Exorcising toxic Trump: An intentional alternative in our back yard?

Hancock Shaker Village — photo by Massachusetts Office of Tourism, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 9, 2020 by William P. Densmore



I’ve been thinking a lot about furniture lately as my sisters and I assess the provenance and best disposition of fine furniture in our parents’ Worcester home. We’re learning that “dark furniture” isn’t very valuable anymore. Kind of like the stock market after today, and quite out of our individual control so not to worry. But thinking about furniture and value inevitable leads to the mass-market tag line for the Shakers furniture. Excellent, simple, stripped of vanity and excess — furniture.



But it is not Shaker furniture on my mind for tonight. Rather, I wish to digress in perhaps contrarian fashion to a set of difference considerations about the Shakers — their status as the longest running intentional community in America — an effort at utopia which has tested a set of values in many respects relevant not only to contemporary American society but as well perhaps to some of the attributes of the culture which occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.



Fifteen years ago I spent six months working at Hancock Shaker Village. Like most people, I knew about furniture and celibacy and that was about it. I learned somewhat more, but ever since I’ve wanted to spend a chunk of time digging into Shaker values and practices.  This talk is the result and it stems from sit-down interviews last month with five Shaker experts — and an admittedly fast literature review.



What I will highlight, using with attribution the words of my interviewees as well as published authors is this: The Shakers can teach our contemporary politicians, and maybe Donald Trump, much about gender equity, caring for “others,” housing and economic security and the management of dissent. Seventy-five years before emancipation, and 150 years before suffrage, Shakers were already practicing social, sexual, economic and spiritual equality. For the most part, the Shakers just lived their politics, although in 1852, Shaker elder Frederick Evans was proselytizing that women should have the right to vote.



There are multiple sources — from Wikipedia to scholarly volumes, to fill in the basic Shaker history so I’ll rewrite to a few sentences. Factory worker “Mother” Ann Lee and her husband arrive near Albany, N.Y., in 1774 from Manchester, England and after several frustrating years begin to attract converts to her Protestant-offshoot idea of a community that sees women as a natural representation of God after the death of Jesus. The three tenets: celibacy, confession and community. At its peak, the Shaker movement involved 6,000 members and followers at 19 sites from Kentucky east to Maine; only two (or is it three) members remain — at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.



Before declining, Shaker societies were organized around “families” with 20 to 150 members of each non-biological family and a total of two to 11 such families in each geographic society.



Scholars generally agree that Shakers grew (and prospered mightily) through about 1840 when a slow decline began as many male members — the “brothers” — found better work and life outside the community. Because Mother Ann believed chastity to be a necessary part of the faith, Shakers could only maintain communities by taking in new families, children or individuals. The Hancock Bishopric declined and in 1959-1960 the property was sold to what has become Hancock Shaker Village, a living-history museum.



Filmmaker Ken Burns wrote for his 1984 PBS video special, “Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” what I found to be the most elegant summary of the Shakers and here is a small part of it. Burns wrote that by the mid-1800s:

The Shakers were suddenly appreciated as successful communitarians when Americans became interested in communities, as successful utopians when America hosted a hundred utopian experiments, as spiritualists when American parlors filled with mediums and with voices from other worlds. They invented hundreds of laborsaving devices from the clothespin to the circular saw, which they shared without patents (some of these machines launched brilliant industrial careers for the men who borrowed them), nor were they frightened of useful inventions . . . They were admired and derided, imitated for their successes and ridiculed for their eccentricities. And they are enduringly appreciated for their contribution to American crafts and architecture

With thanks to Ken Burns, that’s the basic history and story line. Let’s now focus on these five aspects which, as I say, seem to teach us to varying degree about our political moment in ways I’ll assert.

1. Gender relationships


2. Caring for others, and the infirm


3. Housing and economic security


4. Focusing on quality, and science


5. Managing dissent

GENDER RELATIONSHIPS 



When it comes to gender relationships and society, perhaps we might invite Elizabeth Warren’s input, or perhaps some of the many women who have described relationships with Mr. Trump. I think its fair to sale we have some work to do in figuring how we value and engage women in leadership in America. The Shakers have much to teach here.



Glendyne R. Wergland of Dalton is one of the four Shaker experts I spoke with last month at HSV. Her 2011 University of Massachusetts Press book, Sisters in the Faith, draws together document research to show — as one reviewer has written — that Shaker communities achieved a remarkable degree of gender equality at a time when women elsewhere still suffered under the legal and social strictures of a traditional patriarchal order. In so doing, Wergland finds, the reviewer writes, that the experience of Shaker women served as a model for promoting women’s rights in American political culture.



Deborah E. Burns is an editor at Storey Communications in North Adams and the author of the 1993 Shaker Cities of Peace, Love and Union: A History of the Hancock Bishopric, which she took three years to write at the request of HSV’s first president and lead founder, Amy Bess Miller. Burns was one of the people I sought out for guidance on interpreting the Shakers for contemporary America. Burns believes the equality of women with men in managing and holding leadership roles in the Shaker church was a reason for its balance and stability during the growth years “in a way that we just never have had in our country.” When men slowly drifted away from Shaker societies in the late 19th century, a greater proportion of women stayed, Burns says, because for them, the stability of Shaker living was as good or better than the outside world. “The communal system and the segregation of sexes took a lot of clutter out of the brain,” Burns says.



University of Alabama-Huntsville history professor Suzanne R. Thurman expands on this view in an excerpt from her book, O Sisters Ain’t You Happy, published in 2002:

Attacking the patriarchal basis for most of American family life, the Shakers cleared the way for a new society where relationships were built on love and choice, not duty and obligation, and where traditional female characteristics were upheld as normative for society . . . . women took on positions of responsibility, made choices about their bodies and their lifestyles, and were empowered by Shaker religious practices. 

Prof. Thurman says Shaker women understood the community-building features of communal, non-biological families, that still well-nurtured and educated adopted children or children of other members. As Burns reports in her scholarship, the evidence was that Shaker-raised children tended to be excellent students, their schools in Hancock were praised and sought by non-Shaker parents. Continues Prof. Thurman:

[A]s the Shakers and their reformer counterparts debated the merits of life in community and life in the biological family, as they analyzed and discussed what constituted the “best” and most “normal” kind of relationship, they touched on issues that have vexed human society for centuries. The Shakers came down squarely on the side of . . . the transforming power of communal life.

CELIBACY, CHOICE , CLIMATE AND POPULATION



Because much focus is on celibacy when we consider the Shakers, on the grounds that it was a sort of “failure mode” for the survival of the community, I’ll mention that briefly here by saying there are contrarian views. The Shakers themselves wrote that most people left communities not because of sex but because they found it in other ways hard to put aside self-interest in favor of community interest. By not bearing children, Shakers could be sure that anyone in the faith had chosen to be there. If Shakers were recruiting converts today, they could also make the argument that celibacy is a possible rational choice in a world that scientists — apparently not Mr. Trump — see as threatened by climate change and overpopulation.



Scholars Elisa J. Sobo and Sandra Bell, (writing in their book, Celibacy, Culture and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence (2001) report that around 1900 some Shaker writers also . . .

. . . Maintained that celibacy (specifically as freedom from marriage), was an important inducement to women to enter membership, first, because marriage sometimes licensed the physical and sexual abuse of women; second, because abstention from marriage facilitated community, and therefore egalitarian, property ownership. They argued that when women are given the opportunity to eschew economic dependence on men, they become men’s equal in all spheres of life.

HEALTH IN BROADEST SENSE



In Shaker communities there was health-care for all, a lesson for today’s society. As well, there was a focus on healthy eating and living — something Shaker societies might have been better able to enforce than we are today.



Here are three examples:

1. HSV and other sites have examples of adult-size cradles, potty chairs and other accessibility and mobility devices for the elderly. 


2. Dwelling houses had areas designed as “infirmaries” and the social covenant included care for infirm and elderly members according to need. There brethren who functioned in roles as doctors.


3. When members were sick, it was understood that other members of the community would take on their work until they recovered. 

Thus, unlike 30 million Americans with no health insurance, and millions without sick pay, a sick or infirm believer could rest, receive care and attention for as long as needed, without worry of financial loss or neglect to the duties of the farm. As for Covid-19 — Burns says there are no accounts of any contagions sweeping a Shaker community, but there are accounts of infirmaries taking in people with flu or pneumonia-like symptoms.



Shakers grew and profitably sold medicinal herbs — they made their own herbal tinctures. Some Shaker orders willingly adjusted food preparation to members who chose a vegetarian diet, wrote June Sprigg in her 1975 book, By Shaker Hands. Children studied physiology, a weekly hot bath was encouraged.



Sprigg added:

To keep themselves healthy, the Shakers used wisely all four earthly elements for their heavenly goal — air, fire, water and earth. Translated into health terms, that meant good ventilation; the use of static electricity as the latest in rheumatism treatment; extensive and progressive plumbing systems; and a sensible diet, herbal medicines, and for the most part no liquor or tobacco. Besides these measures, Shakers slept at least seven hours nightly and exercised not only in their work but in their worship, too [by dancing producing a healthy sweat]. 

HOUSING AND ECONOMIC SECURITY



Housing, homelesslness and economic security loom large as American issues, especially for millennials. For Shakers, these were off the table as concerns. Once a person had stayed long enough in a Shaker community to want to join the faith, they turned over all of their assets but in exchange for doing the community’s work, they were sheltered and fed.  In their own way, Shakers also addressed homelessness; they took in people in need, including widows and orphans. They sheltered and fed fugitive slaves. One might assume that they would be inclined to operate today as welcoming communities for able-bodied and committed immigrants.



Among the scholars I spoke with, one observed that millennials and retirees in the Berkshires and elsewhere are now considering alternate living arrangements, and micro-communities of like-minded people to help with gardening, household responsibilities childcare and bills. What might be learned about the mechanics and challenges of co-housing as practiced by the Shakers, this scholar asked? In the Shaker community construct, your children would be taken care of by brethren and sisters, and you could “age in place” with similar care. Another scholar asked: With the world’s resources now seen as finite, will it be necessary to think of housing and living in less individualistic fashion?



Said one of my interview subjects at HSV:

Millenials are thinking more broadly about how we can live together, in smaller spaces, more sustainably, holding possessions longer so we can consume less. We are rethinking our worldmaking, creating a landscape more intentional and sustainable, in its essence very Shaker. They built a world and a vocabulary for themselves like no other community in this country.

Intergenerational mixing in intentional communities is an ideal spawned by the Shakers (and other communal societies) that should be re-imagined, says Deb Burns. When might the campus of a recently closed college be envisioned for such a purpose, she suggests, balanced in age and genders.





FOCUS ON QUALITY — AND SCIENCE



Until the Industrial Revolution took hold, an important Shaker ethic contributed to their economic prosperity — a focus on quality in everything they made. Shaker brethren who traveled the countryside selling their packaged seeds were eagerly awaited because the seeds’ were clean and reliable. Furniture and devices built more than 200 years ago in dwellings and work buildings still work today. But eventually, scholars say, the ability for factories to turn out goods faster and cheaper became a competitive challenge to the ethic of high quality.



Yet the Shakers actually believed in science, and used inventiveness to maintain their admired position in agriculture and related fields for as long as possible.  Shaker elders considered whether to permit the introduction of labor- and time-saving devices. After initial caution — requiring a six-month period of consideration when a new such idea was offered — they ultimately decided their faith accepted that useful inventions should be encouraged even though they might impact lifestyle. They did not patent some early inventions. Paraphrasing the Wikipedia entry:



Their industry brought about many inventions like Babbitt metal, the rotary harrow, the circular saw, the clothespin, the Shaker peg, the flat broom, the wheel-driven washing machine, a machine for setting teeth in textile cards, a threshing machine, metal pens, a new type of fire engine, the common clothes pin, the first screw propeller, a machine for matching boards, numerous innovations in waterworks, planing machinery, a hernia truss, silk reeling machinery, small looms for weaving palm leaf, machines for processing broom corn and ball-and-socket tilters for chair legs.





MANAGING DISSENT



In reviewing five aspects of the Shakers that I suggest may be relevant to our current culture and politics, I come to the final one — the management of dissent. How might this compare with contemporary politics?



One scholar says that the Shakers viewed men as representing power and women as representing wisdom. It must have been wisdom which defined what would happen when a Shaker community resident need to be dismissed. The problem was managed through constant attempts at rehabilitation, scholars say. Sometimes breathren or sisters would leave the community, only to be welcomed back. Most the time, they would leave with abundant food of gifts. In extreme case, they might have their personal effects removed to the street, however. Sometimes an individual Shaker would challenge the authority of elders, and such charismatic leaders could be asked to leave, or be ejected. “It was very tense and anxious,” says Deb Burns. “But that’s what it was, trying to give the person a chance.”





SHAKERS — NOT APART FROM US



I want to wrap up with three views about why the Shakers matter, and with a poem.



First, the Shakers were in many ways not so different from the rest of us, from other people of their era, writes Joseph Manca, a Rice University art-history professor in a new work of scholarship published just last year by University of Massachusetts Press and entitled: Shaker Vision: Seeing Beauty in Early America. He writes:

In many ways, Shakers lived sensuously: They ate well, they swam regularly in their ponds and lakes and in the ocean, and they danced and sang ecstatically. They viewed landscapes, watched sunsets, pretty rains, rainbows, comets . . . enjoyed the sight of green fields, snow-covered ground and the colors and shapes of fruit on vines and limbs . . . enjoyed pretty faces and bodies, marveled at freaks of nature and admired well-made and colorful buildings.

Second, even if a day comes when the last Shaker is gone, their societies will continue to influence American thought, writes College of the Holy Cross Prof. Joanne Pierce, in her reflection “Why the legacy of Shakers will endure,” published at The Conversation online in 2017. She cites values of cleanliness, honesty, frugality, economy efficiency, quality, simplicity, hard work, debt avoidance and humility affecting social reform, agriculture, technology and innovation. She continued:

[The] Shakers’ rejection of ‘the world’ does offer us today some insightful reflections on contemporary issues such as their pacifism when confronted by terrorism; their mutual love and respect in the face of gender and racial divisions; and their cheerful blending of prosperity and simplicity as a response to the wasteful nature of many materialistic cultures.

Third, in 1977, then-Williams College President John W. Chandler wrote the foreword for Shaker Literature: A Bibliography compiled and annotated by Mary L. Richmond, published by Shaker Community Inc., distributed by University Press of Nebraska, Chandler wrote:

The alienating character of modern work, and questions about the potential for extended non-biological family communities as possible superior to nuclear, biological families drive contemporary interest in the Shakers, Chandler suggests. “Similarly, the Shaker denial of private ownership in favor of communal property attracts those who believe ownership to be a root cause of social injustice.

Chandler wrote that for all these reasons, and for the Shakers commitment to sexual balance their place in history is secure.



There is an untitled poem by Shaker Mary Whitcher, of the Canterbury, N.H., site, in the 1993 Penguin Book Simple Wisdom: Shaker Sayings, Poems and Songs. I read it now as advice to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

Be slow to anger, slow to blame,

And slow to plead thy cause.

But swift to speak of any gain

That gives thy friend applause.

Read More

The Past Is Never Dead: On intergenerational trauma

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, January 13, 2020 by Erik Bruun



1. The Damnedest Thing I Ever Saw



Seventy years ago my grandfather, Henry Ashton Crosby, was sitting in a New York City subway. He had recently returned to the United States after serving as a front-line officer during World War II. He was a gracious and polite man, so when an elderly woman got into the crowded subway car, he stood up to offer his seat. Just then another man scooted behind him to take the seat. My grandfather snapped.



He swung around, picked the man up and threw him through the subway window, smashing glass everywhere. The police arrived. After learning that he was a combat veteran, they let him go.



“That sort of thing used to happen all the time after the war,” my stepfather Player Crosby explained to me when I was a boy, delighted to have such chivalry in my family. I mean, what a grandfather!



Two overriding memories come to mind when I recall him.



One was his sparkling eyes. They absolutely lit up when he saw me after an extended absence as he shook my hand firmly and vigorously. He looked at me as if I was the most exciting person he could imagine seeing at that moment. It left such an impression that I try to mimic his enthusiasm when I see young people who I have not seen for a while.



This was a fantastic trait that all six of his children inherited. When you were in his presence you felt as if you were not just seen, but a source of complete delight. Your life felt special. He loved people and people loved him, as the hundreds who attended his standing-room-only funeral when he died at the age of 87 would attest.



The second memory was as a 10-year-old visiting him on summer vacation in Franconia, New Hampshire. I cannot remember what prompted it, but we were on the porch and he started talking about a patrol he led on the Western Front during World War II.



"We were walking through the forest and the Germans fired an .88-artillery shell," he said as if he was recalling a good tennis shot. "It took the head clean off of some poor bastard. He kept walking for another 20 or 30 steps before he fell over. The damnedest thing I ever saw."



2. Old Blood and Guts



General George S. Patton's Third Army landed in France in July 1944, several weeks after the D-Day invasion on June 6. The German Army had pinned Allied Forces on to the Normandy Peninsula for nearly two months in what was known as the Battle of the Hedgerows.



During World War I, Patton was a tank officer, known for his courage, flair and flamboyance. Between the wars he stayed in the Army and for a time was the national polo champion. When the Second World War started, Patton led successful campaigns in Northern Africa and Sicily, but US high command was cautious about giving Patton too much responsibility. Known as "Old Blood and Guts", Patton famously slapped and sent back into combat two American soldiers in Sicily who suffered from battle fatigue. He called them cowards.



But Patton’s Third Army lead the breakout from Normandy. Patton was not just aggressive. He was smart. His staff headquarters had the highest proportion of intelligence officers in Europe, most were focused on coordinating air force support for attacking tanks. The combination of armored columns, close air cover, and radio communication was extremely effective.



On August 1, Patton's army launched its attack, bursting through German lines and advancing every day until his tanks literally ran out of gas 30 days and 400 miles later near the French town of Metz, about 20 miles from the German frontier. A few weeks later, the Third Army's Fourth Armored Division repulsed the largest German tank attack on the Western Front at the Battle of Arracourt and in December, Patton's 4th Armored Division again played a crucial role, this time in the Battle of the Bulge.



The Third Army went on the offensive in February deep into Germany.  Progress was so fast that orders from Central Command to capture towns, cities and bridges often came after Patton's men had already seized them. "Do you want me to give it back," Patton responded after he was ordered to bypass a well-fortified town that he captured the day before. All told, the Third Army engaged in continuous combat for 281 days, crossed 24 major rivers and captured 12,000 towns and cities. The 3rd Army killed 50,000 men, wounded three times that number, and accepted the surrender of nearly 1.5 million soldiers.



3. Wartime Memoirs



Forty years later, my grandfather wrote a 170-page unpublished memoir of his experience of those campaigns. As executive officer of the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion of the 4th Armored Division, he had command control in one of three attack battalions in the most aggressive allied force of World War II. The battalion's casualty rate, including replacements, was 400 percent. Of the 1,000 soldiers in the battalion who landed in France in July, only 30 of whom were still fighting when the Germans surrendered with one officer still amongst them — Major Crosby, awarded three Purple Hearts for injuries suffered in combat, as well as four Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars for valor under fire.



The memoir is a series of stories. Where he was when he learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Weekend visits with his wife. His burning anger at the sadistic commanding officer Colonel Albert Strock who wouldn’t give him leave to see his two sons (Ashton and Player) in the U.S. but later broke down into tears when he came under fire in France. Funny tales abound about food, getting soaking wet, and a chance encounter with an officer who asked him his name so he could recommend him for a medal. "My God," the officer said, "you're my godson."



And then there are stories like this early in his combat experience:



"We continued through the orchard and rounded up six or eight Germans. One, about 6' 4", had a pair of field glasses hanging around his neck. I reached for his field glasses and he pulled back, my gun went off. The round hit him in the stomach. he said in English, "You shouldn't have done that; I've surrendered." He then fell down. I apologized and ran off to find a medic.. When I returned, he was gone. I still have the field glasses — an excellent Wetzlar. I also still have the 45."



Thirty pages are devoted to the assault of a single town called Baerendorf that he cites as an example of a typical day of fighting. He led two columns that suffered an artillery barrage, hand-to-hand combat and a counterattack to capture the town. Forty American soldiers were killed under his command that day, one of several small battles he oversaw as leader of this particular task force. In early November the task force started with 750 men and 17 tanks. A month later there were fewer than 100 men and only two tanks.



He reports about his own men after the fight for Baerendorf ended: "I saw a group of B Company soldiers with their rifles pointed at Major Hughes. I asked what was going on and was told that Major Hughes had pulled a wounded B Company man on top of himself to protect himself from German artillery fire. The men were about to execute him. I should have let them! I took Hughes, put him in my quarter-ton, put my 45 in his ear and told him if he blinked I'd blow his bloody head off." When the major was subsequently told he would face a court martial "Hughes collapsed on the floor and became hysterical, drooling and frothing at the mouth."



4. So Deeply Does Vision Carve on the Mind



Battle fatigue is as old as combat.



"Some people in the past, when seeing fearful sights, have lost their presence of mind at the instant," wrote Georgias of Leontini in the fifth century BC of soldiers in the Peloponnesian War. "Fear extinguishes and casts out the mind. Many have succumbed to groundless distress, great malady, and incurable insanity, so deeply does vision carve on the mind images of action seen."



Just experiencing war’s violence is often shocking enough to induce traumatic injuries with no obvious physical cause. You have not been hit by a sword, bullet or shrapnel, but you are struck blind, get terrible headaches, lose physical control of yourself, suffer cardiac problems, lose your appetite, or become depressed or anxious. The industrialization of war dramatically increased incidents of such transient madness.



In World War I "shell shock" was an epidemic problem in all armies. Some believed it was a physiological reaction to the undetectable impacts of passing artillery shells or the result of some underlying condition that combat--most specifically an artillery barrage--triggered. In France, doctors emphasized electric shock treatment. Germany built villages to send the nervously ill to perform menial work tasks as a form of therapy, along with other bizarre treatments such as barking military orders or blaring the national anthem at sleeping men to try to shock them back to normalcy. England built hospitals back home to treat the unhinged with various psychological and psychoanalytical treatments.



The English neurologist WHR Rivers emphasized the lack of control men felt in battle. He wrote "Combat induced an internal conflict between the emotion of honest fear and their sense of duty as men," adding that "three assumptions about personal invulnerability were shattered: seeing the world as meaningful, as comprehensible, and seeing oneself in a positive light."



Tending to hundreds of thousands of men for shell shock led to a scientific understanding that mental illness could be caused by circumstances and thus the popularization of psychology. But scientific recognition is not the same as military reform. The stigma of becoming unhinged remained a fixed feature of the American military, including my grandfather's memoir. At one point he recounts the fate of his fellow company commanders who landed in France with him. Four out of eight, he wrote, were "relieved for cowardice." The other four were killed. Among the staff officers, he describes Major Hughes as an "abject coward" even though he had fought for three months prior to his breakdown at Baerendorf.



In World War II the term changed from shell shock to battle fatigue, reflecting the military's reluctance to accept that trauma could permanently impact a soldier's psyche, as if a good man will come back to health after a short rest.



This was not a completely groundless conclusion as relieving men from front line duty sustained their fighting capacity. A person can only tolerate for so long combat's explosive noise, sleep deprivation, the random and violent death and injury of your friends and colleagues, as well as the moral dilemma of killing people. Experience revealed that after 60 days of constant combat, 98 percent of people go mad. With proper rest and relief from battle, you could extend a soldier's capacity to fight to between 80 and 400 days.



5. The Battle of the Bulge



On December 16, 1944, 300,000 German soldiers launched a surprise attack at the Ardennes Forest to try to break through American lines to Antwerp to split allied forces in two, cut off the supply line for the isolated northern troops and induce them to surrender. Hitler took a desperate gamble to break the American-British offensive. The Battle of the Bulge was the largest battle in U.S history involving more than 500,000 American soldiers, 67,000 of whom were killed, wounded or captured.



Located immediately to the south of the attack, the Third Army suspended its own offensive and swung 90 degrees to the north. The 4th Armored Division was assigned to fight through armored SS divisions to relieve the besieged village of Bastogne, a key crossroad defended by American soldiers. The 53rd Armored Battalion led the way.



My grandfather was recovering in a French farmhouse from illness and exhaustion after his month-long command of the temporary task force described earlier when the Battle of the Bulge started. He and his reconstituted task force were ordered north into Belgium to relieve Bastogne. Famed wartime photographer Robert Capa joined the unit for the six-week battle. I remember my grandfather telling us that Capa "was the craziest person I ever met." Life magazine published a Capa photograph of Major Crosby accepting the surrender of a German artillery observer with his hands in the air, "just to his rear and out of sight is a German major whom I'd just shot in the ass," he recalls in his memoir.

American solders at Bastogne had repulsed wave after wave of brutal armored German assaults. Both sides considered Bastogne as the linchpin of the German drive to Antwerp. By late Christmas night, my grandfather's task force had reached the outskirts of the town. Against his commanding officer's orders, he led a night attack.



"We started off, about 2:15 a.m., down a single two-lane country road leading to Bastogne.… The road ran through a patch of woods and strewn along the road for about 10 yards was a bunch of German mines. As the lead half-track reached the mines, the night erupted in tracer fire as dozens of machine guns and rifles started firing at the column. A private named Hendricks jumped out of the first half-track and started throwing the mines to the left side of the road. The fire was murderous--he cleared away all the mines, was not even scratched, and the column roared through at about 20 mph, firing wildly in all directions. We emerged from the woods, spread out in extended formation and rolled into Bastogne at top speed on 26 December, past groups of startled German artillerymen and infantry wondering what the hell was going on. By morning, the narrow road was secured and we had relieved Bastogne."



6. "Death Had Become Meaningless"



The memoir describes the air raids on Bastogne as his most terrifying experience up to that point, but the entire next five months of combat represent a descent into hell. Atrocities and death abound.



At the Battle of the Bulge, the officer who turned out to be my grandfather's god father was taken prisoner with several colleagues. German SS troops stripped and tied them to beams in a farmhouse then burned it to the ground, incinerating everyone in it. This was done in reprisal for a similar atrocity committed by American soldiers from the same division earlier in the war. He describes a Belgian village scene in which two children are screaming in terror outside their demolished house. Inside there is a Christmas tree with their parents lying dead in front of it.



On February 27, he was with his division command staff in a farmhouse when German artillery struck. An explosion threw him 20 feet from the building. "I staggered into the house and met an appalling sight," he wrote. "Captain Volz, our signals officer, was lying on the hallway floor with both his legs blown off above the knees. Next to him lay Sgt. Curtis, holding the two stumps of his legs. Sgt. Curtis said to me, "Are you all right, sir?" This was almost more than I could take. Curtis hadn't yet realized the extent of his injuries nor yet felt the pain. At the foot of where the stairs had been lay Murdock--scalped. There were three or four dead on the floor and in the adjacent room. Almost everyone left was wounded. I was furious. Our Command Post had been practically wiped out. A host of soldiers and officers who had been with me for four years were dead or badly wounded."



Enraged, he charged into the nearby town to try to find and kill the German who had signaled to artillery to bomb the headquarters. He went into a church where 200 women, children and old men were shrieking from the German bombardment. "I came to my senses and walked out of the church before I started shooting them," he wrote.



In another instance, Americans entered a German town called Koblenz where civilians hid in their cellars. American tank fire hit the town church, which erupted into flames, prompting the civilians to emerge from hiding. "Water bucket gangs of old men, children, and women formed to try to quench the flames, assisted by a hand-pulled and hand-worked pump. Then some sadist called in artillery-time fire. Time fire explodes the projectile about 20 feet above the target and rains down a deadly dispersion of jagged pieces of steel, ripping and shredding everything in its path. The village burned to the ground as we watched, with a good one half of the villagers dead or mutilated--and we cheered."



In another German village he witnessed a friend and fellow officer get killed right in front of him by a sniper. "We'd been in constant combat at this time for nine months and death had become meaningless. [John] Finnegan had been my roommate, a good close friend for four years yet when someone asked me the name of the Captain of A Company who'd been killed earlier in the day, I couldn't remember his name."



7. The past is never dead. It is not even past. 



The International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma has this to say about the legacy of combat trauma.



"Posttrauma symptoms can have a profound effect on the manner in which a trauma survivor relates to others, including, perhaps most significantly, family members. Survivors are markedly changed by their experiences. The psychological impact of trauma is well established in a variety of survivor populations. These posttrauma symptoms include (1) experiencing the trauma through flashbacks, nightmares, and persistent thoughts; (2) cognitive and phobic avoidance of trauma-related stimuli; (3) hyperarousal symptoms of irritability, startle response, and sleep disturbance. It is easy to understand how survivors’ numbing of responsiveness, social withdrawal, and irritability, with episodic outbursts of rage, can make it difficult for them to maintain interpersonal relationships. In turn, children of traumatized patients may be affected directly or indirectly by their parents’ posttrauma symptoms."



My grandfather may not have suffered shell shock or battle fatigue, but he suffered post traumatic stress disorder symptoms. I mean, how could he not? When the war ended, he remarried a Red Cross nurse who he had met while fighting in Europe--Letitia Jones ("Aunt Letty" to me). The two of them had four children together.



"People have no idea how much he suffered," she said shortly after he died, talking about his nightmares in which he woke up screaming in a cold sweat.



Letty shared the memoirs with all six of Tersh's children, including Player, who gave me his copy almost immediately upon receiving it twenty years ago. I read it, was deeply impressed and then asked Player if he had read it. I was shocked by his response.



"No. I will never read it!" he said in a fury that I had never seen in him before. It was stunning. "My father failed at everything he did other than that. He was a failure as a man and as a father."



According to researchers of intergenerational trauma, the emotional numbing, detachment and avoidance that many combat veterans experience may directly impact on the veteran’s parenting ability by diminishing the capability to interact with the child and develop a meaningful relationship.



I will quote from a paper by two Israeli psychologists Rachel Deckel and Hadass Goldblatt entitled "Is there Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma? The Case of Combat Veterans' Children."



"The main mechanisms of direct transmission that is described by psychodynamic approaches are projection and identification. Fathers with PTSD have difficulty containing their emotions, and their attempts to mitigate their pain lead to passive use of projection mechanisms, where severe emotions such as persecution, aggression, shame and guilt are split and projected onto their children. As result, the children may identify with the projected parts of their fathers' emotions, and perceive his experiences and feelings as their own. These unconscious processes can make it difficult for the child to form a separate self and may result in the development of symptoms that replicate the disturbances of the father such as social isolation, guilt and detachment."



The authors write about a veteran's function and engagement in the family unit.



"The main symptoms of PTSD reflect difficulties in regulating proximity and distance from the event and therefore may contribute to problems in attachment and intimacy, thus reducing the father's involvement in family activities. Normal development in childhood and adolescence requires regulating distance/closeness from the parents to enable formation of a separate identity. Fathers who have difficulty regulating distance/closeness from their traumatic memories might also find it hard to properly regulate distance/closeness from their children. The father's physical presence and psychological absence or ambiguous loss, as well as the difficulty involved in understanding and explaining his behavior, might cause lack of appreciation and disappointment among the children. In these cases, the father is part of the family but only fulfills partial functions. The persistence of such ambiguity over a prolonged period can lead to emotional distress. Consequently, family members experience a confusion of boundaries, which is manifested by transferring the father's roles to the mother and/or the children."



I believe that this description of intergenerational trauma is true and goes well beyond a single generation. As William Faulkner put it more succinctly "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

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Across the bridge: A personal reflection

Presented to the Club on Monday, February 10, 2020 by Richard L. Floyd



We will come to the bridge in my title in due time, but it is a later piece of the story I want to tell tonight, so I will begin with an important book I read last summer while I was filling in as a guest preacher for my daughter during her maternity leave.



The book was Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. My pastor had given it to me the year before, but I hadn’t got around to reading it. It was written in 1949, which happens to be the year I was born, and it came out right before the civil rights movement really got moving in the 1950’s.



Howard Thurman, a black minister and scholar, was the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. He had traveled to India and had met Mahatma Gandhi. When Thurman asked Gandhi what message he should take back to the United States, Gandhi said he regretted not having made nonviolence more visible as a practice worldwide and he famously remarked “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”



Thurman did come back with that message about non-violent resistance, and became one of the influences on one of his students, Martin Luther King, who did his doctorate at Boston University. And the Civil Rights movement did in fact employ a variety of the tactics of nonviolent resistance, such as sit-ins, bus boycotts, Freedom Rides, marches, and mass demonstrations.



In his book, Howard Thurman draws comparisons between the socio-political world that Jesus grew up in under Roman Occupation, and the American South during the Jim Crow era. In both cases powerful majorities disinherited powerless minorities through fear and the threat of violence. The regular lynching in Howard Thurman’s day and the regular crucifixions of Jesus’s day were both designed to instill terror in the disinherited minority and keep them in their place.



Howard Thurmond had learned the Bible by reading it out loud to his grandmother, who was born a slave and was never taught to read. One day he asked her why she never read from the letters of Paul. She said the slaveowners wouldn’t let black preachers preach to them, but would bring in white preachers, and it was always Paul telling them, “Slaves, obey your masters.” “That is why I don’t want to hear from Paul!” she told him.



But she also told him that the slaves would have secret church meetings in the middle of the night, and the black preachers would tell them, “You are not a slave. You are not that bad word they call you. You are a child of God. God loves you.”



In the night they heard a different story than the official day-time story of their oppressors. The stories we tell ourselves help shape our self-understanding. Our country is in an ongoing national conversation about race, and the meaning and impact of hundreds of years of enslavement and oppression.



That conversation is not an easy one, but it is a necessary one if we are going to get our national story straight. For many people that truth is so threatening and painful that they deny it. I want to share with you an experience I had recently that has influenced how I understand America’s story in regard to race. My understanding is not complete, but it has been deepened.



Early in September of last year, Martha and I went to a United Church of Christ Pension Board meeting in Montgomery, AL. I have to confess that Montgomery. AL had never been on my bucket list of places to visit. But I was pleasantly surprised. Montgomery is a bustling modern city with lots of nice restaurants and places to visit.



But what was really special about our Montgomery trip was visiting the many Civil Rights Movement sites. We spent an afternoon at the Rosa Parks museum, which tells the inspiring story of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. For thirteen months the black citizens refused to take city buses, and traveled by a fleet of taxis, hearses, and church buses to get to work.



I learned some things I didn’t know about Rosa Parks. I knew she was an elderly seamstress who refused to go to the back of the bus because she was tired. The seamstress part is true, but Rosa Parks was only 42 at the time of the incident. On December 1, 1955 she refused to relinquish her seat to a white passenger and the bus driver called the police, who escorted her off the bus and arrested her.



I also learned that the police couldn’t sustain the charge against her, because she hadn’t broken any law, rather she had violated a norm. There was a white section, but Parks was sitting in the row after the white section. By custom she would have given up her seat to any white person who came in after the white section was filled up, but she refused.



She was also not just some random person, but the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, and she had recently attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, for a workshop training in non-violent resistance. There were “repercussions” for her act. Repercussions were the cost of courage during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. Rosa Parks was fired by the department store where she worked, and she received death threats for many years. Today in Montgomery there is a marker on the site where she refused to go to the back of the bus.



We also went to the “Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration,” built near the site of the market where tens of thousands of Black enslaved people were sold. The museum opened in April, 2018 and is a project of the Equal Justice Initiative. The EJI

believes that the history of racial inequality and economic injustice in the United States has created continuing challenges for all Americans, and more must be done to advance our collective goal of equal justice for all. The United States has done very little to acknowledge the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation.

Through the use of multi-media and storytelling the museum presents parts of the national story that have often been left untold.



We also visited another EJI project which opened the same day as the museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally called the National Lynching Memorial. It is hard for me to talk about this, but it is part of our national story.



Let me describe the Memorial for you. “Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror.” The memorial square has 805 hanging steel rectangles, roughly the size and shape of coffins. Each of them has the names of the counties where a documented lynching took place in the United States. Each of the steel plates also has the names and dates of the documented lynching victims (or “unknown” if the name is not known).

More than 4075 documented lynching of African Americans took place between 1877 and 1950, concentrated in 12 Southern states, but also lynching took place in several states outside the South. I saw counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, among others. The monument is the first major work in the nation to name and honor these victims. As you walk under these coffin-shaped rectangles the floor gradually slopes lower and lower, so the coffins seem to be rising above your head. It is absolutely chilling.



Why the date of 1877 as the start of the lynching? That was the year that Reconstruction ended and the last Union troops, who had been stationed throughout the South since the end of the Civil War in 1865, were removed from the former Confederacy.



Without these troops to protect the rights of the freed slaves, a new period began in the former Confederacy, which they ironically called “Redemption.” New measures, called Jim Crow laws, were enacted to enforce segregation and deny blacks civil rights and voting rights. Violence and the threat of violence upheld this system. Lynching was an important piece of the system. These thousands of extra-judicial murders took place without trials or due process. They were often community events that looked like a Fourth of July celebration or a Sunday School picnic. No one would ever be arrested, or if so, no white jury would ever convict.



This de facto state-sponsored violence kept free African Americans in a state of bondage for the better part of a century, and mass incarceration of young black men and voter suppression continue to this day. The ideology of white supremacy is alive and well in America. The story it tells is that blacks are inferior to whites, and so can be treated unfairly and unjustly and deprived of their rights, especially their right to vote.



And now I have to tell you about Jake Williams. Jake is the owner/operator of Montgomery Tours. Martha and I stayed an extra day to go on a bus tour with Jake of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March. Jake was on that march with two of his older sisters when he was 12 years old.



Jake is an Africa-American man who owns his own company. He’s owned two restaurants, was a truck driver and teaches truck-driving at the local community college.



Jake grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama where his father was a sharecropper and his mother was a domestic servant who worked for a white family. Jake pointed out a cotton field where he had picked cotton as a boy. He said if he didn’t pick his quota his mother would strike him in the head. His mother got up at 4 in the morning to walk out to the highway to hitch a ride to her white family’s house, where she cleaned the kitchen and made them breakfast. She was paid $4 a day.



Jake said that the sharecropper system was better for the plantation owner than slavery. The owner provided housing and the sharecroppers bought all their food and goods from the owner’s store on credit, and they were always behind. Jake told the story about how his father got behind in his credit and the plantation owner offered to erase his debt if he would let him “have his way” with his teenage daughter. His father took a night-time job to see that didn’t happen.



Jake drove us along the March Route to Selma and we had lunch there. Selma today is a run-down town that fell on hard times when their local Air Force base was closed. We went to the church where the marchers gathered on March 7, 1965. The impetus for the march was that on February 26, an activist and deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, died after being mortally shot several days earlier by a state trooper, during a peaceful march in nearby Marion, Alabama.



The marchers were committed to and trained in non-violent resistance. They carried no weapons. On March 7, the marchers left Selma and headed across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The bridge is only 250 long, and it is arched so you can’t see to the other side of the Alabama River until you get to the top of the span. This became significant to the marchers since the other side of the bridge is no longer Selma, but county territory. On my trip with Jake I walked across it. I felt like I was on holy ground. That is the bridge of my title.



Selma Police Chief Wilson Baker and his officers controlled the city, but County Sheriff Jim Clark had jurisdiction outside the city. He was a hardline segregationist, who used violence to enforce the Jim Crow laws. He gathered Alabama State troopers wielding nightsticks and tear gas. He also called for every white male 22 years or older to appear to be sworn in as a posse, under an old law. These civilians showed up, many of them on horseback, with long whips and cattle prods used to herd cattle. There were about 200 of these deputies, some of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan.



When the marchers, led by now Congressman John Lewis, among others, got to the top of the bridge, they were savagely set upon by the state troopers and posse men and were driven back to the church. Jake told us that men on horseback followed the protesters right into the church.



Amelia Boynton, one of the organizers of the March, was beaten unconscious by police, and a photo of her lying bleeding on the bridge was shown nationally in the media. This day’s march is referred to as “Bloody Sunday.”



“Bloody Sunday” was the first of three marches. The second march was called “Turnaround Tuesday” on March 9, 1965. The organizers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a call for clergy and citizens from across the country to join them. Awakened to issues of civil and voting rights by years of Civil Rights Movement activities, and shocked by the television images of “Bloody Sunday,” hundreds of people responded to the call and came to Selma to march.



To prevent another outbreak of violence, SCLC asked for a court order that would prohibit the police from interfering. But instead of issuing the court order, U.S. District Court Judge Frank Minis Johnson issued a restraining order, prohibiting the march from taking place until he could hold additional hearings later in the week.



On March 9, Dr. Martin Luther King led about 2,500 in a brief prayer meeting on the bridge before turning them around, thereby obeying the court order preventing them from making the full march. He was much criticized for this at the time.



Many marchers felt let down, including those who had traveled long distances to participate in the march. King asked them to remain in Selma for another march to take place after the injunction was lifted.



That same evening, three white Unitarian Universalist ministers in Selma for the march were attacked on the street and beaten with clubs by four Ku Klux Klan members. The most severely injured was the Reverend James Reeb from Boston. Fearing that Selma’s public hospital would refuse to treat him, he was taken to Birmingham’s University Hospital, which was two hours away. He died two days later at University Hospital, with his wife by his side.



On March 15, President Lyndon Johnson convened a joint session of Congress, where he outlined his proposed new voting rights bill, and demanded that Congress pass it. In a presentation carried nationally on live television Johnson praised the courage of the African-American activists. He called Selma “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” I was a sophomore in High School and watched his speech with my family.



A week after Reverend Reeb’s death, on March 17, Judge Johnson finally ruled with the protesters, saying their First Amendment right to march in protest could not be abridged by the state of Alabama. He wrote:

The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . … These rights may … be exercised by marching, even along public highways.

Judge Johnson had got the go-ahead from President Johnson after the President, knowing that Governor George Wallace had no intention of protecting the marchers, would use Federal powers to do so. President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard, and that set the stage for the Third and Final March on March 21, the one that made it all the way from Selma to Montgomery.



This is the march Jake Williams was on with his sisters. The marchers set out protected by 1,900 National Guardsmen, and US Marshalls and members of the FBI. They walked through chilling rain and camped in muddy fields. The route of the march was on US Highway 80, known in Alabama as the “Jefferson Davis Highway.” The marchers averaged about 10 miles a day. On the second day and third day the march went through Jake’s home county, Lowndes County.



Let me tell you about Lowndes County, Alabama, a majority black county, in 1965. In the early Twentieth Century Alabama had passed some of the most restrictive voting laws in the land, with a poll tax and a literacy test. At the time of the march, the population of Lowndes County was 81% black and 19% white, but not a single black person was registered to vote. Not one. There were 2,240 whites registered to vote, a figure that represented 118% of the adult white population (in many Southern counties of that era they left white voters on the rolls after they died or had moved away).



If Jake had any anger or bitterness it never showed. He told us the story of the march in a matter of fact way. But he did tell us about what he called “repercussions” to the march.



Repercussion 1: Jake told us that few sharecroppers participated out of fear of the plantation owners, but the ones that did were kicked out of their homes, and a tent city had to be erected for temporary housing.



Repercussion 2: A black woman who ran a convenience store let the marchers camp in a field she owned. Her suppliers retaliated by denying her supplies, and her business closed.



Repercussion 3: In Montgomery on the last night of the march, the Roman Catholic bishop let the marchers camp at St Jude Catholic School field on a campus that housed the St. Jude Catholic hospital. All the white doctors quit and the hospital closed.



Repercussion 4: Viola Liuzzo, a housewife and mother of 5, traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma for the march. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, members of the Ku Klux Klan saw her with a black man in her car and chased her for miles along the highway before shooting her in the head and killing her. She was 39 years old. Jake showed us the spot along the Jefferson Davis Highway where she was murdered.



On March 25 the marchers left St. Jude and marched to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery. Dr. King had asked Governor Wallace for permission to address the crowd there, about 25,000 people, but he was refused. So, the organizers rented a flatbed truck and put a podium on it on the street at the foot of the State House. Jake drove us to the spot. It was a few blocks from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King was pastor.



King delivered a speech known as “How Long? Not Long?” Perhaps, you know it. Let me share with you the closing paragraph (if I can get through it):

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” Somebody’s asking, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?” Somebody’s asking, “When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?” Somebody’s asking, “When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?” I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” How long? Not long, because “no lie can live forever.” How long? Not long, because “you shall reap what you sow.”  “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

On August 6, 1965 President Johnson signed the voting Rights Act that ended Jim Crow, at least in law.



What is the lasting legacy of the Selma to Montgomery March? For one thing it caught the attention of a large segment of the American public and they could no longer turn away from the reality of segregation and injustice. In the decade between the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and the Selma march of 1965, the Civil Rights movement had been active in numerous acts of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience throughout the South. These acts had gained more and more attention from the media and the public about inequality and segregation.



Two years before Selma, in 1963, Dr. King had led an economic boycott in Birmingham, and in May a large number of children and students walked out of school and attempted to address the mayor. 959 of them, ages 6-18, were arrested. The next day more students joined the march and Bull Connor famously ordered his Birmingham police to use fire hoses and attack dogs on the children. The pictures on TV from Birmingham shocked many in the nation, and a changing public opinion allowed for the passage the next year of The Civil Rights Act of 1964.



This was a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, and racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.



This law and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became the landmark legislation that dismantled segregation and the Jim Crow Laws. Many felt the battle for civil rights had been won, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008 led many to speak of “a post racial America” in which the United States would be free from racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice.



Sadly, this optimism has been shown to be premature. In 1913 the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that addressed voting discrimination in a 5-4 decision. States wasted little time in putting practices into play to suppress voting along racial lines.



And then there is the issue of mass incarceration. The American Civil Liberties Union says that:

Since 1970, the number of incarcerated people has increased sevenfold to 2.3 million in jail and prison today, far outpacing population growth and crime. Not everyone is treated equally in the criminal justice system. Racial bias keeps more people of color in prisons and on probation than ever before. One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino boys — compared with one of every 17 white boys. Black people are also subject to pretrial detention at a higher rate than white arrestees with similar charges and history.

In 2010 Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar, wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” in which she argues that the jailing of young black and brown men is like the Jim Crow laws, using the justice system to enforce racism.



The rise of white supremacist groups out of the shadows and into the public square in the era of Donald Trump reminds us that we haven’t arrived at a post-racial America. The killing of unarmed black people by law enforcement, and the resulting “Black Lives Matter movement are another facet of the conversation. Our United Church of Christ headquarters in Framingham had a “Black Lives Matter” banner removed and vandalized several times.



The debate about the Confederate flag and Confederate war memorials shows how much passion and consternation still exists over who gets to choose which story to tell about our national story around race.



I’d like to end with a couple of personal postscripts. The first is that Martin Luther King and other people of faith in the Civil Rights movement were big influences on me, and are part of what shaped and formed me in ways that led to my going into the ministry.



The second postscript is how my trip to Montgomery alerted me to some of my own blind spots and ways I have got the story wrong or at least incomplete. I once preached a sermon on Martin Luther King Day and afterwards one of my congregants came up to me mad as a wet cat and gave me a tongue lashing. She was from Alabama, a niece of George Wallace, and the gist of her complaint was that “you Yankees always blame the South, as if there is no racial bigotry in the North.”



She had a point. The systematic oppression of the Post-Reconstruction South under Jim Crow is not the only kind of racism there is, although it is a particularly toxic and evil form of it. But here is where I need to make a confession. I was born in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and when I was three, my parents moved us across the Hudson to suburban Bergen County, New Jersey. There I received my education from kindergarten through 12thgrade. During those years I never had a black classmate at my schools. Not one. This came home to me several years ago when I learned that Senator Corey Booker graduated from my high school. When I was there, there were no black students.



My parents were liberal Democrats, and in the Sixties, while we watched Jim Clarke and Bull Connor use violence to put down protestors of racial segregation, we ourselves were living in a segregated community. The segregation in our community was not laid down by law, as In Alabama, but by redlining, the practice of discriminatory lending practices by banks to deny mortgages to minorities based on maps of neighborhoods.



In 2017, I returned to my high school for my fiftieth reunion. One of the little towns I grew up in is largely Korean, and the marching band at the football came was majority Asian. The Congregational Church in that town is now a Korean church.



This is the multi-racial America that so many decry and find threatening. The current anti-immigrant political movement is part of this same backlash. It is estimated that our country will be majority minority by 2045 or 2050. Fewer than half of American children under the age of fifteen are white.



What will the story be that we tell ourselves about who we are as Americans? Will we remember the brave men, women, and children that risked life and limb to non-violently protest and resist their oppression at the hands of the majority? Will we come to terms with our complicated history that includes the story of enslaved people and centuries of racial injustice and bigotry? That is a conversation we need to be having. When I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge last September in Selma, I realized how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go.

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