REDEMPTION
For a good hour this afternoon, I walked around a grey, drizzled lower Manhattan, cluttered with commerce and the tense faces of brokers and others watching another stock market swoon. The sour looks of daily witnesses to three hundred point drops have these days become ordinary, and the diminishing light of a late November afternoon overcome by a steady windswept rain was of a piece.
But I was smiling.
Because yesterday, my country redeemed itself.
By birth (and a paradoxically loose but still abiding adult practice), I am a Catholic. So if slavery is America's original sin, we have spent much of the the past 232 years on our knees in the confessional.
Jefferson told the world that we believed "all men are created equal." But we were lying. And like all liars, we were crafting creative justifications. Blacks were slaves in 1776. Conveniently, when the Founders wrote a Constitution, those same slaves were turned into "three-fifths" persons just to give the slavocracy more seats in the House of Representatives and a lock on the Electoral College and therefore the Presidency. To salve our collective conscience, we had that same Constitution outlaw the slave trade. It turns out, of course, that our conscience was not all that troubled. We did not make the slave trade ban effective until 1808. And we certainly didn't end slavery.
For the first half of the nineteenth century, the great statesmen of our American republic -- Clay and Calhoun and Webster -- spent much of their time fashioning compromises with our original sin. In 1820, they drew a line across the country, outlawing slavery in territories to the north while enshrining it in those to the south. Fortunately for the cartographers, Massachusetts had enough left over land to create Maine (which became a newly admitted free state), permitting the admission of Missouri as a slave state. This, of course, didn't last, essentially because, when it comes to sin, line drawing is always a non-starter. Thirty eight years later, Kansas bled as slaveholders and free soilers battled for the soul of the nation in the territories of the west. And two years after that, we were at war with ourselves, often pretending the war was about everything -- states rights, property, traditions -- other than what it was really about.
That too is one of sin's solitary markers. We call it denial today. It makes smart folks dumb and dumb folks . . . dumber.
Lincoln became our great confessor. His journey from those great debates with Stephen Douglas to the tragic end of Booth's gun was preternaturally Biblical. In the first, he still played the racist we all were, laboring to assure Illinois that he did not want to marry a black or even hang with one. By April 1865, however, he had confessed that every drop of blood from the slave man's lash might have to be answered by one from the soldier's sword. Because, as he put it in his Second Inaugural, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
As it turned out, Lincoln was right. The Civil War didn't really end in 1865, it just morphed from an illusory Reconstruction of promised equality, where blacks for a time voted and were even elected as representatives in the newly readmitted Confederate states, to the savage reality of Jim Crow, the Klan, lynchings, disenfranchisement and the new slavery of sharecropper poverty. No lie was too egregious in the service of this continuing sin, from the Confederacy's decision to throw the Presidential election to the loser in 1876 in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the formerly rebellious states, to the Supreme Court's bastardization twenty years later of the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection, legalizing institutionalized racism under the banner of segregation and the legal myth of "separate but equal".
If God works in strange ways, He seemed to be putting in overtime in the United States. We went through agrarian populism, the Progressive Era, World War I, the New Deal and World War II, each in its own way a triumph of the American ideals of freedom, equality and representative democracy. In the famous words of Mary Elizabeth Lease, our farmers raised "less corn and more hell." We rescued our children from robber barons, our productive capital from the trusts, our European ancestors from the killing fields of trench warfare, our economy from depression, and the world from Nazi tyranny. But we could not rescue ourselves from our past. The sons and daughters of former slaves couldn't vote in our elections, go to our schools, live in our neighborhoods, join our unions, eat at our lunch counters, stay in our hotels, or swim in our pools. When Al Gore's father was awakened one night in Washington by drunken revellers telling him we don't want to eat with them, or drink with them, or marry them or go to school with them, the senior Gore asked if they "wanted to go to heaven with them." To that rare Southerner who spurned the Southern Manifesto, they replied, "No, we'd just as soon go to hell with you and Kefauver."
Before Tuesday, the three most important black Americans in my lifetime were Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King.
Robinson made America look in the mirror, exposing the hypocrisy of our fight against Nazism with black soldiers who could not drink from the same water fountain, or compete in the same league, as their white brothers once they returned home. He only asked for a chance. Not four strikes. Or three balls. And no one shortened the base paths when he ran them. After a ten year career with the Brooklyn Dodgers (begun later than most because of his war service and professional baseball's color line), he was a first ballot Hall of Famer. In retirement, he tirelessly worked to advance the economic fortunes of victims of prejudice and never let up in his demand that his own profession open its managerial and executive jobs to qualified people of color.
Today he remains America's most important athlete.
Thurgood Marshall made America look at its Constitution. At great risk to his own safety, he travelled far and wide representing (often without pay and always without much) the victims of America's original sin. He painstakingly shepherded more than a dozen cases through the courts, challenging segregation in a methodical attack that ultimately led to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of public schools. As the first black Justice on the Supreme Court, he never wavered in his commitment to equal protection and equal rights.
Today he remains America's most important lawyer.
Martin Luther King, Jr. made America look at its soul. If racism was fundamentally wrong, Christ had taught him that people could be fundamentally good, and that redemption was possible. The dream inspired by his faith was not one from which sinners -- of which he was one -- were excluded. Rather, it was possible because, as sinners, we still could change. He took his promise of redemption to the bus depots, bridges, slums and churches of America. And then to the White House and Lincoln Memorial. All these venues were his altar. Goaded by Dr. King's efforts, President Johnson lived out his own extraordinary profile in courage -- demanding that Congress pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which LBJ knew would (and has) cost his party the South for more than a generation.
Today Martin Luther King, Jr. remains America's most important preacher.
Yesterday, America finally got off its knees. Its confession ended. Its sin was forgiven.
And today, somewhere in Islamabad . . . or Kabul . . . or Tel Aviv, there is a kid who will not strap a bomb to his body and blow up a bus full of innocents in part because we just elected as President a black guy whose middle name is Hussein, and have now practiced what for more than two centuries we have preached. All men are created equal.
We should thank Barack Obama for offering to serve.
And ourselves for having accepted.
And God, for Her infinite forgiveness.
For a good hour this afternoon, I walked around a grey, drizzled lower Manhattan, cluttered with commerce and the tense faces of brokers and others watching another stock market swoon. The sour looks of daily witnesses to three hundred point drops have these days become ordinary, and the diminishing light of a late November afternoon overcome by a steady windswept rain was of a piece.
But I was smiling.
Because yesterday, my country redeemed itself.
By birth (and a paradoxically loose but still abiding adult practice), I am a Catholic. So if slavery is America's original sin, we have spent much of the the past 232 years on our knees in the confessional.
Jefferson told the world that we believed "all men are created equal." But we were lying. And like all liars, we were crafting creative justifications. Blacks were slaves in 1776. Conveniently, when the Founders wrote a Constitution, those same slaves were turned into "three-fifths" persons just to give the slavocracy more seats in the House of Representatives and a lock on the Electoral College and therefore the Presidency. To salve our collective conscience, we had that same Constitution outlaw the slave trade. It turns out, of course, that our conscience was not all that troubled. We did not make the slave trade ban effective until 1808. And we certainly didn't end slavery.
For the first half of the nineteenth century, the great statesmen of our American republic -- Clay and Calhoun and Webster -- spent much of their time fashioning compromises with our original sin. In 1820, they drew a line across the country, outlawing slavery in territories to the north while enshrining it in those to the south. Fortunately for the cartographers, Massachusetts had enough left over land to create Maine (which became a newly admitted free state), permitting the admission of Missouri as a slave state. This, of course, didn't last, essentially because, when it comes to sin, line drawing is always a non-starter. Thirty eight years later, Kansas bled as slaveholders and free soilers battled for the soul of the nation in the territories of the west. And two years after that, we were at war with ourselves, often pretending the war was about everything -- states rights, property, traditions -- other than what it was really about.
That too is one of sin's solitary markers. We call it denial today. It makes smart folks dumb and dumb folks . . . dumber.
Lincoln became our great confessor. His journey from those great debates with Stephen Douglas to the tragic end of Booth's gun was preternaturally Biblical. In the first, he still played the racist we all were, laboring to assure Illinois that he did not want to marry a black or even hang with one. By April 1865, however, he had confessed that every drop of blood from the slave man's lash might have to be answered by one from the soldier's sword. Because, as he put it in his Second Inaugural, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
As it turned out, Lincoln was right. The Civil War didn't really end in 1865, it just morphed from an illusory Reconstruction of promised equality, where blacks for a time voted and were even elected as representatives in the newly readmitted Confederate states, to the savage reality of Jim Crow, the Klan, lynchings, disenfranchisement and the new slavery of sharecropper poverty. No lie was too egregious in the service of this continuing sin, from the Confederacy's decision to throw the Presidential election to the loser in 1876 in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the formerly rebellious states, to the Supreme Court's bastardization twenty years later of the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection, legalizing institutionalized racism under the banner of segregation and the legal myth of "separate but equal".
If God works in strange ways, He seemed to be putting in overtime in the United States. We went through agrarian populism, the Progressive Era, World War I, the New Deal and World War II, each in its own way a triumph of the American ideals of freedom, equality and representative democracy. In the famous words of Mary Elizabeth Lease, our farmers raised "less corn and more hell." We rescued our children from robber barons, our productive capital from the trusts, our European ancestors from the killing fields of trench warfare, our economy from depression, and the world from Nazi tyranny. But we could not rescue ourselves from our past. The sons and daughters of former slaves couldn't vote in our elections, go to our schools, live in our neighborhoods, join our unions, eat at our lunch counters, stay in our hotels, or swim in our pools. When Al Gore's father was awakened one night in Washington by drunken revellers telling him we don't want to eat with them, or drink with them, or marry them or go to school with them, the senior Gore asked if they "wanted to go to heaven with them." To that rare Southerner who spurned the Southern Manifesto, they replied, "No, we'd just as soon go to hell with you and Kefauver."
Before Tuesday, the three most important black Americans in my lifetime were Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King.
Robinson made America look in the mirror, exposing the hypocrisy of our fight against Nazism with black soldiers who could not drink from the same water fountain, or compete in the same league, as their white brothers once they returned home. He only asked for a chance. Not four strikes. Or three balls. And no one shortened the base paths when he ran them. After a ten year career with the Brooklyn Dodgers (begun later than most because of his war service and professional baseball's color line), he was a first ballot Hall of Famer. In retirement, he tirelessly worked to advance the economic fortunes of victims of prejudice and never let up in his demand that his own profession open its managerial and executive jobs to qualified people of color.
Today he remains America's most important athlete.
Thurgood Marshall made America look at its Constitution. At great risk to his own safety, he travelled far and wide representing (often without pay and always without much) the victims of America's original sin. He painstakingly shepherded more than a dozen cases through the courts, challenging segregation in a methodical attack that ultimately led to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of public schools. As the first black Justice on the Supreme Court, he never wavered in his commitment to equal protection and equal rights.
Today he remains America's most important lawyer.
Martin Luther King, Jr. made America look at its soul. If racism was fundamentally wrong, Christ had taught him that people could be fundamentally good, and that redemption was possible. The dream inspired by his faith was not one from which sinners -- of which he was one -- were excluded. Rather, it was possible because, as sinners, we still could change. He took his promise of redemption to the bus depots, bridges, slums and churches of America. And then to the White House and Lincoln Memorial. All these venues were his altar. Goaded by Dr. King's efforts, President Johnson lived out his own extraordinary profile in courage -- demanding that Congress pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which LBJ knew would (and has) cost his party the South for more than a generation.
Today Martin Luther King, Jr. remains America's most important preacher.
Yesterday, America finally got off its knees. Its confession ended. Its sin was forgiven.
And today, somewhere in Islamabad . . . or Kabul . . . or Tel Aviv, there is a kid who will not strap a bomb to his body and blow up a bus full of innocents in part because we just elected as President a black guy whose middle name is Hussein, and have now practiced what for more than two centuries we have preached. All men are created equal.
We should thank Barack Obama for offering to serve.
And ourselves for having accepted.
And God, for Her infinite forgiveness.
Posts
Amen. Amen. I will have my students at Le Moyne read this tonight for our continuing discussion tomorrow in the Senior Honors class about the election. Beautifully written. Thanks, Neil.
ReplyDeleteVinny
Simply elected a person of mixed race does nothing for the ills that still inflict our nation. Nothing has been redeemed. Young asian girls are still enslaved into the sex trade right here in Southern Nevada. Young black men still practice indiscriminate sex with young black women because it is considered some form of masucline trophy. Bigotry is still preached from Obama's favorite preacher and Farrakhan still thinks Bush somehow controlled a hurricane though racism. No, what happened was left with the choice of Obama over yet another Republican, the American electorate chose against McCain, not for Obama. The question remains, will they appreciate that choice 4 years from now? Lets leave off the liberal white guilt and look at reality. It may not feel as good, but it is reality.
ReplyDeleteSee, that's the thing, Bob. Those of us whose eyes were open Tuesday night saw that this was a new day, that people across the globe reveled in the election of Barack Obama and that that spirit of enthusiasm cannot be denied, no matter how much you may want to cover your ears to drown out the cheers.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are girls AND boys from Asia, India, Eastern Europe and others enslaved in the sex trade, and this has not changed over the 8 years President Bush led us. And, yes, some young black men will practice indiscriminate sex with young black women as will some young white men with young white women, such as Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter and her child’s father, a young man of questionable character, to say the least.
I don’t think what Neil is saying here is that on election day – months before Barack Obama even takes over the Presidency – that the world’s problems will be solved, but that - for the first time in 8 years - people the world over have a shared sense of hope, of pride, of admiration and faith in our Commander in Chief. And that is a wonderful thing.
Give the man the same chance you gave Bush. You just might be pleased with the result....