The Battle Hymn of the Republic went through my mind following the failed impeachment hearing by the Senate. In a surprise move, a Conservative senator from Utah, Mitt Romney addressed the Senate and yes the nation, and said clearly and succinctly how we was cut nearly from the same cloth as the President, that we was of the same party, that he voted for 80% of the policies he promoted, but on the grounds of faith could not let corruption of our democracy stand. On the grounds of faith.
This is the common ground for which women and men have found common purpose in this land. You can say what you want about it: you can say it’s weird, you can say it’s unnecessary, you can say it’s brave. Faith is a powerful thing, and it is also a scary thing. A faith that grounds extremism has brought us the world we see today, a polarized world of warring ideologies, all grounded in some form of faith. The dividing line between someone who uses their faith to speak truth to power and someone who is perceived as a national threat is a line drawn along the kind of a faith you profess to have.
Julia Ward Howe, a member of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington DC was brought a song by James Freeman Clarke, who briefly served a church in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The song was “John Brown’s Body.” She was tasked to write a song for the new Republic that was about to enter into Civil War. Howe used the music of John Brown’s Body, and wrote lyrics for this new Republic, but she kept a nod to John Brown. Instead of John Brown’s soul marching on, she wrote: His truth is marching on.
John Brown was a white man, an abolitionist, who led an armed revolt to capture the armory at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. His ultimate aim was to begin an armed slave revolt throughout the South, with plans to put aside one state of the union that would be completely governed and occupied by former slaves. Frederick Douglass heard of this plan, and thought it way to risky, and he was right. John Brown was captured and executed. Brown denied a religious service from any minister before his execution because all the ministers who were offered to him owned slaves or preached in favor of slavery. At his hanging were an array of witnesses that would greatly influence what this new Republic would become: Walt Whitman, Stonewall Jackson who would go on to become a Confederate general, and John Wilkes Booth would go on to assassinate President Lincoln. The literary community took note. Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame accurately predicted that Brown’s death would lead to civil war in the United States. Hugo published an open letter saying: “Politically speaking, the murder of John Brown would be an uncorrectable sin. It would create in the Union a latent fissure that would in the long run dislocate it. Brown’s agony might perhaps consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it would certainly shake the whole American democracy. You save your shame, but you kill your glory. Morally speaking, it seems a part of the human light would put itself out, that the very notion of justice and injustice would hide itself in darkness, on that day where one would see the assassination of Emancipation by Liberty itself. …”
What is often not noted in the history books is that the raid at Harper’s Ferry would not have happened without Unitarian ministers who among other abolitionists funded the raid. Theodore Parker, a radical and controversial Unitarian minister in Boston was one of the most outspoken abolitionist ministers in American history. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed allowing escaped slaves in Northern territories to be captured and sent back to their slave masters in the South, he publicly vowed that he would hide “fugitive” slaves in his church, and they would only be captured over his dead body. Parker became famous because from that moment forward he preached all his sermons with a revolver in his pulpit in case there was ever a raid. Parker kept his word, and members both white and former slaves came to hear his vision of a new republic when slavery would be no more. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister, compared Brown’s death to Jesus, stating that Brown died for the sins of a nation, the sin of slavery.
I bring all these names up for one simple reason. They were all white, and a good number of them were Unitarian. They didn’t see what was happening to black people in this country, and wonder how they could help them. They saw something much more true. They saw the slave’s lot jeopardized their liberty too. They saw something beyond partisan politics and racial identity – they saw a nation in crisis, a nation that was failing to live up to its premise of liberty and justice.
In Black history month, I think we do ourselves a disservice if we see this as a month just for black people, people with a certain skin pigment. It’s not. It’s really about the heart and soul of this nation.I am not concerned at the present that we will split. I am concerned about something far worse – that we would pay lip service to words like liberty and democracy while we tolerate a sham. I am thinking right now John Brown’s body would be rolling in his grave. Our democracy and the reality of Black History are also a narrative of White History. If we attempt to separate the two, we are missing the point. Black history is White history.
The nature of a thriving democracy, of a thriving church, of a thriving community is that we are able to vote our conscience not along partisan lines, not along racial lines, but what is for the greater good. And that sense of the greater good is an act of faith, and we are good to check out that act of faith with our community. John Brown was an outlier in his time. A White abolitionist who believed the only hope for the full liberty of Black citizens in this country was an armed revolt and a separate state. In a strange way, Brown shared a legacy with Malcolm X in his militancy more than Martin King in his ethos of nonviolence. I am not certain I would support John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry if I were alive during that time. I would probably feel like Frederick Douglass that though on one hand I admired the extent of his commitment, I could not support the means by which he sought his end. Though in the course of history looking back, we can see without this event, it’s possible we would not have abolished slavery in the United States. I do agree with Brown in one crucial respect. He identified slavery and the mentality that leads to justifying slavery as the greatest threat to democracy and the greatest threat to our well being as a people.
While we don’t have slavery in the same form today, we still do have the slave holding mentality. We still have a mentality that is prevalent that justifies its superiority. It’s a mentality that is called White. White culture and Black culture are two mentalities you see pitted against each other in this country. Where does Whiteness come from? Almost nobody here knows. Whiteness is not the same thing as where you’re people are from. It’s not English, it’s not French, it’s not Scandinavian. Whiteness is not concerned about where you’re from. In fact it thrives most where the origin story is unknown. Our view of Black and White in this country is very similar to our two party system of Democrat and Republican. As a country we are still in this simple stage where we identify each other as one or the other, and this almost always is reductive and too simplistic. Except we as a country have bought into it. We have identified with this simplistic scheme, and we have a whole nation of people who will do almost anything not to be seen as Black. This is the basis of Jim Crow law, it’s the basis of the racial make up of our neighborhoods which are so segregated, its the basis of our legal system. If you can find some way to identify as White and thus be offered an unearned sense of superiority, people have done it and are living it. It doesn’t make people bad. It makes them American. It’s a litmus test of citizenship to this day in 2020, of what you will be allowed to do, and who you are allowed to become. And this was not done by most people intentionally. They didn’t even know it was a choice. Black history is White history because both histories are linked forever, completely dependent on the other.
This would be so tragic, if it wasn’t for one simple fact: we’ve made it up. This narrative of who is more superior, of who is afforded certain rights and certain privileges is written into our history, it’s written in our laws, it’s written into our mental frameworks. But as I said, the silver lining is we’ve made it up. It’s a weed with a deep root going back to the founding of this country. John Brown’s major contribution to us other than in helping end slavery was to show people who looked like him that the definition of Whitness that was handed to them was too flimsy. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny, and holding onto what was passed down did not lead to a real sense of liberty, a real democracy, a real life. We can’t control how others see us, but we can have some sense of ownership of how we see ourselves, and how we let that vision inform our lives. Right now there is so much rampant anxiety about race because we are learning an important truth: it’s flimsy, and we made it up. We used skin pigment to define a sense of self worth, except now we see that self worth has no real history. It’s flimsy, it’s shallow, and it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Whiteness is a very fragile identity because it doesn’t have much basis in reality other than how it has been practiced to protect itself in our history and law. There is great anxiety right now about this. There is great anxiety and excitement right now about discovering who we really are as a country, outside of the easy labels and frameworks that we’ve outgrown.
We find ourselves when we attempt to identify with the most vulnerable, the most despised, the most disenfranchised because their history is also our history. Their liberty is our liberty. It is anxiety producing to notice we are living an identity we didn’t know we had. It’s even more scary to want to hold onto that identity as one notices how fragile and shallow it is. Oppression is fragile and shallow. Liberty is deep and boundless. When we identify with that which liberates, we relax and open. When we identify with that which feels protective and superior, we feel small and restless. I had a professor illustrate this point to me. It was a class on James Baldwin, the great American author. There were students in the class from all across the world. The professor was a respected scholar and thinker wrote a seminal book called Black History and Black Power, James Cone. He started a theological movement that influenced thinkers across the nation about race, religion and liberation. One day in class he began by saying that he would like to begin by first only hearing from the black perspective in the room on James Baldwin. About a third of people in the room were African American, and a number raised their hand. Then he looked at me, and he said Joseph, give us a black perspective. You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone looked at me, some with their jaws dropped. It took me a second, but I saw he was smiling, and I knew it was my time to answer that question. It doesn’t matter how you identify racially. If you see yourself as an American, Black history is your history. The more you identify with that which makes you vulnerable in this country, the freer you will become. This is the basis of true liberty. John Brown knew this. Maybe it’s about time we did too, it begins with risking going beyond the mental frameworks we’ve been handed which cause suffering for ourselves. It’s risking going against the party line to speak truth to power, and say I may be only a footnote in history if I’m lucky, but if I’m going to be a footnote I want to set the record straight: I believe in liberty. And I identify with those, who like me, are prepared for glory.
