Category Archives: Civil Rights

The Stones Cry Out

                The Stones Will Cry Out

 In the excitement over the election, perhaps you missed this little news story. It was on Page 9 of the November 8, 2012, New York Times: “Anti-Obama Protest at Ole Miss Turns Unruly.” Early Wednesday morning, a crowd of 400 people – fueled by social media – formed outside the student union building. They chanted racial slurs, yelled profanity, and lit Obama campaign signs on fire. They probably sang “Dixie,” as well. Two people were arrested for disorderly conduct.

                This nasty little bit of business probably wouldn’t have drawn much more than a paragraph had it not been at the University of Mississippi, the site of so much segregation-fueled hatred in the 1950s and ‘60s during the Civil Rights Movement.

                To be fair, Ole Miss has tried to redeem its past in recent years. The Times reported that the school solemnly marked the 50th anniversary of desegregation in September, changed its mascot from a Confederate soldier to a black bear, and even dropped “Dixie” as its fight song. Ole Miss students elected their first black homecoming queen this year. And, in the riot’s aftermath, black and white students have since walked across the campus together, holding candles and singing, in public opposition to the sentiments expressed that night.

                As one white student said, “What happened last night was really disappointing. We do have a history of racial issues, but this is not at all what our school or most students stand for.”

                It was at the University of Mississippi, you may remember, where Air Force veteran James Meredith registered in September 1962, forcing a horrific, sometimes violent, response by thousands of students and outside agitators. President John F. Kennedy eventually called in 31,000 federal troops to force Ole Miss to abide by the law of the land. But Meredith’s couple of years on the campus were living hell.

                The sad, sick little riot at Ole Miss the other night reminded me of a story told me by English contemporary Christian artist Adrian Snell. You must understand that to be a CCM artist in the U.K. means that you must really, really be called to what you do, because there is none of the Christian music infrastructure there. It’s a tiny audience and Snell and the other CCM artists essentially live hand-to-mouth – and keep their day jobs. Not surprisingly, Adrian is a clear-eyed realist. He’s not a mystic, not a dreamer, not a romantic. He writes songs about his faith and is occasionally allowed to sing them before small audiences that may or may not give him a love offering. He’s also very talented.

                Adrian was invited to perform at a church in Germany. Church members promised to provide his transportation costs, room and board, and take up a love offering. He agreed. A lovely older German couple picked him up at the airport on the appropriate evening and drove him to his destination – a town in the Black Forest. The couple spoke passable English and they had an uneventful trip until …

                … until they entered the Black Forest.

                The closer they came to their destination, the more difficulty Adrian had in speaking. He told me he felt as if he were in a small, pitch-black closet – and that the walls were closing in. There was an unspeakable sensation, he recalled, of oppression.

                When they finally arrived at the church, a nice crowd was waiting. Adrian took his guitar, stumbled to the stage, and discovered that he could not sing. He tried several times. Nothing happened. The sense of oppression was too great.

Finally, his hosts led him off stage. The German husband turned to his wife and said, “Well, it has happened again.”

Adrian managed to blurt out, “What has happened again!?”

“Sometimes when we bring singers here, they find they can’t sing, just as it has happened to you.”

“Why?” Adrian cried.

“We believe it is because the church is on the grounds of a Nazi concentration camp where many, many innocent people were murdered. You are apparently sensitive to this.”

Adrian said he spent the night at the couple’s home and they took him to the airport the following day.

In Luke 19:40 (NIV), Jesus tells His disciples, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

Mary once had a similar experience. It happened when I was co-writing the book Madman in Waco with Brad Bailey. Shortly after the fire at the Branch Davidian compound that killed so many people, Mary and I drove out to the site. It was dusk. The feds had taken the fences down and we walked towards to the ashes of the barrack-like buildings. We were alone that evening. Suddenly, Mary was overcome with grief and a feeling of oppression and we had to leave immediately. I’m not as perceptive or intuitive as Mary, but even I felt … something that night.

The stones will cry out …

Perhaps you’ve had a moment like that, a moment where something otherworldly or supernatural or spiritual has washed over you.

Perhaps it was even a good feeling. I had that once – and only once – while visiting the little village of Eyam in the north of England. On the path towards the village of Hathersage one evening, I felt for the one time in my life a sense of being … home. I even broke down in tears. I’ve never had that sensation since.

As you may know, I have been immersed in the intersection of the Civil Rights Movement and black sacred music in recent years. Consequently, I have been to many of the places in the South where blood was shed – Birmingham and Memphis, in particular. Perhaps the stones still cry out there as well, just as they do in the Black Forest and at Ole Miss.

If nothing else, the stupid little riot at the University of Mississippi reminds us that as a people we still have a long way to go when it comes to race in this country. As a number of commentators have pointed out, you only have to over-lay a map of the Confederacy with a map of the states that voted against President Obama …

The Civil Rights Movement is an on-going movement, whether we think it is old history or not. Ole Miss reminds how far will still have to go.

 

The Melancholia of Completion. Maybe.

“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler (credited, but I think the quote is older still)

I have (virtually) finished my book. Six-seven years in the making, I’m (virtually) finished with Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, Volume 1. Oh, there is still the odd nit to pick. And, once I send it to the publisher (Penn State University Press), there will likely be lots of email flurries between my computer and their editors. It ended up at 83,000 words, for those of you who are interested in such things. More than a thousand footnotes. And only one or two snarky comments.

That means I am free to resume blogging, which I’ve missed. Once I started the actual writing, I put almost all of my other writing aside. Thanks to Gardner Campbell, I’d found blogging to be a helpful tool, emotionally and creatively.

As those of you who have written books, dissertations, theses, screenplays, songs, symphonies, and very, very long letters home may know, it is a curious feeling to complete something this large, something that has been a this big of a part of your life for such a long time. I’ve moved (twice!), kids have gotten married, dictatorships have (hopefully) fallen, Baylor’s athletic programs have flourished, my knees have failed me. The feeling of finishing is not really sadness, it’s not really relief. It’s just … curious. As Robert Haas once said: “It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”

I’m not so sure about that. The research (for the most part) was exciting. The writing (for the most part) was exhilarating. The rewriting (for the most part) was rewarding. The finishing? Slightly melancholy.

It’s not so much that Volume 2 is left to do, either. I haven’t discussed a deadline with Penn State. (For you blessed few who have NOT heard me rattle on about the book, Volume 1 covers the use of black sacred music as a form of protest from the American Civil War through the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Volume 2 will cover from the earliest Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides through Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago and Memphis through the Poor People’s March and Resurrection City. At least it will if I live that long.) For me, the act of completion the last couple of days has been something akin to … melancholy. It is bittersweet. I’m not sad or blue, just … reflective.

Part of that may be due to devoting so much of my life to a single topic, even something as far-reaching and complex as this one. You wonder, at least I do, did I miss something along the way? What did I give up over the many weeknights, weekends, and supposed vacations I worked? Yesterday, I heard Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle” on the radio and all but broke into tears. How many times did I tell the kids “No, I’ve got to work. You go on and play.”? Once is probably too much. Sorry guys.

But what has kept me from completely wallowing in morose introspection has been my unshakeable belief that this topic matters. The longer I got involved in the interviews and research, the more convinced I became that this vast, far-reaching subject is worthy of continued study. I suppose every writer, fiction or non-fiction, thinks the same way, ultimately.

But here’s why I believe that a better understanding of the Civil Rights Movement is important today: It’s an on-going process. WAY too many people in this country of all races and creeds, of all genders and ages, still do not enjoy the full fruits of democracy. Too many poor people, too many people with differing ideas about sexuality, too many people with various physical, mental and emotional challenges do not share equally in the guarantees built into our Constitution. And when one person is denied their civil rights, we all suffer…

Is the study of the power and influence of African-American sacred music of the past 150 years still relevant? I really, really think so.

Perhaps you saw this little story, tucked away in the margins of most news sources. An African-American couple – male and female, for those of you who care about such things – sought to get married in a Baptist church in Mississippi. The congregation denied them that privilege. Even the Tea Party Republican governor was appalled: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/03/mississippi-governor-wedding-ban-unfortunate

Alas, this just as easily could have happened (and probably has, we just don’t know about it) in Texas or Alabama or Illinois. This topic will never go away. In a nation that was founded with a significant portion of the population considered to be inferior, this problem is likely to always be with us, in one form or another. It’s like racism (and the other –isms) are in our national DNA somehow.

So, I’ll take a little break. I’ll wait for the edits from the Penn State University Press editor. I’ll begin to leisurely organize yet again the mountains of research I’ve accumulated for Volume 2. I’ll vow to spend more time with Mary and the kids and grandkids and friends and family. I’ll read more. I’ll email you.

And I’ll out-wait this odd little feeling of … (virtual) completion.

High John de Conquer and Holy Laughter

From Zora Neale Hurston’s The Sanctified Church:

High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning. First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum. Black people had an irresistible impulse to laugh. High John the Conquer was a man in full, and had come to live and work on the plantations, and all of the slave folks knew him in the flesh.

The sign of his man was a laugh, and his singing-symbol was a drum. No parading drum-shout like soldiers out for show. It did not call to the feet of those who were fixed to hear it. It was an inside thing to live by. It was sure to be heard when and where the work was hardest, and the lot the most cruel. It helped the slaves endure. They knew that something better was coming. So they laughed in the face of things and sang, “I’m so glad! Trouble don’t last always.” And the white people who heard them were struck dumb that they could laugh. In an outside way, this was Old Massa’s fun, so what was Old Cuffy laughing for?

Old Massa couldn’t know, of course, but High John de Conquer was there walking his plantation like a natural man.

You never know how or when the threads of your lives intertwine. I have written three books in recent years and, upon reflection, I see that they are inter-related: People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, Reluctant Prophets and Clueless Disciples: Understanding the Bible by Telling Its Stories, and Jesus Laughed: The Redemptive Power of Humor. And now that I’ve begun work on Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, I see where they all connect. They’ve all helped prepare me for this moment.

I wrote Jesus Laughed in part because of the visits Mary and I had made to black churches in the course of writing People Get Ready. Black churches resound with laughter before, during, and after the services in a way that the white churches I’ve attended do not. Where did we lose that capacity to laugh?

I’m writing Nothing But Love in God’s Water in part because of the ways black sacred song — from the spirituals through the union movements through the Civil Rights movement — has continued to irrepressibly bubble up and envelope black people at their times of greatest need … as if this music is always there, always available, always waiting for a moment like this.

And now I stumble across Zora Neale Hurston’s essay on High John de Conquer, a mythic black figure who pre-dates John Henry and Stagger (or Stack-o) Lee. High John’s weapons are laughter and song. And speed. High John is fast, as Hurston writes:

Maybe he was in Texas when the lash fell on a slave in Alabama, but before the blood was dry on the back, he was there. A faint pulsing of a drum like a goat-skin stretched over a heart, that came nearer and closer, then sombody in the saddened quarters would feel like laughing and say, “Now High John de Conquer, Old Mass couldn’t get the best of him. That old John was a case!”  Then everybody began to smile.

It’s about story — a story that came from Africa that sustained the slaves and their descendents for generations. It’s about song — songs that came from Africa and enveloped the best of the Christian faith and withstood the dogs and water cannons in Birmingham. It’s about laughter — laughter that came from Africa and enabled blacks in the Jim Crow south to laugh secretly at those who spent most of their waking moments trying to figure out ways to crush High John and the millions like him.

It is no accident, Hurston writes, that High John de Conquer has evaded the ears of white people. They were not supposed to know. You can’t know what folks won’t tell you.

And so it is with Nothing But Love in God’s Water. I’m teasing out from the songs and singers HOW this music helped them get over. WHAT this music provided that enabled them to challenge the most powerful nation on the planet armed only with love and justice. It’s all there in those on spirituals and those unstoppable gospel songs — the stories, the laughter, the music. The trouble is, of course, is that I’m seeing (and hearing) through a glass darkly. 

And armed this knowledge, once again, I pray for strength every day to do that song, that laughter, that story justice.

Marian Anderson and Civil Rights

Marian Anderson in Washington D.C.

My research into the influence of black sacred music on the Civil Rights Movement continues. In addition to Paul Robeson and Jules Bledsoe, I’ve been reading about the brilliant African American opera singer Marian Anderson, who overcome racism and sexism by the sheer force of her talent and gentle spirit. She’s probably best known today when her manager’s attempt to have her sing in Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall in 1939 was blocked by the folks who ran the Hall, the Daughters of the American Revolution (the DAR). Eleanor Roosevelt and others withdrew their membership and a fierce debate ensued… the DAR simply wouldn’t budge. They would not allow blacks to sing in the Hall, even though it belongs to all Americans.

However, while all of this is going on, Anderson is purposefully NOT being made aware of the brouhaha. She’s on a grueling concert tour, one that will take her, for the first time, into the Segregated South.

At last, with the help of the White House, a massive outdoor Easter concert is arranged at the Lincoln Memorial, one that 75,000 will hear in person and millions more on the radio.

Anderson’s manager wires her the good news. So, where IS Marian Anderson at that very moment? She is …

… wait for it …

… in a hotel in Waco, Texas, following at concert in the city.