|
Coming of Age
Trinity Sunday - Commemorating Thurgood Marshall[1]
May 18, 2008
The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector
I graduated from high school in 1970; college, in 1974. I came of age, moving from adolescence to young adulthood, after one historical period
and during another.
I came of age after the Civil Rights Era[2] – that era of great reform aimed at abolishing racial discrimination
and restoring suffrage in Southern states. An era which bore the fruit of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. An era in which I was
steeped in the theoria and praxis of the non-violence of Martin Luther King, Jr., which my grandmother, Audia Roberts, a first generation civil
rights advocate, made sure I knew.
And I came of age during the Black Power movement,[3] which sought to expand the aims of that earlier era to include
racial dignity and economic and political self-determination, often articulated in the context of liberty from white domination. A movement during
which I began to listen to other, angrier voices. Like that of Malcolm X, who, when commenting, generally, on America’s racism and responding
specifically to the northern boast that when compared to the former Confederate states the land above the Mason-Dixon Line[4]
was a bastion of racial equality, once said, “In America, if you’re south of Canada, you’re in the South.”
I came of age after one era and during another. Influenced by and, at times, torn between those two dominant voices – Martin, with his call
for peaceful reconciliation and Malcolm, with his call for revolution “by any means necessary,” including violence.
There was, however, another voice. One whose labor my aunt, Evelyn Roberts, who followed my grandmother in civil rights advocacy and political
activism, particularly through the NAACP, made sure I knew. Thurgood Marshall. Civil rights attorney and later Supreme Court justice. As an attorney,
his victories in arguing before the Supreme Court – particularly the 1954 landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the
segregationist educational policy of “separate but equal,” effectively ending the legal apartheid of black and white children in American public
schools – energized the civil rights movement and established racial equality as a governing principle of American life.
Martin, with protest marches and rallies and eloquent oratory, summoned all people of good will to labor for justice. Malcolm, especially in his
earlier years, with the fiery rhetoric of a separatist philosophy, galvanized black people to stand up and fight for justice. Thurgood, whose field
of engagement was the courtroom, whose pulpit was the bar, with ardent arguments for individual and equal rights under the law, was as much a
defining figure in our nation’s long and slow trek toward the realization of justice for all.
And in this, Thurgood, for me, is a clarifying lens through which I see an essential part of our ongoing national, verily, our current parish
dialogue about that historically intractable issue of race. Intractable because we have yet to achieve the fullest victory of justice for all.
Intractable because a mark of our human sinfulness remains our proclivity to judge others based on their skin color and not the content of their
character. Intractable because we still don’t know how to talk with one another about race in a way that allows us to hear and understand without
first having to defend our views. Intractable because across the dividing line of race, our perceptions are so different. One sees individual and
personal acts of prejudice whereas another, structural and institutional bias. One perceives Jeremiah Wright[5] to be
a racist demagogue whereas another, a champion of his people. Hence, when we talk across the dividing line of race, it often sounds, seems, is as
if we are speaking different and untranslatable languages.
Thurgood, as an advocate and activist, is, for me, a clarifying lens. For if we confine our talk about race – or about any of the other pressing
issues of our time, climate change, gender disparity, poverty – only to our personal disclosure, however earnest, of our individual attitudes and
never work to address the structures, the institutions that produce and maintain the inequality of opportunity, then, justice remains a dream, at
best, deferred and, at worst, denied.
Advocacy and activism, I believe, are as much within the sphere of religion, I daresay spirituality as are prayer and worship. So it was that Amos,
as a prophet sent by God, was called to proclaim his withering word about the righteousness of economic and social justice to
God’s people who had forgotten this purpose of their existence. So it was that Jesus, as an act of his divinely ordained ministry, condemned
the institutional abuses of those scribes and Pharisees who made the Law an end in itself for them and not a means toward the justice of liberating
others to love God and love neighbor.
It is impossible to separate completely religion and politics. For, I believe, politics – the root of which is the Greek, polis, meaning, the city
or more generally, citizenship – at its purest, is not an act of manipulation, but rather an art of relation among people in community. When Jesus
called his disciples and launched his public ministry that was as much a political act as it was religious.
So, again, I believe that advocacy and activism are a part of the religious life. This is especially true for Christians. Our faith is both incarnational
and communal. Christianity is all about God’s Spirit taking human flesh, dwelling in the world as a body that lives to do deeds of love and justice so
to reflect in nature the nature of God.
So, again, I say that Thurgood Marshall – as a prophetic voice, who challenged the institution of the judiciary to do justice – is a model for us,
particularly at this time in our nation when we have been reminded afresh of how intractable the issue of race remains, how much we still need to
talk with one another, and before, while, and after we have talked, how much we need to do something.
[1] At the 2006 General Convention, the Diocese of Washington presented a resolution calling for the addition of Thurgood Marshall to Lesser Feasts and Fasts with May 17 as the designated annual day of observance. (On that date in 1954, the Supreme Court rendered its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.) Following procedure, the 2009 General Convention, meeting this summer, will consider the matter for a formal vote. The Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, Bishop of Washington, has encouraged congregations in the Diocese of Washington to honor Justice Marshall’s memory. The lessons appointed for the day are: Amos 5.10-15, 21-24; Psalm 34.15-22; 1 Corinthians 13.1-13; and Matthew 23.1-11.
[2] Approximately 1955-1968
[3] Approximately 1968-1975
[4] A demarcation line between four states, forming the borders of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, surveyed in 1763-67 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, which later in common parlance became the symbolic, cultural north-south U.S. boundary.
[5] The Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, the church of Barack Obama, a Democrat Party presidential candidate. In March of this year, several soundbites of the Reverend Wright’s sermons received widespread airplay and were subjected to criticism for being “anti-American.”
|