“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”—
Eugene V. Debs, Socialist candidate for President – 1855-1926
Sunday, August 17th was one of those days that television provided me with more than one story about the presence, participation and performance of persons who are black.
I rushed home from church to watch the Melissa Harris Perry program on MSNBC, tennis star Serena Williams won the final of another tennis tournament, the all-black Little League team from Chicago played and lost its first game, later, the Philadelphia LIttle League team with its amazing girl pitcher, Mo’ne Davis (she did not pitch on Sunday, but she did play,) her team lost, the Church service to honor the life of Michael Brown in Ferguson, to mourn his death, support his family, and decry why and how he was killed, was a service that reflected the black Church tradition of celebration, prayer, praise, proclamation, social analysis, fund raising, renewed commitment and a call and a cry for nonviolence by those who protested the killing of Michael Brown.
My edition of the NY Times did not carry the story of the violence amidst the nonviolence that took place in Ferguson, Missouri on Sunday night because of the time of its publication. But, it was that violence that prompted me to begin this writing with the words of Eugene Debs; words that I first read years ago, and now for me, are appropriate for this moment in USA history.
VIOLENCE amidst the NONVIOLENCE; The nonviolence that we were taught in the Civil Rights Movement had practical, political, and persuasive aspects that at times are minimized as we proclaim the moral and ethical value of nonviolence. The fact of the matter is that although blacks are daily restricted and restrained by the lasting legacies of slavery and racial segregation; we have not been able to communicate what those in the Tea Party, say to the nation; “DON’T TREAD ON ME”.
If any group of people have been victimized by government tyranny at every level, it is those who are black who are neither indigenous, nor immigrants, but whose ancestors were imported to provide free slave labor for the economic and physical building of the USA. Even, with the ready acceptance of some who proclaim their 2nd Amendment right to carry weaponry in public, black persons are at risk whenever there is any semblance of real or possible violent response by them, to governmental, anti-black, sins of commission and/or omission. Unfortunately the anti-social acts of some persons in Ferguson, Missouri can be used by some to avoid the reality of the police violence that precipitated what happened in Ferguson.
In “THE CASE for REPARATIONS” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (the cover story of The ATLANTIC magazine, June issue) says If we do not allow our understandings, misunderstandings, disagreements and declarations of the impracticability of reparations get in the way, the cover of this issue of The ATLANTIC as it reminds us of our national racial history, re; blacks, can help us understand what is going on in Ferguson, Missouri. After listing the contradictory actions of a nation toward blacks from its very beginnings, we read, “The nation will not be WHOLE until it responds to this history.”
Many persons seem to experience some kind of “holy fit” (whatever that means) whenever socialism or socialist is mentioned. Yet, at times we as a nation seem to engage in “socialism for the rich” and “capitalism for the poor”. It is not the socialism of Debs that caused me to remember the quote at the beginning of these words, but rather these words in the quotation:
“We deceive ourselves if we proclaim class realities are unknown in the USA. They are present and one of the ways we have been historically hoodwinked is to engage in the practice of separating/segregating people by race.” in what Debs describes as the “lower class”. “Imagine”, what might have happened and who we might be today as a nation, if in my native North Carolina & Texas, the black poor and the white poor had united and collaborated?
And today, if the struggling middle class of all races, realized that they were being victimized, not by capitalism, but by the greed that seems to go hand-in-glove with much of capitalism. The economic inequalities that blacks, women and others experience today, and the gap between the “CEO class” and everybody else, ought not require a long-dead socialist like Eugene Debs to wake us up, but rather all of us who believe that those final words of the Pledge of Allegiance; “…with Liberty and Justice for all”, has yet-to-be realized economic implications.
It could be that because I have been arrested 4 times and detained for civil disobedience, I am a member of the “criminal element” and therefore sympathetic to it. While those of us who have been arrested because of a cause are viewed with some favor, the penalties re denial of voting rights, employment, acceptance, etc., of those whose “crimes” are without favor are, indeed, severe.
And, because rehabilitation of them is suspect and re-entry to a place in society for them is not universally accepted, we might better understand why some despite the strong calls for nonviolence in Ferguson, did not heed those calls. It is not a justification for the violence we have seen in Ferguson, but my memories of the violence in Boston on Blue Hill Avenue after the assassination of Martin Luther King, when I and other community leaders sought to “keep the peace”, puts me in touch with and helps me to understand that there are among us young and not-so-young people, who have given up on being responsible. They are irresponsible at times, because too many of us, as well as society, have been irresponsible towards them.
“While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” I quote in full these last words of Debs, because these PRISON – shaped words, describe the incomplete freedom of all of us, because of the imprisonment of a few of us with racial/ethnic backgrounds.
Michelle Alexander’s sub-title of her book, THE NEW JIM CROW: is, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The jailing of some because of their race and class, and the failure to jail others because of their race and class, culturally and psychologically imprisons all of us. The inequality in the jailing of persons because of their drug as well as their economic crimes, is possibly the most vivid expression of how all of our nation is imprisoned by the “chains” of class and race bias.
The late Billy Taylor, the gifted and great Jazz Pianist and Educator, played more than once at St. Marks United Methodist Church in Harlem when I was Pastor there from 1994-1997. Taylor with others wrote/composed the song that has these words:
“I wish I knew how it would feel to be be free. I wish I could break all the chains holding me. I wish I could say all the things I should say. Say ’em loud, say ’em clear for the whole world to hear.”
My prayerful hope is that the learnings that all of our nation can derive from what happened and is happening in Ferguson, Missouri, will break the chains, both visible and invisible, that continue to imprison us.
Gilbert H. Caldwell is a retired United Methodist Minister based in Asbury Park, New Jersey
