Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

“Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans, 13:10)

 
Henry Fonda.
Remember him?

In a chapter titled “The Evil of Silence,” Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, tells a powerful story that features a fourteen-year-old boy named Henry Fonda – the very same person who most of us will remember later became one of the leading actors in Hollywood.

In 1919, Ms. Wilkerson writes, a riot had broken out in Omaha, Nebraska.

“A white woman and her boyfriend had said that a black man had molested her when the couple were out on the town …. There was no investigation, no due process.” Nevertheless, people in the town designated a black person named Willie Brown as the culprit. As a result, people in the town “started a bonfire and readied it for a hanging.”

The person they designated as the perpetrator was publicly stripped , “and those up front fought each other to beat him. They hoisted him, half-conscious, onto a lamppost outside the courthouse. Then they fired bullets into his dangling body, cheering as they fired …. They burned his body in the bonfire they had made on the courthouse square. Then they tied the body to a police car and dragged the corpse through the streets of Omaha.”

Henry Fonda was helping his father at his printing plant across the street from the courthouse in the middle of the riot …. “Fonda and his father locked the plant and drove home in silence.”

“It was the most horrendous sight I’ve ever seen,” Henry Fonda would say years later.

Perhaps it is no coincidence, as Ms. Wilkerson writes, “that he would appear in many movies in which he was the moral voice calling for a life to be spared.”  For example, In the 1948 film, The Ox-Bow Incident, about vigilante violence, “it is Fonda’s character  who warns a blood-lusting mob: ‘Man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands, and hang people, without hurting everybody in the world.’”

Long after this hanging in 1919, and the hundreds like it before and since, the issue of racism remains front and center in America. Sadly, it is endemic in our society.

So much so, in fact, that Nazi Germany studied how America dealt with this issue so thoroughly that, according to one historian, “Germany became a full-fledged racist regime. American laws were the main precedents for the legislation” that led to the attempt to rid their country of Jews.

In America, there are no longer any hangings.

There is no longer a civil war that took some 650,000 American lives.

There is no longer a Jim Crow South that grew out of mass enslavement and lasted until 1970.

There are no longer separate leagues for baseball players.

Slavery is now history.  

Or, so we think.

What is still true is that one group of people in America is consistently elevated over another.

One group of people in America is still targeted in a way that another isn’t.

One group of people in America is still subject to being treated with suspicion, fear, and outright hatred.

One group of people in America is still the object of senseless brutality and even murder.

One group of people in America is still considered a danger to “white suburbs.”

This history of hatred and utter disregard for a whole group of human beings started in August 1619 – a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, when a ship carrying 20 Negroes set anchor at the mouth of the James River in what is now known as Virginia.

And, as Ms. Wilkerson so powerfully reports, “By the late 1600’s, Africans were not merely slaves, they were hostages subjected to unspeakable tortures that their captors documented without remorse.” What the original colonists did was then develop “an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world.”

Enslavement became “a living death passed down for twelve generations … that led to a form of violence that included creative levels of sadism never before seen. Slavery made the enslavers among the richest people in the world by granting them the ability to turn a human being into cash at the shortest possible notice.”

“This,” Ms. Wilkerson writes, “was what the United States was for longer than it was not ….” The author, James Baldwin, puts it this way: “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life, there has been almost no language.”  

And what was the horrific crime that the enslaved committed?
To be born with black skin.
 
What is perhaps most disturbing is that slavery was developed to its fullest horrifying level in a country that prided themselves on being “Christian” – a Christian country that long ago made sure that its various religious congregations drew the line at admitting people of color. Instead “Christian” people decided that the slaves had to develop their own churches, their own rituals, their own hymns, their own clergy.

The depth of fear and hatred of blacks has always stunned me. I grew up in a family that allowed for no distinction concerning race. My parents welcomed people of all races, national backgrounds, and religious beliefs into their home. As my one uncle used to say, “It’s like a United Nations at their house.”
Sadly, though, some of my parent’s friends wouldn’t let their children visit our home because we lived too close to those “niggers” – an extremely disparaging and insulting word used to refer to a person with black skin.
 
But, even with all that life experience, it still stunned me when in 1963 I marched for civil rights in Davenport, Iowa, and again in 1964 in Kansas City, Missouri.

What absolutely blew me away both times was the depth of pure unblemished hatred I encountered from certain white people during those marches. It not only stunned me; it terrified me. I had never encountered such a depth of revulsion and loathing.

This hatred is what is still going on – however less openly and less honestly.

This hatred is what continues to tear America apart.
This hatred is what is eating away at the soul of way too many publicly proclaimed followers of Jesus of Nazareth – the same Jesus who was crucified because of his care for the least of humanity.

This hatred is what I pray will change – soon. 

My fervent hope is that all of this hatred and revulsion will be fully  replaced by a firm resolution that all of us together – black and white – will come to fully embrace and live out the words of that first Christian, that first impassioned follower of Jesus – St. Paul:
“Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence love is the fulfillment of the law.”

My dream before I die, then, is that I will be able to witness a major healing take place in America – the healing of our deepest and most degrading and shameful national wound:
Racism.

Then, and only then, can we all join hands – black and white – and proudly sing together one of our most treasured hymns:

God bless America, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above.
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans  white with foam
God bless America, my home sweet home.

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
 
NOTES:
In his recent Mass of Installation as the new Archbishop of St. Louis, Mitchell Rozanski talked of our being “Gate-ways and not just Gate-keepers” – a reference, of course to St. Louis as the gateway to the west.  He particularly emphasized the issue of COVID-19, but then added “as a nation we find ourselves still struggling with the scars of systemic racism in our society …. This crime against human life and dignity is another, no less devastating virus, this one a man-made plague that also isolates us from one another and diminishes the God-given humanity that we all must cherish if we are to be His children.”
 
Fr. James Martin, S.J. writes:
“A reminder: when a politician is called ‘pro life’, Pro-life means not just the unborn child, but the Black person whose life is endangered, the inmate on death row, the starving homeless person, the migrant family. Pro life means pro All lives, not pro Some lives.”