James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In our reading for today, in the midst of intimations of Jesus' approaching death, Jesus said to the Pharisees who had come to warn him to get away from here, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.” The first part of Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer says: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Facing danger, when justice is at stake: that's what Jesus was doing; he sought to bring the helpless and forgotten into God's care. Facing the challenges before us, that's of what James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr speak.
Now listen for the call to justice in these words that were written in the late 1800's in New England – probably about an incident in Great Barrington, MA: It is early in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day… I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it to the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards –ten cents a package – and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card – refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil…. Alas, with all the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep those prizes, I said….Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote these words in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois was an educator, a scholar, writer, and an activist around the turn of the twentieth century. His well- and outspoken voice gave rise to an invigorated sense of black, African American, consciousness some sixty years later. Du Bois brings a crucial message to us all in America even to this day. He minced no words in telling what life what like for Black Folk, and in that faced the danger head on.
I don't know that when John Stokes started out as a nineteen year old senior in high school that he had heard of WEB Du Bois; I like to imagine so. Du Bois was speaking to, about John Stokes. John Stokes did have a very clear idea of the veil that separated him and people like him from the possibilities and opportunities that white folk took for granted. John Stokes has gone on to become an educator and administrator; he lived much of his life in Maryland and in Philadelphia, PA. He grew up in Prince Edward County, Virginia. His recent 2008 memoir, Students on Strike, not written until now because of some of the memories and harsh unintended consequences of the student strike he organized and subsequent Supreme Court action to folk like him, describes what he accomplished as a teenager in Prince Edward County, VA.
In the first half of the twentieth century, they lived under the rule of Jim Crow: the rules told them they were second class citizens. They faced danger whenever they were involved in a situation with people other than those like themselves. They knew not to be caught out after dark. They knew not to associate with whites too closely. They knew where to sit, what doors to use, and what latrine was available to them. They knew, with only a few exceptions, that they were not allowed to try on clothes at a store to see if they fit. They had to take their chances. For schools: Unlike the whites, they had no transportation provided to get to the one school in Farmville. 450 students attended a high school built for 180 students. There was no gymnasium, no books in the library, no central heat, no running water, no science laboratory. Because of the numbers, several tar papered outhouses built on stilts were provided as classroom space. This situation went on for years always with the promise that a new school building would be constructed. Everyone knew that separate was not equal. In practice, Plessy vs. Ferguson was a disgrace for black folk.
John Stokes, in his senior year of high, knew he did not want this for the next generation. How could he/they get the school conditions changed? He decided to face the danger of speaking out in order to make a difference. He carefully chose fifteen others who could be trusted to keep a secret and be looked at as leaders. Secrecy was needed in order to be able to carry out what was necessary without it being intercepted by parents or squelched by white folk. In order to keep identities and plans secret, they spoke of their plan using the same terms planners of the Manhattan Project used.
They spent months planning. They chose a 16 year-old freshman, Barbara Johns, to be their spokesperson. They believed they needed numbers in order to be heard and to have an effect. D-Day came on April 23, 1951; they began their student strike at the Robert Mussa Moton High School . They got no response from school officials, so John's church and their preacher became involved. They continued their student strike. The NAACP also became involved; integration of the high school became the goal.
John Stokes' Baptist preacher was threatened his job loss by his congregation when the student strike became drawn out and the goal became integration. But Rev. Lester Griffin responded saying, ‘I would sacrifice my job, money, and any property for the principles of right. I offered my life for a decadent democracy (in WWII) and I'm willing to die rather than let these children down.”
John Stokes and the many involved in that student strike, in the name of justice, faced danger, risked their lives and livelihoods in order to gain the equality they deserved. But justice did not come for a number of years. It came only after the Brown vs. Education Department Supreme Court ruling of 1954 and another five more years when the public schools re-opened in Prince Edward County : they had closed because officials refused to integrate their classes. As you know the country rocked for years to come in making the integration of public schools a reality in the north and the south. We still work toward that goal.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote at the turn of the last century “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem color line.” At the end of the twentieth century, John Hope Franklin, dean of historians of African-American life, reminds people of Du Bois's warning some ninety years earlier and continues by saying, “The problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of the color line….By any standard of measurement or evaluation the problem has not been solved in the twentieth century and this becomes part of the legacy and burden of the next century.”
Jesus as he spoke in our gospel reading says, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.” Jesus speaks in utter disappointment at the refusal of his own people to hear and heed the summons of God to draw near, to gather, and to come home. For Jesus, God's passionate desire, and bold determination is to gather God's human children closer and closer in God's embrace and love. That was at the center of Jesus' work. Like a mother hen, God seeks to draw, embrace, include, and welcome God's children – all of them. That work to draw everyone into God's love was Jesus' call, death knell, and triumph.
John Stokes was acting out of God's call – gathering all equally together in God's embrace – in education.
You can hear that call of Jesus and of God throughout the gospel of Luke. A peasant girl named Mary sings of God's revolutionary way of including those at the margins. The shepherds, who in actuality were at the fringe of society – dishonest and outside the law – are the first ones to hear the good news. When it was thought that the only good Samaritan was a dead one, the gospel raises a totally different picture of one who went the extra mile to care for a hurt traveler.
You can hear the call of Jesus even in the early days of the church when the day of Pentecost arrives. As the new community is forming in all its diversity, they recall, “In the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams….”
We are not finished dreaming; God is not finished with us. I have lifted up Du Bois and the actions that John Stokes took as a reminder of where we have been and where we are today. This is Black History month: a time for such recalling.
But I bring this up also because our schools are our present and our future. I read last week of two charter schools in Albany which are at risk. In the last couple of weeks, I read of the Albany Public High School being put on notification that because of its being on the warning list for the last five years, it has several difficult options it must consider. David McCalla is a relative newcomer as the principal of the school; Albany has had 4 different principals in the last ten years. I find refreshing what the veteran urban principal David McCalla is doing in the Albany high school and the results he is getting. I find that as Jesus yearned for his people to come together to be embraced by a God of love, so McCalla is trying to recreate a school system which presently has a two-tier system into one in which every student is embraced and learns. He is trying to change the system which promotes those who are successful, and forgets and labels those who are lost into trouble-makers. He is doing it through discipline and presence and attention, and expectations. McCalla is facing the danger of a two-tiered system.
I wonder, we who live in Bethlehem, Slingerlands, Delmar, Selkirk if we should be concerned about such matters that folks in Albany live with? I wonder where Jesus would be in all this. McCalla seemed to think that we could have a role in making a difference in Albany's children's lives. He invited pastors from all around to meet with him to have conversation around this very issue. AUMS seems to think we can make a difference; it is heading up a group of folks who would be willing to spend time with teenagers and be mentors for teenagers and those looking for jobs. We were invited to be a part of that.
James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Jesus said, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.” The Serenity Prayer says: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Where do you think Jesus is asking you to go?
