MLK Jr. Day 2003

Week of Monday, January 20, 2003

On Friday December 20 Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) announced that he was stepping down as the Republican leader of the Senate because of the controversy he created by his remarks that many deemed overtly racist. Lott, you'll remember, had praised Senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign for the presidency, saying that our country would have been better off if we had elected Thurmond (December 5). Before too long media pit bulls had unearthed every conceivable racist implication in Lott's past, including his fraternity days forty years ago.

Is Lott a bigot who in an unguarded moment revealed his “real” feelings? It's hard to imagine a seasoned politician being so careless, foolish and insensitive. Or maybe what we have here is another example of the tremendous power of the media, in this instance to bring down a politician for uttering a single sentence. Lott had predictable detractors (Bill and Hillary) and unusual defenders like the black civil rights activist John Lewis (D-Georgia) who said he accepted Lott's apology. Still, after five public apologies, including an interview on Black Entertainment Television, Lott was a huge liability to the Republicans and they dropped him. I'm glad they did.

Sad to say, others have said and done worse than Lott without consequence. For the Democrats's own Lott-figure, consider Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia), who at one time was the Senate's president pro tem, putting him third in line for the presidency behind the vice president and the speaker of the House. Byrd quit the KKK in 1940, but six years later wrote letters supporting the group. He voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and was the only Senator to vote against both of the only two black Supreme Court nominees (Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas). Just last year Byrd referred to “white niggers” in an interview.

I don't know if Lott or Byrd are racists. I find it impossible to know when any politician speaks out of admirable political principle regardless of consequences, out of sheer and despicable opportunism, or as a matter of personal conviction. Lott's comments were disturbing enough, whether or not they reflect his personal biases, but what I find more deeply disturbing is how his comments revealed the state of race and reconciliation in our country. Scratch just beneath the surface and you realize that things are not good. Yes, our country is better off than not too long ago, but we have a long way to go. The Lott fiasco, then, raises social questions about race relations in our country that are far more important than the personal questions about Lott.

Consider these four examples. Since 1995 there have been some thirty black churches burned by suspicious fires.¹ Some of our state legislatures have had to debate whether to continue flying the confederate battle flag, even though for many of our citizens, both black and white, doing so perpetuates an offensive symbol of oppression. Or again, in his recent book At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (2002), Philip Dray documents what he calls a “systematized reign of terror” in our country. According to Dray, between 1882 and 1944, at least 3,417 African-Americans were lynched in America (just more than one each week); it was not until 1952 that an entire year passed without a racial lynching. Finally, just last weekend George Ryan, the outgoing (Republican) Governor of Illinois, commuted the death penalty sentences of all 171 of his state's death row inmates, partly because he had concluded that the system was grossly unfair to racial minorities.

Racism in America is no worse than in most places around the world. Japanese and Koreans have a long history of hate, Arabs and Africans traded their own peoples as slaves, and Russians routinely discriminate against their citizens of central Asia descent. No one is immune, not even our beloved Shaquille O'Neal, who recently made inexcusably insensitive jests about Yao Ming, the new Chinese center in the NBA (just a joke, said Shaq). But to say that racism in America is not exceptional is hardly to excuse it.

Part of the journey with Jesus involves experiencing and then fostering racial reconciliation. One of the more remarkable stories in the New Testament is about this very issue as it erupted between what might be argued are our two greatest apostles—Peter and Paul. When Paul wrote to the Galatians he did so to address a uniquely racial (or ethnic) issue: should Gentile believers be compelled to obey the Jewish law in order to be fully Christian? The answer was clearly no, he said, then he told a story.

When Peter came to Antioch, Paul wrote, “I opposed him to his face.” Why? Because even Peter had succumbed to a form of racism. At one time Peter, a conscientious Jew, freely ate with Gentiles. But then he changed his mind under pressure from other believers and fell into the sin of racial hypocrisy. He separated himself from these Gentiles and as a consequence others, including Barnabas, followed his example. Paul argued that Peter was in the wrong. He was not “acting in line with the truth of the Gospel,” and so he rebuked Peter “in front of them all.” A few pages later in his letter to the Galatians Paul accentuates the radical equality of all people before God when he writes that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Galatians 3:28).

To celebrate Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month I decided to read some primary materials on the subject. Of all the many good options, I chose three slave narratives: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), and then Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs. These three, and the hundreds of other people who wrote slave narratives, are nothing less than American heroes.² Their autobiographies played a crucial role in the abolitionist movement by documenting firsthand the horrors of slavery, contrary to those who claimed that conditions were not so bad. Their literary brilliance belied the charge, made by many, that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. They revealed the grotesque hypocrisy of so many Christians who sanctioned slavery in the name of Christ.³ They analyzed how personal sin is bad but how institutional oppression is far worse. Women like Truth and Jacobs were some of the very first women to write about sexual exploitation and patriarchialism.

I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, and so I resonated with Trent Lott's remarks in his nationally televised interview December 16 on BET: “There was a society...that was wrong and wicked. I didn't create it, and I didn't really understand it for many years. I had concerns over some of the things I saw. But I didn't act upon them when I should have.” Is Lott a racist? I don't know. He voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday. But that's his business. For my part I thank God for King, for all those like him, and for this national holiday. These witnesses and this holiday remind me of the direction I need to travel on the journey with Jesus.

1. Cf. the PBS series by Bill Moyers entitled Forgotten Fires.
2. The first autobiographical slave narrative written in English was by Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written By Himself (1789).
3. See Stephen Haynes, Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: OUP, 2002).