by the Rev. Lowell Grisham

printed in the Northwest Arkansas Times, Fayetteville, Arkansas

November 10, 2008

 

I remember “Whites Only” drinking fountains and “Colored” restrooms and the side door where black people went into their separate waiting room at the doctor’s office.  I remember when blacks were not allowed into restaurants or motels.  I’m not that old; I’m only 56.  It doesn’t seem that long ago to me.  But it’s like another age.

I was in fifth grade in 1962 when my town, a community not unlike Fayetteville, turned into a war zone because an African American wanted to go to school at Ole Miss.  It took several hundred U.S. Marshals, the Mississippi National Guard and regular U.S. Army troops to quell a riot and to enroll James Meredith as a student.  I remember the burned out cars and the smell of tear gas.  I remember a contorted face screaming “Let’s go git ‘em” as he drove his car past my back seat window.  His hand-painted message, “I Hate Nigger Lovers” covered his back window, just over the Confederate flag draping his car’s trunk.

I remember the state politicians.  They were all segregationists.  To speak of equal rights for black citizens was instant defeat at the polls.

Most of the preachers were either silent or they defended our traditional Southern values.  God created the races separate and disapproved of mixing blood, they said.  They told about Phinehas, a Bible hero who stopped a plague when he speared to death an Israelite and his Midianite wife. They had intermarried against God’s laws.  The preachers taught about the “curse of Ham,” the father of the dark races.

Our Episcopal priest was in a definite minority.  He preached in favor of equal rights.  Many left our church or dropped their pledges because of his liberal positions.  The Baptist pastor’s daughter told my best friend that her daddy thought segregation was wrong too, but he would be fired if he said so.  I remember him.  He was a good man.

On our televisions we saw dogs attack peaceful marchers, we saw cities burn in angry reaction.  Fear and misunderstanding dominated. 

We had one school system for white students and a separate school system for black students.  When my fifth grade teacher asked, “Who in here is an integrationist?” two hands raised among the thirty-three students.  After class my closest girl friend confronted me.  “Did you know that when a nigger and a white person marry their child is almost always a nigger?”  “So?” I answered.  She threw the necklace she wore with my name into the ground.

That happened about a year before a baby named Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.  If his parents had lived in Arkansas or Mississippi it would have been illegal for them to marry. 

What a different country we are forty-six years later.  Our next President will be an African-American man from an interracial marriage. 

Did you see the tears flowing down the faces of some of those who remember facing dogs and sticks and jail when they attempted to register to vote?  Did you see the joy on so many young faces?  Faces that don’t inherit such fears and divisions.  There is healing and hope in the air.

Yet, on election day our paper carried this headline:  “Four gay-rights activists arrested at Baptist college.”  As they sang, “Love, love, love love, Christians, this is your call,” four members of Soulforce Q were arrested “immediately as they set foot on the Central Baptist College campus” in Conway.  Later that day voters in Arkansas and elsewhere passed discriminatory laws and blocked equal rights for American citizens who are gay. 

Way back in the 1850’s, abolitionist Theodore Parker said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. renewed that vision more than a century later.  His widow Coretta Scott King connected his dream with that of our other oppressed minorities:  “Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union,” she said.  “A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.”  Banning their fostering and adopting does nothing to protect children who need loving homes either.

On a day when our African American brothers and sisters celebrated a new sense of healing and equality in our country, our gay brothers and sisters were bashed yet again.  But I am not discouraged.  I still believe in the dream.  I believe in the arc of justice.  I believe that those who fight against the full humanity of others haven’t got a chance.  They couldn’t prevail in the 1960’s and they won’t prevail in our century.  After all, they fight against God.  They fight against angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.  They fight against love and honor and dignity.  I believe that love will prevail, not fear.  Perfect love casts out fear.

It’s not hard to imagine the election year 2052.  Just forty-four years from now.  I can imagine a gay person being elected President and moving into the White House with a spouse that looks as different as Barack and Michelle do today.  Sounds impossible?  I remember “Whites Only” drinking fountains and “Colored” restrooms…