Two Nights & a Lifetime with Dr. King

Next Monday will be devoted to the work and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

It was my good fortune to work under Dr. King in the great voting rights campaign he led with others in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Besides being historic for America, that experience was formative for me. It led me to jail, to a repudiation of war, and even to Quakers.

Monday evening at Pendle Hill, starting at 7:30 PM, as part of this remembrance, I’ll be talking about that experience, and you’re invited. Details are here, and it’s free.

In December 1964, I joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta. Shortly thereafter I was sent by SCLC to Selma, Alabama, where I worked in the Voting Rights Movement organized by Dr. King and SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

During that time I was arrested three times and spent one night in a jail cell with Dr. King, as told in my book, Eating Dr. King’s Dinner.

The Selma campaign resulted in passage of the Voting Rights Act, which changed politics in the South and across America for fifty years. That legacy has been under severe attack in recent years, and the struggle is continuing.

Remembering this history is part of renewing and extending it. In the photo above, that’s me at the far right (beardless!), behind Andrew Young, John Lewis and Hosea Williams. They were sharing details of the first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery (led by Williams and Lewis) on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965.  

On this Monday I’ll describe two nights in Selma that were important for the movement and me personally. And we’ll talk about
how far we’ve come, and where we need to go.

I hope you can join in the evening.

The post For MLK Day: Stories from Selma, January 16 appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

NOTE: This report has been updated as of late Feb. 14. The update is here.

News background:

Wynnewood (Philadelphia) PA, February 13, 2017: “Two Friends’ Central School teachers who supervised a club that invited a Palestinian speaker to the Wynnewood campus — an appearance the school canceled after some parents and students complained — were placed on administrative leave Monday morning.

 

English teacher Ariel Eure, 25, and history teacher Layla Helwa, 26, were called to an off-campus meeting with Craig Sellers, the head of school, and a human resources manager, and informed they were suspended indefinitely, said Mark D. Schwartz, a lawyer and former parent at the school who is representing the women.

Schwartz said that he tried to attend the 7:30 a.m. meeting at the Llanerch Diner in Upper Darby, but that school officials turned him away. The teachers were told they were being suspended for disobeying a supervisor and for having a “single-minded approach to a complicated issue for the community,” he said.

“This was done in a non-Quaker fashion,” Schwartz said. “It was more like storm trooper fashion.”

Late Monday afternoon, the administration released a statement: “As a Quaker school, we have long-standing expectations for all members of our community – especially for our teachers, who have the responsibility of guiding young minds. There are very real concerns about the conduct of Ariel Eure and Layla Helwa for their disregard of our guiding testimonies, which include community, peace, and integrity. As of today, Ariel Eure and Layla Helwa are on indefinite paid administrative leave while a more extensive review is conducted.”

The controversy has stirred passions at the school and shone a light on a thorny issue for many Quaker schools: While the American Friends Service Committee supports putting economic pressure on Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian territories, many students at Quaker schools are Jewish.

Sa’ed Atshan, a Swarthmore College professor and a Quaker, had been invited to speak Friday by the school’s Peace and Equality in Palestine Club, which formed last April. After parents complained about Atshan’s ties to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates punitive measures against Israel, the school rescinded the invitation.

About 65 students walked out of a weekly Meeting for Sharing on Wednesday to protest the cancellation, while others stood and read a statement. Eure and Helwa walked out with the students. . . .”

— Cathy Bocella, Staff Reporter, phillynews.com

A Message to students at Friends Central School:

From Chuck Fager

A few weeks ago I visited Friends Central School (FCS) and shared a story with you, about getting arrested in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and spending the night in jail with Dr. King.

I told you that for almost 50 years, that true story had a happy ending: from the black struggle in Selma came the Voting Rights Act, which had advanced freedom, elected presidents, and made America better.

But then starting a few years back, that happy ending was snatched away. In its place came massive vote suppression, and following that,  continuing attacks on the other freedoms that democracy protects. So my story about a fight for freedom was not over after all.

At my age, I said, passing on these stories is my main contribution. It’s a passing of the torch. As for the real activism, as for the new leadership demanded by our times, — and these were my final words:
“It’s your turn.”

Now it looks as if your turn has come already.

I don’t know Sa’ed Atshan; but people I respect (like former FCS teacher Max Carter) say he’s well-informed & reasonable. Yet I gather some of his views are controversial.

I’m no expert on those issues. So maybe Atshad’s views are right, or maybe they’re mistaken; that’s not for me to say.

Instead, that’s for you to say, by hearing his views, and those of others, studying & debating them & making up your own minds.

That’s what we call education. In FCS fundraising materials, like for the “Vision2020,” it’s called “Educating for Excellence.”
We also call it freedom.

But somebody doesn’t seem to want you to exercise that freedom, or get that education.

So now the line is drawn: not only in Alabama, but right there in Wynnewood, on your campus. Not just for students, but for staff, whose jobs are on the line.

So the question now becomes: are you ready to claim and defend your freedom, as part of your education?

Or will you let an unnamed few chop off this piece of it– this important piece?

The message being sent is clear:  you may not hear these views here. That topic is verboten on this campus. Teachers who stood up for that are paying the price. 

Just so you know, all this makes a mockery of the claims about “excellence.” And if you accept this, there are more pieces of freedom waiting to be chopped off, like limbs from a tree, and others ready to give similar orders. 

But here’s something I learned in Selma, and not only from Dr. King:
You don’t have to comply.

An order not to hear, not to consider, not to think and debate about matters of this importance –such an order may be technically legal, but it defies the higher law that we were all given minds to be used, freely and fully, for knowledge, and for seeking justice.

 One of my Quaker heroes, Philadelphia’s own Lucretia Mott, put it as well as anyone: “Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth.” For her this was a Quaker Testimony, a central one.

Dr. King put it another way:

But you don’t have to be silenced.

In 2017, it’s easy to imagine alternatives: check your social media, you’ll see that resistance to similar attacks is rising all around you.

Spring will be here soon, and then you, students, could invite Atshan to speak on the edge of campus, to a flash mob (but since this is school, let’s call it a flash assembly). Same for his critics. Or you can think of another way to listen, study & debate: to take charge of this piece of your education.

But, some may say, what if we get in trouble? Will it cut our chances of getting into an elite college?

Who knows? Freedom, as they say in the army, isn’t free. It takes organization, and it takes courage. In Selma it led Dr. King and me to jail; a few years later it led him to a bullet in Memphis.

But chill: chances are no one will be in mortal danger insisting on real educational excellence and freedom at FCS. If you haven’t noticed, it’s a pretty cushioned, advantaged place.

So put these advantages to work, for your benefit now, and as training in “education for excellence” in the not-so advantaged world that awaits beyond the campus.

That’s a world in which the struggles for freedom are heating up on every side. Looks like they won’t leave you alone even now.

Which means, my parting words to you last month weren’t a prophecy, and not even a prediction, but simply an announcement. Brothers & sisters:
“It’s your turn.”

Please share this post.

The post A Letter to Students at Friends Central School: Resist! appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

When I wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King’s office in the late fall of 1964, seeking a job in the civil rights movement, I claimed to be a writer, and that’s what they hired me to do.

It turned out my claim was mostly about the future: I was working toward becoming a writer.  But once on the staff, when confronted by my green rookie whiteness (yes: green whiteness was a thing; maybe still is), I was essentially struck dumb as a writer. I was overwhelmed by the weight of my utter ignorance about the South, the movement, about black and white — about myself.

(I am everlastingly grateful to Dr. King’s office manager, the late Randolph Blackwell, for indulging my failure, and not firing me; I think he could see I needed what Quakers call “seasoning” — a lot of it. And besides, I was only drawing $25 per week from the payroll, which was not much even then.)
For nearly a year, I was able to write only a few poems. (This period of internally-enforced silence is detailed in my memoir of that time –written 30-plus years later– Eating Dr. King’s Dinner.)

But then, late in 1965, after being part of the Selma voting rights campaign and its aftermath — after, as my veteran mentors in the movement explained, “paying my dues,” I finally began to recover a prose voice.

And by then, the seemingly sunny prospects for major progress toward racial justice were being increasingly clouded over by an external threat: the rapidly-escalating U. S. war in Vietnam.

And that’s what I was moved to write the first post-silence piece about: the problems posed by the war, not only to the country or the movement, but in particular to its putative leader, Dr. King. I finished the piece pretty quickly, then feeling bold, sent it off to a magazine — a real magazine, one I had reason to believe Dr. King read.

And they accepted it! The piece was published fifty-one years ago today: March 16, 1966. 

It was a first for me in two important respects: my first article published in a “real” national magazine. And it was the first article I was ever paid for: the grand sum of $35. (In a box somewhere in the house, or the storage shed out back, I still have the stub of that check, in a frame; at least I hope I still have it.)

Because it was the first, I have often thought of that piece in March, as this date rolls past. And from time to time, I have searched it out and looked it over. 

And it’s not so bad, for a debut article. Sure I was young and callow, and it shows. But maybe the piece was useful then. And maybe it’s worth looking at here. Much has changed since 1966. But much also seems to still be stuck, or even worse. Issues of progress toward racial justice are certainly still salient, and the draining of resources away from closing these gaps on behalf of an ever-greedy war machine are as timely as this morning’s headlines.

So as both a personal exercise, and a public offering, I have copied the full text here, interleaved with some current reflections.

The Christian Century – MARCH 16, 1966, pp 331-332

Dilemma for Dr. King

The Vietnam war is perhaps the greatest challenge of this Negro leader’s career and conceivably its culmination.

Charles E. Fager

(Mr. Fager, formerly on the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is now on the faculty of Friends World Institute in East Norwich, New York.)

AS THE LEADER of the Negro struggle for equality, Martin Luther King is faced with the perils of success. His movement, it is now clear, is going to bring America’s Negroes into the mainstream of national life. The job will not be done “NOW!” or even within a generation, but the forces set in motion by five years of mass nonviolent effort are too far-reaching to be reversed. The nation’s “white power structure” has come to realize not only that integration can be accomplished without major upheavals in the present American socioeconomic system but also that it will in the long run serve to enrich that system.

Reflections: How language has changed! The universal “he” leaps accusingly out at me; that was still standard discourse then. 
Also “Negro”: yet it was a respectful term at the time. Dr. King used it all his life.
But what is almost embarrassing is the presumptive tone of optimism: “we” (the movement) had won; all over but the shouting.

I wish.  But this was not merely my personal conceit. The 1960s civil rights movement had just reached its high-water mark in Selma: the new Voting Rights Act was registering black voters by the tens of thousands across the South; both President Lyndon Johnson and a progressive Congress seemed on board.

Sure it would take time to mop up the remaining pockets of resistance. But that year the movement had hit what looked like a home run, rounded third, and was striding confidently toward home plate. And Dr. King, who came to Selma with a Nobel Peace Prize fresh in his pocket, appeared to be at the apex of his prestige and influence.
Those were the days! And how soon they passed . . . . 

With victory on the horizon, the Negro leadership with Dr. King as its symbol seems uncertain about what to do next. There is a strong temptation to dig in, to consolidate and expand the gains already made; in short, to begin playing the political game for an ever larger piece of the nation- al pie, as did the labor movement at the end of its rise.
Such a feeling is natural. “Freedom Now!” translated into more specific terms means for most Negroes simply: “We want in!” Into the economy, into the political circuses, into all the currents and eddies of the American mainstream. This is why the Muslims and Black Nationalists failed to catch on with the Negro masses: they preached revolution and prepared for an Armageddon which would destroy the white world. But the average Negro doesn’t want to destroy anything; he wants to spread it around. He isn’t basically opposed to “the system”; he just doesn’t like being at its bottom.

Of course, Muslims and black nationalism, beginning with the cry of “Black Power,” were hardly fading, but about to become a major fixture of the news and the black community. Ah well; more that I and other white liberals never guessed about the future, though by mid-1967 my first book , White Reflections On Black Power, undertook to grapple with its first wave.

The way is not so clear for Dr. King, primarily because during his entire career his whole stance has been not merely an economic one but more basically a moral one. He opposed segregation not simply because it was economically debilitating but because it was evil and unchristian. Perhaps such a focus on ethical matters was but part of a strategy, a necessity if the conscience of the non-southern white community was to be stirred and drawn into the struggle. If so, it now stands revealed as a two-edged sword, because many of the moral issues which Dr. King and the movement have raised in the restricted context of the segregated south have national and international contexts and implications as well. With the entry of the civil rights movement into the level of full national participation, the leaders are no longer just confronting the nation with its regional sins but are themselves confronted as full-fledged citizens and moral spokesmen with the issues of overall national policy.

I think I was right about the moral foundation for the movement here. But economics did not go away. Dr King returned to focus on it in his last year, with the plans for what became his last effort, the Poor Peoples Campaign. I wrote about that in my book Uncertain Resurrection; but it’s another story.

The most unsettling context for these issues is, of course, the war in Vietnam. Negro leaders, even up to last spring in Selma, frequently told draft-age males in their audiences that they had no business fighting for anything abroad until things were straightened out at home. Now, faced with the realities of tripled draft calls and Negro bodies being shipped home from southeast Asia, many are wishing they had kept their mouths shut. When some worker in Mississippi (who apparently hadn’t got the word) seriously suggested that Negroes refuse the draft, the resulting flap reverberated all the way to Harlem and back. The traditional Uncle Tom leadership hastily scrambled aboard the Johnson escalator; the militants, and Dr. King as the most successful and ethically articulate of them all, were thrown into a public quandary.

Dr. King is not known as a man of vacillation, yet his statements on the war seem curiously circumspect, almost tame. His staff is said to be deeply, even bitterly divided over strategy regarding a response to the war. Some have reportedly urged him to begin immediately an all-out effort to challenge the surrounding smokescreen of official doubletalk. Others are convinced that such a course is suicide; they contend that Dr. King and his organization would be Red-baited into bankruptcy and oblivion even within the Negro community. The few mild protests he has made are said already to have cut substantially into the donations coming into his Atlanta office. Given the permanently precarious finances of civil rights organizations, this makes further ventures even more risky.

Here I get to the point and the piece begins to hit its stride: In fact, Dr. King was being very circumspect in comments about the Vietnam war in those months. But I had also heard him, at a closed staff retreat in late 1965, say that eventually he would have to face up to the war, and take whatever criticism a more public stance provoked. “Eventually” still seemed to be far off when I wrote this piece — and when it was published.

At present Dr. King seems to be trying to walk a tortuous middle path: opposing the war as a matter of form but doing so as quietly as possible. Speaking to a support rally for unseated Georgia representative-elect Julian Bond, a SNCC staffer, King concentrated on the issue of free speech, not the SNCC statement opposing the war which brought on the legislative move. Perhaps Dr. King is biding his time, hoping to get his campaign against northern slums off the ground before tackling the broader issues of the war. There is something to be said for this as a matter of tactics.

Julian Bond, (1940-2015, educated in part at the Quaker George School in Pennsylvania), still young but a veteran civil rights activist, was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives soon after the Voting Rights Act was passed. But in January 1966, the Georgia House refused to seat him because he had endorsed a public anti-Vietnam War statement. Some months later the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ordered that he be seated, and he served in the Georgia legislature for twenty years.

It is also possible, however, that Dr. King simply doesn’t yet know what to do. Challenging the war would mean an open break with the administration and the loss of all the perquisites of membership in the “great consensus.” In any case it seems unlikely that he can continue to be quiet in the face of continuing escalation of the fighting without seriously compromising his acknowledged role as a man of principle.

Though going through motions of support, the nation is clearly uneasy about the war. This self-conscious, almost guilty attitude is new in the national consciousness, and Dr. King’s nonviolent campaigns can take much credit for its development. As the administration’s facade of “national honor” in Vietnam continues to be punctured by the responsible press, the underlying contradictions and moral evasions of our policy are brought home ever more forcefully to much of the informed public. Each new lapse of credibility, each new revelation of official immorality cries out the louder for rebuke and makes more critical the need for authentic moral challenge to the war.

Among all our truly national figures Dr. King is one of the few who are undeniably men of conscience.

Even now, I stand by that statement, while acknowledging that Dr. King had his flaws and sins: he  plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation; he was serially unfaithful to his wife. On the matters of racial justice and war, he was indeed moved by conscience, lived bravely, and paid for his witness with his life.

If there is to be any significant national reassessment of the Vietnam war and the policies it exemplifies, he could do more than anyone else to bring this about and his implicit acquiescence in the war would do the most to prevent any such reassessment. He cannot escape these facts. No one thrust as Dr. King has been onto the stage of world attention and conflict can ever again find a refuge in the sectional or minority cause from which he sprang. When he accepted the Nobel peace prize he baptized all races into his congregation and confirmed the world as the battleground for his gospel of nonviolence and reconciliation. He is no longer and probably never again can be a spokesman for just an American Negro minority. Simply because of his position in the world limelight, he cannot avoid confrontation with the ethical implications of national and international events.

Other voices, much more influential, were delivering similar messages to Dr. King. And he was listening. At the end of 1966, he went on a month-long private retreat. At an airport enroute, he picked up a magazine which had on its cover the unforgettable photo of a young Vietnamese girl (Kim Phuc, who survived horrible burns and scarring and now lives in Canada) running down a road, her back seared with burning napalm from U.S. bombers. The image reportedly shook him (as it shook many others, including me.) When King returned from his retreat, at the beginning of 1967, he was ready to take on the war with the full blast of his eloquence.

This is why as the Johnson administration talks of escalating the war beyond 450,000 men, of bombing Hanoi-Haiphong and even of confronting China on the Asian mainland the virtual silence of the unchallenged spokesman of American conscience becomes ever louder and more painful to those who have followed him thus far. The war in Vietnam is perhaps the gravest challenge of Dr. King’s career and conceivably its culmination. Who among us today could blame him if, faced with this dilemma, he agonizes over his course of action? No one, surely; but Martin Luther King, Jr., is not only answerable to us of today: he must walk with history as well. And if in his agony he should fail to act, it must be asked: can history forgive him?

Dr. King not only made peace with history — he made history when he took on the Vietnam War. His finest address on the war, “Beyond Vietnam,” given at the Riverside Church in New York City, was initially blasted by white Establishment voices (and some more cautious black ones). The Washington Post was typical, declaring that he had thereby “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

I was among the several thousand packed into the Riverside Church to hear this address — delivered April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, and it fulfilled every aspiration expressed in my article. And despite the initial cascade of criticism, Dr. King’s witness, reinforced by that of others, and events in the war, turned much of this Establishment in his direction within a couple of years.

Dr. King did not live to see his sacrificial witness bear fruit. I did, and its personal impact has has never diminished. All of which makes this article, and this personal anniversary #51, more important than simply marking the first toehold in public print. Despite its youthful limitations, it discerned themes and concerns that continue to this day, and seem (alas) undiminished in their urgency. 

The post “Dilemma for Dr. King” – A 51st Anniversary Review appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

The Carolina Friends Emergency Consultation – March 25, 2017
Spring Friends Meeting, Snow Camp NC
(For Directions, click here)

The Consultation Schedule:

Noon – 1230: arrivals & lunch
1230 – 1:15: Welcome & small group intro, to get acquainted & identify major interests
1:15-1:30 – Break
1:30 – 2:30: briefings by resource persons (2 each, of 25 minutes, so attenders can take in two)
2:30-2:45 – Break
2:45 – 3:45: interest groups for intensive networking & testing ideas
3:45-4:00 – Break
4:00 – 4:45: reporting, evaluation & closing.
And when we’re finished, we’re not done: Head back home, Resist & Raise Heck!

Resource Persons

— Scott Holmes: mass incarceration, police abuse
— Clare Hanrahan & Coleman Smith, Asheville: Direct Action
— Steve Woolford, Bill O’Connor, Quaker House: peace anti-war work
— Lori Khamala, AFSC: Immigration work & resistance
— Sarah Gillooly, NC ACLU staff: defending civil liberties
— Mandy Carter, the National Black Justice Coalition: lgbtq issues & racial justice
— Barrett Brown, President, Alamance chapter, NAACP
— Joan Walsh, NC StopTortureNow: Torture Accountability, 
— Karen Porter & Sion Dayson, Indivisible:  Chapel Hill

There is a Facebook Event page for the gathering, at:
Carolina Friends Emergency Consultation

(For Directions, click here)

The post The Carolina Friends Emergency Consultation – March 25, 2017 appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

No, really: Just today I found an unimpeachable source, shown below. I saw the outline of the plan sitting there, exposed & unguarded — and, once an investigative reporter, always an investigative reporter — scooped it up.

Opening it, in an out-of-the-way corner of the undisclosed location (disguised as the checkout line of a certain big-box retailer), I whipped out my hidden camera and snapped the key pages, which are about to be revealed here, regardless of the risks.  .  .  . 

[The undisclosed location]

(And sorry, but for now you’ll just have to live without knowing the details of how Kelly Busted John, who maybe was cheating with another man.  And I didn’t check to see what the “It” is that Richard Simmons just can’t take anymore.)  After all, “War is hell.” 

Perhaps you’re tempted to snicker, or even guffaw at all this, especially considering the source.

Well, laugh if you want, but be careful, because maybe the joke is on you.

After all, this blogger is rather late to the party when it comes to exploring the ties between this paper and the Oval Office guy.  Much bigger, weightier media types have been all over it for quite awhile.

Take for instance, Bloomberg, the 800-pound gorilla of business news.  This graphic is from a 2016 cover story by Felix Gillette in a pre-election issue of its Business Week :

“In 2011, shortly after Trump announced he would not run for the Republican nomination for president, the Enquirer published an article headlined, “Millions Implore Donald Trump to Reconsider New Presidential Run.” Eventually, Trump obliged. And soon after he declared his candidacy last summer, he gave Enquirer readers a world exclusive, in which he explained why he was running. “I am the only one who can make America great again!” he wrote.

More first-person essays from Trump followed. So did a flurry of articles from the Enquirer’s staff knocking his Republican primary opponents: Ben Carson was a “bungling surgeon,” Jeb Bush had “sleazy cheating scandals,” Ted Cruz’s father was linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (Each of the candidates, or their surrogates, quickly disputed the Enquirer’s reporting.) In March, the Enquirer endorsed Trump for president—its first endorsement in its 90-year history.”

[NOTE: When the Enquirer threw itself a 90th birthday party [in September of 2016, it did so at — wait for it — the Trump SoHo Hotel in Manhattan.]

And then there’s the Washington Post,  which has been singing the same song, about “The very cozy relationship between Donald Trump and the National Enquirer”, as their reporter Callum Borchers  put it:

Trump and Enquirer chief executive David Pecker are reportedly palsy — “very close,” according to the New York Daily News, and “friends for years,” according to New York magazine. Conservative radio host Michael Savage, a Trump backer, told listeners last week that “David Pecker flies to Florida from New York on Trump’s private jet.” In 2013, Trump even suggested Pecker ought to take over Time magazine. 

The apparent coziness has spawned the #TrumpLovesPecker hashtag. A representative sample from Twitter: 

[Note: this blog decided to skip the “representative sample” here; some of it may be NSFW. But determined searchers can follow the hashtag.]

So  no matter how unlikely it may seem, the Enquirer looks like about as good a showcase for this administration’s war plans as any; personally, I’d say it beats the White House press briefings all hollow. 

And you’d better read fast, because the story says that the “Go Hour” for what the paper dubs “the Mother of All Wars,” but is more formally called “Operation Clean Sweep” is expected to be given at 1500 hours (3 PM for civilians) Central Daylight Time, sometime in early May.

“History,” says their source, “will long remember this day.” (In fact, this post is being written on a day in early May, and 1500 hours has passed; so maybe today was not this extra “Mother’s Day.  Maybe.)

But enough of all that. What about “Operation Clean Sweep”?  Where will its bunched bombs & bullets take their supposedly cleansing and righteous aim?

Well, the above map makes it look like those bloody bristles will be scouring many clogged corners simultaneously. “The [South American] drug cartels,” says the Enquirer source, “Boko Haram, Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, the evil ayatollahs, Operation Clean Sweep has plans for them all.” And more . . . .

Speaking of the “evil ayatollahs,” The Broom’s bristles, says the paper, will mean “sweeping sanctions across all economic sectors to bring the regime to its knees. ‘We’re done fooling around with Iran,’ said our Pentagon source.”

Moving to Syria, the stakes are being raised several notches higher: the “source” claims, “in an extraordinary move, President Trump has  authorized the use of a nuclear weapon for only the third time  in world history — and the first since World War II — to take out Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, if needed.” And once it is dropped, major military maneuvers will then be staged with other NATO allies in the Baltics, says the source, “to discourage” an expected hostile response from Russia to a nuke exploding near its border. 

“America will drop a single B61 Model 12 nuclear weapon on [Assad’s heavily shielded underground] bunker. It’s the most advanced nuclear weapon in America’s arsenal, and is known as ‘Nuclear Tsunami.'”

[The B61 nuclear bomb]

Then in two other areas the plan involves newer high-tech warfare:  For ISIS, “the ENQUIRER can report American intelligence has located  [the] ISIS mastermind, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, [they say he’s hiding in Yemen, but don’t tell anybody] and he will soon meet his maker in a “surgical strike” drone attack directed by Special Forces.”

Several thousand miles away, North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons will all be grounded and neutralized by “cyber-warriors from U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, MD, [who will] initiate a massive assault on North Korea’s radar and surface-to-air defense systems,” followed by a missiles shot by “Stingray” drones from the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.

“The drones will act in concert with intelligence assets [i.e., spies] within Kim Jong Un’s regime, which America has long cultivated. These agents will reveal Kim’s location for targeting by the drone-launched missile assault.”

[MQ25 “Stingray” carrier-launched drone]

For Europe, plans are also being readied for simultaneous raids to “swoop down” on what a CIA source told the Enquirer are ISIS-connected safe houses in “Madrid, Nice, Hamburg and Rome.”

And in Latin America, “Amphibious units from the U.S. 4th Fleet will hit narcotics production facilities throughout Mexico and South America — dealing a devastating blow to the bloodthirsty drug cartels.”

All in all, the Enquirer insists, the White House is 

marshaling and mobilizing America’s military might around the globe in preparation for giving the ‘go order’ to launch a coordinated campaign across five continents that will wipe out America’s enemies in one fell swoop!

Is this all a fever dream? Campaign rhetoric taken flight? “Alternative facts” with no more substance than the Bowling Green Massacre?

Maybe. Military experts might question the practicality of some or most of these plans. Even so, there they are, laid out at length for an audience that’s been solidly in the president’s corner for years, in a journal he has communicated with directly and in detail many times.

And Enquirer Editor-in-Chief Dylan Howard is firm in his avowal of the paper’s “standards of truth”:
“What we do, that the mainstream media doesn’t do, is that we put people through lie-detector tests to prove the validity of their information,” said Howard.  (He didn’t say the sources for this story had been thus  subjected to this “enhanced interrogation,” but the implication is plain. . . .

But polygraphs aside, given the president’s well-established track record, announcing actual military plans for an imminent new version of “World War Three” in what has been his “newspaper of record” could make as much sense as floating them anywhere else. Or maybe more. 

And ignoring or scoffing at them because of where they surfaced could make even less.

The post Never Mind Armageddon: World War III Is Coming First — I’ve Seen the Secret Plan appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

To respond to the State of the Union address, we’ve invited two special Friendly commentators, who are joining us via our new astral projection uplink. 

First up is our old buddy, Walter Whitman, late of Camden, New Jersey, where he settled once they named a big bridge there after him. Whitman is known as the author of the best-selling pro-marijuana polemic of all time, Leaves of Grass.

Walt — if you don’t mind me calling you that — you’ve hovered over a lot of these talkfests. So tell us: what was your reaction to what you heard tonight?

Whitman: Why sure, Chuck. I even scribbled a few notes; let me check my pockets. Yeah, here they are:

Walt Whitman’s Caution.

TO The States, or any one of them, or any city of
The States,
Resist much, obey little;
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth,
ever afterward resumes its liberty. . . .

To a Certain Cantatrice, a female opera singer

HERE, take this gift!
I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or General,

One who should serve the good old cause, the great
Idea, the progress and freedom of the race;
Some brave confronter of despots—some daring rebel;
—But I see that what I was reserving, belongs to you
just as much as to any.

Oh, and one more thing:

When liberty goes out of a place, it is not the first to
go, nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go—it is the last.

When there are no more memories of heroes and
martyrs,
And when all life, and all the souls of men and women
are discharged from any part of the earth,
Then only shall liberty, or the idea of liberty, be dis-
charged from that part of the earth,
And the infidel come into full possession.

So that’s about it, Chuck: Meet the New Boss; Worse than the Old Boss. (But maybe I borrowed that from somebody; can’t remember Who.)

Chuck: Well thank you, Walt, always good to have you on the show.

Our next analyst is James Richardson, Jr., a Unitarian minister from Brooklyn, New York. Jim, and a fast friend of Progressive Friends. I understand you also wrote something about the SOTU — you guys sure work fast. 

Richardson: Why yes, Chuck, I admit I started on it a few days ago, because there was so much material. And that was a good thing, because it came thick and fast tonight. But there was really nothing new in it.  I even put a retro sort-of title to it, tried to sum it up:

The Tyrant’s Ancient Argument: Or, The Dangers of Thought

Cease your thinking, O ye people! shouts the Tyrant, fierce and loud. 
As, with scornful eye, he glances o’er the slowly moving crowd;

Ye were made for toil and labor — mark your hard and brawny hand!
We are God’s appointed Rulers, to obey is his command!

Cease your thinking, lest ye fancy ye can rule yourselves by thought,

And the world’s fair peace and order be to swift destruction brought;
Lest, seduced by idle dreams, ye may fondly think there be
Minds and souls in those rough bodies, and we’re men as well as he.

Cease your thinking, chimes the Rich man, else you’ll soon uneasy grow,
Feeling you must have whatever we your lords and betters do;
I am rich and sleek and happy, my condition’s well enough;
every change my peace endangers, and your grievance is but stuff:

For it makes you fierce and restless, fills your lives with discontent,
Loses present joys in grasping what for you was never meant. . . .
Claiming that mankind are equal, that the bondman should be free,

That the vile, degraded masses all should educated be;
Claiming that the humble labor of the low degraded thrall
Is too worthy, is too noble, to depend on capital.

Cease your thinking, shrieks the Bigot, there’s your Bible, and the creed
To interpret what it tells you, so that all may be agreed;

So that no one thro’ his thinking, daring to dissent from these,
Might blasphemously endanger his salvation and his peace.

Carnal reason’s use is sinful; ‘tis a blind deceitful guide;

I have wondered why ‘twas given us — Satan’s lure is Reason’s pride!
God ordained you Falwell-Graham, who should safely think for you;
Tell you what you must believe in, what you may and may not do.

Chuck: Well, thank you Jim. I guess you’ve shown us again that a man’s Best Friend is His Dog-gerel. (It’s a woman’s Best Friend too, I think.)
Oops — there goes our astral projection uplink, and the password is lost again somewhere in the Akashic records. So I better go look for it. And that’s all from here. Cheer up, folks, there’s no more than seven more of these SOTU’s to get through, max . . .

The post Some Quick Quaker Responses to the SOTU appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Charlottesville VA – I came here for a panel on Dr. King’s Ill-fated Poor Peoples Campaign of 1968, 50 years past and now aiming to be re-launched.

I did my part in the event (having written a book about the campaign); but I want to admit here that my mind frequently wandered, hankering to head downtown to visit some of the newly-more historic sites there.

Two in particular: the shrouded statue of Robert E. Lee, and a few blocks away  the graffiti wall on the stretch of 4th Street now rechristened “Heather Heyer Way.”

Late  that rainy afternoon, the panel finished, and the chance came. My activist photographer friend Laura from Toronto, also a panelist, felt a similar urge, and soon we were in “Emancipation (neé Lee) Park” clicking away. 

The statue’s fate is as shrouded as its image: the city says “Move it!” But the state says, “No!” Perhaps a judge will decide.
And the struggle continues more concretely: several locals told us that the shroud has repeatedly been removed under cover of darkness, leaving some unknown persons’ icon on horseback once more boldly facing the rising sun. These “strippers” remain uncaught, the shroud is quickly remounted; and the cycle goes on.

We had no time to keep vigil to see the next unveiling; daylight was fading, and we wanted to pay respects at the touching Heather Heyer memorial, which feels already timeless though it is entirely of chalk drawn on a brick wall. 

These two sites were impressive enough, but another, unknown to us then, was waiting.

Our gracious hostess Helena, an activist publisher, told us about it: a Confederate cemetery near her house, owned by the University of Virginia.

When we got there a grey morning rain was falling. Helena explained that the cemetery was originally for UVA faculty, and all around us were headstones commemorating the resting places of professors of this & scholars of that.

But during the CIvil War, a sizable chunk of the land had been requisitioned by the Confederate army, which set up a field hospital nearby. In its beds — as was true in most such facilities on both sides — disease killed as many or more as formal combat. So the ground here was essentially a mass grave; there were records of the occupants, but their actual locations were hazy.

Here was the city’s civil war statue who will likely be left alone, to mark and celebrate the Confederate Dead. (That by the way is fine by me; the bravado of its base inscription rang with an emptiness that ought to be obvious to all but the diminishing band of the hard core.)

Still, there were wrinkles even here: Helena pointed out bright, new-looking headstones, dating burials from 1862 to 1865. They not only looked new, but were in fact so, placed by order of the state government, which was funding the refurbishment of such Confederate cemeteries statewide. Further, these new markers do not stand where the soldiers they named yet lie; that is known only generally: but never mind.

Helena then beckoned us through an opening in the low wall, into what seemed an empty field.

This plot was meant to be added to the cemetery (since UVA professors keep stubbornly falling short of immortality). But when archaeologists tested the ground, they discovered that it too was full of unmarked, and previously unknown graves.

Have you guessed where we’re going with this?
This unmarked additional cemetery contains the remains of 67 persons of color, many but maybe not all enslaved, who worked for (& likely were owned by) UVA.

Once this fact was verified, the University reacted, with the markers shown here. Note that those listed on the sign Helena is leaning in to read, may include some of those resting here, but that is no more than somewhat educated guesswork, as incomplete as most of the names it records.

We took more pictures, and then went on to join meeting for worship with Charlottesville Quakers. Then I headed home, The images of funerary splendor for deceased academics, namesless unmarked grass for their onetime chattels, and continued mawkish attention by the state to those who died to keep it all that way. 

No wonder Lee’s shroud keeps coming off.  But at least, Heather’s  graffiti is still there.

The post The Deaths Of Racism, And Racism In Deaths appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

At Snow Camp we’re working at broadening the vision that created our acclaimed historical drama, Pathway to Freedom, to bring out more awareness of our practical connections to the actual Underground Railroad.

I admit, though, that sometimes I’m tempted to believe, as one prominent historian has argued, that the “Underground Railroad” (UGRR) is mainly a myth, spun into heroic proportions on legends, that serve mainly to puff up self-serving white people’s memories.

And surely there has been a lot of myth-making about it, feeding white rescue fantasies, which has deservedly been deflated by recent revisionist research.

But even after discounting the expansionist folklore, I haven’t been able to dismiss this saga — not since I visited this church, the Salem Chapel in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, only a few miles beyond the U.S. border at Niagara Falls.

The modest people of Salem Chapel are the descendants of many intrepid men and women who made this long and often terrifying  journey and succeeded. More than twenty such settlements of freed peoples’ were planted along the southern end of Ontario, stretching 250-plus miles from Buffalo to the lakeside city of Windsor, just a short ferry (or clandestine canoe) ride from Detroit. Many thousands of enslaved people showed the grit and stamina to start and finish their incredible journeys. (Many thousands more, truth be told, tried and failed, and usually paid a terrible price.)

Among the early worshipers at Salem Chapel was Harriett Tubman,. She led several parties there, and stayed on for most of the 1850s, when she was being hunted below the border. She returned south when the Civil War began, to undertake more exploits for the Union war effort.

Moreover, alternatives to the white savior UGRR plotline have been around for a long time, if too-long neglected. One of the best was also the earliest, by William Still of Philadelphia.

He had been a key figure in that city’s Vigilance Committee, which aided a great many successful slave escapes, and in 1872 he published the first detailed, documented account of his work and that of the Philadelphia underground.

Still’s  book is a landmark, and available free online, in full.) Further, Still’s view of the struggle was proudly Black-centered, as is evident right from his book’s title page:

Yet he was also forthright and even generous in acknowledging the active and sustained assistance his committee had from numerous activist whites, many of whom also took substantial risks. Among the white supporters, none outnumbered Quakers or former Quakers.

So William Still’s Underground Railroad was a Black initiative, built on and energized by the desire and action of the enslaved to break from bondage, but many were not entirely alone in the effort. And as Still’s 780 pages of dense text showed, there was plenty of joint initiative to recount.

The most complete recent history of the UGRR, Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich, reflects a similar pattern, only painted on a much broader canvas: where William Still focused on Philadelphia; Burdewich points out that what was then called the “Northwest” (now the Midwest), was criss-crossed by an equally, if not more important group of UGRR pathways, particularly in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, routes ultimately terminating in Canada.

It’s about 700 miles from Salem Chapel in Ontario to Snow Camp, North Carolina —  as the Canadian geese flocks fly; on the ground it’s many more. Hard miles, through forests, winding through mountains and crossing rivers, in all kinds of weather, hungry and hunted.  Here in Snow Camp, what we know of the UGRR is mostly folklore, but still it fits with these big-picture accounts, though with plenty of local twists.

For one thing, it’s right in the thick of a “Quaker hotbed” that was almost a century old in the years leading up to the Civil War, and which survived the fighting, despite losing many members in treks west, to Indiana and other non-slave states.

This meant there were many potential UGRR sympathizers around Snow Camp– though they kept a low profile. After all, while the UGRR was controversial in the North, it was criminally illegal in the South: a number of white sympathizers were caught at it in the South and served long prison terms; more than one died in jail.

In this tense atmosphere, UGRR work was kept both secret and carefully compartmentalized: most participants only knew where the next next stopping place was, and often were unaware of who operated it. The renowned UGRR tree near the Guilford College campus is a good example: nestled in a thick woods, which tree was it?

Thus, if seized by the patrollers or the sheriff, “conductors” could give truthful (or nearly truthful), yet minimally informative answers.

So there are very few concrete records. (Levi Coffin, originally from Greensboro, described some of his forays in his memoirs– online here in full — many years after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished.) Yet local historians at the Friends meetings near Snow Camp have long asserted that area Quakers were active in UGRR efforts.

Even so, Quakers were a suspect minority as far as local authorities were concerned, on a subject which frequently evoked actual violence.  Thus habits of concealment, and what spies call “cut-outs” and “drops” were key tools for UGRR work in this area.

In addition to preparing the 25th season of Pathway to Freedom, the only ongoing play about the UGRR, we hope to soon be able to make use of our historic buildings and artifacts to illustrate the day-to-day reality of life in a seemingly quiet but inwardly turbulent slave society. Watch this space for more details as they develop, And we ask again that our supporters send donations soon, so we can meet the high expenses of season preparation. 

Donations are welcome via a secure online link here:

http://bit.ly/2klVgpy
For regular mail, make checks to:
Snow Camp Outdoor Theatre
P. O. Box 535
Snow Camp NC 27349

PS. A reminder: our local auditions will take place at the Drama site [301 drama Rd., Snow Camp] on  Wednesday March 14, noon to 5 PM, and Thursday March 15, 3PM to 8 PM. Make appointments by email at: info@nullsnowcampoutdoortheatre.com

The post Snow Camp & The Underground Railroad – Beyond Mythmaking appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

There’s a must-read in today’s New York Times: “A Quiet Exodus: Why Blacks Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches”

It is carefully reported, and digs deep. It takes a broad view, but focuses on a huge megachurch, “Gateway,” in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.

The Gateway congregations are “integrated”; people of color have been worshiping there for years; pastors at two of its “campuses” are black. As Charmaine Pruitt, one longtime attender, told the Times: 

“This is what I need right now,” thought Ms. Pruitt, moved to tears when she first went to orientation programs at the church. Members who happened to sit near her at worship came to ask about her when she missed a service, and some came to her grandmother’s wake. One couple began to refer to her as a daughter.

The congregation is mostly white, but not entirely; the pastors at two of the six satellite campuses are black men. Church videos and promotional materials are intentionally filled with people of color. 

But recently, some there, and in similar churches, have become increasingly uncomfortable. 

Two events seem to have marked this discomfort: first was the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, followed by growing anger and protest of the killings of many more black people (mostly young males). These killings were traumatic to many; but the disturbing aspect to some Gateway attenders was the silence about them in the church.

The second landmark was the 2016 election. As the campaign proceeded, there was anything but silence from the Gateway pulpit. 

The church’s founder and “Senior Pastor,” Robert Morris, preached about the election in August 2016. As the Times quoted him:

  “We (in America) are going the wrong way,” he concluded. “We need to get involved, we need to pray and we need to vote.”

[Morris] never said to vote for Mr. Trump. But the implication in the sermon, and in the leaflets that [were] handed out at church, was lost on no one: that one must vote to uphold Christian values and that the Republican Party platform reflected those values. And Mr. Trump was the Republican candidate.

This sermon, and the previous silence, left Charmaine Pruitt, who had attended Gateway for some years, more & more uneasy:

Pruitt sent messages to several white couples she had befriended at the church, telling them she was going to take some time off. She had become uneasy at a church, she told them, that speaks of overcoming racism on one Sunday “and then turns around later and asks me to support” Trump, who she believed was “a racist candidate.”

One of the couples invited her to come to their house. Sitting in the living room over a plate of brownies, Ms. Pruitt explained to the wife how disturbed she had been by the clear inference from the pulpit that she should support a candidate whose behavior and rhetoric were so offensive that she could not bring herself even to say his name.
The woman explained that a Trump victory had been prophesied and handed Ms. Pruitt a two-page printout, which began: “The Spirit of God says, ‘I have chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.’”

[NOTE: the full text of this “prophecy,” issued in 2011, is here, with “updates.” Here is an excerpt:

The Spirit of God says, I have chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this. For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to Israel, so shall this man be to the United States of America! For I will use this man to bring honor, respect and restoration to America. America will be respected once again as the most powerful and prosperous nation on Earth, (other than Israel). The dollar will be the strongest it has ever been in the history of the United States, and will once again be the currency by which all others are judged.

The Spirit of God says, the enemy will quake and shake and fear this man I have anointed. They will even quake and shake when he announces he is running for president, it will be like the shot heard across the world. The enemy will say what shall we do now? This man knows all our tricks and schemes. We have been robbing America for decades, what shall we do to stop this? The Spirit says HA! No one shall stop this that l have started! For the enemy has stolen from America for decades and it stops now! For I will use this man to reap the harvest that the United States has sown for and plunder from the enemy what he has stolen and return it seven-fold back to the United States. The enemy will say Israel, Israel, what about Israel? For Israel will be protected by America once again. The spirit says yes! America will once again stand hand and hand with Israel, and the two shall be as one. For the ties between Israel and America will be stronger than ever, and Israel will flourish like never before.

The Spirit of God says, I will protect America and Israel, for this next president will be a man of his word, when he speaks the world will listen and know that there is something greater in him than all the others before him. This man’s word is his bond and the world and America will know this and the enemy will fear this, for this man will be fearless. The Spirit says, when the financial harvest begins so shall it parallel in the spiritual for America.

The Spirit of God says, in this next election they will spend billions to keep this president in; it will be like flushing their money down the toilet. Let them waste their money, for it comes from and it is being used by evil forces at work, but they will not succeed, for this next election will be a clean sweep for the man I have chosen. They [the enemy] will say things about this man, but it will not affect him, and they shall say it rolls off of him like the duck, for as the feathers of a duck protect it, so shall My feathers protect this next president. Even mainstream news media will be captivated by this man and the abilities that I have gifted him with, and they will even begin to agree with him says the Spirit of God.

[NOTE: the “next election” following this “prophecy” was that of 2012, which we will recall was won handily by Barack Obama. However, the premature chronology did not trouble the woman who gave it to Pruitt. As the Times reported]:

Barack Obama, the woman continued, should never have been president, since he was not born a United State citizen. The visit ended with the woman suggesting that Ms. Pruitt’s discomfort at the church was God telling her it was time to move on.

Ms. Pruitt never went back.

. . . Mr. Trump’s win, which one elder at Gateway described as a “supernatural answer to prayer,” generated a frisson of excitement at the church. Pastor Morris told the congregation that he was one of Mr. Trump’s faith advisers. The church was a sponsor of an inaugural ball in January 2017. . . .

Pastor Morris has since preached about race, However, his feelings about the current administration have not changed:

 “We were electing what we felt was the person who held the values that the church loves dearly the most. That doesn’t mean that he’s perfect. But I do believe after spending time with him that he really wants to learn, that he really wants to do a good job for all Americans. I really do.”

There are larger racial injustices in the country, he said, and those injustices need to be fixed — though not in ways that would enable dependence, he clarified, but rather to “give people a hand up, not a handout.” He noted the low black unemployment rate under Mr. Trump. The answer to racism lies primarily in the church, not the government, he said, and now that white pastors are waking up to the pain that black people have felt, it is in many ways a hopeful time.

“I think that there’s an anger and a hurt right now, and a fear,” he said, “and I think that people are going to get past that.”

There is now a team at the church focused exclusively on making the church more diverse. On the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a 49-second video of excerpts from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was played at worship services — “a monumental moment in Gateway church history,” one pastor said, the first time that the day had been acknowledged. . . .

For Charmaine Pruitt, this was too little, too late:

[Ms. Pruitt] had kept giving tithe money to Gateway for some months after she stopped going, but after learning about the inaugural ball, started donating to another church. On most Sundays she had stayed at home, watching services online.

Read the rest of this remarkable article.

PS.  One of Mark Taylor’s recent prophecies; find it on YouTube.

The post A Stunning Article About Blacks in (& Troubled by) White Evangelical churches appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

When I look at this photo of President Obama in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 2015, I think I see something different from many.

Standing at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he & his handlers were evoking the marches across it fifty years earlier.

One of those ended in a bloody police attack on unarmed voting rights marchers. Another, two weeks later, opened their momentous  trek to Montgomery to demand full voting rights for people of color. 

That second march, by the way, is still going on.

I was in Selma in 1965. And again, along with Obama in 2015.

But beyond and behind the pageantry, I saw something else: protection; protection that was overwhelming, in all directions, and yet invisible to the public.

Let me explain.

In 1965, I was a rookie civil rights worker in Selma, fresh from college and not a southerner. As such, I had few useful skills. But one thing I could do was walk.

And walking was what I was asked to do, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in town to lead voting rights protests. I was one of several junior staffers assigned to walk close to Dr. King through Selma’s downtown, to the county courthouse. There a white voter registration board had for decades routinely turned away all but a very few black residents.

“Why are we doing this?” I asked big James Orange, a movement veteran, as we took our places the first time.

 “Simple, Chuck,” he answered, and pointed to a nearby building. “Suppose somebody’s up there on the roof with a high-powered rifle. We’re gonna block their aim.”

Orange saw my eyes widen, and grinned. 

“But, uh, Jim,” l sputtered, “what — what if somebody’s up there & they squeeze the trigger and get me instead?”

His grin got wider. He slapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Chuck,” he said, “if you get shot, I promise: Dr. King will preach at your funeral.”

“Oh, thanks, Jim,” I said & tried to laugh, but it was a serious matter.

I had already learned that Dr. King got death threats almost every day. And while we were unarmed, our bodyguard duty was not just for show. Selma was a small city, but numerous three-story buildings clustered downtown: many upstairs windows glared blankly down on us, and their nearly flat roofs made good cover.

Lucky for me, no shots were fired during the marches I was on then. But I was also among the throng that crossed the Pettus bridge several weeks later, after two protesters had been killed and many more injured, headed for the capital in Montgomery, our journey guarded this time by rifle-bearing U.S. army troops. 

The soldiers were busy: long stretches of our route on US Highway 80 were lined by thick woods and swamps. A line of woods also ran along the edge of the Alabama River near the bridge, right across from Selma’s downtown, offering excellent cover for would be snipers.

That march made it to Montgomery safely five days later; but on the way back, Ku Klux Klan assassins shot and killed Viola Liuzzo, who had come from Detroit to join it.

 Several years later, while  doing research for my book, Selma 1965, I came across a report that police believed that on at least one of the marches where James Orange I were beside Dr. King, a rifleman was spotted on a nearby rooftop. By then, of course, one of the daily threats against Dr. King had been fatally carried out, in Memphis. 

All this was on my mind in 2015 when I heard that President Obama was coming to Selma, to mark the Selma movement’s half-century. I was going too, with some friends.

This time I wasn’t worried about my own safety: there would be tens of thousands to shield me, and besides the occasion was rightly viewed as a tourism bonanza by Alabama authorities.

But Obama was another matter. It was no secret that, as the first black president, he too got death threats every day, reportedly many more than his white predecessors. Further, Alabama and the Deep South still harbored extremist groups that regarded his public prominence as a standing offense.

I knew Obama would want to speak in the open air, likely with the Pettus bridge looming above him. And that worried me. Such visibility was risky: on one end of the bridge, downtown was a jumble of three-story buildings.

On the other end, the woods were still there on the high bank of the Alabama river. How would the Secret Service cover it all—and make it all appear “normal,” a peaceful celebration, not a military occupation?

Maybe it was just my own mild case of PTSD, but it worried me. But after much mulling, I thought I knew how it could be done.

When I saw this picture of Obama, alone on the bridge behind a compact lectern, I felt like I guessed right. Here’s how it went down:

On the city side, early that morning the Secret Service cordoned off several square blocks with metal barriers, set up airport-type metal detector entrances, where they looked in all bags & wanded each of the tens of thousands of those lined up; it took hours.

 At the same time, they quietly, unobtrusively occupied and no doubt searched the buildings along and near the riverfront. Few structures had changed in fifty years, and for that matter, many were empty; Selma and the whole region around it was still dogged by poverty and decay.

Beyond the other end of the bridge, traffic was diverted to other routes. While I don’t know for sure, I’m convinced that special teams combed through the nearby line of woods to be sure they stayed clear.

One other precaution might also have been in play: for most of March 7, when the Obamas & George W. and Laura Bush were in town, the internet went down in Selma. This gummed up many journalists; I know, because a few had interviewed me, but then had to pack up and leave town to get their footage uploaded to their home networks. For that matter, I had planned to blog during the day myself; after a few futile tries, I gave up.

There were two theories on the street about this outage: one, the Secret Service (or maybe NSA) had jammed it, so no insurgents could coordinate attack plans, or remotely set off explosives; the other, more plausible but less exciting, was that all 50,000 of us tried to send our snapshots to Facebook & Instagram at the same time, and simply crashed all the local servers and such. (It didn’t occur to me  that maybe Russian hackers were involved; but it certainly would today.)

Obama stood & spoke almost exactly where I had imagined: note that the bridge behind him makes an arc, one actually much higher than it seems in the camera’s perspective.  Where Obama is standing, the bridge itself would block the aim of anyone who evaded pursuit and tried to take aim from those woods.

The result was a successful combination of security and stagecraft. The scene eased my anxiety then and after: it meant somebody knew what they were doing, and did it right.

The Secret Service has to secure similar events every week, sometimes every day. So maybe this was a piece of cake for them. Compared to their skill, our mornings walks near Dr. King now seem utterly, almost comically amateurish.

But even so, somehow we came through it. Dr. King wasn’t called on to preach at our funerals. Instead, we lasted long enough to hear others preaching at his.

More about my time in the movement is in this book, available here.

The post Selma, Alabama: Protecting King, Protecting Obama appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

The Guardian: “Christian democracy, a political ideology embodied by figures like Germany’s Angela Merkel, contributed to establishing stable democracies in Europe in the aftermath of the second world war. The US was often deeply supportive of this process, yet never cultivated an analogous political movement at home. Now that it is facing a serious institutional threat of its own, it can perhaps learn from what it has long preached abroad.

The role of Christian democratic parties and agents in the creation of the United Nations, the European Union and the international human rights regime was decisive.

Well, maybe. But finding “a better alternative” won’t be easy.

Still, there’s plenty  of wisdom here. American evangelical Christianity COULD in theory move way from the current regime, which mocks almost every aspect of its core.

But I see four BIG hazards that will need to be overcome on the way to becoming a better option:

1. The Mormon hegemony. While most evangelicals supposedly condemn Mormonism as a “cult,” it has become a major power center in their political world (cf. Mitt Romney), one which is organized behind a solidly reactionary social-economic agenda, and it will not yield the floor easily.

2. Christian Zionism: a tenacious, well-funded crusade, with a wide following, firmly allied with most of the most dangerous & reactionary elements of the Israeli government, and panting for its chance to bring on Armageddon.

 3. “Christian Dominionism.” These are the cadres who firmly believe that their sort should rule like Old Testament Kings, enforcing the most brutal Old Testament strictures (i. e., death to LGBTs & others). Roy Moore is their kind of guy.

And last but hardly least—

4. Racism. Sure, racism is everywhere in American religion. But major chunks of evangelicalism  long ago abandoned its initial reformist notions and retreated into a segregated nativist ghetto, which made it the seedbed for the second rising of the Ku Klux Klan, the host for many less well-known pillars of Jim Crow, the key to the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” and now shelter the most loyal legions of the 45 regime. A few voices are crying out in that wilderness, but they are still lonely & mostly scorned.

I’m no expert on how their European counterparts overcame their own obstacles, which were the opposite of trivial, but for two generations they’ve done well enough to produce leaders of the caliber of Angela Merkel. Yet Merkel’s hold is slipping there, and the alternatives look grim. 

Considering the state of American evangelicalism in 2018, it’s hard to imagine this movement evolving and spawning a resurgence of humane “Christian Democracy” here, or shoring up its beleaguered outposts across the Atlantic.

The post Is “Christian Democracy” Possible in the U.S.? appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Friends, there are many deeply disturbing things going on in Washington; it’s hard to keep up.

But here’s one I’m keeping up with, and I invite your attention:

The nomination of longtime CIA officer Gina Haspel to be head of the CIA.

Her nomination should be stopped. Haspel is a torturer, with deep involvement in some of the most horrible abuses and crimes of the ‘War On Terror” era.

Yes, torture IS already a crime. A federal felony. We don’t need Congress to pass new laws about that. Just enforce the laws already on the books. And one big step toward such accountability would be to stop the Haspel nomination.

Time is short for action to stop Haspel’s ascent. A hearing on her nomination is slated for early May. One of those who has made the case against promoting Haspel is libertarian Senator Rand Paul. Here’s part of his argument:

“Why I’m Against Gina Haspel”
Some details may be disputed, but it remains true that Haspel ran a secret center in Thailand where prisoners were tortured.

There is no question that during her career, Haspel participated in and helped develop the program that our own government has labeled torture. Though there have been the typical suggestions that she was “simply following orders,” Glenn Carle, a former CIA interrogator, has described her as “one of the architects, designers, implementers and one of the top two managers of the [“Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” torture program] and a true believer, by all accounts, in the ‘Global War in Terror’ paradigm.”

This does not sound like someone who was simply “following orders.” This sounds like someone who was giving them, which I would argue is far worse.

Nor is it debatable that she was present in Thailand when Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was waterboarded three times in late 2002.

Further, multiple accounts have discussed her involvement in destroying video documentation of the torture program.

Think about that for a moment. She helped destroy the very evidence of this program, and people tell us we have no reason for concern?

Direct participation in the program itself would be disqualifying enough for me, but appointing someone who also helped push for destroying evidence of that program to run one of the most powerful organizations in the world should not be acceptable to Congress.

Paul was preceded by Senator John McCain, who has spoken out against the CIA torture program many times. Here’s part of one statement:

“What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies, but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise, since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in private that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism.

And I suspect the objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure – torture’s ineffectiveness – because we gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer. Too much.

“Obviously, we need intelligence to defeat our enemies, but we need reliable intelligence. Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence. And what the advocates of harsh and cruel interrogation methods have never established is that we couldn’t have gathered as good or more reliable intelligence from using humane methods.

“The most important lead we got in the search for bin Laden came from using conventional interrogation methods. I think it is an insult to the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence without hurting or degrading prisoners to assert we can’t win this war without such methods. Yes, we can and we will.

“But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.

“We have made our way in this often dangerous and cruel world, not by just strictly pursuing our geopolitical interests, but by exemplifying our political values, and influencing other nations to embrace them. When we fight to defend our security we fight also for an idea, not for a tribe or a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion or for a king, but for an idea that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights.

How much safer the world would be if all nations believed the same. How much more dangerous it can become when we forget it ourselves even momentarily. . . .

Much more material, pro and con, is available online. But my view is clear: torture is a crime, she pushed for it, led it and helped conceal it. Such behavior should not be rewarded. In fact, my meme is:

Haspel should be investigated, not nominated. 

If you agree, I invite you to let Washington know, now.  You can call, write letters, FAX the Senate, show up and protest.

And my colleagues in QUIT (the Quaker Initiative to end Torture) have prepared a convenient postcard to send to Senators, the White House, the media, and other “influencers.”

Its message is succinct:

If you’d like to join this effort, I’ll send you a dozen postcards free, while supplies last. Just send me a private message or an email at chuckfager(at)aol(dot)com & tell me where to send them. (If you want 100, thats okay too, but please add $10 to help with costs.) Pass some along to others who are concerned. If you use them up, send for more.

To be sure, this is a long shot. But ten years ago, I interviewed a Swiss investigator named Dick Marty.

A seemingly modest, unassuming man, Marty’s brilliant & relentless detective work had ripped the cover off the CIA’s “black sites” torture centers, and exposed the “torture taxi” flights that serviced them (many of which started in my home state of North Carolina, to our continuing shame).

He told me then that uprooting the U.S. torture program would be “a long work,” calling for “patience and determination.” He was right when he said that. He’s still right.

I agree with him about determination. 

But I have trouble with the patience part. Accountability is years overdue. Opposition to promoting a known torture chief to the top CIA job is before us. Now. Let us act.

PS. These cards are available too. Same deal.

The post Urgent – Act to Stop Torturer Gina Haspel appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

As Gina Haspel prepares to face Congress and the press tomorrow in her quest to become CIA Director, there’s a duel underway in the background.

The duel is between two letters: one from a company of former spy chiefs, endorsing her nomination. The other is from a battalion of retired generals and admirals, vehemently opposing it.

Torture is the nub of the clash. Haspel ran one of the CIA’s “black sites” in which prisoners were tortured. She also helped run the whole program, and called for destruction of videotapes of torture sessions, in defiance of court orders to preserve them.

The contrast between the two letters is remarkable, and worth examining.

The Washington Post notes today that 

“To say that she was part of this [detention and interrogation] program, from a management standpoint, and is not qualified to lead the agency, is misguided,” said John Brennan, who served as CIA director under President Barack Obama.

Brennan joined 52 other former senior national security officials in signing a letter of support for Haspel’s nomination, calling her a “true intelligence professional who brings care, integrity and a commitment to the rule of law to her work every day.” 

The full text of the Brennan letter is here. It is relatively brief, barely 400 words. The money quote:

Ms. Haspel’s qualifications to become CIA Director match or exceed those of most candidates put forward in the Agency’s 70-year history. She has spent more than 30 years of her life quietly serving America and the CIA, routinely stepping up to handle some of the most demanding assignments around the globe. Ms. Haspel is a proven leader who inspires others and has what it takes to make tough calls in times of crisis. . . . She will speak truth to power, offering unbiased intelligence to policymakers no matter how difficult the situation. 

Throughout her distinguished career, Ms. Haspel has received numerous honors, including the Intelligence Medal of Merit, the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism, the Donovan Award and a Presidential Rank Award, the highest award in the federal service. 

Those who have served alongside Ms. Haspel have only the utmost praise and respect for her . . . . 

“Speak truth to power?” A striking phrase. Many others who served on the ground, and have had to deal with the continuing fallout of the CIA’s torture program, have also spoken, and declared a very different kind of truth.  As the Post also reports:

But more than twice as many retired military generals signed a letter opposing Haspel. [The full text of the letter is here.] “We do not accept efforts to excuse her actions relating to torture and other unlawful abuse of detainees by offering that she was ‘just following orders,’ ” they wrote. 

And rejection of the “just following orders,” which is what the CIA case for Haspel comes down to, was just the beginning. Where the spymasters’ letter was fulsome but clipped, the generals are, not to put too fine a point on it, outraged:

We urge [Senators] to examine closely the full extent of Ms. Haspel’s involvement in the rendition, detention, and interrogation program and, should you find that she played any role in carrying out, supervising, or directing the torture or abuse of people in U.S. custody, or the destruction of evidence relating to these activities, we urge you to reject her nomination.

“Any role”? Most of Haspel’s career is still secret; but the facts of her being deep into the torture program, in numerous roles, is one of the few sets of facts even the CIA has acknowledged. And for the generals this is not a quibble, but a matter of “profound concern”: 

We are deeply troubled by the prospect of someone who appears to have been intimately involved in torture being elevated to one of the most important positions of leadership in the intelligence community.. . .

In addition, former CIA general counsel John Rizzo has stated that for some period of time a person we now know to be Ms. Haspel oversaw the CIA’s entire interrogation program—a program that was rife with mismanagement and abuse.

Moreover, the generals flatly reject the excuses & assurances by Brennan and the spymasters:

We understand that some well-respected former senior government intelligence officials have spoken highly of Ms. Haspel’s experience and long record of service to the Agency. However, we do not accept efforts to excuse her actions relating to torture and other unlawful abuse of detainees by offering that she was “just following orders,” or that shock from the 9/11 terrorist attacks should excuse illegal and unethical conduct. We did not accept the “just following orders” justification after World War II, and we should not accept it now. Waterboarding and other forms of torture or cruel and inhuman treatment are—and always have been—clearly unlawful. Individuals in the service of our country, even at the lowest levels, have a duty to refuse to carry out such actions.”

And that’s not all:

Moreover, Ms. Haspel appears to have been involved in inappropriate actions that went beyond what was authorized by Congress or senior officials in the executive branch. Public reports suggest that cases of detainee abuse she supervised or otherwise had an operational role in involved conduct even more abusive than what the discredited legal memos supported. In addition to her role in overseeing and implementing torture, Ms. Haspel also appears to have strongly advocated for and played a key role in carrying out an order to destroy 92 videotapes of individuals in U.S. custody being subjected to torture. She did so despite federal court orders requiring preservation of all records pertaining to detainee abuse, and over the objections of congressional leaders, the Director of National Intelligence, Director of Central Intelligence, two successive White House counsels, Department of Justice officials, and the vice president’s top lawyer. This disregard for lawful checks on the CIA’s power is troubling.

The torture and cruel treatment of prisoners undermines our national security by increasing the risks to our troops, hindering cooperation with allies, alienating populations whose support the United States needs in the struggle against terrorism, and providing a propaganda tool for extremists who wish to do us harm. It would send a terrible signal to confirm as the next Director of the CIA someone who was so intimately involved in this dark chapter of our nation’s history.

“A terrible signal.” The 108 signers’ names sprawl across three pages.

So there it is: The generals vs the spooks.

Will the brass will get to have their say at Haspel’s hearing?  Regardless, I hope their protest, for that is what it is, will be heard as the Senate works its will.

More about Gina Haspel & her life in the CIA is in yesterday’s post, here

The post The Spooks Vs. The Brass: Will This Duel Stop Haspel’s Rise? appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

After thinking about the remodeled “backing-up-new-Iranian-sanctions-with-War” scenario, I did some searching & quickly came across several disquieting facts:

1. Iran’s population is at least twice that of Iraq;
2. it’s also more homogenous, linguistically, culturally & especially religiously (90+% Shi’a Muslim; Iraq, 60/40 Shia vs Sunni); further,
3. Iranians tend to be quite proud of their country & culture even if they despise their government;

4. Iran’s land mass is also 3.5 times bigger than Iraq, with lots of mountains; (Iraq is mostly desert)
5. Teheran, the capital, is several hundred miles farther from the bases & seaports necessary to supply an invading force than, say, Baghdad; and —by the way:
6. Iran has a real army, a big one, rather than the pretend bunch of mutually hostile gangs that Saddam Hussein “led.”

Now, I’m no expert at grand military strategy. But considering how U. S. forces got their butts kicked in Iraq (& —oh, did I forget to mention Afghanistan? And, er, Vietnam?)

I figure that the war with Iran the Orange mob seems to be working up to is gonna be something other than a piece of cake.

But it will be huge.

So, what can we do?? I’m guessing that after this week, soon might be a good time for American parents of pre- & teenage boys to start digging around on the internet for dog-eared copies of such 1960s bestsellers as, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, to pass around & ponder until some very woke Millennial updates & uploads it.

Free Advance Excerpts:

10 Invent a time machine and go back to the 19th century.
11 Start to menstruate. (Better red than dead.)
18 Rent a motel room with a ewe.
19 Rent a motel room with a ram.
20 Say you’re crazy.
21 Say they’re crazy.
23 Marry J. Edgar Hoover.

(For backup, there are lots of YouTube videos for beginners on Quebec French.)

Just sayin’.
(I mean, Juste dire!)

The post After Blowing Up The Iran Deal: Anybody Feeling a Draft? appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

A good friend works the late shift in a 24-hour diner near here. During the slow hours, the diner is a stopping place for homeless people. For the last couple of nights, one particular homeless man has come in. Last night he handed over a grimy five dollar bill and ordered some eggs & bacon.

Halfway through eating it he stood and asked for a  take-out box. When  handed it, he walked around the nearly-empty diner, scooping  into it all the scraps and leftovers from plates that hadn’t been cleared, then left.

Such scavenging is strictly against the house rules; but my friend studiously ignored it. She’s become particularly permissive since she met up with two young women camping out behind the dumpster in the back parking lot.

She met them during the recent dry weeks. Then the rains came for several days, often pelting and blowing, and the young women left. We’re in the third week of another dry spell, and newcomers are here, crouched behind a different dumpster by the gas station up the block. They sweat through the mid-nineties days and scrounge for food that’s enroute to becoming trash.

Which brings me to Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the UN, who just threw a fit because that body’s poverty investigator (aka special rapporteur) after making an extensive study trip cross the nation, dared to call for examining poverty in America.

“It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” Haley wrote in a letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday. “In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering.”

Why “ridiculous”? Because, she said, there are other countries which have higher poverty rates than ours. (True enough, but that doesn’t feed our hungry or homeless. Read the article for her short “Whatabout” list of countries; interesting that they were places populated by dark-skinned children of God.)

This outburst was not surprising. For that matter its deep roots in  southern hypocrisy were easy to expose. Haley is the former governor of South Carolina, which has long been among the states with the highest rates of poverty. Further, it is the runaway leader, Numero Uno for decades, in slurping up federal welfare.

Last year, for instance, South Carolina received almost eight dollars in federal payments for every one dollar the IRS collected there. It’s also in the top ten states for the percentage of residents getting food stamps.

And its poverty figures show some familiar skews: it’s among the top 8 for child poverty, and top 11 for working women who are still poor.

But who could forget race? As you might expect, Haley’s home state is a pace-setter here too. This chart lists poverty by ethnicity:

There’s another key indicator, the proportion of citizens living in mobile homes. Here South Carolina is in front again, beating out even my state:

Nonetheless, Haley declared that

“I am deeply disappointed that the Special Rapporteur used his platform to make misleading and politically motivated statements about American domestic policy issues,” Haley said. “Regrettably, his report is an all too common example of the misplaced priorities” of the United Nations.

Well, tell it to the guy who asked for the takeout box at my friend’s diner. Speaking of whom, he mentioned that he was taking his box of scraps back to the tent camp down near Exit 13 on the Durham Freeway. Was he going to share it there, or keep it and try to stretch it through the long hot day, unless he dozed off and the rats got to it? He didn’t say.

I know that camp.  Drive past it almost every day; less than a mile from my house. As such places go, it’s been relatively innocuous. After the last spell of rain, most of the tents seemed to disappear. Besides the downpours, the state had posted a sort-of eviction notice, telling them to clear out or face arrest. A few left; others said they had nowhere else to go. As of yesterday, the tents were back, and no one has yet been arrested.

The camp will probably be cleared soon; nearby property owners will relax. Then it will reassemble somewhere else. The latest report from HUD says homelessness in the US is declining as the economy strengthens; but such numbers are  suspect, and disputed for me by data gathered by my own eyes.

Nevertheless, Haley’s indignation is all too common, especially among our current rulers. The UN report clashes with the official story that America is being made “great again”, and poverty ipso facto is on the way out, or doesn’t actually exist, except maybe for welfare cheaters,  (or Republicans indicted by rogue federal prosecutors).

Perhaps I’m not doing her justice here. But in gauging her reaction, beyond Palmetto hypocrisy, there’s the fact that the Special Rapporteur on poverty was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, which Haley had just taken the US out of.

Most observers saw the US departure as a way of deflecting its criticisms of Israel. But reviewing Haley’s outburst about its investigating US poverty suggests that there may be more to her agenda here.

Her target,  by the way, is Philip Alston, a noted law professor with human rights expertise.  And it’s not hard to see why Haley would despise his report, given this excerpt from his oral summary of it:

I turn now to my report on the United States.  My starting point is that the combination of extreme inequality and extreme poverty generally create ideal conditions for small elites to trample on the human rights of minorities, and sometimes even of majorities.

The United States has the highest income inequality in the Western world, and this can only be made worse by the massive new tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy. At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million of those live in extreme poverty.  In addition, vast numbers of middle class Americans are perched on the edge, with 40% of the adult population saying they would be unable to cover an unexpected $400 expense.

In response, the Trump administration has pursued a welfare policy that consists primarily of

(i) steadily diminishing the number of Americans with health insurance (‘Obamacare’);

(ii) stigmatizing those receiving government benefits by arguing that most of them could and should work, despite evidence to the contrary; and

(iii) adding ever more restrictive conditions to social safety net protections such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and cash transfers, each of which will push millions off existing benefits.

For example, a Farm Bill approved yesterday by Republicans in the House of Representatives would impose stricter work requirements on up to 7 million food stamp recipients. Presumably this would also affect the tens of thousands of serving military personnel whose families need to depend on food stamps, and the 1.5 million low-income veterans who receive them. . . .”

“Misleading”? “Politically motivated”? “Patently ridiculous”?

Bernie Sanders didn’t think so: “You are certainly right in suggesting that poverty in many countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi is far worse than it is in the United States,” Sanders said. “But … as it happens, I personally believe that it is totally appropriate for the U.N. Special Rapporteur to focus on poverty in the United States.”

And never mind Haley & the UN, or Alston and Bernie. Tonight my friend will be back at the diner, gathering her own data. She hasn’t talked to Philip Alston. But I bet she could give him quite an earful; along with some good waffles.

Or for that matter, she could tell Haley a thing or two as well.

The post Nikki Haley’s Got A Lot of Nerve; She Really Needs a Waffle appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

I can’t deny it: I’m feeling conflicted about the expulsion of Sarah Huckabee Sanders (hereafter SHS) from the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington Virginia this weekend.

On the one hand, the report of it sets off alarms and bring back vivid memories from my young activist years. Then  most restaurants, especially in the South, were racially segregated. And it took long hard months of protests (that had really started on a small scale years earlier) to begin to break through and open up this part of public space to nonwhite Americans.

Soon after, when a major Civil Rights bill was moving through Congress, one of the toughest, longest fights over it focused on the provision that would make “public accommodations:”(especially restaurants, lunch counters, stores and hotels) open to all regardless of race, religion, gender, etc. And those of us who supported it were thrilled when this provision was voted in.

Rising comedian Dick Gregory managed to wring rueful jokes out of all this:
“We tried to integrate a restaurant, and they said, `We don’t serve colored folk here,’ and I said, `Well, I don’t eat colored folk nowhere. Bring me some pork chops.'”

And: “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months. When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”

So when the great Civil Rights Act was finally passed in the summer of 1965,  one of its first and most visible impacts was the opening up of “public accommodations” to hungry customers of all shades and denominations.

Some places resisted. There were some court fights, but the segregationists lost. More than six months later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the first integrated group into the Selma Del restaurant in Selma, Alabama. As a rookie civil rights worker, I followed him in.

The rule now was that: if a customer was orderly, she or he as a member of the public, deserved to be “accommodated” in a public business like a restaurant, equally with all others.

When I look back at all this, I’m uneasy about seeing SHS ejected from the Red Hen. It’s open to “the public”; she’s a member of the public. So if she was behaving herself, the staff should take her money and give her the food; suck it up about her politics and lies.

Otherwise we could be sliding back, not to the ’60s but toward the segregated ’50s. Social media, as this notice on the Yelp! review page, was all over it.

But now, in 2018, there’s another side to this situation, courtesy of the U. S. Supreme Court, and its decision in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which came down earlier in June.

The Court upheld the refusal by Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker, to make a cake for a same sex couple’s wedding because of his anti-gay religious beliefs. His lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, said

 “Jack serves all customers; he simply declines to express messages or celebrate events that violate his deeply held beliefs. Creative professionals who serve all people should be free to create art consistent with their convictions without the threat of government punishment.”

I’m a strong supporter of gay rights, so I differ sharply from Jack Phillips on that point. But I’m also a Quaker, and for me the issue of religious liberty is not a simple one.

Cakes I could take or leave. But when it comes to some other huge issues– in particular, going to war or helping the government pay for our many wars– a venerable Quaker tradition tells me: Quakers don’t do war. And we don’t pay others, through our government, to make wars for “us.”

Sure, not every Quaker follows this imperative, which we call a Testimony. (I’m looking at you, Richard Nixon.)

But many have, down through 360 years of wars. More than a few have endured persecution or worse for refusing to fight or pay war taxes. Even many here in North Carolina. Our Quaker “religious liberty” in this area, such as it is, has come hard and is still contested.

Besides individual war refusal, numerous Quaker businesses, large and small, have done their best to avoid war-related contracts, customers and profits. (Cadbury Chocolate was one; you couldn’t make bombs with cocoa.)

And at the other end from Big Cocoa, there’s puny me: twenty years ago, I was a part-time announcer at a  campus public radio station. That station, despite being technically “non-profit,” ran many commercials, euphemised as “underwriter IDs.” And I read many of these between classical music pieces.

One day the station manager gave me a script to read, for an ROTC recruiting spot. I looked it over. In another life, I had been in ROTC. But that was then. I’d been a peacenik Quaker for a long time since.

The spot, like most, promised money and adventure, and didn’t mention war, killing or dying. Reading it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I swallowed hard and went to the manager’s office. I told her I couldn’t read this spot on the air. It was a religious thing.

I could tell she thought I was nuts. But she knew, and I knew, that such religious convictions were supposed to be “accommodated,” under the same Civil Rights Act of 1964 that opened up the lunch counters.

I gave her a  way out: if she recorded the spot, I would play it, like all the music and other spots. To me that was like delivering mail (which I had also done); I didn’t censor people’s mail, and I wasn’t trying to censor the station’s messages. I just couldn’t “speak” that one.

So she taped it, I played it, and it was fine; or at least okay. Probably the smallest achievement in modern Quaker peace work.

Even so, with my Quaker hat on, it’s not so far from that radio station (“open,” in its way, to the “public”), to the Red Hen. From the restaurant’s description, its staff thinks of their food as art, or connected to the earth and their “values.”  The co-owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, wasn’t eager for a face-off.  She told  the Washington Post that

she knew — she believed — that Sarah Huckabee Sanders worked in the service of an “inhumane and unethical” administration. That she publicly defended the president’s cruelest policies, and that that could not stand.

“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” Wilkinson said. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

So Wilkinson, after consulting with her staff, asked SHS to leave: “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation. I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave.’ ”

SHS and her party left. Wilkinson didn’t charge for the food they had already eaten.

Since I’m a liberal kind Quaker, I’m mindful of my heritage (been with it 52 years now), but not a fan of hard and fast rules. Still, situations can come up when it seems your deep values are confronted directly, up close. And then, it’s like those anti-terrorism billboards: you see something and it’s time to decide if you’re going to say something, or not.

Wilkinson wasn’t seeking publicity about this encounter. But one of the staff left a note for the morning crew with the cryptic meme: “86 Sara (sic) Huckabee Sanders.” In restaurant jargon, “86” means to refuse service to someone. He snapped a photo of it, put it on his Facebook page; from zero to viral in a few hours.

If I was running the Red Hen, or was simply a server carrying a loaded tray, would I be able to uphold my civil rights side, and carry & serve it to SHS with a stiff smile? Or, would the Quaker reflexes kick in as with the ROTC spot, to say — more like Colorado Jack Phillips than I might have expected — “No cake in Colorado, and no plate for SHS at the Red Hen”?

What’s the determining frame here? Public accommodation civil rights, open to all the “public”, in a way that many in my generation struggled & suffered to gain? Or an arena of moral witness, where a stand had to be made?

What say we do lunch, and talk it over. . . .

The post The Red Hen vs the Lunch Counter: Which Values Apply? appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Debates over “civility” are nothing new for Quakers. And other people.

The last time I was thrown out of a retail establishment, it was a screen printing shop in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. I came in on a  warm day in 2007, wanting some tee shirts made for a conference being planned by Quaker House. The shirts were to be black, and the wording something like this:

I handed over a CD with the image on it, and the guy at the desk put down his cigarette & slid it into a computer. I couldn’t see the screen when the image came up; but his widened eyes told me.

He stood up as the CD slid back out of the slot. “Hey, Sarge,” he called, and carried it into a back room.

“Sarge” was out in a couple moments; likely retired Army. He didn’t throw the CD at me, but dropped it on the counter and made clear in a loud voice that anybody at Guantanamo or what we were just learning to call “black sites” was a goddam terrorist who deserved whatever they got, and that he was not about to print such treason as this on any of his shirts.

I didn’t quibble. But I called the next shop on my list before I went in, to see if they too had any objection. The shirts got done. And I didn’t think til later about how the issue of who was being uncivil here could be fitted into the “It’s Complicated” category:

Was it “Sarge,” who at best might have considered my image some very bad joke that didn’t play; or was it I, who brought such a patently offensive message into his patriotic establishment?

Or consider this image:

It’s a satire on the refusal of early Friends in England to pay “hat honour” or bow to their social superiors. Mention of this “witness” does not produce much of a reaction today. But many early Friends paid dearly for such effrontery

Meantime, across the pond in Massachusetts Bay colony, the “Puritan Fathers,” who never meant to establish any religious liberty (except theirs), decreed that fines be levied against persons who did NOT attend their official Sunday  church services.

Among those who defied this law was a local Quaker convert named Lydia Wardell and her husband Eliakim. The authorities stripped their home and farm of almost all property of any value to pay the succession of fines, and repeatedly summoned Lydia to appear at the church service to account for her absences.

This she did in May, 1663, but when she came into the church she was naked, thereby, says one historian, to stand as a “sign” of the authorities’ “spiritual nakedness.”

For which incivility she was arrested, tied to a whipping post, stripped to the waist and given 20 to 30 stripes.

Civility, incivility and violence; they’re often closely related. Soon Lydia and Eliakim moved to New Jersey.

A few years later, the palace elite in London was aghast when King Charles II agreed to meet with the rising Quaker leader William Penn.

This painting does not convey the courtiers’ consternation and indignation at the upstart Quaker, though the main cause is evident in that Penn, wearing the unadorned gray coat, is also the only one with his hat on. Any other commoner could end up in the Tower for that.

Yet Charles, perhaps having a sense of the ridiculousness of such customs, also had a not-so-hidden reason for tolerating what to the others was open insolence: Charles had been a refugee for a decade after his father, Charles I lost the English Revolution, his throne, and his head, and the monarchy was abolished. In his years on the run, Charles had borrowed a lot of money from Penn’s father, a wealthy admiral and landowner.

Charles regained the throne in 1660, and when the elder Penn died, the younger inherited the debt — which Charles would much rather not pay, preferring to spend money on luxuries and mistresses.

So Charles tried the art of the deal: ignoring the black hat, he offered to “pay” Penn with a big swath of land on the east coast of what was called the “New World.” Charles hoped Penn would not only accept, but also persuade his peculiar and often troublesome fellow Quakers to settle there with him. Then they could practice all their weird religious and social ideas, across the Atlantic, far far away from the (momentarily) debt-free Charles.

It would be, if the king had known modern lingo, a “win-win.”

As some of us recall, Penn went for the deal, but we’ll skip the rest of his story, which didn’t go all that swimmingly — except to mention that future breaches of “civility” would play a role in various emerging issues.

In this Philadelphia history, there are some figures who  are renowned for their “civility,” and perhaps none more so than John Woolman. He worked patiently and seemingly always inoffensively, to persuade other Philadelphia Quakers that slavery was an evil of which they should free  themselves; a labor which was eventually crowned with success. If Quakers were to have a patron saint of civility, he would be the one. Some today place him beyond mere sanctity: he’s more like the very archetype and gold standard of Quaker authenticity.

A famous historian wrote later that “Close your ears to John Woolman one century, and you will get John Brown the next, with Grant to follow.” That is well-put, but too neat. Before John Brown you got other, different Quakers, aiming to head him off. Times changed in the decades after Woolman’s death in 1772. His quiet crusade was for manumission, where owners voluntarily freed their chattels; even with all his modesty, it ran into plenty of opposition. But sixty years later, that was not enough, and a new cry was heard, for abolition: that slavery be made illegal, the whip snatched from the masters’ hands, and all those held in bondage be freed, immediately.

Just  hearing that proposition, be it ever so delicately phrased, sent many slavery supporters into paroxysms of insulted rage. Such incivility was not to be tolerated: in most of the South it was soon made into a felony, and the U. S. mails were searched and cleansed of “incendiary” publications.

Quakers were among the first to speak for abolition. They did so over the stiff objections of a Quaker establishment, many of whom were people of wealth, and all of those who were in commerce were also deeply entangled with the slave economy.

“Yes, slavery is evil,” the establishment said. “But the ending of it is in God’s hands, not ours. So steer clear of it, pray for its end, and keep quiet.”

There was soon resistance to this edict, and some of the most forceful came from Quaker women. Among abolition’s earliest public advocates were two sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Quaker converts raised in a wealthy slave-owning South Carolina family. They left the South for Philadelphia, and what they thought was a supportive base for their religious and social reform impulses.

It turned out they were mistaken. The Quaker establishment accepted them as members, but then wanted them also to keep quiet: their firsthand stories of southern slavery were bound to stir up trouble. Incivility again.

But the sisters didn’t, couldn’t comply; and Angelina proved to be a remarkably articulate and persuasive speaker. In late 1837 they were invited to make a speaking tour of Massachusetts, where they drew huge crowds day after day, speaking of slavery and abolition. But here they also ran smack into vehement charges of more scandalous incivility.

Their worst offense was not speaking against slavery, but speaking at all. Or rather, doing so before promiscuous audiences; that is, groups including both women — and men. Together!

Members of a prominent association of Massachusetts Congregational ministers were  so shocked at this shameless spectacle they issued a public pastoral letter demanding the Grimkes stop such meetings at once. Even many abolitionist leaders were nervous: it was not then considered seemly, or civil, for women to speak in public at all; but if they were to speak, it should be only to other women. The grounds were both biblical and customary.  (If this seems outlandish, it’s worth noting that some very prominent church groups — looking at YOU, Southern Baptists, and you, too, Francis— continue to enforce similar rules today.)

Yet while their meetings were advertised for women, men simply barged in, day after day, in droves; no one was able to stop them. But the complaints also continued. And soon, as one biographer put it,

[Angelina} had learned what it was to have halls refused because she was a woman, to see herself attacked in the public press, to know she was upbraided from many church pulpits, and to read and hear the epithets that were hurled at her person, much as they had been at the male abolitionists: “Sabbath-breaker,” “infidel,” “heretic,” “incendiary,” “insurrectionist,” “disunionist”; particularly for herself, “woman-preacher,” “female fanatic”; and for them all, “amalgamationist.”

She could comment dryly toward the end of the summer, “Since I have studied human rights & had my own invaded, ” the woman’s rights cause had become her own. The conception she then expressed remained with her ever after. She saw no conflict between her two great causes.

When she received a letter of reproof for mixing the issues of women speaking and abolition from two prominent abolitionists, poet John Greenleaf Whittier and organizer Theodore Weld, Angelina responded firmly:

“Can you not see the deep scheme ofthe clergy against us as lecturers?…[to] persuade the people it is a shame for us to speak in public, and that every time we open our mouths for the dumb we are breaking a divine command? . . . What then can woman do for the slave when she is herself under the feet of man and shamed into silence?”

Under the feet, under the bus. The civility she challenged, first reluctantly then with gathering force, would have dictated silence. So, “what then?” Although not physically strong, the Grimkes saw their duty; the tour went on.

The following year, a crisis in civility gripped Philadelphia.

The Grimkes joined with another outspoken Quaker abolitionist, Lucretia Mott, and others in a project to remedy the fact that so many venues were closed to abolitionists: they would build their own, for meetings and conventions. And so they did, raising a large sum, and calling it Pennsylvania Hall. It opened on May 14, 1838, hosting a series of large meetings. Lucretia spoke several times, and  Angelina Grimke was slated for a major address on the night of May 17.

She did speak, for an hour. But as she did so a proslavery mob gathered outside. They had been incited in part by widely-distributed flyers calling for “citizens who entertain a proper respect for the right of property,”  to “interfere, forcibly if they must, and prevent the violation of these pledges (the preservation of the Constitution of the United States), heretofore held sacred.” And so they did.

As Grimke spoke, the mob threw bricks and other missiles through the windows, and soon set the building on fire. Mott and Grimke escaped unharmed; but by the following morning, Pennsylvania Hall had been burned to the ground. Its venture in civility had lasted three days. Ah, but was it sacrificed to the “Preserving of sacred pledges”?

Something else went up in smoke that week. On May 14, a few hours before Pennsylvania Hall officially opened, Angelina Grimke and Theodore Weld were married. Sarah was among a small group of guests.

By this action the sisters left Quakerism; deliberately, consciously. They had had enough of its Establishment-enforced silences.  Theodore Weld was a non-Quaker. In those days such  “marrying out” — and even Sarah’s mere presence thereat– were grounds for immediate disownment.

After her marriage, Angelina Grimke Weld retired to a private family life; sister Sarah stayed at her side as a companion/servant.

For Lucretia Mott, the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall  did not dampen her devotion to pacifism or activism. She became the most well-known female public speaker in the country. Nevertheless, the following twenty years made her commitments increasingly difficult to keep.

By late 1860, when Abraham Lincoln, whom she scorned as a spineless compromiser on slavery, was about to win the presidency amid rising talk of secession, she found herself at a public meeting to remember John Brown. Brown, the prophesied abolitionist terrorist, had attacked a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to use its store of weapons to spark and equip a slave insurrection across the South.

His raid had failed, and Brown was hung. But his vision of a national bloodbath that would wipe out slavery was about to begin playing out on another, much larger stage. And Lucretia insisted, not entirely convincingly to my ears, that her paying homage to his memory did not compromise her peace principles.

Lucretia told this meeting,

We did not countenance force, and it did not become those–Friends and others–who go to the polls to elect a commander-in-chief of the army and navy, whose business it would be to use that army and navy, if needed, to keep the slaves of the South in their chains, and secure to the masters the undisturbed enjoyment of their system

–it did not become such to find fault with us because we praise John Brown for his heroism.

For it is not John Brown the soldier that we praise; it is John Brown the moral hero; John Brown the noble confessor and martyr whom we honor, and whom we think it proper to honor in this day when men are carried away by the corrupt and pro-slavery clamor against him.

Our weapons were drawn only from the armory of Truth; they were those of faith and hope and love. They were those of moral indignation strongly expressed against wrong. Robert Purvis [1810-1898: a longtime black abolitionist, and friend of the Motts] has said that I was “the most belligerent non-resistant he ever saw.”

I accept the character he gives me; and I glory in it. I have no idea, because I am a non-resistant, of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity. Quakerism, as I understand it, does not mean quietism. The early Friends were agitators; disturbers of the peace; and were more obnoxious in their day to charges, which are now so freely made, than we are.”

Lucretia Mott, Remarks delivered at the 24th annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, October 25-26, 1860

With that, Lucretia became in a real sense the obverse of the gentle, almost invisible Quaker reformer John Woolman.

Or maybe not the obverse; more like one pole of a dialectic, one that is ongoing among Quakers and other like-minded persons:

How is “civility” shaped (& misshapen) by other circumstances? And how and how much does its importance vary with changes in these circumstances? To what extent is it in the eye of the beholder? Does its violation lead to, or justify, violent responses?

And who, when push  comes to shove, will be the judge?

The post Civility, Schmivility: A Quaker Dialectic, Then & Now appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

I won’t try to predict who will be nominated for Anthony Kennedy’s seat. I  only vaguely recall the list of names that was floated before the 2016 election; the ones I recognized ranged from the outrageous to unthinkable.

I didn’t recognize Gorsuch then; but now we know that anything is possible, and lily Tomlin was RIGHT:

So let’s consider some of those legal landmarks that are now in deeper peril.

At the top of my non-lawyer’s list is Obergefell v. Hodges, the  5-4 decision legalizing same sex marriage. Kennedy wrote that decision, which came down three years ago this week. Now the door is open for a  5-4 reversal.

This year it was wedding cakes. Next time: the whole shebang. And as for trans rights?

Then comes Roe v. Wade. My guess is that the new court will go for a kind of repeal that will let states have their way; several states have laws criminalizing all abortions already in place; a new 5-4 could pull the triggers.

I imagine a few providers will stand up for their work, followed by some show trials,  which they’ll likely lose.  Anybody who takes that road better be prepared to do hard time, or worse.

And let’s not forget the Voting Rights Act. Already there’s not much left of it since the notorious Shelby case in 2013, and the latest spate of gerrymandering and vote suppression decisions all tended toward upholding increasing restrictions. Recall that even in the worst of the Jim Crow decades, the segregated states did not formally “repeal” minorities’ “right to vote.”

Plus, I don’t know the name for the cases, but resegregation and privatization of public schools, big green lights.

Affirmative action? Out the window.

And bow your heads for “religious liberty.” The present court just upheld the odious Muslim ban. And it took the cake. Watch what’s next.

Any labor union cases? Forget about it. Consumer rights vs. corporate power; no way.

Environmental protection? Reining in Big Pharma?

Okay, I’m getting too depressed to continue. But the list should definitely be longer. So concerned readers: send me your nominees for precedents likely to be reversed, or trends in line to be strengthened. We’ll do a followup expanded list.

The post Full-Court Press: Apres Kennedy, Le Deluge? appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Found a valuable piece on the History News Network: “Why Is Christian America Supporting Donald Trump?” It’s by John Fea, a historian  at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.

Fea’s piece is not just timely, it’s also important. He homes in on the fact that the “Christians” in Trump’s base are operating on a specific religious reading of American history, one that’s not new, but which has always been false.

In fact, it’s not really an exaggeration to say that our struggle today for a democratic American future is also a fierce struggle to confront & root out a false so-called “Christian” pack of lies about our past. Unfortunately, at the moment the false history charlatans are way ahead, and it makes a real difference. And it could soon make much more.

Ever since the founding of the republic, a significant number of Americans have supposed that the United States is exceptional because it has a special place in God’s unfolding plan for the world. Since the early 17th century founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony by Puritans, evangelicals have relished in their perceived status as God’s new Israel—His chosen people. America, they argued, is in a covenant relationship with God. . . .

This “Divine Exceptionalism” had a heyday beginning during the  Civil War and the following decades, under the banner of the National Reform Association (Yes — NRA!) They pushed  a specific political goal, a constitutional amendment declaring the U.S. to be a “Christian nation.” One  version would have changed the existing preamble to the Constitution thus (the proposed change is highlighted):

“We the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, and His revealed will as our supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, to form a more perfect union, … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The amendment was introduced in Congress in 1864, 1874 and 1896; it did not pass, but the idea did not disappear. One force that helped stop it in those years was the Free Religious Association, founded in 1867, as an interdenominational liberal association, which was an active defender of a strict separation of church and state. Among FRA’s ten founders were several Unitarians, and one woman: Quaker Lucretia Mott. 

Similar amendments bubbled up again in the next century, during the years of the Cold War and anti-Communist hysteria; none passed. But now the drive is back again, no longer in constitutional amendment form, but as a thick package of incremental statutes, aimed at a conservative Congress, a cooperative White House, and an expected complaisant Supreme court.

Behind the current resurgence is a coalition that has come together since the 1960s. Fea:

Though dissenters have always been present, the Christian culture of the United States remained intact well into the 20th century. But since World War II, the moorings of this culture have loosened, and evangelicals have responded with fear that their Christian nation is about to collapse. . . .

During the 1960s, the Supreme Court removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools, the federal government cut federal funding to Christian academies and colleges that practiced segregation, the country grew more diverse through immigration, and the sexual revolution threatened evangelical patriarchy and gave women the right to choose to have an abortion.

The fear that America’s Christian civilization was falling apart translated into political action. 

In the late 1970s, conservative evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye (the author of the popular Left Behind novels), and a group of politicians who had been closely affiliated with the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, developed a political playbook to win back the culture from the forces of secularization. Most of the 81% of American evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 understood, and continue to understand, the relationship between their faith and their politics through this playbook. 

This playbook, which would eventual become the culture-war battle plan of the “Religious Right,” was tweaked occasionally over the years to address whatever moral issues seemed most important at the time, but it never lost its focus on “restoring,” “renewing,” and “reclaiming” America for Christ through the pursuit of political power. 

When executed properly, the playbook teaches evangelicals to elect the right President and members of Congress who will pass laws privileging evangelical Christian views of the world. These elected officials will then appoint and confirm conservative Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade, defend life in the womb, and uphold religious liberty for those who believe in traditional views of marriage.

The playbook rests firmly on the Religious Right’s understanding of American identity as rooted in its view of the American past. If America was not founded as a Christian nation, the Religious Right’s political agenda collapses or, at the very least, is weakened severely.

To indoctrinate its followers in the dubious claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, the Religious Right has turned to political activists, many of whom claim to be historians, to propagate the idea that the founding fathers of the United States were in the business of building a Christian nation.

The most prominent of these Christian nationalist purveyors of the past is David Barton, the founder of Wallbuilders, an organization in Aledo, Texas that claims to be “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built—a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.”

I can’t help  but interject that the agenda described here is based on a very selective and limited kind of “Christianity,” one that has never been unchallenged. In its early incarnation, it faced strong pushback from an emerging American liberal Quakerism among others. Today, though, this issue shows up on very few of their successors’ agendas.

Fea continues:

For the past thirty years, Barton has provided pastors and conservative politicians with inaccurate or misinterpreted facts used to fuel the Religious Right’s nostalgic longings for an American Christian golden age. American historians, including those who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges, have debunked Barton’s use of the past, but he continues to maintain a large following in the evangelical community. 

David Barton peddles fake news about the American past. . . .
The United States Constitution never mentions God or Christianity but does forbid religious tests for office. The First Amendment rejects a state-sponsored church and celebrates the free-exercise of religion. This is hardly the kind of stuff by which Christian nations are made. Yet Barton and [others] invoke these founders and these documents to defend the idea that the United States was founded as a distinctly Christian nation.

***

If the Christian Right, and by extension the 81% of evangelical voters who use its political playbook, are operating on such a weak historical foundation, why doesn’t someone correct their faulty views and dubious claims?

We do.

We have. 

But countering bad history with good history is not as easy as it sounds. 

David Barton and his fellow Christian nationalist purveyors of the past are well-funded by Christian conservatives who know that the views of the past they are peddling serve their political agenda. Barton has demonized Christian intellectuals and historians as sheep in wolves’ clothing. They may call themselves Christians on Sunday morning, but, according to Barton, their “world view” has been shaped by the secular universities where they earned their Ph.Ds. Thanks to Barton, many conservative evangelicals do not trust academic and professional historians—even academic and professional historians with whom they share a pew on Sunday mornings.

I know this first-hand from some of the negative emails and course evaluation forms I received after teaching a Sunday School course on the history of religion and politics at the Evangelical Free Church congregation where my family worship every Sunday. Because I was a college history professor—even a college history professor at a Christian college with strong evangelical roots—I could not be trusted.

Fea notes that Barton and his allies are well-funded by rich Fundamentalist right-wingers. He calls for progressive evangelical philanthropists to support a counterthrust by truth-minded evangelical scholars.

That’s a good idea, but I doubt many liberal Quakers or other progressive religious folks are ready to sign up for it. [One exception is the Quaker history H. Larry ingle, who took on one of the other main “textbooks” of this fake history in Quaker Theology back in 2005.] Personally, my own sense is that progressives need to do their own homework and strategize to make their own thrust against Barton and his baloney.

One reason why progressives should pay attention is that Bartonism is taking dead aim at some of the issues closest to their hearts and communities.

For an example, here from the current edition of the legislative playbook, is part of a lengthy section on what they call–

The post Time To Do Some History Homework appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

We don’t have a picture of John Jeffress, at least I haven’t found one.  Same for personal background: where he was from, when he was born. We only have a report about his end, which came on this date, august 25,  98 years ago.

This report was published in several papers on August 26, 2018:

Sheriff Storey and Jeffress were in Graham NC, the seat of Alamance County. When they turned toward the courthouse, they passed near this Confederate memorial, 30 feet high including the statue on the top, which had already been standing for six years.

At this point, the crowd made its move:

In the version of this report published in the Charlotte NC News, additional details were included:

Sheriff Story [sic] and his six assistants started with Jeffress to the courthouse one block away. Arriving at the spot where Ray was killed, a mob formed around the Officers and their prisoner. There was a sudden surge forward and in the twinkling of an eye, according to the sheriff, the prisoner had been taken from the officers and was placed in an automobile and rushed away. There was not a shot fired: not even a gun drawn during the minute scuffle between the mob and officers. 

Sheriff Story said tonight that resistance would have been folly as the mob was made up of between 25 and 50 determined men. There were at least 150 additional men nearby whose sympathies were with the mob, he stated tonight. Answering a. direct question, Sheriff Story declared that he did not know anyone in the mob. The man who led the mob and took the prisoner away, the sheriff said, must have just moved into the county and was not known to him. 

There were no arrests or prosecutions after this killing. And there is no memorial to John Jeffress in Alamance County. There was none anywhere — until this spring. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative opened what it called the National Memorial for Peace & Justice.

In this unique structure, there are 800 pillars, one for each county where the founders could verify a lynching. Names of the know victims are engraved on the pillars.

That, of course, includes Alamance County, NC. and on the Alamance pillar, there is one name:

The fact that we know this much (or this little) about John Jeffress is because in those years, a century and more ago, the young (and often denounced as “radical”) NAACP was compiling a record. It often hung this flag outside its New York office:

The Equal Justice Initiative, sponsors of the Montgomery Memorial, is encouraging persons elsewhere to remember these “erased” crimes.

The Charlotte News editor, whoever it was, gets a bit of credit with their account:

“The crime for which the young negro was put to death is, alleged to have been committed at 10 o’clock yesterday morning, near the child’s home. Cries of her mother, it is said, caused the negro to run, leaving the little girl without serious injury.”

At least he said “alleged.” This entire affair began about 10 AM, and was over by shortly after 3 PM. Jeffress was on his way to be arraigned, formally charged, when he was snatched and then killed. No arraignment, no trial, no evidence, no defense, nothing.

Is all this far in the past, better left alone? I snapped the photo below outside a McDonalds in Graham a few months ago.

I don’t have a bumpersticker for John Jeffress. But I can contribute this remembrance.

The post John Jeffress Remembrance Day: August 25, 1920 appeared first on A Friendly Letter.