My Reflections on Racism
I want to share some thoughts on race and racism, on why I
think that America is still a racist nation and why I think that racism is so
insidious and pervasive.
My political science professor, an Episcopalian teaching at Presbyterian
College, told us, “I can accept a Black on equal terms in an impersonal
relationship, or I can accept a Black in a personal relationship as long as he
is not my equal, but I cannot accept a Black on equal terms in a personal
relationship.”
In so many ways I find that remark still characterizes human relations in
America today. I grew up in a strangely contradictory society. I had regular
contact with African-Americans, but never in an equal relationship. My Black
nursemaid took good care of me, and I loved Amy. Later we moved to Myrtle Beach,
South Carolina, and Mattie entered my life. These were kind and loving women who
were gentle and knew how to raise children.
As I recall, my aunts and uncles had Black servants who were treated as part of
the family, but never with equality. When I visited my father’s sister on her
ninetieth birthday, I noticed her servant James. His eyes looked funny, the way
that they do when people need surgery, so I said to my aunt: “Inez, James’
eyes look like he may have cataracts.”
“I don’t know, Robert, I was always taught never to look a Niggrah in the
eyes,” she responded.
Her response startled me. I had known James all my life. He had gone to work for
my aunt’s husband as a little boy, and he was now around seventy, having
worked for her most of his life. Even though most of that time it was part time,
not a day went by that he didn’t check on her. He even telephoned my aunt when
he was away visiting relatives in New York. He obviously loved her and she
obviously loved him, but she had never looked him in the eye.
She was always “Miss Inez,” while he was always simply James. Her husband,
my father’s brother-in-law, was born roughly five years after the end of
Reconstruction, and he held to the values of the old South. He was a kind and
paternalistic man. He did not hate African-Americans. Their presence did not
make him uncomfortable. When a Black friend needed something, “Mr. Henry”
would take care of it. It was his duty, and he never begrudged this expense.
Before daylight, their Black cook would arrive. How I remember those wonderful
breakfasts: hot hominy grits, eggs, sausage and Viola’s homemade biscuits,
served with real butter. Her midday dinners were even better: fried chicken,
butter beans, rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese, and more biscuits. Nobody
could cook as well as Viola. I still savor the memory of her meals.
This was the world into which I was born. These were the African-Americans that
I knew. They all seemed happy and kind. I was “Mr. Robert” when I went back
into the kitchen to chat with Viola or James. She never seemed to mind the
intrusion of a curious little boy watching her cook on the old, black iron
stove. I was always treated as an honored guest.
Over the years, whenever I would go to South Carolina and visit my aunt, I would
always visit with James. Sometimes that meant that I would travel down to where
he lived and visit him in his home on the way out of town, but I always went to
see him—he was part of my family. Viola died many years ago, but I last saw
James in the late summer of 1998. I was in South Carolina and took my family to
see my aunt. It was just short of her 102nd birthday. After visiting with her
for a while, I went out in the yard, where James was working. He still called me
“Mr. Robert.” But we hugged each other and spoke affectionately. He had a
stroke less than a month later and died shortly thereafter.
That was one side of race relations in the South in which I was born—it was
warm and personal but terribly unequal and demanded a measure of deceit from the
African Americans who successfully navigated the intricacies of that
paternalistic world. But I did not understand that for years.
When I was a junior in high school, I worked as a desk clerk in a small hotel;
the bellhop was a middle-aged Black man. He was introduced to me by his first
name, Charles. He educated me more than anyone else about the Black experience.
“Do you think I like acting like a fool—smiling and laughing at White folks
making fun of me? I got to feed my kids, and the more I act like a fool, the
more food I can put on the table.”
Charles got me to think. He was the first Black who was really honest with me.
It had never dawned on me that the kindly African-Americans of my childhood had
had to keep us in the dark about their true feelings. Their very survival
depended on it. Under Charles’ tutelage the contradictions of my upbringing
began to register.
I had only known adult African-Americans; I had never met their children. Many
of the White children that I grew up with did not have any kind of personal
relationship with African-Americans. I had gone to all White schools, and
African-Americans were oftentimes the objects of scorn and twisted humor. Older
boys bragged to me about riding through “N. i. g. g. e. r. town” and
shooting African-Americans with twenty-twos. They had replaced the lead with
wax. This other side of my life, the public side, was completely devoid of
African-Americans.
My first job was pumping gas at Chapins’ Shell Service in Myrtle Beach, South
Carolina; I was thirteen, and Daddy believed that I needed to learn how to work
for other people. We had three restrooms: “Men,” “Women” and “Colored.”
When our only Black employee quit, the “Colored” restroom was never cleaned
again. It had no light bulb and was nasty.
My father was a health officer; once I was with him when he inspected a Black
school. “Separate but equal,” he said, as he got in the car, “there’s
not a damned thing equal about their schools . . . used books, worn-out
equipment, buildings needing repair.” Daddy believed in being fair: “N. i.
g. g. e. r. s. love me, because I treat them just like White people.” To the
best of my knowledge my father never mistreated a Black person. He was a kind
and decent man, a good father and an active churchman. But my Daddy was a
racist, and he taught me to be a racist, too.
In so many ways my mother exemplified the contradictions of my society. Mama
would drink coffee with our maid in the kitchen. She cried with her and went to
the funeral when Mattie’s father died. After I became a Christian, I asked
Mama about African-Americans coming to our church, she responded, “Oh, Robert,
I couldn’t stand it if a Niggrah man sat down next to me!” How well I
remember Daddy coming home from a session meeting and proudly telling us that
the elders had passed a resolution on how to handle these agitators: “We
agreed to meet them at the door and ask why they had come. If they tell us that
they are here to worship, we’ll tell them they have their own churches to
worship in and send them away.” Mama was relieved.
This action on the part of the officers of my church was not isolated. Back in
the sixties, my wife and I worked at Thornwell Orphanage; it was under the
oversight of the Synods of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida of the
Presbyterian Church U.S. Black children weren’t allowed there. My alma mater,
Presbyterian College, finally admitted a couple of African-Americans my senior
year. I remember a chapel sermon preached by Bob Jones, Jr.,
back when I had attended his university. “Blacks have never had a successful
civilization.” “They are only happy when they are in the role of a servant.”
It was in flight from that world that I went to the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., back in 1968.
During the four years that I was in seminary—three in Philadelphia, one in
Pittsburgh—I became acquainted with Northern people. Since I was married and
had to work at least part time, I discovered that there was at least as much
bigotry up North as there was in the South; it’s simply that the non-Christian
Northern folk with whom I worked were less honest about their prejudices than
the non-Christians in the South. Once again, to quote my political science
professor: “I can accept a Black on equal terms in an impersonal relationship,
or I can accept a Black in a personal relationship as long as he is not my
equal, but I cannot accept a Black on equal terms in a personal relationship.”
In many ways the South is becoming more like the North; it has become more
hypocritical, and relationships between African-Americans and European-Americans
have become much less personal. By and large, racism on the surface is gone;
there are lots of changes that have come. The nineteen sixty-four Civil Rights
Act has guaranteed many things, but underneath, in so many ways, little has
changed.
Illiteracy among African-Americans is far greater now than it was fifty years
ago. There is still great disparity in everything from jobs to housing. Streets
are poorer; streetlights are left burned out more often; mailboxes are harder to
come by. And Black folk, especially males, are far more likely to be stopped by
the police.
I know the response that is usually given by White conservatives to these
things, but I wonder about corporate responsibility. My ancestors on both my
mother and father’s sides owned slaves. In many places in the old South, it
was illegal for a Black to be able to read or write. A marriage between
African-Americans was not accorded the same legal status as that between
European-Americans. Families were broken up: fathers and mothers were sold and
separated, sometimes by hundreds of miles.
I don’t feel guilt for the past—Adam’s, my ancestors or my own—because
the Lord Jesus died in my place as my substitute and became a curse for me.
(Galatians 3:13) But I do accept responsibility to work for change. I will not
respond like Cain; I acknowledge that I am responsible. A society that has
systematically, overtly and legally discriminated against African-Americans for
several hundred years is responsible, too.
I believe that most Americans are racists, at least at some level, but hopefully
most are not hateful, malevolent racists. That’s true for African-Americans as
well as European-Americans. Until we recognize it in ourselves, we cannot deal
with it. Racist thinking is a bit like self-pity, pride or lust, it sometimes
knocks on the door of the conscious mind, but the Christian person must learn to
reject it by the authority of the name of Jesus.
Does 2 Samuel 21:1-14 have anything to say to us in America today, other than,
“Thank God, I’m under the New Covenant!”? (I have
placed the relevant verses at the end of this page, underneath Dr. King’s
famous speech.) As I come to the chilling implications of 2 Samuel 21:14 (“After
that, God answered prayer in behalf of the land.”), I understand that I am
affected by what my ancestors and my federal representatives did long before my
time. It makes me wonder if systemic racism isn’t a curse on American society
just like abortion and public sodomy.
Like Daniel and others, it makes me confess my sins and those of my fathers. It
causes me to see that the burden is on me for improved race relations. It is my
obligation to take the first step, to go the second mile, to be the first to
open my home for a meal. And it is my task to work together for a better world,
coming not as a superior to teach, but as a brother to share and learn.
Over the past decade, I have prayed together with Black pastors on a weekly
basis; some of us have swapped pulpits. I have learned much more than I have
taught. It is a bright spot of encouragement in a world that is becoming
increasingly racially polarized.
I long to see the day when my professor’s words are no longer true: where
African-Americans and European-Americans enjoy both equal and personal
relationships.
For some more thoughts and something you can do . . .
Why I still march in January . . .
Bob Vincent
I Have a Dream:
(Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington
D.C. on August 28, 1963)
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed
the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon
light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of
withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of
captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is
still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly
crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One
hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst
of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is
still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile
in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling
condition.
In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the
architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and
the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which
every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be
guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar
as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred
obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back
marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of
justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in
the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this
check—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the
security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America
of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling
off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise
from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial
justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s
children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial
injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to
underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the
Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating
autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a
beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now
be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as
usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is
granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake
the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm
threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our
rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to
satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and
hatred.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and
discipline. we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical
violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting
physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed
the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many
of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to
realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is
inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot
turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When
will you be satisfied?” we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy
with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways
and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s
basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be
satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York
believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we
will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness
like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and
tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have
come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of
persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the
veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned
suffering is redemptive.
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to
Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that
somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley
of despair.
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and
frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in
the American dream.
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.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a
table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state,
sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into
an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are
presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be
transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be
able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as
sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and
mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked
places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and
all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this
faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation
into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to
work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together,
to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a
new meaning, “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I
sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every
mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom
ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the
mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies
of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every
mountainside, let freedom ring.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every
hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day
when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles,
Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of
the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we
are free at last!”
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Peaceful Warrior, Pocket Books, NY 1968
2 Samuel 21:1-14:
1 During the reign of David, there was a famine for three successive years; so
David sought the face of the LORD. The LORD said, “It is on account of Saul
and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death.”
3 David asked the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? How shall I make
amends so that you will bless the LORD’s inheritance?”
4 The Gibeonites answered him, “We have no right to demand silver or gold from
Saul or his family, nor do we have the right to put anyone in Israel to death.”
“What do you want me to do for you?” David asked.
5 They answered the king, “ . . . let seven of his male descendants be given
to us to be killed and exposed before the LORD at Gibeah of Saul—the Lord’s
chosen one.” So the king said, “I will give them to you.”
8 But the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Aiah’s daughter
Rizpah, whom she had borne to Saul, together with the five sons of Saul’s
daughter Merab, whom she had borne to Adriel son of Barzillai the Meholathite.
9 He handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed and exposed them on a hill
before the LORD. All seven of them fell together; they were put to death during
the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning.
13 David brought the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan from there, and the
bones of those who had been killed and exposed were gathered up.
14 They buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the tomb of Saul’s
father Kish, at Zela in Benjamin, and did everything the king commanded. After
that, God answered prayer in behalf of the land.
In effect, the sins of one man profoundly affected those who lived after him, even to the point of God’s refusing to answer prayer until the matter was put right and those who had been wronged spoke blessing.
