Dave Concepcion, states C*UUYAN's position in this sermon. I disagree wholeheartedly, but it is fair that the opposite viewpoint get shared.
Withouth further adou:
The reading I refer to is from "If White Kids Die: Memoris of a Civil Rights Movement Volunteer" by Dick J. Reavis, a white civil rights volunteeer in the mid -'60s. I'm including the reading here beacuse it was important to the sermon.
READING: "If White Kids Die: Memoris of a Civil Rights Movement Volunteer" by Dick J. Reavis.
"All civil rights workers, as far as I know, came to believe in something called 'The System.' Belief in the existence of the System became, I think, the key ideological point that held us together. The term was never defined in any formal way. It was not precisely the 'system of apartheid' that te South Africans talked about, but it wasn't distinguished from that either. It wasnt' precisely the 'capitalist system' of Marxist belief, but it wasn't distinguished from that. Each of us formed our idea of it only by piecing together things that we heard and saw; it was not an idea that came from texts or formal doctrine. The System was the rule of the people on top, all or most of these people being whites. In dozens of ways, the System profited by the oppression of blacks. Because blacks were disenfranchised, governments didn't face strong demands for wealth-sharing or welfare programs. Because the have-nots could not safely rally for democratic ends, society was run for the haves. The System thrived that way.
"The idea was that the United States was not a democracy. It was run by the System, not its people. This was, in essence, a revolutionary idea, swelling inside of an obstensibly non-revolutionary movement. In its latter years, when parts of the civil rights movement became known as the Black Liberation Movement, the idea of the System burst its reformist bonds, and the Movement became openly revolutionary. By then most whites had abandoned it, and the Movement's latter-day organizations, notably teh Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa, were repressed. The first expressions of revolutionism from within the civil rights movement came from SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee], making their debut in the mass media during the Meredith March.
"[Stokely] Carmichael and his allies began by pointing out that Southern blacks did not need sympathetic whites to lead them. If the role of whites had been to integrat the tally of missing and murdered civil right agitators, they argued, the need for that role was passing, despite the killings of two black Alabama civil rights workers during the year that followed the Selma march.
"Whites were needed, however to take the struggle where blacks couldn't go, into white communities. the people who ran the System were white: that was obvious from the state of things. But the System didn't exempt whites from oppression. In fact, it used most of the American people agaisnt their interests. White civil rigths workers perhaps couldn't do effective agitation in white communities like Demopolis [Alabama], because we would not have been accepted. But we could agitate for racial reform in our home towns, and even if we could not do that, we could agitate against the Vietnam War, which was drafting inordinate numbers of blacks and disadvantaged whites to senseless deaths. The point of arguments to exclude us was that we were needed more among whites, where racism was stronger and the System resided. The System could be fought almost anywhere, and most needed to be fought in the communities--white communities--where allegiance to it was strongest."
SERMON/HOMILY: AR WORK IN UU COMMUNITIES
When I became a member of the First and Second Church of Boston, while we were on stage receiving our flowers and gifts, the senior minister had all everyone in the congregation read aloud the UU seven principles. It was actually a very powerful moment. While I am a life-long UU, I had never heard these principles before; they only really came into effect around 1992 and were not meant for the entire religion itself, rather a covenant for the UUA itself to work amongst themselves and the member congregations. But the principles had a powerful resonance with many member churches and congregants that it has given widespread meaning to the religion. I for one on that stage reading hearing them read aloud, felt that I had a clearer and better understanding of the religion I was born into. Almost immediately after us new members sat back down, a middle-aged white man in a navy blue suit got up, walked to the front of the sanctuary, and with the piano accompaniment began a rendition of “Ol’ Man River” – complete with broken, southern black speech pattern. Needless to say I was thrown back into confusion over our religion.
To me, this story illustrates why anti-racism work is so important for all UU congregations to examine, and it gives insight into how we as UUs can get in our own way of that work. First of all, while the story might seem innocuous and even oddly funny, the fact is it did hurt in some way. It hurts more so because unlike a visible (or blatant) wound, it isn't a discernible injury. I know that whatever feelings the event brought up for me at the time was all internal, it doesn't mean that it was no less real. Racism is like that. I once described to a friend how hard it is to explain to white people how certain actions can be racist. I said it was like trying to show someone a wolf that can change itself into a tree: I know it's a wolf, but all they see is a tree. Many people find it easy to label things racist when it is obvious—the KKK, Skinheads yelling “White Power,” hate fueled web sites. What people have trouble with is equating subtle, everyday actions, statements, etc. as potentially racist. I'm sure the church leaders thought the song at the membership service was appropriate and meaningful, and the singer is a great singer. But what if the church audience was of a different color? Would that have changed things? Would they have thought that the image of a white man singing song in a “black” dialect be appropriate? The problem is these questions never come to mind. While it may not be an overt act of racism, it is the fact that it might be hurtful never came to mind. If we want ours to truly be the beloved community, if we want to live out our principles, we need to work on making our UU community an anti-racist community.
So here's a question for you: why ruin our time today talking about racism? It's a topic that we already struggle with daily; so why do we need to worry about it here at church? There are a few pertinent reasons to talk about it now. Right now the biggest one I can think of is at our recent Spring Business meeting, Reverend Hank suggested that we as a church need to work on our mission statement, and one of the ideas he threw out to us was being an anti-racist church. An absolutely very noble goal for us, to be sure. However I'm not sure we the congregation knows what dedicating ourselves to that task would entail. I am here today to, in my own way, lobby to make that a part of our mission as a church, but I am also here to explain what doing so within a UU context means, and illuminate some of the pitfalls we face.
The first thing to know is how the UU community is working on becoming an anti-racist community. The Journey Towards Wholeness program is our anti-racism effort to help transform the UUA and member congregations into an “anti-racist” community. The main thrust of it is to combat and dismantle institutional racism. This is the idea that while prejudice is a huge part of racism, it is when those prejudices are upheld by an infrastructure that supports the subjugation of another group of people based on arbitrary guideposts, that racism exists and thrives. The easiest explanation of that definition in that sense is racial prejudice + institutional power = racism. It is a guideline the Journey Towards Wholeness has been given by Crossroads Ministry, an outside interfaith consultancy group that deals with anti-racism efforts. So the mission is to dismantle racism from its base.
This is illustrated a bit in our reading from Dick Reavis' book “If White Kids Die.”He talks about “the System”that upholds racism itself. While it remains a little amorphous as to what the system actually is, it is what actually controls America, not the people and not democracy. If racism is to be defeated, what needs to come crashing down and be dismantles is this system that “prevents the have-nots” from safely rallying for democracy” leaving society to be “run for the haves.” Of course the big question is how do we do this. Unfortunately, there is not one definitive answer. In his book, Reavis points out that Civil Rights revolutionary Stokely Carmichael's philosophy was to take the struggle into the white communities, having whites agitate “where blacks could not go.” In fact the book's title “If White Kids Die” comes from Carmichael's comments to a group of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers in New York that if black people were to be killed for the civil rights struggle, whites would die with them. The idea was to use racism against itself in a way. If no one gave a damn about black people dying, they would care more when it started happening to white people.
Oddly this is evident even through our recent history. In the mid to late 1980s, Black and Latino inner-city schools were becoming battlegrounds and areas of violence. It got notice when large spurts of it happened at once, but generally people accepted it as what happens in public schools in the city. Then on April 20, 1999, two teens armed with automatic weapons slaughtered 12 people and took their own lives at Columbine high school in Littleton, Colorado. That's when white America started to demand “zero tolerance” policies to end the violence in our schools. Now this is not to say that solving violence in inner-city schools earlier would have prevented Columbine, but where was the huge outcry when it was happening there? As Civil Rights activist Ella Baker said “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until the killing of a black man, black mothers' sons, are as important to the killing of a white man, white mothers' sons.”
So yes, our mission is to take down the system itself. As such, this is a struggle that is ongoing. I know will never see such a day when racism as we know it (or even as we think we know it) will end, but it is important to take those first steps. This mission then becomes a generational one. It will not end with me or even my daughter, but each generation has to make sure each one has an easier time with the struggle than the one before it. We have made strides. We UUs have made strides.
We have a long history of having abolitionists among our ranks, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and four of the “Secret Six”—men who funded John Brown’s famous raid on Harper’s Ferry—including Reverends Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth. During the Civil Rights era, Reverend James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo were killed fighting for the civil rights for southern blacks. The Unitarian Universalist Association started to work in earnest on anti-racism work in 1997, when the UUA resolved to “urge Unitarian Universalists to examine carefully their own conscious and unconscious racism as participants in a racist society and the effect that racism has on all our lives, regardless of color.” At this year’s GA, there was a resolution passed that congregations should “hold at least one program over the year to address racism or classism and to report on it at next year’s assembly.” We know that racism violates our first and seventh principle: affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person; and respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part. Even if they weren’t against those principles, we must say that we cannot have a strong and blessed community if part of that community is left out of full participation. This means, that yes, anti-racism work is spiritual work for us (and many other faiths) as well.
Because of that, it seems that anti-racism work is right up our alley. We should be a church that leads this fight. It seems like we are a church who should be in the forefront of anti-racism work. If we are on the forefront of the Gay marriage issue, another societal oppression, why would we not be on the forefront of fighting racial oppression?
However that effort to own up to our principles has had rough spots. If you notice in my listing of our credentials, you'll see many individual efforts, but not a lot of backing from the institutions. While preparing this sermon I checked out a timeline of anti-racism work among UUs in history. The only institutional action taken against slavery was a Universalist resolution in 1790 calling for the “gradual abolition of slavery.” At the General Assembly in 1969 in Boston, there was a famous walkout by black Unitarians after Black Affairs Council (BAC) after the previous commitment of $1 million to the group was reduced. In many ways we haven't recovered from that incident as far as African American membership. It is this institutional problem that threatens the work we do. It is what we need to work on the most. Yet while we are addressing it, we can find ourselves behind the curve in these efforts, in my honest opinion.
Now you can argue with me that these events were in the past, and occurred in times of great turmoil and struggle—times when not knowing the right actions to take can be excused. Certainly we've learned from them and are improving. Well I will address that with this example. In 1992, the UUA General Assembly asked the governing body to work on anti-racism within the UU community and formed the committee that would eventually become the Journey Towards Wholeness committee. The next year, 1993, the General Assembly was held in Charlotte, North Carolina—the Thomas Jefferson District. Since it was also the year of electing a new UUA president, they had an idea for a special event. Delegates were invited to a Jeffersonian-era ball in which everyone was asked to dress in period costumes. Sounds appropriate and fun agreed? Now ask yourselves this: if you were black, what would your period costume be? Many black delegates actually considered showing up to the ball in shackles. Needless to say there was a lot of controversy. Much like the choice of “Ol Man River” this was an idea done in good faith but one that had unintended consequences. And that's where the tough work of anti-racism comes in. It is the unconscious, ingrained learned behavior and beliefs that are the hardest to combat, yet are the ones that are not only the hardest to lose, they are often the most reinforced by societal forces. Accepting that violence will occur in inner city schools lead to abandonment of the schools themselves rather than making the efforts to solve the problems at their source. Failure to understand how the song “Ol Man River” fits in a historical context and how and who performs it, leads to misunderstandings at best. While we believe in polity of the congregations, the governing bodies of the whole church should also provide leadership. When they don’t, we lose direction of the religion as a whole. In the case of anti-racism work, there is often a disconnect between what individual members are doing and what the leadership does.
Yes, we have improved but often we are playing catch up. This most recent resolution from GA on racism and classism comes one year after an incident at the end of the Fort Worth General Assembly hurt many young people of color at that time. There are also many faiths out there that are working on anti-racism work and have been doing so for a longer time than we have been. The fact that we had to approach Crossroads Ministry, and Episcopal based group, for an anti-racism training and model says volumes about where we are in the struggle.
We also have other handicaps when it comes to anti-racism work, and a lot of those handicaps come from within. This is a very white religion, let's face it. Most of you suck at gospel, most of you don't dance, and you can't clap on the beat and/or in unison very well. Trust me. As such we don't have a large black population. At First and Second church, our historian told a group of us that the largest attendance of Black people in that church was 50 or 60 people, but this was in the year 1780. My response was “God help us if we have to rise to the challenge of the 1700s.” So is the answer to bring in more people of color? Many people believe that; I don't. It only provides “window dressing” and is just a form of tokenism, and like any token effort, it doesn't address the critical institutional racial problems within the religion, and it will cause people of color to never attend our services. An all white institution can be anti-racist. It is possible. And to do that shows us to be more sincere than trying to recruit Black members.
Another issue: because we are focused on institutional racism, we get too caught up in that fight and can sometimes have blinders on for any other model that doesn't include institutional power analysis (which is too large a concept to get into here now). Oddly this is a very UU problem. I have often spoken on the need to reach both the head and the heart with worship and spirituality or lose both. We can't stop at only fighting personal prejudices; but while institutional racism supports the entire structure, it is the personal prejudices that help feed the institutional side. They both feed off each other. In anti-racism circles, they talk about getting the proper diagnosis to treat the disease correctly. And yes racism is a disease, a cancer. But if to ignore the suffering of the patient from the subsequent illnesses while fighting the tumor, the doctor is only doing half the job; and vice versa. If we are a religion that can house so many different spiritual paths, surely we should be able to harbor different models of fighting racism.
Another uniquely UU problem is where our fascination with semantics rears its ugly head. I have heard personally from people (a majority of whom are white) who say that it is wrong for us to be anti-racist because we as UUs shouldn’t be “anti” anything; we need to be pro something—though I’m not sure they know what the something would be. Some of these people aren't just congregants; ministers and administrators have also stated this as well. This is one thing that drives me crazy and crazy enough to voice my opinion about it. As a Latino, as a Black man, as a person of color, I need white people to be anti-racist. Racism is something that is ever present in my life and in all facets of society that I deal with. As such it is impossible to be pro-something else until racism is taken out of my way. In my opinion, asking a person of color to try and focus on a positive is like telling someone living in a locked from the outside basement apartment with no windows to look at the sky. If you can help me out of the basement, only then will I be willing to think more positively. Malcolm X was famously asked by a young white student what can a non-racist white person do to help his struggle. His answer was, “You can do nothing”—an answer he said was one of his biggest mistakes. Later he said he would have asked her to go tell white people to stop hating black people. This echoes what Stokely Carmichael eventually said as I recounted earlier.
This leads me to probably the biggest problem in dealing with anti-racism in UU circles: how we stumble over the concept of white privilege. The reading from Reavis' book is probably the clearest explanation of white privilege that I've heard the six years of anti-racism work that I've been involved with. However we never explain it this way. Part of it I think comes from the model we use. Like I said Crossroads is an Episcopal based group; Episcopals believe in the concept of Original Sin. Therefore white privilege is explained with, again in my opinion, all the guilt and mea culpa of dealing with Original Sin. Since UUs don't believe in sin much less Original Sin, we have a ridiculously hard time with the concept of white privilege as explained to us in the model and therefore we resent being made to feel guilty for being white. If that's the way it's to be explained, we will be losing any opportunity to get people to fight against institutional racism, which is necessary. If we can explain it in the way Malcolm X wanted to, or even in a uniquely UU way—possibly either that if white people are to help maintain the strength of the beloved community, they need to be willing to give up power in order ensure equality among all members; or that maintaining the interdependent web means to ensure that all the links need to be of a base strength in order for it to stay intact—we would have a better chance of fighting a unified front against racism.
The problems seem insurmountable. We have individuals who are active in the fight but the institution can be lacking or at least stumbles. There is no short term solution; it is an ongoing fight that has no end in sight, or at least has no end that we have been able to definitively discern. So why talk about racism today? Why do it? Why fight it? Because it is a necessary and worhthy fight. These various stumbling blocks are the growing pains to fully live out our religion's potential. Yes, racism affects every strata of our society including our spiritual lives. As such the need has arisen to think about anti-racism work as spiritual work. How can we be connected to each other if some of those we are connected to are being held back? How can we not feel it if one we are connected to is being held back? And how can we allow this to happen and not act, when our principles tell us that this is what we struggle for. If our principles are to mean anything, this is a mission, a life mission that needs to be undertaken. We have covenanted these principles among us, and now it is time to do so for the entire human community.
African American writer/philosopher Richard Wright wrote in his 12 Million Black Voices “We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we black folk perish, America will perish. If America has forgotten her past, then let her look into the mirror of our consciousness and she will see the living past living in the present, for our memories go back, through our black folk of today, through the recollections of our black parents and through the tales of slavery told by our black grandparents, to the time when none of us, black or white, lived in this fertile land. The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope which we all traveled has brought us into a stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims.” We have a long road ahead of us. If this is to be the mission of our church, let us do it with eyes wide open. Let us do it with sincerity. Let us fight with ferocity, let us learn humbly from one another, and let us look forward to a day when sermons like this will be completely unnecessary.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Monday, January 08, 2007
Leanne's Toes
THE BOOK
(Greatly Abridged)
for Leanne
CHAPTER ONE:
Leanne talked to her toes. "Oh toes, I love you!" she proclaimed, to anyone who would listen. "I love you so! I love my beautiful, cute, piano toes".
They were, indeed, the most beautiful toes everyone had ever lain eyes upon. They routinely won prizes and exposure in such contests as "Toes of Washington State" and "Miss Toes Universe". Her toes were so famous, in fact, that they were mentioned in an article of Cosmopolitan, dated June 2004, titled "Ten Tips For Perfect Toenails".
Recently, however, Leanne and her toes had fallen upon rough times. It seems that her toes believed that they were not receiving the high quality pedicure treatments they believed they had deserved, after winning so many important accolades. Her toes came forward with a list of demands. First, they were to always have access to the finest pumice scrub. Next, they were to never be painted by anything followed by high quality, fast drying, no smudging toenail polish. Lastly, Leanne's toes included legal language that read that if at any time their needs were not meet, then they had every right to refuse to perform their duties.
Leanne was furious. Since when did she owe her toes anything? In fact, if he hadn't been for the skillful manipulation of other parts of her body, in particular, her brain, her toes wouldn't have been anywhere. They would have been just another pretty bunch of toes, scraping by, trying to make ends meet.
"You are nothing without ME, toes!" she spat. "Toes! I feed you, I wash you, I paint you, I rub you, I sing to you, I talk to you when you are lonely, and THIS is the thanks that I get!
FINE!!!"
At that point, Leanne's toes refused to straighten out so that she could walk. Their toe demands were not being met, and as promised Leanne was forced to cancel a photoshoot with a prominent periodical called Playtoes, that would have netted both of them several thousand dollars. Leanne hobbled along on toes that would not fully bend and on the remnants of their life savings.
CHAPTER TWO:
Leanne was also one of extraordinary beauty. I forgot about that.
CHAPTER THREE:
Leanne reached a settlement with her toes after six weeks of antagonizing stalemate. An outside negotiator was called in, and it was agreed that Leanne and her toes would make a clean break. Leanne retained the right to all previous photography and media ventures in which they were both attached. In return, her toes were allowed to go free-lance and find another pair of feet who would agree to their demands. The deal was rumored to be somewhere around $31 million dollars. Leanne's toes signed the contract agreement then wriggled off her feet. . Leanne then found a pair of temporary toes, which were not nearly as beautiful as her previous set, but were willing to learn the ropes of professional toe modeling and didn't complain.
CHAPTER FOUR:
Leanne's original toes called her up one day, out of the blue. Things had not worked out nearly as well as they'd intended. They wanted to reconcile. They missed her. They missed it when she talked to them, rubbed them when they hurt, sang to them when they were lonely. In short, they wanted to get back together.
Leanne had missed her original toes, too. Things had never been quite the same without them. So, she forgave them and they returned to the top of the toe-modeling career where they have been ever since. I'm sure you've seen them everywhere.
The Lessons that Don't Stick
"I know what evil I am about to impart. My irrational self is greater than my rational self."- Medea
Some years ago, I was befriended by a family from London. They were kind enough to see me through a rough spot in my life and I'll forever be grateful for the mother, Carola, who gave me a piece of advice that I've never forgotten.
After listening to me ramble on about yet another hurt feeling, or callous remark, I remember her calm, wise response.
"You just need to realise that you're not responsible for what other people think, nor for what they think of you".
It's one of those lessons that I wish I could make myself believe all the time, as opposed to the times when I'm in the right mood to believe it.
I once had a friend who had this exact idea, though worded differently, typed out and stuck with magnets to one side of her refrigerator. These words have probably been voiced by the eloquent tongues of millions of therapists from the time of Freud until now--to the simple wisdom of common folk.
It's a distinctly human malady; this idea of letting others' opinions and thoughtless insults ruin your day. Yet, this is indeed an avoidable burden we place upon ourselves. If these things didn't matter to us, then naturally the pain involved wouldn't exist.
You've always got to consider the source and understand that most peoples' primary concern is themselves. Why would most people look outside their primary focus to care for your petty concerns, in their manner of thinking?
Furthermore, the indirect nastiness most people dish out in your direction is a result of their own inner issues and probably would be directed towards anyone with the misfortune to be in their way at the time.
In more personal relationships, people may lash out at you out of their own insecurities, because you've raised painful issues they've tried desperately to keep to themselves.
Despite all of this...their misery is not yours, and though it might be admirable of a caring, thoughtful, loving, compassionate person to try to take on their burden as your own...one must understand that one can only deal with one's own problems.
I hope I don't sound self-rightous in stating all this...you see, all of this advice is for my own benefit right now, as I'm recoiling from my own hurt feelings.
I wish all of this would stick permanently.
I'm not telling you all something you don't already know.
But I do hope that it sticks...and this time for good.
Some years ago, I was befriended by a family from London. They were kind enough to see me through a rough spot in my life and I'll forever be grateful for the mother, Carola, who gave me a piece of advice that I've never forgotten.
After listening to me ramble on about yet another hurt feeling, or callous remark, I remember her calm, wise response.
"You just need to realise that you're not responsible for what other people think, nor for what they think of you".
It's one of those lessons that I wish I could make myself believe all the time, as opposed to the times when I'm in the right mood to believe it.
I once had a friend who had this exact idea, though worded differently, typed out and stuck with magnets to one side of her refrigerator. These words have probably been voiced by the eloquent tongues of millions of therapists from the time of Freud until now--to the simple wisdom of common folk.
It's a distinctly human malady; this idea of letting others' opinions and thoughtless insults ruin your day. Yet, this is indeed an avoidable burden we place upon ourselves. If these things didn't matter to us, then naturally the pain involved wouldn't exist.
You've always got to consider the source and understand that most peoples' primary concern is themselves. Why would most people look outside their primary focus to care for your petty concerns, in their manner of thinking?
Furthermore, the indirect nastiness most people dish out in your direction is a result of their own inner issues and probably would be directed towards anyone with the misfortune to be in their way at the time.
In more personal relationships, people may lash out at you out of their own insecurities, because you've raised painful issues they've tried desperately to keep to themselves.
Despite all of this...their misery is not yours, and though it might be admirable of a caring, thoughtful, loving, compassionate person to try to take on their burden as your own...one must understand that one can only deal with one's own problems.
I hope I don't sound self-rightous in stating all this...you see, all of this advice is for my own benefit right now, as I'm recoiling from my own hurt feelings.
I wish all of this would stick permanently.
I'm not telling you all something you don't already know.
But I do hope that it sticks...and this time for good.
Angry Death Goblins of Pain
A break from heavy shit.
Copywrite 2006, Kevin Camp.
ngry Death Goblins of Pain
Part One
Rick Covey sat at his book-signing desk, daydreaming as usual. For several years, he had been an established, if not highly respected author. Often, in times such as now—those dead spaces in between affixing his signature to yet another freshly printed book—his thoughts drifted back to his first published story.
Like most young writers, he started out with grandiose dreams. Fresh out of college, some eight years before, he had submitted poem after poem to all of the key literary journals and periodicals: The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, The Harvard Review, among others. All of them came back returned, unsurprisingly, along with a standard rejection form on a half sheet of paper.
After filling half a dresser drawer with similar slips of paper, Rick started to become desperate. He shifted to fiction. Still, the results were the same.
The remnants of his college fund slowly running its course and with no visible means of income in front of him, Rick contemplated returning to his old high school job. The elder Covey, Rick’s father, originally a native of Alabama, had uprooted and moved his family to Atlanta during the economic boom of the 1980’s. Through a combination of dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time, Mr. Covey invested in cellular phones when they were just reaching mass popularity. Over the years, the man used his wealth and influence to become a powerful and notable ultra-right wing reactionary.
Mr. Covey counted Pat Roberson, Jerry Falwell, and The Graham Family as close personal friends. He had once been known as James R. Covey but decided for symbolic and public relations reasons to have his name legally changed to Pro-Life Covey.
With the incentive of an easy job and good wages, Mr. Covey had paid his only son to drive around his hometown in a truck. The vehicle prominently displayed, on either side, a titanic picture of an aborted fetus. Yet, to Rick, the thought of having to dodge hurled garbage, screamed epithets, and the occasional militant feminist was not appealing.
Rick could not have been more different than his father. Rick left the Southern Baptist church of his boyhood at age sixteen, disagreed openly with his father’s political views, and expressed no interest in the family business. He wanted to make it on his own, out of the shadow of his father.
So, one day, deeply frustrated, he revamped a manuscript he had written in the middle of high school. The story featured an often-abused main character that had once been beaten up for criticizing the maturity of two of his classmates—two football jocks who roared with laughter while simulating copulation with two tiny plastic giraffes.
When satisfied with the finished product he enclosed the manuscript in a large manila envelope and slid the package through the tiny curbside mail slot.
Ten days later, after he had finished washing the wheels of the Fetus-mobile, an enthusiastic letter arrived from a prominent magazine.
Dear Sir,
We here at Depressed Teen are enthusiastic about your story, “My Black Metaphoric Ebony Soul.” We are willing to publish it in our March issue. Please call our publishing editor, Mary Scarlon, at your convenience.
Sincerely,
H. Thomas Forbes
And so it had begun.
While he had yearned for the attention of a serious adult audience, instead, he was the darling of a new generation of teenage misfits.
They skipped school for each book signing. They looked, invariably, the same. The girls always wore long sleeves and thrift store jackets over black t-shirts proclaiming the virtues of the newest death-metal band. Their acne was unskillfully concealed behind gallons of foundation and they referred to themselves as “Jade” or “Portutia”, even when their real names were Jennifer or Amy.
Often they came hand in hand with unbelievably pale, skinny boys wearing form-fitting turtleneck sweaters, who cradled their hand mirrors to their chests while openly pondering why their voices had yet to change.
“I LOVE your newest book, Mr. Covey!” gushed an adoring teenage female fan. Wearing a black choker and oversized canvas pants, the girl also sported a nametag on the right side of her XXL Cannibal Corpse shirt. The tag read: “Elveria”. The dot in the lower cased “i” in “Elveria” had been replaced with a cute circle.
“I used to only read R.L. Stein books but one day, I was at the library in the young adult section and saw a copy of Somber Death Rattle. I read the whole thing in three hours!”
Rick sighed and signed his name on the title page.
The next kid in line bore a similar nametag, which in stenciled script identified him as “Franklin”.
“Rick, that is if I may call you that, sir…you have been SUCH an inspiration! I really think of you as my sorcerer. I hope that isn’t too creepy.”
“Nope. That isn’t creepy at all, Franklin,” Rick said, not once lifting his eyes from a fresh copy of the book that the boy had placed before him on the table. “So, who should I make this out to?”
“Lord Belvedere,” Franklin responded. “That’s my nickname among my friends.”
______________________________________________________ Part Two
During a momentary lapse in book signings, Rick reminisced about his devoted fans. The strangest ones tended to stick in his memory more than others did. In particular, Rick remembered the kids with severe personality disorders. Once, somewhere in the Northeast, he had met a child, who, like some fussy one-year-old, responded to every question with a snotty and apparently reflexive, “NO!”
He seemed to be a normal child apart from that unfortunate side effect. Admittedly, Rick shouldn’t have taken the opportunity to use the malady to his amusement.
“Hey, Billy! Will you give me a million dollars?”
“No!”
“Hey, Billy! Will you sleep with me?”
“No!”
“Hey Billy! Do you think Rancid is a great
band?”
“No!”
Rick often received phone numbers from underage girls and occasionally, underage boys. He never consummated any of these invitations to dance the jailbait shuffle, though often he listened to their sob stories. Most of these came in the form of fan e-mails. Much like his phone number, which had been unlisted for years, he had also been forced to change his e-mail address periodically. Someone always managed to find it out after a few weeks and eventually his inbox would be swamped with admiring, adolescent praise.
One girl from Minnesota named Katherine was remarkably persistent.
Rick often thought about notifying the authorities when he’d receive yet another long-winded and highly sexually explicit e-mail from her. He had long delayed saying anything to anyone about her because most people simply wouldn’t believe him. Who has a sixteen-year old girl for a stalker?
Over the months she continued to write, he silently compiled a list of things she had variously told him about herself. For starters, she had been molested at age twelve by an uncle, but had in her words, “enjoyed it”. Now a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac, she routinely picked up random people of both sexes at shopping malls for group sex.
Rick suspected her family dynamic might be to blame for some of the dysfunction. She was the oldest child of a family of six and often had to keep an eye on her twelve-year old twin brothers, who always asked to sleep in the same bed as the younger children. She claimed that she and her mother were best friends: “More sisters than mother and daughter,” she had written. “We tell each other about everything”.
Rick often thought about writing a book about all the strange correspondence he received, but knew that unless he wanted to lose his core audience, he had best keep it unpublished. Instead, he cleverly worked the often times horrifying lives of his adoring fans into new books. So long as they continued to bombard him with their deep dark secrets, he knew he had material to write about for years.
______________________________________________________
Part Three
The next two girls in line had driven all the way from Washington State to see him. The first informed him that her name was Willow. She pointed to her mousy looking female friend and identified her as Jesus Christ. Jesus was cradling a baby girl, apparently hers, in her arms; the mother couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen
Willow talked too loud.
“Do you remember, Jesus, when you were seven and a half months pregnant, before you realized you were actually going to have a baby?”
Jesus stared ahead blankly, saying nothing.
“Oh, that’s right!” The friend replied. “I keep forgetting you made a vow of silence after Raven got you pregnant and you don’t talk anymore.”
“May I help you, ladies?” Rick impatiently interrupted them.
“Oh yes, Mr. Covey! I came all the way from Olympia for you to autograph my copy of Narcissistic Angry Bitch God.
“Ah, yes,” Rick replied. “That was the one where the main character has ‘intelligent Tourette’s Syndrome’. He only blurts out gothic obscenities.”
They both laughed. Jesus just nodded.
“You’re funny, Mr. Covey. Just like I knew you’d be.” The girl shyly looked down at Rick and caressed his hand sensually with her fingers.
He tried to change the subject.
“So, how old are you, my dear?”
Seductively flirting more with him, the girl responded, fluttering her eyelashes.
“Well, I’m sixteen, but my last boyfriend was twenty-eight. I had to dump him because we were in this mosh pit and someone’s lit cigarette burned a hole into his eye.
She frowned.
“After that, he had to wear an eye patch, and I
just don’t find them sexy at all. But now he tells me that he can see shades of red and blue now, so he decided to take the patch off.”
Rick sighed once again, signed his name on the indicated portion of the title page, and shoved the book back in the girls’ direction.
Jesus offered a weak grin, and Willow gave Rick a far too intimate hug before they both departed.
______________________________________________________
Part Four
Katherine arose earlier that day. Four days before, she had read about the book signing in Evanton by means of her local newspaper and decided that she was finally ready to meet her meet her infatuation face to face. After all, Evanton was only four hours away.
Booking the hotel room had been easy. Katherine’s mother didn’t suspect a thing when her daughter had asked to borrow her credit card. The reservation had been made for nearly five days before Katherine cranked her funeral black, heavily used car and started out on the road. On the drive, the girl listened exclusively to audiobook after audiobook of Rick reading his best selling novels.
Along with her paint-stained thrift store pants, Katherine wore a man’s white v-neck t-shirt. In fact, when he met her later that day, Rick speculated that she had purchased a whole value pack of them at Wal-Mart. He surmised this because Rick’s father wore the identical sort of shirt around the house when he wasn’t working and always underneath his stunning array of country club attire. The girl had taken a black permanent marker to the shirt and, in shaky, feminine writing, slashed “I love Rick Covey” across the front.
She had the swagger of a woman much older than her sixteen years. It was a slightly swaying, highly confident, cocky sort of presentation attempted only by a few females. Despite her sloppy dress, she was beautiful.
Rick had not expected this in the least. He had never known a nymphomaniac, this is true, but he had always pictured them as somewhat akin to crack whores—with the same facial scars, open sores, singed fingers, and lingering body funk. This girl, as she was still very much a girl, seemed to have breezily walked off a runway, not dazedly crawled away from a drug den.
Rick had certainly been tempted, at least at first. However, Katherine proved quickly that she possessed the extremely bad habit (like most of his fans) of not being able to withhold any personal details. The girl could not tell a lie in the presence of anyone.
So, when she said—quite matter of factly, that she didn’t believe her genital warts were in a contagious stage at the moment, Rick had to politely decline her offer. He then lifted his right hand above his head: a signal to security that he wanted this person away from him immediately.
Security complied.
Copywrite 2006, Kevin Camp.
ngry Death Goblins of Pain
Part One
Rick Covey sat at his book-signing desk, daydreaming as usual. For several years, he had been an established, if not highly respected author. Often, in times such as now—those dead spaces in between affixing his signature to yet another freshly printed book—his thoughts drifted back to his first published story.
Like most young writers, he started out with grandiose dreams. Fresh out of college, some eight years before, he had submitted poem after poem to all of the key literary journals and periodicals: The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, The Harvard Review, among others. All of them came back returned, unsurprisingly, along with a standard rejection form on a half sheet of paper.
After filling half a dresser drawer with similar slips of paper, Rick started to become desperate. He shifted to fiction. Still, the results were the same.
The remnants of his college fund slowly running its course and with no visible means of income in front of him, Rick contemplated returning to his old high school job. The elder Covey, Rick’s father, originally a native of Alabama, had uprooted and moved his family to Atlanta during the economic boom of the 1980’s. Through a combination of dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time, Mr. Covey invested in cellular phones when they were just reaching mass popularity. Over the years, the man used his wealth and influence to become a powerful and notable ultra-right wing reactionary.
Mr. Covey counted Pat Roberson, Jerry Falwell, and The Graham Family as close personal friends. He had once been known as James R. Covey but decided for symbolic and public relations reasons to have his name legally changed to Pro-Life Covey.
With the incentive of an easy job and good wages, Mr. Covey had paid his only son to drive around his hometown in a truck. The vehicle prominently displayed, on either side, a titanic picture of an aborted fetus. Yet, to Rick, the thought of having to dodge hurled garbage, screamed epithets, and the occasional militant feminist was not appealing.
Rick could not have been more different than his father. Rick left the Southern Baptist church of his boyhood at age sixteen, disagreed openly with his father’s political views, and expressed no interest in the family business. He wanted to make it on his own, out of the shadow of his father.
So, one day, deeply frustrated, he revamped a manuscript he had written in the middle of high school. The story featured an often-abused main character that had once been beaten up for criticizing the maturity of two of his classmates—two football jocks who roared with laughter while simulating copulation with two tiny plastic giraffes.
When satisfied with the finished product he enclosed the manuscript in a large manila envelope and slid the package through the tiny curbside mail slot.
Ten days later, after he had finished washing the wheels of the Fetus-mobile, an enthusiastic letter arrived from a prominent magazine.
Dear Sir,
We here at Depressed Teen are enthusiastic about your story, “My Black Metaphoric Ebony Soul.” We are willing to publish it in our March issue. Please call our publishing editor, Mary Scarlon, at your convenience.
Sincerely,
H. Thomas Forbes
And so it had begun.
While he had yearned for the attention of a serious adult audience, instead, he was the darling of a new generation of teenage misfits.
They skipped school for each book signing. They looked, invariably, the same. The girls always wore long sleeves and thrift store jackets over black t-shirts proclaiming the virtues of the newest death-metal band. Their acne was unskillfully concealed behind gallons of foundation and they referred to themselves as “Jade” or “Portutia”, even when their real names were Jennifer or Amy.
Often they came hand in hand with unbelievably pale, skinny boys wearing form-fitting turtleneck sweaters, who cradled their hand mirrors to their chests while openly pondering why their voices had yet to change.
“I LOVE your newest book, Mr. Covey!” gushed an adoring teenage female fan. Wearing a black choker and oversized canvas pants, the girl also sported a nametag on the right side of her XXL Cannibal Corpse shirt. The tag read: “Elveria”. The dot in the lower cased “i” in “Elveria” had been replaced with a cute circle.
“I used to only read R.L. Stein books but one day, I was at the library in the young adult section and saw a copy of Somber Death Rattle. I read the whole thing in three hours!”
Rick sighed and signed his name on the title page.
The next kid in line bore a similar nametag, which in stenciled script identified him as “Franklin”.
“Rick, that is if I may call you that, sir…you have been SUCH an inspiration! I really think of you as my sorcerer. I hope that isn’t too creepy.”
“Nope. That isn’t creepy at all, Franklin,” Rick said, not once lifting his eyes from a fresh copy of the book that the boy had placed before him on the table. “So, who should I make this out to?”
“Lord Belvedere,” Franklin responded. “That’s my nickname among my friends.”
______________________________________________________ Part Two
During a momentary lapse in book signings, Rick reminisced about his devoted fans. The strangest ones tended to stick in his memory more than others did. In particular, Rick remembered the kids with severe personality disorders. Once, somewhere in the Northeast, he had met a child, who, like some fussy one-year-old, responded to every question with a snotty and apparently reflexive, “NO!”
He seemed to be a normal child apart from that unfortunate side effect. Admittedly, Rick shouldn’t have taken the opportunity to use the malady to his amusement.
“Hey, Billy! Will you give me a million dollars?”
“No!”
“Hey, Billy! Will you sleep with me?”
“No!”
“Hey Billy! Do you think Rancid is a great
band?”
“No!”
Rick often received phone numbers from underage girls and occasionally, underage boys. He never consummated any of these invitations to dance the jailbait shuffle, though often he listened to their sob stories. Most of these came in the form of fan e-mails. Much like his phone number, which had been unlisted for years, he had also been forced to change his e-mail address periodically. Someone always managed to find it out after a few weeks and eventually his inbox would be swamped with admiring, adolescent praise.
One girl from Minnesota named Katherine was remarkably persistent.
Rick often thought about notifying the authorities when he’d receive yet another long-winded and highly sexually explicit e-mail from her. He had long delayed saying anything to anyone about her because most people simply wouldn’t believe him. Who has a sixteen-year old girl for a stalker?
Over the months she continued to write, he silently compiled a list of things she had variously told him about herself. For starters, she had been molested at age twelve by an uncle, but had in her words, “enjoyed it”. Now a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac, she routinely picked up random people of both sexes at shopping malls for group sex.
Rick suspected her family dynamic might be to blame for some of the dysfunction. She was the oldest child of a family of six and often had to keep an eye on her twelve-year old twin brothers, who always asked to sleep in the same bed as the younger children. She claimed that she and her mother were best friends: “More sisters than mother and daughter,” she had written. “We tell each other about everything”.
Rick often thought about writing a book about all the strange correspondence he received, but knew that unless he wanted to lose his core audience, he had best keep it unpublished. Instead, he cleverly worked the often times horrifying lives of his adoring fans into new books. So long as they continued to bombard him with their deep dark secrets, he knew he had material to write about for years.
______________________________________________________
Part Three
The next two girls in line had driven all the way from Washington State to see him. The first informed him that her name was Willow. She pointed to her mousy looking female friend and identified her as Jesus Christ. Jesus was cradling a baby girl, apparently hers, in her arms; the mother couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen
Willow talked too loud.
“Do you remember, Jesus, when you were seven and a half months pregnant, before you realized you were actually going to have a baby?”
Jesus stared ahead blankly, saying nothing.
“Oh, that’s right!” The friend replied. “I keep forgetting you made a vow of silence after Raven got you pregnant and you don’t talk anymore.”
“May I help you, ladies?” Rick impatiently interrupted them.
“Oh yes, Mr. Covey! I came all the way from Olympia for you to autograph my copy of Narcissistic Angry Bitch God.
“Ah, yes,” Rick replied. “That was the one where the main character has ‘intelligent Tourette’s Syndrome’. He only blurts out gothic obscenities.”
They both laughed. Jesus just nodded.
“You’re funny, Mr. Covey. Just like I knew you’d be.” The girl shyly looked down at Rick and caressed his hand sensually with her fingers.
He tried to change the subject.
“So, how old are you, my dear?”
Seductively flirting more with him, the girl responded, fluttering her eyelashes.
“Well, I’m sixteen, but my last boyfriend was twenty-eight. I had to dump him because we were in this mosh pit and someone’s lit cigarette burned a hole into his eye.
She frowned.
“After that, he had to wear an eye patch, and I
just don’t find them sexy at all. But now he tells me that he can see shades of red and blue now, so he decided to take the patch off.”
Rick sighed once again, signed his name on the indicated portion of the title page, and shoved the book back in the girls’ direction.
Jesus offered a weak grin, and Willow gave Rick a far too intimate hug before they both departed.
______________________________________________________
Part Four
Katherine arose earlier that day. Four days before, she had read about the book signing in Evanton by means of her local newspaper and decided that she was finally ready to meet her meet her infatuation face to face. After all, Evanton was only four hours away.
Booking the hotel room had been easy. Katherine’s mother didn’t suspect a thing when her daughter had asked to borrow her credit card. The reservation had been made for nearly five days before Katherine cranked her funeral black, heavily used car and started out on the road. On the drive, the girl listened exclusively to audiobook after audiobook of Rick reading his best selling novels.
Along with her paint-stained thrift store pants, Katherine wore a man’s white v-neck t-shirt. In fact, when he met her later that day, Rick speculated that she had purchased a whole value pack of them at Wal-Mart. He surmised this because Rick’s father wore the identical sort of shirt around the house when he wasn’t working and always underneath his stunning array of country club attire. The girl had taken a black permanent marker to the shirt and, in shaky, feminine writing, slashed “I love Rick Covey” across the front.
She had the swagger of a woman much older than her sixteen years. It was a slightly swaying, highly confident, cocky sort of presentation attempted only by a few females. Despite her sloppy dress, she was beautiful.
Rick had not expected this in the least. He had never known a nymphomaniac, this is true, but he had always pictured them as somewhat akin to crack whores—with the same facial scars, open sores, singed fingers, and lingering body funk. This girl, as she was still very much a girl, seemed to have breezily walked off a runway, not dazedly crawled away from a drug den.
Rick had certainly been tempted, at least at first. However, Katherine proved quickly that she possessed the extremely bad habit (like most of his fans) of not being able to withhold any personal details. The girl could not tell a lie in the presence of anyone.
So, when she said—quite matter of factly, that she didn’t believe her genital warts were in a contagious stage at the moment, Rick had to politely decline her offer. He then lifted his right hand above his head: a signal to security that he wanted this person away from him immediately.
Security complied.
A History of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham and its Role in the Civil Rights Movement
The present day Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, Alabama, has a storied history. Ironically formed during the height of a new wave of conservatism during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term, the church served as a bastion of liberal religious thought. Its formative years, fraught with tension and great upheaval, strengthened a progressive presence in the South and the State of Alabama that ceased to exist before its formation. Moreover, its primarily Caucasian laity remained openly committed to the struggle of Civil Rights in a time where few whites dared to openly oppose a system of racism and oppression existent in the region for some two hundred years prior.
The formation of the church stemmed from the efforts of Mary Aymar Hobart, who had been sent to Birmingham from Boston representing the denomination. She placed a newspaper ad in The Birmingham Post-Herald requesting the formation of a fellowship. “Eighteen persons met at the Redmont Hotel on 18 January 1952 and agreed to organize.” Her husband, Rev. Alfred Hobart, agreed to serve as minister for the gathering. Hobart served the church as full time minister from then until 1964?, when Larry McGinty succeeded him.
Mrs. Hobart had been sent to the South as a result of an American Unitarian Association (AUA, henceforth) program known as “The Fellowship Movement”. “…Flourishing through the early ‘60s, this program attracted thousands of new members to hundreds of new fellowships, some of which are among [the] most vibrant congregations today.” The program was created as a means to encourage the spread of religious liberalism, and in a desire to reach out to disenfranchised liberals throughout the country. Unitarianism, up until that point, had been a primarily New England based religion.
The Fellowship Movement, effectively established in May 1948, was spawned in response to the splitting of the Democratic Party into two rival factions. The incumbent, Harry S. Truman, favored a plank that favored Civil Rights and Integration. In response, the Southern delegates of the party left the Democratic convention in a huff and formed their own party, The States’ Rights Democratic (commonly known as “Dixiecrat”) Party. Nominating then-South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their candidate for President, the Dixiecrats strongly opposed Civil Rights and strongly supported segregation. They met in Birmingham in the summer of that year. “Their four day convention was big news in Birmingham”. It was big news across the country as well.
Alabama, in its traditional role as the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, gave its 11 electoral votes to Thurmond. Thurmond also captured the electoral votes of three other southern states: Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
In the upset of the century, of course, Truman defeated Dewey, despite what the Chicago Daily Tribune had predicted. Despite facing not two, but three separate opponents, Thurmond of the Dixiecrats, Thomas E. Dewey of the Republicans, and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party, Truman won with less than 50 percent of the total popular vote. He collected 2.1 million more popular votes than his closest opponent, Dewey, and 114 more electoral votes.
1948 also saw two major events. 2 May marked the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man adopted by the Organization of American States. On 10 December, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was the first document to provide a comprehensive statement of international human rights for the world.
The roots of The Fellowship Movement go back even farther than 1948, of course. “The AUA appointed a layperson, Munroe Husbands, as director of the new program. Husbands was also the appointed clerk of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), which the AUA had organized in 1944 to served isolated Unitarians through the mail.” CLF had been established partially in response to a fireside chat by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had stated firmly in one of his radio addresses (but rather obliquely) that future Democratic Party platforms would contain a plank supporting Civil Rights and Integration.
Back to the history of the Birmingham Unitarians.
Almost immediately the fledgling group ran into numerous problems with finding a permanent meeting place. The group originally met at the downtown YMCA but found itself forced out within a few weeks. The reason stated by the YMCA staff to excuse such an abrupt dismissal remains telling. “The stained glass windows of our building certainly would not appeal to a group who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ”. In essence, Unitarians were forced out because they were perceived as heretics. This would not be the first time that charge was levied against the group.
Next, in March 1952, the assembly moved to temporary quarters in Mountain Brook Village. Today, most people drop the noun “Village” when they refer to “Mountain Brook”. They took up residence in a small city owned building that formerly housed an Episcopalian Congregation. Services stayed anchor at this location for the next four years. By this point, the gathering, 50 members strong, dubbed itself “The Birmingham Unitarian Fellowship” (BUF). The American Unitarian Association (AUA), located at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, officially recognized the assemblage that same month.
1952 was an election year. Illinois senator Adlai E. Stevenson, himself a Unitarian, secured the Democratic Nomination for President. Interestingly, his running mate was an Alabamian, senator John J. Sparkman. The Republican candidate running against Stevenson was Dwight D. Eisenhower, immensely popular, war hero, and the allied commander of the European theatre during World War II. Stevenson didn’t stand a chance.
Eisenhower trounced his Democratic opponent in a landslide. Not only did “Ike” collect 6.62 million more popular votes, and 55 percent of the vote, he convincingly captured the Electoral College. At the end of election night, the scorecard read 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and a paltry 89 for Stevenson. In addition, Eisenhower’s Republicans secured control of both house of Congress. Alabama, once again in its traditional role as the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, naturally gave all of its 11 electoral votes to the loser. In an irony lost on no one these days, Stevenson won only the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
By 1953, a man named Joseph Volker had come prominently onto the scene of Birmingham politics. His passionate struggles for Civil Rights left an indelible impact upon Birmingham and upon University College, as the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was known at the time. Initially established as the medical school for the state of Alabama, UAB, in no small part due to his efforts, became a world-renowned medical center. A building housing math and science on the campus of UAB is named Volker Hall, in his honor. Volker personally integrated the medical school. The day after he had succeeded in his efforts, a handmade banner prominently swayed over the main medical building on campus. “Joseph Volker. Nigger lover.”
At a May 1953 meeting, Volker spoke in front of his fellow Unitarians, prophetically uttering a statement that remains true to this day. “To be a Unitarian in Boston is almost fashionable, but to be a Unitarian in the Deep South requires courage”. In the Unitarian Universalist archives, located at 25 Beacon Street in Boston, three copies of this address exist in a hefty vertical file, stuffed to the brim with information relating to the history of Unitarianism in Birmingham.
By the end of that same year, 1953, the BUF made an informed decision to apply to the AUA for full church status. Church status, achieved officially 26 January 1954, and served as a sense of great pride to its members. The gathering, now known officially as “The Birmingham Unitarian Church”, comprised seventy-two families and one hundred and six individuals. A number of new members heard about the church from their participation in the Great Books Discussion Group.
1954 was a tumultuous year, both in Birmingham and the rest of the country. On 11 February of that year, the Birmingham City Commission repealed a ban that had formerly refused to allow African-American and Caucasian athletes to compete together in athletic events. It agreed to let the “Say Hey Kid”, Willie Mays, of the New York Giants baseball team play in exhibitions in Birmingham.
The bombshell of the year, of course, occurred when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled for school integration. Chief Justice Earl Warren led a unanimous decision, on 17 May, in which the doctrine of “separate but equal” was forever repealed. Officially, it was known as Brown v. Board of (Topeka, Kansas) Education. De facto and de jure segregation in public schools was ruled officially unconstitutional, overturning a judicial precedent that had existed for 58 years. The case overturned the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. Shock waves pulsed through America, the South, and Birmingham. A dismayed President Eisenhower remarked that appointing Earl Warren to the bench had been “the most damn fool thing [he] had ever done”.
The Southern reaction, not surprisingly, was swift. By 25 May, governors and other public officials in Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and including then-Alabama governor Gordon Persons denounced school integration. They threatened to close all public schools in their states as a result. In Birmingham, on 3 June, ten thousand voters filed a petition to have a vote on the practice of allowing black and white athletes to compete in city-owned facilities. The vote effectively revoked the City Commission action of 11 February.
Three months later, on 24 August, the Communist Control Act went into effect, essentially outlawing the Communist Party in the United States. This reactionary legislation is important to the Civil Rights Movement because it gave segregationist leaders an excuse to baselessly accuse Civil Rights leaders of being Communist in the years ahead. By September, the Southern School News began to monitor and report on the progress of desegregation of previously all white schools. On the 7th of that month, integration of public schools began in Washington, D.C. and Maryland. During the months of September, through October, the Southern Regional Council set up the Alabama Council of Human Relations in an effort to foster inter-racial dialogue and monitor racial changes. In November, at the mid-Congressional elections of that year, the Republican lost their hold on both houses of Congress.
President Eisenhower would have to work with a Democratic controlled Congress the rest of his term.
But perhaps what was the most important, but little noted event of the year occurred in September.
An African-American man, formerly from Atlanta, took a position as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr. His accomplishments would inspire a world, a nation, a denomination, and a group of religious liberals in Birmingham, Alabama.
Meanwhile, in Boston, according to a unpublished AUA department memo, dictated the following year, 1955, the Birmingham Unitarian Church was stated to contain 136 members, but its unknown author noted with no small degree of annoyance that many of its key members had moved out of state. “This has been a pattern throughout the church’s life”, the document seems to sigh. Unfortunately, this is a pattern that continues to plague the church even to this day. Yet, it is not an unusual problem at all by UU standards. The present day Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham seems to gain as many members as it loses. This is a fact of UU culture, not just Birmingham culture.
The nature of the Fellowship Movement, combined with the tendency of southern culture and southern liberals to circle the wagons, ensures that each UU church or fellowship in the Deep South remains an oasis of liberal thought, but an impenetrable fortress of liberal thought as well. Only sporadic communication between each individual church and fellowship in the Mid-South District (which comprises the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the extreme western panhandle of Florida) exists even to this day. As noted above, this is due to the nature of both insular southern culture and insular UU culture. Interestingly enough, the Birmingham Unitarian Church was originally part of the Thomas Jefferson District, which today comprises most of the state of Virginia, as one would expect from such a name.
Still, the church had no permanent home, which was desired strongly by all members. By 1956, a building had been proposed, land purchased, and an architectural firm contacted to construct the home of Unitarianism in Birmingham. This building, designed in the shape of two A-frames, was located at 2365 Cahaba Road, Mountain Brook, Alabama. It remained in place until mid-2004, when it was razed to make way for garden homes.
According to the Birmingham Post Herald of Wednesday, 13 June 1956, the building would cost $65,000. Construction on the structure would presumably begin in the fall of that year. The paper noted that services prior had been held at 50 Oak Street, Crestline Heights.
The dream was becoming a reality, but it would take over two years before it came to total fruition.
Meanwhile, 1956 was another election year. Once again, the Democrats nominated faithful Unitarian Adlai Stevenson as their choice for President. This time, however, his running mate was Estes Kefauver, another southern senator. Kefauver was from Tennessee. Once again, the Republican nominated their incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term. Eisenhower’s margin of victory was even greater this time around.
Eisenhower collected 9.5 million more popular votes than Stevenson, and won overwhelmingly in the electoral college, again. This time, Eisenhower collected 457 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 73. Yet again, in its role as Patron Saint of Lost Causes, Alabama voted for the loser. Yet, only ten of its electoral votes went to Stevenson. One vote went to Walter B. Jones. Stevenson won the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Four years before, Stevenson had won nine states. This time around, he won only eight, and seven outright, if you take into account Alabama’s split electoral college vote.
However, in Congressional Elections, the Democratic party maintained their control over both houses of Congress. Two years later, in 1958, at yet another mid-Congressional election, The Democratic party won enough seats in Congress to effectively override Eisenhower’s veto power. Clearly, the Republican Party and Eisenhower were deeply wounded.
Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, the members of the BUC were abuzz with ideas and enthusiasm for their cause. According to a Birmingham Post-Herald article, dated 22 February 1958, the church at Cahaba Road was to be a shared worship space with the local Reform Judaism congregation. As both religious groups shared the same essential doctrines and worked towards establishing Civil Rights, this generous decision is not at all surprising.
Everything came into focus on 12 October 1958. All of the dreams, aspirations, desire, hopes, and prayers of a small group of religious liberals culminated on that day in early fall. Rev. Alfred Hobart preached his first sermon preached in a new, partially completed building on Cahaba Road. The members of the Birmingham Unitarian Church were justly proud of their accomplishment. So it was that the church was dedicated on 2 December 1959 at eight o’clock in the evening. The culmination of five years of hard work and steady progress had paid off handsomely.
The formation of the church stemmed from the efforts of Mary Aymar Hobart, who had been sent to Birmingham from Boston representing the denomination. She placed a newspaper ad in The Birmingham Post-Herald requesting the formation of a fellowship. “Eighteen persons met at the Redmont Hotel on 18 January 1952 and agreed to organize.” Her husband, Rev. Alfred Hobart, agreed to serve as minister for the gathering. Hobart served the church as full time minister from then until 1964?, when Larry McGinty succeeded him.
Mrs. Hobart had been sent to the South as a result of an American Unitarian Association (AUA, henceforth) program known as “The Fellowship Movement”. “…Flourishing through the early ‘60s, this program attracted thousands of new members to hundreds of new fellowships, some of which are among [the] most vibrant congregations today.” The program was created as a means to encourage the spread of religious liberalism, and in a desire to reach out to disenfranchised liberals throughout the country. Unitarianism, up until that point, had been a primarily New England based religion.
The Fellowship Movement, effectively established in May 1948, was spawned in response to the splitting of the Democratic Party into two rival factions. The incumbent, Harry S. Truman, favored a plank that favored Civil Rights and Integration. In response, the Southern delegates of the party left the Democratic convention in a huff and formed their own party, The States’ Rights Democratic (commonly known as “Dixiecrat”) Party. Nominating then-South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their candidate for President, the Dixiecrats strongly opposed Civil Rights and strongly supported segregation. They met in Birmingham in the summer of that year. “Their four day convention was big news in Birmingham”. It was big news across the country as well.
Alabama, in its traditional role as the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, gave its 11 electoral votes to Thurmond. Thurmond also captured the electoral votes of three other southern states: Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
In the upset of the century, of course, Truman defeated Dewey, despite what the Chicago Daily Tribune had predicted. Despite facing not two, but three separate opponents, Thurmond of the Dixiecrats, Thomas E. Dewey of the Republicans, and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party, Truman won with less than 50 percent of the total popular vote. He collected 2.1 million more popular votes than his closest opponent, Dewey, and 114 more electoral votes.
1948 also saw two major events. 2 May marked the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man adopted by the Organization of American States. On 10 December, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was the first document to provide a comprehensive statement of international human rights for the world.
The roots of The Fellowship Movement go back even farther than 1948, of course. “The AUA appointed a layperson, Munroe Husbands, as director of the new program. Husbands was also the appointed clerk of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), which the AUA had organized in 1944 to served isolated Unitarians through the mail.” CLF had been established partially in response to a fireside chat by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had stated firmly in one of his radio addresses (but rather obliquely) that future Democratic Party platforms would contain a plank supporting Civil Rights and Integration.
Back to the history of the Birmingham Unitarians.
Almost immediately the fledgling group ran into numerous problems with finding a permanent meeting place. The group originally met at the downtown YMCA but found itself forced out within a few weeks. The reason stated by the YMCA staff to excuse such an abrupt dismissal remains telling. “The stained glass windows of our building certainly would not appeal to a group who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ”. In essence, Unitarians were forced out because they were perceived as heretics. This would not be the first time that charge was levied against the group.
Next, in March 1952, the assembly moved to temporary quarters in Mountain Brook Village. Today, most people drop the noun “Village” when they refer to “Mountain Brook”. They took up residence in a small city owned building that formerly housed an Episcopalian Congregation. Services stayed anchor at this location for the next four years. By this point, the gathering, 50 members strong, dubbed itself “The Birmingham Unitarian Fellowship” (BUF). The American Unitarian Association (AUA), located at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, officially recognized the assemblage that same month.
1952 was an election year. Illinois senator Adlai E. Stevenson, himself a Unitarian, secured the Democratic Nomination for President. Interestingly, his running mate was an Alabamian, senator John J. Sparkman. The Republican candidate running against Stevenson was Dwight D. Eisenhower, immensely popular, war hero, and the allied commander of the European theatre during World War II. Stevenson didn’t stand a chance.
Eisenhower trounced his Democratic opponent in a landslide. Not only did “Ike” collect 6.62 million more popular votes, and 55 percent of the vote, he convincingly captured the Electoral College. At the end of election night, the scorecard read 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and a paltry 89 for Stevenson. In addition, Eisenhower’s Republicans secured control of both house of Congress. Alabama, once again in its traditional role as the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, naturally gave all of its 11 electoral votes to the loser. In an irony lost on no one these days, Stevenson won only the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
By 1953, a man named Joseph Volker had come prominently onto the scene of Birmingham politics. His passionate struggles for Civil Rights left an indelible impact upon Birmingham and upon University College, as the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was known at the time. Initially established as the medical school for the state of Alabama, UAB, in no small part due to his efforts, became a world-renowned medical center. A building housing math and science on the campus of UAB is named Volker Hall, in his honor. Volker personally integrated the medical school. The day after he had succeeded in his efforts, a handmade banner prominently swayed over the main medical building on campus. “Joseph Volker. Nigger lover.”
At a May 1953 meeting, Volker spoke in front of his fellow Unitarians, prophetically uttering a statement that remains true to this day. “To be a Unitarian in Boston is almost fashionable, but to be a Unitarian in the Deep South requires courage”. In the Unitarian Universalist archives, located at 25 Beacon Street in Boston, three copies of this address exist in a hefty vertical file, stuffed to the brim with information relating to the history of Unitarianism in Birmingham.
By the end of that same year, 1953, the BUF made an informed decision to apply to the AUA for full church status. Church status, achieved officially 26 January 1954, and served as a sense of great pride to its members. The gathering, now known officially as “The Birmingham Unitarian Church”, comprised seventy-two families and one hundred and six individuals. A number of new members heard about the church from their participation in the Great Books Discussion Group.
1954 was a tumultuous year, both in Birmingham and the rest of the country. On 11 February of that year, the Birmingham City Commission repealed a ban that had formerly refused to allow African-American and Caucasian athletes to compete together in athletic events. It agreed to let the “Say Hey Kid”, Willie Mays, of the New York Giants baseball team play in exhibitions in Birmingham.
The bombshell of the year, of course, occurred when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled for school integration. Chief Justice Earl Warren led a unanimous decision, on 17 May, in which the doctrine of “separate but equal” was forever repealed. Officially, it was known as Brown v. Board of (Topeka, Kansas) Education. De facto and de jure segregation in public schools was ruled officially unconstitutional, overturning a judicial precedent that had existed for 58 years. The case overturned the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. Shock waves pulsed through America, the South, and Birmingham. A dismayed President Eisenhower remarked that appointing Earl Warren to the bench had been “the most damn fool thing [he] had ever done”.
The Southern reaction, not surprisingly, was swift. By 25 May, governors and other public officials in Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and including then-Alabama governor Gordon Persons denounced school integration. They threatened to close all public schools in their states as a result. In Birmingham, on 3 June, ten thousand voters filed a petition to have a vote on the practice of allowing black and white athletes to compete in city-owned facilities. The vote effectively revoked the City Commission action of 11 February.
Three months later, on 24 August, the Communist Control Act went into effect, essentially outlawing the Communist Party in the United States. This reactionary legislation is important to the Civil Rights Movement because it gave segregationist leaders an excuse to baselessly accuse Civil Rights leaders of being Communist in the years ahead. By September, the Southern School News began to monitor and report on the progress of desegregation of previously all white schools. On the 7th of that month, integration of public schools began in Washington, D.C. and Maryland. During the months of September, through October, the Southern Regional Council set up the Alabama Council of Human Relations in an effort to foster inter-racial dialogue and monitor racial changes. In November, at the mid-Congressional elections of that year, the Republican lost their hold on both houses of Congress.
President Eisenhower would have to work with a Democratic controlled Congress the rest of his term.
But perhaps what was the most important, but little noted event of the year occurred in September.
An African-American man, formerly from Atlanta, took a position as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr. His accomplishments would inspire a world, a nation, a denomination, and a group of religious liberals in Birmingham, Alabama.
Meanwhile, in Boston, according to a unpublished AUA department memo, dictated the following year, 1955, the Birmingham Unitarian Church was stated to contain 136 members, but its unknown author noted with no small degree of annoyance that many of its key members had moved out of state. “This has been a pattern throughout the church’s life”, the document seems to sigh. Unfortunately, this is a pattern that continues to plague the church even to this day. Yet, it is not an unusual problem at all by UU standards. The present day Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham seems to gain as many members as it loses. This is a fact of UU culture, not just Birmingham culture.
The nature of the Fellowship Movement, combined with the tendency of southern culture and southern liberals to circle the wagons, ensures that each UU church or fellowship in the Deep South remains an oasis of liberal thought, but an impenetrable fortress of liberal thought as well. Only sporadic communication between each individual church and fellowship in the Mid-South District (which comprises the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the extreme western panhandle of Florida) exists even to this day. As noted above, this is due to the nature of both insular southern culture and insular UU culture. Interestingly enough, the Birmingham Unitarian Church was originally part of the Thomas Jefferson District, which today comprises most of the state of Virginia, as one would expect from such a name.
Still, the church had no permanent home, which was desired strongly by all members. By 1956, a building had been proposed, land purchased, and an architectural firm contacted to construct the home of Unitarianism in Birmingham. This building, designed in the shape of two A-frames, was located at 2365 Cahaba Road, Mountain Brook, Alabama. It remained in place until mid-2004, when it was razed to make way for garden homes.
According to the Birmingham Post Herald of Wednesday, 13 June 1956, the building would cost $65,000. Construction on the structure would presumably begin in the fall of that year. The paper noted that services prior had been held at 50 Oak Street, Crestline Heights.
The dream was becoming a reality, but it would take over two years before it came to total fruition.
Meanwhile, 1956 was another election year. Once again, the Democrats nominated faithful Unitarian Adlai Stevenson as their choice for President. This time, however, his running mate was Estes Kefauver, another southern senator. Kefauver was from Tennessee. Once again, the Republican nominated their incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term. Eisenhower’s margin of victory was even greater this time around.
Eisenhower collected 9.5 million more popular votes than Stevenson, and won overwhelmingly in the electoral college, again. This time, Eisenhower collected 457 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 73. Yet again, in its role as Patron Saint of Lost Causes, Alabama voted for the loser. Yet, only ten of its electoral votes went to Stevenson. One vote went to Walter B. Jones. Stevenson won the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Four years before, Stevenson had won nine states. This time around, he won only eight, and seven outright, if you take into account Alabama’s split electoral college vote.
However, in Congressional Elections, the Democratic party maintained their control over both houses of Congress. Two years later, in 1958, at yet another mid-Congressional election, The Democratic party won enough seats in Congress to effectively override Eisenhower’s veto power. Clearly, the Republican Party and Eisenhower were deeply wounded.
Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, the members of the BUC were abuzz with ideas and enthusiasm for their cause. According to a Birmingham Post-Herald article, dated 22 February 1958, the church at Cahaba Road was to be a shared worship space with the local Reform Judaism congregation. As both religious groups shared the same essential doctrines and worked towards establishing Civil Rights, this generous decision is not at all surprising.
Everything came into focus on 12 October 1958. All of the dreams, aspirations, desire, hopes, and prayers of a small group of religious liberals culminated on that day in early fall. Rev. Alfred Hobart preached his first sermon preached in a new, partially completed building on Cahaba Road. The members of the Birmingham Unitarian Church were justly proud of their accomplishment. So it was that the church was dedicated on 2 December 1959 at eight o’clock in the evening. The culmination of five years of hard work and steady progress had paid off handsomely.
Common People
She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge,
she studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College,
that's where I,
caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded,
I said "In that case I'll have a rum and coca-cola."
She said "Fine."
and in thirty seconds time she said,
"I want to live like common people,
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people,
I want to sleep with common people,
like you."
Well what else could I do -
I said "I'll see what I can do."
I took her to a supermarket,
I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere,
so it started there.
I said pretend you've got no money,
she just laughed and said,
"Oh you're so funny."
I said "yeah?
Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here.
Are you sure you want to live like common people,
you want to see whatever common people see,
you want to sleep with common people,
you want to sleep with common people,
like me?"
But she didn't understand,
she just smiled and held my hand.
Rent a flat above a shop,
cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right,
cause when you're laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.
You'll never live like common people,
you'll never do what common people do,
you'll never fail like common people,
you'll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw,
because there's nothing else to do.
Sing along with the common people,
sing along and it might just get you through,
laugh along with the common people,
laugh along even though they're laughing at you,
and the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.
she studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College,
that's where I,
caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded,
I said "In that case I'll have a rum and coca-cola."
She said "Fine."
and in thirty seconds time she said,
"I want to live like common people,
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people,
I want to sleep with common people,
like you."
Well what else could I do -
I said "I'll see what I can do."
I took her to a supermarket,
I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere,
so it started there.
I said pretend you've got no money,
she just laughed and said,
"Oh you're so funny."
I said "yeah?
Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here.
Are you sure you want to live like common people,
you want to see whatever common people see,
you want to sleep with common people,
you want to sleep with common people,
like me?"
But she didn't understand,
she just smiled and held my hand.
Rent a flat above a shop,
cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right,
cause when you're laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.
You'll never live like common people,
you'll never do what common people do,
you'll never fail like common people,
you'll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw,
because there's nothing else to do.
Sing along with the common people,
sing along and it might just get you through,
laugh along with the common people,
laugh along even though they're laughing at you,
and the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.
Manifesto 2007
However, to make change in this world, in my opinion, we must make a variety of changes in attitude.
1. Stop being so insular-minded. In other words, it is a natural tendency for us to "circle the wagons" and withdraw within ourselves. I have been guilty of this, too.
To make any actual change or progress against the great societal injustices we see in the world, we will have to work from INSIDE the system, not OUTSIDE the system.
2. Protests are wonderful ways to coalesce support within ourselves, but they do not change things on a larger scale.
3. Money and power have no allegiance to PARTY, NATIONAL BOUNDARIES, and POLTICAL IDEOLOGY.
In examining the 2004 Presidental election, I am further reminded about how democracy is merely a vehicle for capitalism.
Both Bush and Kerry were capitalist hacks...manipulated by the system, to give the appearance that a democratic system actually is in place.
The truth of the matter is that democracy is a sham. The U.S.A. is, at best, a plutocracy. There's a reason why the electoral college is in place, and why it won't ever go away.
The powerful elite don't want direct elections. Think about it.
4. What we need to do to make changes is not to attempt to sabotage the system.
If we burned down the corporate headquarters of every American corporation, it wouldn't matter. They would just relocate in Indonesia or China or somewhere else, where it's probably cheaper to exist anyway.
5. Instead of pissing in the wind (or tilting at windmills), as we like to do...all of us who REALLY care about changing the world need to do one of the following:
---Become very wealthy. After you've become very wealthy, you have bargaining power. Until you have wealth or influence, you might as well not even exist to the people at the top
---Become famous. Being famous means exposure. In this society, for better or for worse, once you're a household name, you have a means to affect the whims and desires of the average person. Think about how many people look up to their favorite sports player or actor/actress. Sad, but true.
Being famous also means that the powerful elite will be more inclined to listen to what you have to say.
---Learn the fine art of "playing dumb"
Learn to talk out of both sides of your mouth, if you haven't learned this useful trait already. Keep your true agenda hidden. Placate people by "going through the motions". Most people aren't smart enough to realize the difference between true intentions and face value.
6. Understand that true leaders are rare, and that most people are followers.
Most people are quite content to be sheep.
7. Most people who crave leadership roles are in it for all the wrong reasons.
Their real motivations are for their own self-gain and not for the betterment of other people, regardless of what they might say to the contrary.
Having said all of this...I want your responses.
I believe we can change the world, but doing so requires a complete paradigm shift. It will not be easy...it will require a lot of effort. But the rewards will be quite thrilling indeed.
1. Stop being so insular-minded. In other words, it is a natural tendency for us to "circle the wagons" and withdraw within ourselves. I have been guilty of this, too.
To make any actual change or progress against the great societal injustices we see in the world, we will have to work from INSIDE the system, not OUTSIDE the system.
2. Protests are wonderful ways to coalesce support within ourselves, but they do not change things on a larger scale.
3. Money and power have no allegiance to PARTY, NATIONAL BOUNDARIES, and POLTICAL IDEOLOGY.
In examining the 2004 Presidental election, I am further reminded about how democracy is merely a vehicle for capitalism.
Both Bush and Kerry were capitalist hacks...manipulated by the system, to give the appearance that a democratic system actually is in place.
The truth of the matter is that democracy is a sham. The U.S.A. is, at best, a plutocracy. There's a reason why the electoral college is in place, and why it won't ever go away.
The powerful elite don't want direct elections. Think about it.
4. What we need to do to make changes is not to attempt to sabotage the system.
If we burned down the corporate headquarters of every American corporation, it wouldn't matter. They would just relocate in Indonesia or China or somewhere else, where it's probably cheaper to exist anyway.
5. Instead of pissing in the wind (or tilting at windmills), as we like to do...all of us who REALLY care about changing the world need to do one of the following:
---Become very wealthy. After you've become very wealthy, you have bargaining power. Until you have wealth or influence, you might as well not even exist to the people at the top
---Become famous. Being famous means exposure. In this society, for better or for worse, once you're a household name, you have a means to affect the whims and desires of the average person. Think about how many people look up to their favorite sports player or actor/actress. Sad, but true.
Being famous also means that the powerful elite will be more inclined to listen to what you have to say.
---Learn the fine art of "playing dumb"
Learn to talk out of both sides of your mouth, if you haven't learned this useful trait already. Keep your true agenda hidden. Placate people by "going through the motions". Most people aren't smart enough to realize the difference between true intentions and face value.
6. Understand that true leaders are rare, and that most people are followers.
Most people are quite content to be sheep.
7. Most people who crave leadership roles are in it for all the wrong reasons.
Their real motivations are for their own self-gain and not for the betterment of other people, regardless of what they might say to the contrary.
Having said all of this...I want your responses.
I believe we can change the world, but doing so requires a complete paradigm shift. It will not be easy...it will require a lot of effort. But the rewards will be quite thrilling indeed.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
The Tories of the South: Alabama Unionists
The Tories of The South: Alabama Unionists
Until recently, history has not acknowledged the existence of a great number of native Alabamians who remained loyal to the Union during the course of the Civil War. Ex-confederates kept all mention of any division within the C.S.A. out of history books and shamed those to silence that dared to speak otherwise. Southerners often think as one organism, and certainly in this respect many natives did not look kindly on their brethren who dared to deviate from the established majority.
Five Alabama counties were hotbeds of Unionist sympathy: Marion, Winston, Walker, Fayette, and Randolph. However, Union sympathizers were found to a lesser degree in eight other counties of the Northern third of the state. Only one regiment of Federal troops was culled from Alabama natives--the first Alabama Calvary.
These counties were peopled primarily by the poorest of the poor, with the lowest per capita income of any other counties in the state. These impoverished yeomen farmers tended their crops in rocky, mountainous, harsh conditions which did not support much crop growth. Soil conditions were barely adequate to grow much of anything and as such, the meager wages produced could barely support one's own family. The upkeep of slaves was not an inexpensive endeavor, so it is hardly surprising that few, if any residents of these counties owned even one.
So strong was Union sentiment in North Alabama and East Tennessee that it was proposed that North Alabama join with Unionist East Tennessee to form the loyal state of Nickajack. Throughout the south, residents of mountainous areas, by in large stayed loyal to the Union. The most notable example lies with the western counties of Virginia, whose distaste for secession was so strong that they broke from Virginia altogether, and in 1863, joined the Union as the independent state of West Virginia.
Sectionalism, however, proved the undoing of this proposal. The loyalty of Alabama Unionists, other than a de facto devotion to the United States, lay to their own individual county and families.
Furthermore, being ardently against secessionism, they did not want to further subdivide a region that, in their view, had no right to break away from the Federal Government in the first place.
The economic conditions of Winston County, Alabama, were typical of most southern unionists. In 1860, Winston County was the poorest county in Alabama. The per capita value of property was $168 and the county and the country ranked last in cotton production and slaveholding, with only 2 percent of the population owning slaves.
Their resentment of the wealthy planter aristocracy of the Black Belt ran deep. They had long been perceived by the planter aristocracy of the state as mere country bumpkins: backwards, ill-educated, and uncouth. Residents of these mountainous counties in north and northwest Alabama had long been suspicious of outside interference and generally kept to themselves. They did not stray outside the borders of their county, intermarried within their ranks, and shunned outsiders with a proud contempt.
As for their political allegiance, most were proud Jacksonian democrats. Their fathers and grandfathers had fought with Old Hickory against the Creeks and Cherokees and held fast to his belief that the union must be preserved at all costs. As the Civil War arrived, and war seemed inevitable, many Alabama Unionists spoke about how Andrew Jackson would have dealt with secession by hanging the ringleaders and crushing the rebellion before it had even gotten started.
Some thirty years prior, Jackson himself had warned South Carolina about the foolishness of dissolving ties with a Union that had been won at great cost from Great Britain.
Indeed, Jackson warned South Carolina on Dec. 10, 1832 that he was prepared to do just that.
“Are you really ready to incur its guilt? If you are, on the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences; on their heads be the dishonor, but on yours may fall the punishment. On your unhappy State will inevitably fall the evils of the conflict you force upon the Government of your country. It can not accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims.”
Enlisting for the north was a dangerous risk, so sign up (muster) rolls could be found only at clandestine meeting places. As such, times and places to meet were spread almost exclusively by word of mouth. The penalties for “turning traitor” were harsh. Numerous accounts exist of Confederate home guards robbing the homes of Southern Unionists, with murder or political assassination a constant threat. Yet, instead of thwarting the desire to aid the North, such attacks often strengthened the desire to fight against the rebelling South.
It is of note to mention that Union general William T. Sherman used members of the First Alabama Calvary as his trusted scouts while on his infamous raid through the southeast that eventually ended on Christmas Day in Savannah, Georgia. These native southerners, familiar with their home terrain, were invaluable to Sherman and greatly impeded the speed at which he progressed. Ex-Confederates would not soon forget the raping and pillaging that progressed at the hands of Sherman’s men, nor would they forget the role that their native southerners played in wreaking such havoc. After the war, the defeated confederates took out their aggressions upon those who they perceived as "Tories" and "traitors".
Eight months after Appomattox, in testimony before the U.S. Congress, Brevet Brigadier General George E. Spencer, who commanded the 1st Alabama Calvary, estimated that ten percent of the state remained very firmly loyal behind the Federal Union. Spencer, a former resident of Iowa, was asked his opinion of Alabama public sentiment since Lee’s surrender.
He replied, in part, “I find the sentiment of most of the people hostile to the government of the United States…General Sherman’s escort was from my regiment. The lieutenant commanding that escort (returned home)…but was allowed to remain only six hours there. He was mobbed in the streets and was charged with being responsible for everything that Sherman’s army did. His friends and relations made him leave to save his life.”
During the war, but particularly after it had concluded, these counties supported the Republican Party. Seeing first hand the cruelty perpetrated on them by their rebel neighbors, almost all of whom were staunchly Democratic, they concluded that the party of Jackson did not represent them anymore. Their apex of power rested in a brief, eight year period from 1866-1874, which coincided neatly with the Union occupation of Alabama.
Southern Unionists were decried by most members of their state as scalawags, particularly because of their willingness to comply wholeheartedly with the Reconstruction government. Alabama Tories were among the firmest supporters of a series of Washington appointed Republican governors. They provided food and shelter to Union troops who were stationed in their counties, but they refused to directly participate in the Freedman’s Bureau or to involve themselves in the affairs of any other region, save their own. They aided the occupying forces for the year 1867-1868, by providing a base of authority for occupying troops. These two years, unsurprisingly, were the height of Unionist power, as the military ruled the state without a designated figurehead.
Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, when newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes fulfilled a campaign promise and pulled the last remaining occupying forces from the states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. However, Alabama had been reclaimed by the Democratic Party, long before, having wrested political control four years prior. The north lost interest in maintaining an unpopular army and was eager to flee the south and leave its people to their own devices.
The five loyalist counties had never wielded much political power before the Civil War, and after the temporary setback of Reconstruction, a vengeful, Democratic legislature stripped the region of all its political clout. After 1874, these counties had even less influence on Montgomery politics than before the war.
General Spencer, in his testimony before Congress soon after the war, had noted the chaos which occurred immediately after Emancipation. When asked his opinion of what would occur to “colored people” if U.S. troops were removed and the Freedman’s Bureau suspended, he replied that “(Negroes) would be in worse slavery than ever. I consider that the colored people there to-day are worse off than when they had masters. The masters had an interest in them to the extent of so many dollars, and would protect them. Now the general disposition is to mistreat them in every possible manner. The laws of the legislature, which they passed, show that. The arming of the militia is only for the purpose of intimidating the Union men, and enforcing upon the Negroes a species of slavery; making them work for a nominal price for whomever they choose, not allowing the Negroes to have any choice, any way.”
Although Southern Unionists would concede that “negroes” needed civil and legal rights equal to whites, they did not believe freed men should be granted the right of the ballot. Racism still ran rampant between Unionists and ex-Confederates alike and both regarded African-Americans as “socially and intellectually inferior.” Unionists would be less inclined to perpetrate acts of violence against Freedmen, but they certainly were not ready to see them as equals.
Unfortunately, the contributions of loyalists were soon all but forgotten by their northern allies. Despite the fact that 2.578 white Alabamians had joined the Union army during the Civil War, support for continued occupation of the south weakened and as it did, Republicans lost all political authority. Internal dissention proved the undoing of the few years in which Unionists controlled Alabama politics, but in particular, the already bankrupt state found itself $25 million dollars in debt to railroad trusts. It had been the dream of many Unionists to create a massive railway system that would connect the state’s major cities, but state coffers were utterly unable to afford such a massive undertaking. This issue, above all others, secured a massive Democratic victory in 1874 that re-secured power in the hands of former secessionists.
These former secessionists called themselves “Bourbons”, taking their name from a family of French monarchs who had prided themselves on their lavish spending. Though momentarily stunned by the defeat of the Confederacy, they nonetheless grew in strength and made several distinct gains in each election. These gains were due in a large part in their ability to disenfranchise more and more of the African-American vote.
Having failed to cash in on the benefits of Federal occupation during Reconstruction, the fate of “Free Staters” and Southern Unionists alike was secured as soon as the sound of marching Federal troops faded. As a result, the Bourbons steadily consolidated their gains into the myth of the “Solid South”.
Winstonians and other “Tories” were initially persecuted for supporting the Union during the Civil War, later they were persecuted for opposition to the party of secession, and a Democratic legislature all but wrote them out of existence when they secured power. As a result, many Southern Unionists fled Alabama and the south after Reconstruction, settling down primarily in the upper Midwest. Similarly, after the Revolutionary War, British Loyalists fled the United States and settled in Canada for many of the same reasons.
Still, many remained, and these pro-Union counties became even more isolationist and insular as a result. They continued to put together enough signatures to put Republican candidates on the ballot for decades, but found their candidates soundly defeated by their Democratic adversaries in nearly every election. The resentment between Unionists and Confederates lingered for years and traces of it remain to the present day.
For example, Winston county residents still, by in large, maintain a healthy contempt and suspicion of outsiders and make efforts to defy the status quo of their state. Residents from outside the county think of its denizens as strange, unfriendly, and radical. Playing up to its stereotype, the county supported a fair number of far-leftists and communists during the turbulent 1930s, when much of the state was firmly behind FDR’s more pragmatic liberalism.
Federal Judge Frank Johnson, himself a Winston county product, rose from poverty to become a notable U.S. Circuit Judge. He supported the Republican Party and its candidate for President, Thomas Dewey, as a delegate to the 1948 convention. Most of the state supported pro-segregation Democrat Strom Thurmond and his “Dixiecrat” party. Johnson later proved to be the fly in the ointment of Governor George C. Wallace and his platform of segregation. Johnson’s ceaseless rulings for integration and in support of notable figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won him nationwide acclaim, but few friends in his home state.
Johnson, using the power delegated to him by the Federal Government, forced a swift procession of integration, a move that most Alabamians resented. He, then, was a true Southern Unionist, loyal to the Federal Government above all, and distrustful of the issue of individual states’ rights; such ideas had been re-introduced by a variety of segregationist governors, including Wallace, during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Yet, like his Tory ancestors, he was not an absolute liberal. During the 1960s, Johnson maintained that Northern liberal whites in the Civil Rights Movement were ``sorely misguided.'' He personally opposed interracial marriages. Only by 1984 did he believe that blacks should compete equally with whites in education.
In summary, Alabama Unionists played a major role in the politics and policies of their state and their nations, despite their minority status. Their political stance might be describes not so much liberal as libertarian. Their descendents continue to stand counter to the established viewpoints of the majority of Alabamians. Fiercely loyal to the Union, they, unlike neo-Confederates, see themselves as the true sons and daughters of the American Revolution. By in large, they are an opinionated, sometimes secretive, but often highly moral people who would prefer to be left alone, but will often fight to the death for their right to be left in peace.
Until recently, history has not acknowledged the existence of a great number of native Alabamians who remained loyal to the Union during the course of the Civil War. Ex-confederates kept all mention of any division within the C.S.A. out of history books and shamed those to silence that dared to speak otherwise. Southerners often think as one organism, and certainly in this respect many natives did not look kindly on their brethren who dared to deviate from the established majority.
Five Alabama counties were hotbeds of Unionist sympathy: Marion, Winston, Walker, Fayette, and Randolph. However, Union sympathizers were found to a lesser degree in eight other counties of the Northern third of the state. Only one regiment of Federal troops was culled from Alabama natives--the first Alabama Calvary.
These counties were peopled primarily by the poorest of the poor, with the lowest per capita income of any other counties in the state. These impoverished yeomen farmers tended their crops in rocky, mountainous, harsh conditions which did not support much crop growth. Soil conditions were barely adequate to grow much of anything and as such, the meager wages produced could barely support one's own family. The upkeep of slaves was not an inexpensive endeavor, so it is hardly surprising that few, if any residents of these counties owned even one.
So strong was Union sentiment in North Alabama and East Tennessee that it was proposed that North Alabama join with Unionist East Tennessee to form the loyal state of Nickajack. Throughout the south, residents of mountainous areas, by in large stayed loyal to the Union. The most notable example lies with the western counties of Virginia, whose distaste for secession was so strong that they broke from Virginia altogether, and in 1863, joined the Union as the independent state of West Virginia.
Sectionalism, however, proved the undoing of this proposal. The loyalty of Alabama Unionists, other than a de facto devotion to the United States, lay to their own individual county and families.
Furthermore, being ardently against secessionism, they did not want to further subdivide a region that, in their view, had no right to break away from the Federal Government in the first place.
The economic conditions of Winston County, Alabama, were typical of most southern unionists. In 1860, Winston County was the poorest county in Alabama. The per capita value of property was $168 and the county and the country ranked last in cotton production and slaveholding, with only 2 percent of the population owning slaves.
Their resentment of the wealthy planter aristocracy of the Black Belt ran deep. They had long been perceived by the planter aristocracy of the state as mere country bumpkins: backwards, ill-educated, and uncouth. Residents of these mountainous counties in north and northwest Alabama had long been suspicious of outside interference and generally kept to themselves. They did not stray outside the borders of their county, intermarried within their ranks, and shunned outsiders with a proud contempt.
As for their political allegiance, most were proud Jacksonian democrats. Their fathers and grandfathers had fought with Old Hickory against the Creeks and Cherokees and held fast to his belief that the union must be preserved at all costs. As the Civil War arrived, and war seemed inevitable, many Alabama Unionists spoke about how Andrew Jackson would have dealt with secession by hanging the ringleaders and crushing the rebellion before it had even gotten started.
Some thirty years prior, Jackson himself had warned South Carolina about the foolishness of dissolving ties with a Union that had been won at great cost from Great Britain.
Indeed, Jackson warned South Carolina on Dec. 10, 1832 that he was prepared to do just that.
“Are you really ready to incur its guilt? If you are, on the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences; on their heads be the dishonor, but on yours may fall the punishment. On your unhappy State will inevitably fall the evils of the conflict you force upon the Government of your country. It can not accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims.”
Enlisting for the north was a dangerous risk, so sign up (muster) rolls could be found only at clandestine meeting places. As such, times and places to meet were spread almost exclusively by word of mouth. The penalties for “turning traitor” were harsh. Numerous accounts exist of Confederate home guards robbing the homes of Southern Unionists, with murder or political assassination a constant threat. Yet, instead of thwarting the desire to aid the North, such attacks often strengthened the desire to fight against the rebelling South.
It is of note to mention that Union general William T. Sherman used members of the First Alabama Calvary as his trusted scouts while on his infamous raid through the southeast that eventually ended on Christmas Day in Savannah, Georgia. These native southerners, familiar with their home terrain, were invaluable to Sherman and greatly impeded the speed at which he progressed. Ex-Confederates would not soon forget the raping and pillaging that progressed at the hands of Sherman’s men, nor would they forget the role that their native southerners played in wreaking such havoc. After the war, the defeated confederates took out their aggressions upon those who they perceived as "Tories" and "traitors".
Eight months after Appomattox, in testimony before the U.S. Congress, Brevet Brigadier General George E. Spencer, who commanded the 1st Alabama Calvary, estimated that ten percent of the state remained very firmly loyal behind the Federal Union. Spencer, a former resident of Iowa, was asked his opinion of Alabama public sentiment since Lee’s surrender.
He replied, in part, “I find the sentiment of most of the people hostile to the government of the United States…General Sherman’s escort was from my regiment. The lieutenant commanding that escort (returned home)…but was allowed to remain only six hours there. He was mobbed in the streets and was charged with being responsible for everything that Sherman’s army did. His friends and relations made him leave to save his life.”
During the war, but particularly after it had concluded, these counties supported the Republican Party. Seeing first hand the cruelty perpetrated on them by their rebel neighbors, almost all of whom were staunchly Democratic, they concluded that the party of Jackson did not represent them anymore. Their apex of power rested in a brief, eight year period from 1866-1874, which coincided neatly with the Union occupation of Alabama.
Southern Unionists were decried by most members of their state as scalawags, particularly because of their willingness to comply wholeheartedly with the Reconstruction government. Alabama Tories were among the firmest supporters of a series of Washington appointed Republican governors. They provided food and shelter to Union troops who were stationed in their counties, but they refused to directly participate in the Freedman’s Bureau or to involve themselves in the affairs of any other region, save their own. They aided the occupying forces for the year 1867-1868, by providing a base of authority for occupying troops. These two years, unsurprisingly, were the height of Unionist power, as the military ruled the state without a designated figurehead.
Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, when newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes fulfilled a campaign promise and pulled the last remaining occupying forces from the states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. However, Alabama had been reclaimed by the Democratic Party, long before, having wrested political control four years prior. The north lost interest in maintaining an unpopular army and was eager to flee the south and leave its people to their own devices.
The five loyalist counties had never wielded much political power before the Civil War, and after the temporary setback of Reconstruction, a vengeful, Democratic legislature stripped the region of all its political clout. After 1874, these counties had even less influence on Montgomery politics than before the war.
General Spencer, in his testimony before Congress soon after the war, had noted the chaos which occurred immediately after Emancipation. When asked his opinion of what would occur to “colored people” if U.S. troops were removed and the Freedman’s Bureau suspended, he replied that “(Negroes) would be in worse slavery than ever. I consider that the colored people there to-day are worse off than when they had masters. The masters had an interest in them to the extent of so many dollars, and would protect them. Now the general disposition is to mistreat them in every possible manner. The laws of the legislature, which they passed, show that. The arming of the militia is only for the purpose of intimidating the Union men, and enforcing upon the Negroes a species of slavery; making them work for a nominal price for whomever they choose, not allowing the Negroes to have any choice, any way.”
Although Southern Unionists would concede that “negroes” needed civil and legal rights equal to whites, they did not believe freed men should be granted the right of the ballot. Racism still ran rampant between Unionists and ex-Confederates alike and both regarded African-Americans as “socially and intellectually inferior.” Unionists would be less inclined to perpetrate acts of violence against Freedmen, but they certainly were not ready to see them as equals.
Unfortunately, the contributions of loyalists were soon all but forgotten by their northern allies. Despite the fact that 2.578 white Alabamians had joined the Union army during the Civil War, support for continued occupation of the south weakened and as it did, Republicans lost all political authority. Internal dissention proved the undoing of the few years in which Unionists controlled Alabama politics, but in particular, the already bankrupt state found itself $25 million dollars in debt to railroad trusts. It had been the dream of many Unionists to create a massive railway system that would connect the state’s major cities, but state coffers were utterly unable to afford such a massive undertaking. This issue, above all others, secured a massive Democratic victory in 1874 that re-secured power in the hands of former secessionists.
These former secessionists called themselves “Bourbons”, taking their name from a family of French monarchs who had prided themselves on their lavish spending. Though momentarily stunned by the defeat of the Confederacy, they nonetheless grew in strength and made several distinct gains in each election. These gains were due in a large part in their ability to disenfranchise more and more of the African-American vote.
Having failed to cash in on the benefits of Federal occupation during Reconstruction, the fate of “Free Staters” and Southern Unionists alike was secured as soon as the sound of marching Federal troops faded. As a result, the Bourbons steadily consolidated their gains into the myth of the “Solid South”.
Winstonians and other “Tories” were initially persecuted for supporting the Union during the Civil War, later they were persecuted for opposition to the party of secession, and a Democratic legislature all but wrote them out of existence when they secured power. As a result, many Southern Unionists fled Alabama and the south after Reconstruction, settling down primarily in the upper Midwest. Similarly, after the Revolutionary War, British Loyalists fled the United States and settled in Canada for many of the same reasons.
Still, many remained, and these pro-Union counties became even more isolationist and insular as a result. They continued to put together enough signatures to put Republican candidates on the ballot for decades, but found their candidates soundly defeated by their Democratic adversaries in nearly every election. The resentment between Unionists and Confederates lingered for years and traces of it remain to the present day.
For example, Winston county residents still, by in large, maintain a healthy contempt and suspicion of outsiders and make efforts to defy the status quo of their state. Residents from outside the county think of its denizens as strange, unfriendly, and radical. Playing up to its stereotype, the county supported a fair number of far-leftists and communists during the turbulent 1930s, when much of the state was firmly behind FDR’s more pragmatic liberalism.
Federal Judge Frank Johnson, himself a Winston county product, rose from poverty to become a notable U.S. Circuit Judge. He supported the Republican Party and its candidate for President, Thomas Dewey, as a delegate to the 1948 convention. Most of the state supported pro-segregation Democrat Strom Thurmond and his “Dixiecrat” party. Johnson later proved to be the fly in the ointment of Governor George C. Wallace and his platform of segregation. Johnson’s ceaseless rulings for integration and in support of notable figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won him nationwide acclaim, but few friends in his home state.
Johnson, using the power delegated to him by the Federal Government, forced a swift procession of integration, a move that most Alabamians resented. He, then, was a true Southern Unionist, loyal to the Federal Government above all, and distrustful of the issue of individual states’ rights; such ideas had been re-introduced by a variety of segregationist governors, including Wallace, during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Yet, like his Tory ancestors, he was not an absolute liberal. During the 1960s, Johnson maintained that Northern liberal whites in the Civil Rights Movement were ``sorely misguided.'' He personally opposed interracial marriages. Only by 1984 did he believe that blacks should compete equally with whites in education.
In summary, Alabama Unionists played a major role in the politics and policies of their state and their nations, despite their minority status. Their political stance might be describes not so much liberal as libertarian. Their descendents continue to stand counter to the established viewpoints of the majority of Alabamians. Fiercely loyal to the Union, they, unlike neo-Confederates, see themselves as the true sons and daughters of the American Revolution. By in large, they are an opinionated, sometimes secretive, but often highly moral people who would prefer to be left alone, but will often fight to the death for their right to be left in peace.
The Denial of the South
GLBTQs are invisible entities in the south. Here's why.
Kevin Camp
Kevin Camp
The Denial of the South
The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South. Honor came first. The determination of men to have power, prestige, and self-esteem and to immortalize these acquisitions through their progeny was the key to the South’s development… [I]n the South today devotion to family and country, restrictive views of women’s place and role, attitudes about racial hierarchy, and the subordination of all community values remain in the popular mind to an extent not altogether duplicated in the rest of the land.[i].
W.J. Cash, in his influential 1941 work, The Mind of the South, advanced the idea that the southern mentality is defined by its natives’ supreme conformity to their own invented status quo. Inhabitants unable to homogenize efficiently into southern culture find themselves often ostracized and shunned by the larger community. “Southern polite society has not yet faced the fact that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders exist in its midst”.[ii] As Cash might argue, The War of Secession destroyed the framework of the Old South, yet its culture is preserved within Southern families—both African-American and Caucasian. Any challenge to the integrity of the family unit undermines its still shaky foundations; Homosexuality is no exception.[iii]
Sears states the immense impact that southern queers have made upon their native soil, but notes with sadness how their contributions were often relegated to the shadows. Playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, botanists like George Washington Carver, jazz singers like Bessie Smith, and novelists like Rita Mae Brown can be appreciated so long as their sexual orientation is not mentioned. “The interior contradictions of honor [hold people] in shackles of prejudice, pride and superficiality.”[iv] Skillful deniers of reality, Southerners are concerned at all costs with keeping up appearances. Thus, eccentricity is often tolerated, if only as a means not to confront private idiosyncrasies directly.[v] “This storehouse of collective private knowledge, in part, is what identifies a Southern community”.[vi] So long as “dirty little secrets” remain so, the fabric of Southern communities holds together. An expectation of flamboyance and politeness enables the South paradoxically to honor Tallulah Bankhead and Tennessee Williams, while at the same time censuring school libraries that contain homosexual material and passing legislation that denies same-sex couples the right of marriage.
Sears takes pains to separate African-American family life from its Caucasian counterpart, but the reality remains that, aside from a few trifling variations, both are rooted deeply in the same traditions. African-American society, after all, based itself upon the template of Caucasian society.
“In most cases, the social differentiation of the [African-American] community is not built upon occupational differentiation of the population, but represents the efforts of those who have achieved some culture and education to enforce standards and recognize distinction…In a Southern city, for example, the small elite will be composed of a few school teachers, a couple of physicians, a dentist, postal employees, and one or two other families who have acquired a superior status because of family property, or sometimes because of some unique position in the white community.”[vii]
Notwithstanding, the Protestant Church is a powerful influence in the everyday life of each Southerner, regardless of skin color. As Sears himself argues, “this is a culture in which the antebellum, patriarchal ethos is rooted in Southern honor, Christian faith, and an extended family.”[viii] “Americans [and Southerners] have a long history of seeing themselves as God’s chosen people. While tolerating a diversity of religious beliefs ranging from Judaism to Mormonism, Americans, in general, remain no less committed to belief in God, the specialness (sic) of their New Zion, and the righteous certainty of their earthly role to evangelize the world for God and Democracy”.[ix] This self-righteous attitude often excludes GLBT persons, as they are often perceived as antithetical to Christian morality, family cohesion, and general decency.
Furthermore, a tumultuous past and a tradition of shared misfortune unify Southerners together above all else. “Enduring great economic misfortunes and rooted in the chivalric ideals of their antebellum past, Southerners have placed more importance on family and family honor than on outward manifestations of wealth.”[x] Many Americans are aware of the large socio-economic gap that exists between North and South. As Sears argues, what often are not discussed are the differences within the South itself. Vast disparities of wealth and influence exist between rich and poor Southerners and among various Southern subcultures.[xi] The South has a long history of electing populist politicians and much scholarly research has been undertaken to prove that working class Southerners are much more liberal on economic issues than is generally assumed. Unfortunately, on issues of gender norms and stereotypes, the South remains unwaveringly conservative.
Unlike the North, where a discrepancy between public sexual image and private sexual behavior is viewed as an act of hypocrisy, clandestine homosexual behavior escapes public retribution and regulation so long as such acts do not violate the code of family honor.[xii] Sears recognizes this as a freedom peculiar to the South. Northern society adopts a more live-and-let live attitude towards its queer residents and at least acknowledges their presence; many Northerners, in particular, place higher priority upon individual expression, rather than mass conventionality.
The phenomenon of repressed distinctiveness, particularly within the context of sexual expression, cuts across the racial divide but has increasingly come to light in the African-American community. The concept of “the down low” has come to define a subcategory of African-American men who have sexual contact with other men, but do not consider themselves queer.
Sears interviews a working class African-American male, who puts the picture neatly into focus.
“First, the South is conservative. When you’re black in a black society and you’re gay it’s even harder. Blacks don’t want it to be known because they don’t want to mimic or imitate white people. They see it as a crutch and they don’t want to have to deal with it. That’s what they have been taught. They would do all sorts of things to deny that someone in their family is gay.”[xiii]
Southerners produce numerous rationalizations to explain why members of their family and prominent figures in their community cannot really be queer. In their modicum of thinking, queer men, for example, merely are more emotional and creative. Queer women merely enjoy sports and more masculine pursuits. So long as GLBT southerners do not “flaunt” their alternate sexual orientation, they are perceived as slightly eccentric and atypical to the norm.
As Sears himself proclaims, “People who grow up gay in the North are jaded. The conservative views on gender and sexuality take on an air of ambivalence in the Southerner’s imagination.”[xiv] Due to this conditioned denial, one can find many men willing to act and even dress the part of the opposite gender, if only in good fun. Sears recounts a South Carolinian ritual called “the womanless wedding” in which men dress as bride, groom, flower girl, and even soprano soloist—all of this within a strictly heterosexual context.[xv] The primarily Pennsylvanian tradition of the Mummer’s Parade, in which men dress up in flamboyant costumes and often as females, echoes this ceremony.
Sears also reveals the many intrinsic flaws that exist within the context of “hear no evil, see no evil.” The flip side, of course, is that Southern honor often reveals itself to be shallow, superficial, sordid, and ignoble. “Its reliance on shame distorts[s] human personality and individualism, forcing even the good man to lose himself in the cacophony of the crowd.”[xvi] Many queer Southerners find themselves unable to live inside the paradox. Further compounding the problem as Sears points out, the sad reality is that many GLBT southerners deliberately refuse to add their talents towards improving their homeland. Perceiving themselves as the South’s last socially acceptable scapegoat, they leave in droves to escape rampant homophobia. The South remains an unkind place to those who dare to be different. For men and women unfortunate enough to grow up particularly different, it can be an outright liability.
In defiance of these prejudicial attitudes, which are nurtured in ignorance and fear of the unknown, many southern queers refuse to take a defeatist mentality. By refusing to tiptoe around uncomfortable truths and in refusing to take a passive-aggressive approach towards their sexual orientation, they consider themselves the new rebels of their homeland, with a cause every bit as revolutionary as those espoused by their Confederate and Civil Rights ancestors. “They are a reflection of the South’s strengths and tragedies; they are the inheritors of the Southern inclination to rebel.”[xvii] With a bold tenacity as shocking as it is sublime, southern queers lead a new charge up Cemetery Ridge and stand unbowed before the threat of lynching, police dogs, fire hoses, and homemade bombs.
END NOTES
[i] Wyatt-Brown, Betram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford U.P., 1982. pps. 16-17.
[ii] William, Walter L. Growing Up Gay in the South. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park P., 1991. p. 5 (Introduction).
[iii] Sears, James T. Ibid. p. 144.
[iv] Wyatt-Brown. p.114. qtd. in Sears, p.190.
[v] Sears p. 190-91.
[vi] Ibid. p. 191.
[vii] Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago, U. of Chicago P., 1939. p. 79
[viii] Ibid. p. 72
[ix] Ibid. p. 24.
[x][x] Wyatt-Brown. p. 22
[xi] Ibid. p. 10
[xii] Ibid. 185.
[xiii] qtd. in Ibid. p. 135.
[xiv] qtd. in Ibid. p. 247.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Williams, p. 5
The Mind of the South, Review
W.J. Cash- The Reluctant Southerner
W.J. Cash’s 1941 book, The Mind of the South, confronts many hard truths about the Southern character. In a blunt, no-nonsense manner, the author rips into many preconceived stereotypes of the region and explodes the mythology of the South.
However, Cash also reveals much about the south that is great and worth preserving. In doing so, the work divulges as much about its subject as it does about its highly sensitive and troubled author. While at times his portrayal of his native region borders on unfairly critical, it must be understood that Cash often merely projected his own misery and emotional upheaval onto his homeland by way of his embittered prose.
Although he uses the medium of “the South” as the template upon which he launches his sardonic tirades, one must not forget that Cash was his own toughest critic. Thus, the author had a love/hate relationship both with his place of birth as well as himself. This notion is hardly alien to the human condition. Humanity has an unfortunate tendency to desire scapegoats and whipping boys. All of us, to some degree or another, have projected our own weaknesses, fears, and uncertainty upon some group or persons whom we perceive are not like us.
Is it surprising then, that if Cash could not ever find lasting comfort within himself that he would ever find lasting comfort in anyone or anything?
Cash’s proficiency in writing resulted from a keen perception of human nature, a scathing wit, and a unique gift at satire. His tragic flaw lay in his immense resentment towards much of the world around him. Turned outwardly, through his pen, seething resentment allowed him to make prescient insights upon southern society, tinged, of course, with inevitable melancholia. Turned inwardly, resentment produced a brooding worrywart plagued with compulsive doubt, fear, and self-loathing. These emotional conflicts eventually led to his death by his own hand.
All great social satirists possess some degree of these same qualities; Cash was no exception. In the era of Enlightenment, Voltaire and Jonathan Swift both produced works of equal brilliance; it has been noted that satirists “diss because they’re pissed”. Anger/Resentment is often the base motivation of writers who dare to turn a mirror to society’s flaws. They believe they act out of a moral duty to society by forcing people to confront the errors of their ways. They seek to rectify wrong and replace it with right.
Voltaire lampooned the naïve optimism of his time, as did Swift. Cash, by contrast, mocked a society that, in his perception, lived in self-delusion and grandiose fantasy. In his own lifetime, he had seen firsthand the effects of two separate economic depressions. To his dismay, he saw a people unwilling to learn from the example of history.
Despite having lost everything in the aftermath of the Civil War and then The Great Depression, Cash observed in the Southern people an attitude of arrogance and unwillingness to compromise. He believed this temperament would continue to get the South into trouble for years to come.
The Mind of the South explores the reasons why Southerners chose to invent a regional mythology of their very own. Defeated in war, humiliated by conquest, their way of life utterly destroyed, it is hardly surprising that many native sons and daughters of the South would voluntarily believe in a rosy, glossy, highly romanticized version of their own troubled history.
Confronting the truth would be too painful an exercise for a prideful people accustomed to living their lives as they pleased and especially without any outside interference from anyone. In an effort to circle the wagons, edit out the messy bits of their shared past, and take pride in their own unique culture, many Southerners truly believed in over-romanticized tripe like Gone With the Wind, chivalry, and “Good Country People” (as Flannery O’Connor so eloquently put it).
This unfortunate phenomenon continues to this day, regardless of whatever region in the United States to which one claims allegiance. Today, many of us take stock in such foolish constructs as “The American Dream”. We teach our children to believe in miracles and fanciful notions like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
None of these are, in fact, “real”. Perception might be ninety percent of reality, but despite our best efforts, we cannot change what should be or what isn’t into what we want it to be. To do so remains an exercise in wishful thinking and futility. Such efforts are akin to pissing in the wind, or in the manner of Cervantes’ tragic protagonist, Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. Cash understood this concept well.
As he saw it, the South was trying to accomplish the impossible—invent a better past. As he realized, not only were such actions useless and bordering on psychotic, they were also counterproductive. To Cash, the past was past, and no amount of well-intentioned posturing would ever change it. The Chinese definition of insanity explains this paradox quite nicely. This principle states that insanity is the action of doing the same thing the same way and expecting a completely different result in return.
In Cash’s viewpoint, this pointless gesture was another great fallacy of the Southern mentality. He believed that progress did not and would not occur until Southerners put their past behind them and genuinely sought to change things for the better.
Even now, Southerners remain mired in this great quandary. Instead of putting issues of racial conflict and societal inferiority behind them, they still cling to the very things that keep them in chains.
Their prideful, stubborn nature keeps society exactly the way they’ve it’s been ever since William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery rhetoric created the concept of the South as we know it—nearly two hundred years ago.
The irony is that many are not willing to change. They are not willing to let go of their own pain and suffering to make strides for the better. As Cash would argue, in the short term, change is painful, but the long-term rewards are lasting and much more beneficial.
As has been stated earlier, Cash took a jaundiced view of his people. Yet, he clearly loved the South—if he did not, then he would not have bothered to agonize over every misstep and flaw. Like an overprotective parent, he doled out occasionally obsessive doses of tough love. He fretted over his Southern progeny, fearful that if he did not come down hard on them, they would not learn from their mistakes. Still, he ultimately wanted only the best for his fellow people.
Cash thus was the reluctant Southerner. He was both an insider and an outsider to the cause. In one respect, his flair for the dramatic and love of storytelling, to name two examples, showed him to be the consummate Southern gentleman. Although, counterbalanced with his showmanship and verbosity was an often tactless, accusatory, warts-and-all delivery that only an outsider to the South would dare reveal.
Again, this speaks volumes about a man who lived his life in extremes—one moment energetic and optimistic, the next woeful and depressed.
His bipolar disorder made him an almost impartial critic. In his times of great joy, he sang the praises of his homeland like a happy songbird. In his times of misery, he showed the seamy, dark underbelly of a culture gone astray. Therein lay the genius of W.J. Cash.
The Mind of the South, then, is a study in contrasts---possessing rays of light as well as shades of dark. It possesses the unique ability to be exuberant yet depressing, funny yet somber, judgmental yet forgiving…all of these at the same instant. Behind each cloud lies a silver lining, and behind each silver lining lies another cloud.
W.J. Cash’s 1941 book, The Mind of the South, confronts many hard truths about the Southern character. In a blunt, no-nonsense manner, the author rips into many preconceived stereotypes of the region and explodes the mythology of the South.
However, Cash also reveals much about the south that is great and worth preserving. In doing so, the work divulges as much about its subject as it does about its highly sensitive and troubled author. While at times his portrayal of his native region borders on unfairly critical, it must be understood that Cash often merely projected his own misery and emotional upheaval onto his homeland by way of his embittered prose.
Although he uses the medium of “the South” as the template upon which he launches his sardonic tirades, one must not forget that Cash was his own toughest critic. Thus, the author had a love/hate relationship both with his place of birth as well as himself. This notion is hardly alien to the human condition. Humanity has an unfortunate tendency to desire scapegoats and whipping boys. All of us, to some degree or another, have projected our own weaknesses, fears, and uncertainty upon some group or persons whom we perceive are not like us.
Is it surprising then, that if Cash could not ever find lasting comfort within himself that he would ever find lasting comfort in anyone or anything?
Cash’s proficiency in writing resulted from a keen perception of human nature, a scathing wit, and a unique gift at satire. His tragic flaw lay in his immense resentment towards much of the world around him. Turned outwardly, through his pen, seething resentment allowed him to make prescient insights upon southern society, tinged, of course, with inevitable melancholia. Turned inwardly, resentment produced a brooding worrywart plagued with compulsive doubt, fear, and self-loathing. These emotional conflicts eventually led to his death by his own hand.
All great social satirists possess some degree of these same qualities; Cash was no exception. In the era of Enlightenment, Voltaire and Jonathan Swift both produced works of equal brilliance; it has been noted that satirists “diss because they’re pissed”. Anger/Resentment is often the base motivation of writers who dare to turn a mirror to society’s flaws. They believe they act out of a moral duty to society by forcing people to confront the errors of their ways. They seek to rectify wrong and replace it with right.
Voltaire lampooned the naïve optimism of his time, as did Swift. Cash, by contrast, mocked a society that, in his perception, lived in self-delusion and grandiose fantasy. In his own lifetime, he had seen firsthand the effects of two separate economic depressions. To his dismay, he saw a people unwilling to learn from the example of history.
Despite having lost everything in the aftermath of the Civil War and then The Great Depression, Cash observed in the Southern people an attitude of arrogance and unwillingness to compromise. He believed this temperament would continue to get the South into trouble for years to come.
The Mind of the South explores the reasons why Southerners chose to invent a regional mythology of their very own. Defeated in war, humiliated by conquest, their way of life utterly destroyed, it is hardly surprising that many native sons and daughters of the South would voluntarily believe in a rosy, glossy, highly romanticized version of their own troubled history.
Confronting the truth would be too painful an exercise for a prideful people accustomed to living their lives as they pleased and especially without any outside interference from anyone. In an effort to circle the wagons, edit out the messy bits of their shared past, and take pride in their own unique culture, many Southerners truly believed in over-romanticized tripe like Gone With the Wind, chivalry, and “Good Country People” (as Flannery O’Connor so eloquently put it).
This unfortunate phenomenon continues to this day, regardless of whatever region in the United States to which one claims allegiance. Today, many of us take stock in such foolish constructs as “The American Dream”. We teach our children to believe in miracles and fanciful notions like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
None of these are, in fact, “real”. Perception might be ninety percent of reality, but despite our best efforts, we cannot change what should be or what isn’t into what we want it to be. To do so remains an exercise in wishful thinking and futility. Such efforts are akin to pissing in the wind, or in the manner of Cervantes’ tragic protagonist, Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. Cash understood this concept well.
As he saw it, the South was trying to accomplish the impossible—invent a better past. As he realized, not only were such actions useless and bordering on psychotic, they were also counterproductive. To Cash, the past was past, and no amount of well-intentioned posturing would ever change it. The Chinese definition of insanity explains this paradox quite nicely. This principle states that insanity is the action of doing the same thing the same way and expecting a completely different result in return.
In Cash’s viewpoint, this pointless gesture was another great fallacy of the Southern mentality. He believed that progress did not and would not occur until Southerners put their past behind them and genuinely sought to change things for the better.
Even now, Southerners remain mired in this great quandary. Instead of putting issues of racial conflict and societal inferiority behind them, they still cling to the very things that keep them in chains.
Their prideful, stubborn nature keeps society exactly the way they’ve it’s been ever since William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery rhetoric created the concept of the South as we know it—nearly two hundred years ago.
The irony is that many are not willing to change. They are not willing to let go of their own pain and suffering to make strides for the better. As Cash would argue, in the short term, change is painful, but the long-term rewards are lasting and much more beneficial.
As has been stated earlier, Cash took a jaundiced view of his people. Yet, he clearly loved the South—if he did not, then he would not have bothered to agonize over every misstep and flaw. Like an overprotective parent, he doled out occasionally obsessive doses of tough love. He fretted over his Southern progeny, fearful that if he did not come down hard on them, they would not learn from their mistakes. Still, he ultimately wanted only the best for his fellow people.
Cash thus was the reluctant Southerner. He was both an insider and an outsider to the cause. In one respect, his flair for the dramatic and love of storytelling, to name two examples, showed him to be the consummate Southern gentleman. Although, counterbalanced with his showmanship and verbosity was an often tactless, accusatory, warts-and-all delivery that only an outsider to the South would dare reveal.
Again, this speaks volumes about a man who lived his life in extremes—one moment energetic and optimistic, the next woeful and depressed.
His bipolar disorder made him an almost impartial critic. In his times of great joy, he sang the praises of his homeland like a happy songbird. In his times of misery, he showed the seamy, dark underbelly of a culture gone astray. Therein lay the genius of W.J. Cash.
The Mind of the South, then, is a study in contrasts---possessing rays of light as well as shades of dark. It possesses the unique ability to be exuberant yet depressing, funny yet somber, judgmental yet forgiving…all of these at the same instant. Behind each cloud lies a silver lining, and behind each silver lining lies another cloud.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Bumper Sticker Logic, Isn't
“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!” I am outraged, because I am paying attention, so I went to the rally. …and since I’m paying attention, I saw all the patches—the bumper stickers of the bike crowd. …and they told me to Smash Patriarchy! Smash Capitalism! Smash Racism! Smash the State! …and I was outraged, and I got a hammer, and I got on my bike and I rode and I was set to Smash Patriarchy! Smash Capitalism! Smash Racism! Smash the State! …and I went to kill my television and when I saw it I realized it was never alive, and even if it was, it never did anything to me, it’s the people who make the shows I choose to watch. …and I went to smash capitalism, but all I could find was the products of it, because capitalism is about products, and all I could find to smash were the windows, and those just got replaced by insurance money and the photo of me smashing them did make the papers which impressed me until I realized I was now a poster boy for more cops on the streets to defend capitalism. …and I went to smash the state but all I could find were state workers who grumbled about their jobs but at least they had some benefits and job security which is more than could be said for the rest of the people working for capitalists…and even if I could find a state to smash I started wondering what all these individuals would do without a state and if smashing the state was like smashing an anthill—the ants just rebuild it because they don’t know anything else. …and I went to smash patriarchy, and while I found evidence of it everywhere, I just couldn’t find the headquarters. So I just started talking to people about sex and gender and explaining that all those angry feminists aren’t wrong so much as they are starting conversations with people that are too advanced for them, like trying to teach a kid to read and starting with War and Peace. …and I went to smash racism. But except for the Klan and others who do a better job at overt racism, I realized that a lot of racism is hatred caused by ignorance. And getting mad at the ignorant is like getting mad at that kid who can’t read War and Peace because nobody taught him what A, B, and C meant. And the cure for ignorance isn’t smashing, but information. …and…and …and now I want to end capitalism, end racism, end sexism, end the state as we know it, but I want to build. I’m opening up my mouth, opening up my ears, opening up my arms for a hug and opening up my mind. …and now I’m thinking. …and now I’m outraged. …and now I’m really paying attention. |
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The First Black Reconstruction.
The first African-American Reconstruction. (1866-1877) The second African-American Reconstruction (1949?, possibly sooner- )
Source: Woodward, C
Source: Woodward, C
Source: Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. 2nd edition. Louisiana St. P., 1970. pgs. 104-107
The immigrants had their own handicaps of language and prejudice to deal with, but they never had anything approaching the handicaps against which the African-American had to struggle to gain acceptance. The prejudices that the immigrants confronted were nothing like the race prejudice with which the African-American had to cope.
Nor was the white immigrants’ enfranchisement accompanied by the disfranchisement of the ruling and propertied classes of the community in which he settled. Neither did the exercise of his franchise have to be protected by the bayonets of federal troops, nor did the gaining of his political rights appear to old settlers as a penalty and punishment inflicted upon them, a deliberate humiliation of them by their conquerors.
Political leaders of the immigrants were not ordinarily regarded by the old settlers as “carpetbaggers”, intruders, and puppets of a hostile government sent to rule over them; immigrants did not regard the old settlers as their former owners, any more than the old settlers looked upon the immigrants as their former slaves. The situation of the latest political neophytes was, after all, in many ways quite different from the neophytes of the seventies.
The time eventually came when the incubus of their political genesis returned to haunt the freedmen and destroy their future. That was the time when the two dominant operative motives of Radical Reconstruction, party advantage and sectional business interests, became inactive---the time when it became apparent that those mighty ends could be better served by abandoning the experiment and leaving the freedmen to shift for themselves.
The philanthropic motive was still a factor, and in many minds still strong, but it was not enough without the support of the two powerful props of party advantage and sectional interest. The moment of collapse came at different times and at different states, but the climax and consolidation of the decision came with the disputed presidential election of 1976 and the settlement that resolved it in the Compromise of 1877.
It would be neither fair nor accurate to place all the blame upon the North and its selfish interests. There had been plenty of willing co-operations on the part of Southern whites. They had used craft and guile, force and violence, economic pressure and physical terror, and all the subtle psychological of race prejudice and propaganda at their command.
But the Southern whites were after all a minority, and not a very strong minority at that. The North had not only numbers and powers on its side, but the law and the Constitution as well. When the moment of crisis arrived, however, the old doubts and skepticism of the North returned, the doubts that had kept the African-American disenfranchised in the North after freedman’s suffrage had been imposed upon the South.
After the fifteenth amendment was passed, the North rapidly lost interest in African-American voters. They were pushed out of the limelight by other interests, beset by prejudices, and neglected by politicians.
The Northern African-American did not enjoy a fraction of the political success the Southern African-American enjoyed, as modest as that was. Reformers and Mugwumps of the North identified corruption with the Radical wing of the Republican party, lost interest in the African-American allies of the Radicals, and looked upon them as a means of perpetuating corrupt government all of the nation as well in the South.
In this mood, they came to the conclusion that that the African-American voter had been given a fair chance to prove his worth as a responsible citizen and that the experiment had proved a failure.
This conclusion appeared in many places, most strangely perhaps in that old Champion of the race, the New York Tribune. (April 7, 1877), which declared that African-Americans had been “given ample opportunity to develop their own latent capacities,” and had only succeeded in proving that “as a race they are idle, ignorant, and vicious.”
The North’s loss of faith in its own cause is reflected in many surprising places. One example must suffice. It is of special interest because it comes from the supreme official charged with enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment and guaranteeing to the freedmen their political rights, the President whose administration coincided with Radical Reconstruction and the whole great experiment- General U.S. Grant.
According to the diary of Secretary Hamilton Fish, entry of January 17, 1877, he [Grant] says he opposed the Fifteenth Amendment and thinks it was a mistake, that it done the African-American no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a political advantage to the North.
During the present struggle for African-American rights, which might be called Second Reconstruction—though one of a very different sort—I have noticed among African-American intellectuals at times a tendency to look back upon the First Reconstruction as if it was in some ways a sort of Golden Age.
In this nostalgic view that the period takes the shape of the race’s finest hour, a time of heroic leaders and deed, of high faith and firm resolution, a time of forthright and passionate action, with no bowing to compromises of “deliberate speed”. I think I understand their feelings.
Reconstruction will always have a special and powerful meaning for African-Americans. It is undoubtedly a period full of rich and tragic and meaningful history, a period that should be studiously searched for its meanings, and a period that has many meanings to yield.
But I seriously doubt that it will ever serve satisfactorily as a Golden Age—for anybody.
There is too much irony mixed with the tragedy.
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