I remember a visit several years ago to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. I spent time contemplating as I read the panels in the monument's interior. Words like this kept me there for awhile:
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish a law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state and on a general plan." From monticello.org
My musings always led me to believe that Jefferson knew the right thing to do about enslaved Africans, but could not bring himself to do it. Incredibly, however, his writing enabled the efforts toward enfranchisement that came later. But I mourn the freedom his words could have brought his generation.
This white southerner and founding father comes to mind at the end of a historic week. On the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the eve before the presidential inauguration, I attended The Dallas Leadership Institute's symposium for the holiday.
Journalist Diane McWhorter, who grew up in Alabama, discussed the cultural and political racism fellow white southerners accepted in 1963, the year Dr. Martin Luther King wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." She won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for her chronicling of the era in "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution."
Author Diane McWhorter at The Dallas Leadership Institute event on Jan. 19. Photo courtesy of Tysha Randle.
Joining McWhorter at the symposium was theologian and cultural historian the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker. He was a strategist in the Civil Rights Movement and typed the famous Birmingham letter for King. This man who once served as the executive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference talked about the tactics the civil rights workers used, like allowing children to demonstrate in Birmingham.
He talked about the sacrifice his family endured as blacks, and recounted how he was restrained by a journalist when he learned his wife had been struck by an Alabama law enforcement official. If he had not been restrained, Walker could have lost his life.
The Rev. Wyatt T. Walker with symposium guest at The Dallas Leadership Institute event. Photo courtesy of Tysha Randle.
The code of dual citizenship our country accommodated, despite the freedoms Jefferson's words invoked, stood out for all to see in 1963. A bomb placed in a church killed four girls. Police employed dogs and water hoses to deter demonstrators. Rumors swirled that an outsider bombed the church and that demonstrators placed steaks in their clothing to lure dogs toward them, McWhorter told symposium guests.
The symposium brought back the troubles of that year, and how it was not so long ago that America openly sanctioned a red-white-and-blue version of apartheid. Because that history is not so far from us, to call this time in the nation "post-racial" is premature, unless we understand how deeply the nation embraced an infrastructure of difference between people.
The white southerners in Birmingham who sanctioned this system were church-going and family-oriented, McWhorter said. She even suspected that her father, a member of the privileged class, somehow played a role.
And, as McWhorter said, the nation's "national obsession" with closure should not hasten a false, incomplete healing.
May I add that when unattended, true healing is a complicated task because the breadth of the offense dims, and the resistance to forgiveness builds. This fresh page in history need not be as fitful as Jefferson's apparent struggle to do the right thing at the dawn of our nation's birth. America can flow further on this current of good will.
For a fully redeemed church -- shorn of its own clenched fists throughout all congregations and ministries, repentant of linking a pure Gospel with racial intolerance toward anyone -- can lead the way.
Judy Howard Ellis
