Civil Rights Work: Playing on the Angels' Team

 

    Even after I rejected the rococo supernaturalism of John's Apocalypse, I never weakened in my allegiance--the higher meaning of belief--to the brilliantly zen-like moral teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables. I never doubted that, even in a Godless world, Jesus' genius defined how decent people should treat each other. This may explain why I saw the civil rights movement as on the side of the angels when it broke into the news the 1950s. When I heard about Brown v. Board of Education  on the car radio, I thought, "It's about time!" I had seen the pickup truck with wooden benches that was the "colored" school bus in Bibb County. Mother, who grew up there, told me it wasn't right. I owe that woman alongside Jesus. We were on the road to visit relatives in 1954 when decision came on the car radio as we rounded a slow curve between Alabama pastures. As the civil rights movement grew, I identified with the Freedom Riders, Rosa Parks, and MLK. Later, in college, I did a little civil rights work, absolutely sure that segregationists were morally blind if not evil.

    I worked weekends in black voter education--that futile attempt to sweep back the sea of official corruption--as well as rebuilding burned churches and picketing businesses. Once, when we were picketing in a small Louisiana town, a country woman with a child stopped in front of us. The child asked who we were. "Them's white trash walking with n--rs," she told him. My first reaction (though, of course, I said nothing) was, "White trash yourself. I'm a Ph.D. candidate. Who the hell are you?" A natural, sinful, unloving reaction. She couldn't be blamed for her choice of parents, for inherited blindness to the apartheid around her. To her, racial justice must have been as unimaginable as air-life to a fish. But I saw tragedy that she passed this blindness on to her child. The boy, pushing sixty now, may be a white supremacist without knowing why. "You've got to be taught to hate and fear," Oscar Hammerstein wrote in the 1949 South Pacific. "It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear." I thank my parents--even my grandmother who called blacks "darkies" but never used the n-word--for what they didn't teach me.

    I remember watching for cars tailing us when we left Bogalusa, Louisiana, where the Deacons for Defense and Justice were staked out with shotguns against the Klan in the neighborhood where we'd slept, but my strongest civil rights memory is of July 4, 1965. The Louisiana Citizen's Council had organized a "We the White People" rally in front of the state capital with a banner reading, "You're white because your ancestors practiced segregation" (as if either one of those were something to brag about). I was one of seven white guys, members of Student Liberal Federation at Louisiana State University, in a counter-demonstration at the event, which was attended by thousands of out-of-town segregationists. We held small American flags, the only ones visible, and distributed homemade leaflets pointing out that desegregation was the law. Given that we wore white shirts and ties (and two had beards!), it hardly mattered what the leaflets said. We were surrounded, questioned, our flags snatched away, called "n--er lovers," and, when the two state cops (count them) warned they couldn't protect us and we turned to go, a wiry little man in a Confederate-flag vest smacked me from behind with his umbrella. 

    I suffered a broken lens and slight cuts around the eye, but the scarier thing was the crowd--it looked like a hundred--that tried to follow us back to our Volkswagen van. The state police, bless them, blocked the sidewalk, batons in their hands, their arms out, but a muscular young man broke through their cordon and charged me. I guess it was me. I brought up the rear, being over careful not to run or show fear. I glanced back and saw him closing fast, and, after the umbrella assault, was determined not to be blindsided again, so I quickly pivoted to face him, arm raised to protect my injured eye. It must have looked like a karate stance (they'd had already accused us of being from China) because the fellow screeched comically to a halt, the cops yelled "hey!" and it was all over. L'il Abner retreated, and we walked safely to our van. It's the only time my name has ever appeared on national wire services, and you can also read about it in a typescript interview in the bowels of the Stanford University library, which is available online.

    A few days after the event, I retold it to a student from a farming parish near Bogalusa, and he blanched: "That's the Klan!" But I carried on after only a few days of post-traumatic stress, helped by the absolute conviction that I had played on angels' team. My gospel-based distaste of loveless discrimination against neighbor has grown in the decades since, but it's humbling to realize how many systematic injustices I have sleepwalked through before an issue captured enough media for me to hear. We are cyclops, it seems, able to see only one new inequity at a time. The years have raised my consciousness beyond racial civil rights to women's rights. abortion rights, gay rights (belatedly same-sex marriage), and (most recently) trans rights, in addition to the cavalcade of environmental concerns since the 1960s. 

    I imagine each of these as a call for Christians to untangle secular customs from religion and read more clearly the Great Commandment to love neighbors as ourselves. Christ undercuts national and ethnic pride while saying nothing about abortion, women's equality, same-sex partnerships, or sexual identity--all the so-called "Christian" positions constructed on these subjects--but Jesus repeatedly condemns selfishness, privilege, and hoarded wealth. Too many churches, in my view, betray the faith by turning a blind eye to core evils that Jesus denounced such as of competitiveness, self-importance, privilege, and greed, and make litmus tests of debatable issues. They confuse their folkways with divine law, their customs with God's will.

    Christians from Paul on have made a habit of excusing themselves from the call to universal love by describing unloving customs as "nature," invoking of idols such as gender, race, class, and nationality to excuse neighbor-abuse. Paul endorses slavery (Colossians 3:22) and commands wives to submit to their husbands (but not vice versa, and no recourse from vicious or incompetent spouses) (Ephesians 5:22). He thus supported pagan systems that exposed slaves and women to systematic abuse, meanwhile teaching the falseness of distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. "All are one in Christ Jesus" ( Galatians 3:28), but some more "one" than others. 

    Of course, a harried missionary facing persecution even as he became "all things to all people" (1 Corinthians 9:22) would have lost his cause (and his life) if he had agitated for social equality. This would have been seen as "stealing" (a common trope in 1850s America) by his slave-owning converts and an attack on the economic foundations of the Empire. His churches survived by respecting Roman law (Romans 13:5), and it is absurd to imagine that he could have overthrown the patriarchal family, even if the idea had occurred to him. So the prophet of equality in Christ can only call for voluntary compliance--exhorting husbands and slavers to play nice in the face of vast, systematic inequalities of power. Maybe Paul did the best he could under the circumstances, but he joined the devil's team to survive.

    Another famous instance of evasion is Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that all men "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" while he alienated the rights of scores of slaves, exploited to maintain his aristocratic status. It is a tribute to human toleration of cognitive dissonance that that the Continental Congress didn't roar with laughter at the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson retained Jesus' neighborly morality in his cut-and-paste Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, a demythologized digest of the New Testament, and he always claimed to be a Christian. But I doubt that he wanted his slaves to enslave him, the only justification for enslaving them under the Golden Rule. Of course, moral dissonance is unavoidable in any "Christian" nation. Imagine a military that loved an invading neighbor army as itself and turned the other flank. 

    A Christian nation is, at best, an oxymoron like a "jumbo shrimp." Nations may honor a few gospel precepts (just as some shrimp may be less non-jumbo than others), but to imitate the crucified Lord is to be a loser in a competitive world. The gospel preaches losing, being last, a servant. Christ's blessed are the poor, the weak, and the reviled. As a practical politician and beneficiary of white male privilege, Jefferson understood that abolition of slavery in Virginia would end his world--would be as politically suicidal as arming the militia with daisies. Self-righteous claims about inalienable human rights--important as they are as an ideals for us today--ended for him where human chattel were needed to pay the bills at Monticello.

    In my childhood, women had more rights than in the previous century, when they couldn't vote, hold office, work in most occupations, or own property if married, but most women were still housewives like my mother, who quit teaching when she married. She felt obliged to become a housewife.

     I understood the historic need for housewives while visiting my grandparents before rural electrification when their transportation into town was a mule-drawn wagon. Grandmother woke before dawn to fire up the wood-stove, cook biscuits and grits, and finally fry bacon and eggs fetched from the henhouse before my grandfather rose a dawn to tend to the crops and livestock. After breakfast there was milking, churning, and cooking a large dinner with cornbread (the noon meal)--most of the year made from fresh ingredients from the big garden and chicken yard she tended. If chicken was on the menu, she wrung the necks and plucked and cleaned the birds. The evening meal (supper) was leftovers with buttermilk, cornbread, and syrup, so the afternoon was free for cleaning the house and yard, washing clothes, and much more--much of this with a child on her hip when she was younger unless a girl was old enough to help. Good food was fresh and from scratch, so a solitary man ate badly, and bachelors in town time-shared cooks at boarding houses. Men often married to make a home, so older widows were desirable brides. Even if men could keep house, in a marriage it was the "natural" function of women who spent years pregnant and breastfeeding children--inevitable before widespread birth control and when children produced income on farms or in factories before child labor was outlawed. With bigger muscles and no pregnancy or nursing, men "naturally" worked the fields and barns.

    The point is that traditional gender roles as a rule (there were always exceptions) were integral to prosperous farm family a century ago, so that violations of them impoverished both genders. It's even arguable that freeing of slaves in the Roman Empire might have crashed the economy, hurting most the poor--especially the freed slaves. I don't know. I do know that those in power keep the books, and it seems that expanded applications of the Golden Rule (such as emancipation, feminism, and scaling back of racism and sexual-identity bias) occur only after social or technological changes facilitate them, and then they take a generation or so to emerge. 

    A lot that happened between my grandmother's youth and the 1950s opened the way for women to enter the world of men: emigration into towns, grocery stores, factory-preserved food, kitchen appliances (especially refrigerators and washing machines), free public schools, an explosion of restaurants, and social security to support of aged parents--not to speak of available condoms (later the Pill) and children drifting from the column of profit to that of loss. All of these converged in the first half of the 20th century, making feminism possible, even inevitable. In my childhood, women who kept house while their husbands "brought home the bacon" did so mostly out of social inertia. With some shifting of priorities they might have had masculine-style careers. They just didn't realize it or care to change. Their daughters did, insisting that men do unto women as they would have women do unto them. Then it happened.

    I wonder what egregious injustices, obvious to future generations, we accept as natural. I may be too optimistic, but I hope that extreme concentration of wealth is one of them--a blatant violation of the Golden Rule that only indifference prevents us from mitigating. Mechanisms are in place, such as progressive income tax and public education, but are applied weakly--the rich often paying lower percentages of tax than the middle class and the poor crushed by college debt. The existing economic system lavishly advantages haves (and their children) and disadvantages have-nots (and theirs), but this is somehow seen as fair, and the poor (most of them disadvantaged from childhood) are stigmatized even as they work three jobs to raise a family. Official, if hollow, respect for people regardless of gender, race, and sexuality is an easy sell compared to respect for people regardless of income. 

     Maybe someday "classist" will have the connotation that "racist" does today. Granted, that was the case briefly in the past century--in Soviet Russia, for instance--and the violent manufacturing of equality attempted then didn't work. Conservatives rightly condemn it but wrongly conflate it with moderate market-based reforms to more closely approach the Golden Rule, with economic play on the angels' team.

Note: This was written in August 2019, before the George Floyd demonstrations and the summer that followed, which I saw as a flashback to the 60s and their dream of of a better America.

Work Cited

Interview of members of the Student Liberal Federation. Accessed 7/20/2019.

 (https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:gd814nm2179/gd814nm2179.pdf).