The Promise and the Problem

Two contradictory stories collided this week to teach us more about ourselves than we may want to know.

The Promise on the Mall

Monday was the 60th anniversary of the March On Washington. On August 28, 1963, over 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to call for action on civil rights. (Watch a five-minute video history of the event here. )

A century before, November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered “the words that remade America” when he reclaimed the “proposition” that gave birth to this nation. 

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Jefferson’s “proposition” pointed to a future he never imagined; a future when “all” would include all women, all races, all religions, and all sexual orientations. Martin Luther King, Jr., reclaimed Jefferson’s “proposition” as “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

When Mahalia Jackson called out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”, the preacher soared with words that are embedded in our history like the Gettysburg Address.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Twenty-three year old John Lewis spoke words that day that are as true as they were 60 years ago.

“American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation … We will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.  By the force of our demands, our determination, and our numbers … we must say: ‘Wake up America!  Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient. “

At Gettysburg, Lincoln said the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The “testing” continues today.

The Problem at the Dollar Store

At the same time, a 21-year-old white man killed three Black people at a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville. He used a Glock revolver and a AR-15 semi-automatic rifle which were purchased legally despite the killer’s history of involuntary committal for mental illness.

Of course, the shooter is individually responsible for his actions. And, of course, mental illness is a problem. But focusing on those factors is taking the easy way out and dodging the larger issue. At a memorial service on Sunday, when our Governor called the shooter “a major-league scumbag,” the host pastor corrected him, “Respectfully, Governor, he was not a scumbag. He was a racist.”

The problem in Jacksonville (and across our nation) is the lethal combination of racism and guns. Racism has been with us since the first slaves were unloaded in Virginia in 1614. But banning the teaching of that history proves that it continues to infect us by protecting white folks like me from facing up to its reality.

Wendell Berry named “the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness—the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism … to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedding in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.” (The Hidden Wound, p. 48-49)

There have always been white supremacists and anti-Semites in our nation. Sometimes they hid under white sheets or slithered beneath the surface, but particularly since the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, they have reemerged with a vengeance resulting in a major increase in deadly attacks on African Americans and Jews.

We’ve always had white supremacists and anti-Semites, but they did not always have easy access to weapons designed for war. A tragic distortion of the Second Amendment, the lack of positive action by our legislators for reasonable gun control, and their action in favor of “permitless carry” contribute to the racist violence that inspired a mentally ill, 21-year-old, white supremacist to act on his worst impulses. Ironically, at the same time, the Florida Legislature voted to put bullet-proof windows in the Capitol. (You can’t make this stuff up!)

The Testing Goes On

And so, we live with the promise on the Mall and the problem at the Dollar Store. We are still “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” As the dead are being buried in Jacksonville we need to remember Jefferson’s “proposition” and hear Lincoln’s words:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

May it be so.

Grace and peace,

Jim