in 1875 to parents who had been held in slavery in Virginia, but who saved and scrimped and bought the land where Woodson was born.  Woodson and his brothers did hard work on his parents’ tobacco farm, but he also went to a Freedman’s Bureau school.  It was there that he found his calling – as he learned to read, a whole new world opened to him, as it does to all of us who learn to read.

After the destruction of Reconstruction in the early 1880’s, there were no Black schools nearby for Woodson to attend, so he moved to Huntingdon, West Virginia, to work in the coal mines and to go to Frederick Douglass High School at age 20.  He graduated and attended Berea College in Kentucky, where he got his degree in 1904  just before the state of Kentucky forced Berea to deny entrance to Black people.  Berea appealed Kentucky’s order to SCOTUS, and in a continuing effort to cancel Black humanity and Black culture, in 1908 SCOTUS upheld the Kentucky law.  

Woodson was undaunted and went into teaching school while he earned his Master’s degree at the University of Chicago and his PhD at Harvard (the second Black person to do so – who was the first?).  In 1915 he and four friends at the Chicago YMCA founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  Their goal in doing this was to affirm the humanity and culture of African-Americans, at a time when the “white” culture was doing all that it could to deny those.  They also developed the Journal of Negro History to publish scholarly studies of Black life and Black history.  Both of those organizations continue to this day because they focused a bright light on the power and life of those classified as “Black.”

In 1926, Woodson and his colleagues started Negro History Week, choosing the dates of February 12-19 because they encompassed the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (2/12) and Frederick Douglass (2/14).  Woodson did not just “pronounce” this celebration – he sent out messengers to all his contacts in the field of education, and several states and the cities of Baltimore and Washington, DC, adopted it.  The idea struggled in the 1940’s but regained strength in the 1960’s, and in 1970 Kent State University changed it to “Black History” and stretched it out to a month.  In 1976 President Gerald Ford proclaimed February as “Black History Month,” and so it has continued.

    Here are the words that Woodson used to describe the need for Black History Month, a need that continues today, not so much because African-Americans have internalized “inferiority,” but because white supremacy is so deeply ingrained in our national culture. (I apologize for the lack of inclusive language here, but I have left the quote as it was given):

“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”