God damn America?

By
Dallas Blanchard                                                               Read Spanish Version

June
1963 to June 1965 I was pastor of First United Methodist Church in
Fort Deposit, Alabama. 

Lowndes
County, Alabama, had at that time about 1,900 whites of voting age
and around 2,100 registered voters, none of them black since
Reconstruction.  Yet there were over 6,000 blacks of voting
age.  A county Registrar told me they had one black farmer come
to register, they handed him the forms to take home to complete, and
advised him strongly not to bring it back, which he did not. 

Black
maids in Mobile at that time were being paid $6.00 a day, plus lunch
and bus fare.  Black maids in Fort Deposit got $1.50 a day and
"tote," meal left-overs. 

My
wife hired a maid but we told her there was no way we could pay her
less that $6.00 a day.  She replied that she could not accept
that.  "If I did, the word would get out and I’d be the one
to pay, not you.  They’d take it out on me." 

A
black woman working as a maid five days a week could make $390 a
year.  If she worked 6 days a week, she would earn $468 a year. 
If she could not work and had three children, Alabama welfare would
pay her about $500 per year. 

In
the local barbershop one Saturday, one farmer asked another why he
had fired his new maid, since that maid had a reputation for being a
hard worker.  The former employer responded, "She wouldn’t
f-k me.  Ain’t about to have a nig-r work for me who won’t f-k." 

A
man who served on a jury bragged that in a case where a black man had
shot and killed another before over 100 witnesses the jury did not
even retire to deliberate the verdict.  They returned a "Not
Guilty" verdict with the side comment, "Send him back to
kill some more."  Justice in Lowndes County and a number of
other counties in Alabama depended on the race and social position of
the plaintiff, that of the defendant, and that of the victim. 

One
week I learned a local member of my church (who never attended it)
had sat in his car in front of the church with a machine gun because
he had heard a rumor that a busload of blacks were coming to that
church that past Sunday. 

 At
that time, in the 1960s, peonage still existed in the rural South. 
A black tenant farmer in Lowndes County, according a group of whites
there, had planned to sneak off and move to a tenant farming position
in a nearby county.  The landowner heard, rode on horseback to
the tenant’s house, called him out to the porch, and shot him in cold
blood with a shotgun with impunity. 

A
white, married deputy sheriff was reported to have shot and killed a
young black man because he had asked the deputy’s black "girlfriend"
for a date. 

Before
Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, I got a call from
a Justice Department attorney.  He asked if I would come talk to
him and his partner in Selma about the conditions in Lowndes County. 
(The longest stretch of the Selma-Montgomery March was to be through
Lowndes County.)  I readily agreed to meet them, at his
direction, at the Selma Holiday Inn at midnight Saturday night. 
"Don’t go to the desk and ask for us.  Don’t park in the
lot on our side of the motel, but on the opposite side, and come
knock on our door." 

I
talked with them, told what little I knew about the County.  As
I readied to go home, one said to me, "If word gets out in the
community that you talked with us, call the FBI.  But don’t call
the Montgomery office (35 miles from my parsonage).  Call the
Mobile office (150 miles away), and ask for this specific agent. 
We know you can trust him." 

The
FBI agents at that time were often in collusion with the Ku Klux Klan
and some Klan groups used the money paid to their self-chosen FBI
informant to purchase weapons and dynamite.  

The
urban centers of the South and the North have a large number of black
residents, many of them only one generation from Black Belt Southern
counties, if not themselves from them.  While urban areas tended
to be less brutal, degradation and abasement was an everyday
experience for blacks both North and South.  Black boys from
early childhood were constantly cautioned never to look a white woman
in the eye.  Black girls were reminded daily never to be alone
with a white male.  

The
degradation, the brutality of those years are seared in the
collective memories of the black community.  Vestiges of those
days still remain in the patterns of some whites toward blacks.  

To
add to these tragedies, the same, if a little softer, patterns of
behavior were visited on poor whites, especially the tenant farmers
and their families.  Even worse, the poor whites were often
convinced by those in power that their debased station was caused by
blacks.  As Will D. Campbell has asserted, "The white power
structure stole the blacks’ labor, but worse, they stole the poor
whites’ minds." 

Also,
the same sentiments, even the same words as those excerpted from Rev.
White’s sermons have been expressed for years on TV and radio by
white preachers condemning America for allowing abortion, for
permitting use of alcohol, for prohibiting King James Version
readings in public schools, for teaching sex education, and endless
other issues.  We treat those as normal and understand from
whence they come.

I
would, as a white Southerner, amend Rev. Wright’s words:  "God
has already damned America!"  We saw and pretended we did
not see.  We heard and said nothing.  We whites attended
superior schools with textbooks while blacks in rural Alabama had
only 3 months education a year, and that only to the 7th grade with
no books.  We ate the fruits of better education, of higher
wages, of superior positions, and we were silent.  

If
God is just, S/He has already damned America! 

Dallas
A. Blanchard is a retired United Methodist Minister and Professor
Emeritus at the University of West Florida.

http://www.uwf.edu/counterterrorism/main.html

From
OpEdNews.com