Get Up And Do Something

Wesley Bros Aim at Racism

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You have been waiting for God, [Jesus] said, while God has been waiting for you. No wonder nothing is happening. You want God’s intervention, he said, while God wants your collaboration. God’s kingdom is here, but only insofar as you accept it, enter it, live it, and thereby establish it.

– John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a truth-teller and a get-up-and-doer. A sharecropper with her husband on a Mississippi plantation, Hamer given a hysterectomy without her permission in 1961. Forced sterilization of black women had become so common it was called the “Mississippi appendectomy.” But the injustice was the instigation Hamer needed to start her journey as a Civil Rights activist. In 1962, Hamer went with a small group of African-Americans to register to vote to become “first-class citizens.” But unfair literacy tests were designed to prevent blacks from eligibility to vote. Blacks also had to name where they lived and who they worked for, information used by the KKK to harass and by employers to fire blacks who tried to register. Hamer, who could read well, failed the literacy test which asked her to explain “de facto law.” Her boss fired her that night.

After finally registering to vote in 1963, Hamer and several other black women were arrested and brutally beaten in jail for entering a "whites only" bus stop station (when they reminded the cops that segregated bus stops had been made illegal). Hamer would suffer a lifelong limp and problems with her eye and internal organs from the beating she received in jail (the police forced black prisoners to beat her until they were exhausted).

She Got Up and Did Something

Hamer  founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party  in 1964, seeking to integrate the racist Democratic Party of her state. When given the opportunity to provide a televised testimony at the DNC, President LBJ was so threatened by her moves toward integration that he held a televised press conference coinciding with Hamer’s testimony so she wouldn’t be shown of TV. But her testimony of the brutalization and injustices she had suffered in her pursuit to vote was so powerful the TV stations showed it in its entirety on primetime news that night.

Hamer organized  a movement of black and white college students to educate blacks in the South so they could pass the unfair literacy tests required to register to vote.  As she became more and more frustrated with the uphill battle of politics, Hamer focused on economic ways to improve the lives for blacks in the South, providing free pigs for black farmers, and buying 640 acres for a co-op for blacks to farm on. She also was able to establish 200 low-income housing units in her home county.  Hamer died from breast cancer in 1977.

It’s Our Turn

We live in a time in America where congressmen and women have outright advocated for killing peaceful protestors.  Where Amazon.com is allowing a shirt to be sold (and people are buying it) that says “All Lives Splatter” with the picture of a car driving over peaceful protestors.  Where the President endorses doubling down on violence and brutality as the solution, and is willing to wage war against American citizens.

I need my white Republican friends and family right now. I need you more than ever in my life. I need you to step outside of partisanship and search your heart for what you truly believe about all people being made in the image of God. I need you to boycott Fox News and balance where you get your information from. I need you to demand for your Republican office-holders to represent your actual beliefs, not what Fox News tells you to believe. I need you to get up and do something: tell your office-holders that the Republican Party is at its best when it endorses racial equity, that fair voting and safety for all citizens should not be a partisan issue. I need you to stop arguing about the right way for black people to protest and spend some real time reading what your hero Martin Luther King, Jr. had to say about white moderates.

I need my white Democrat friends and family right now. I need you more than ever in my life. I need you to step outside of partisanship and not assume that you aren’t racist because your Democrat, or that Republicans are ignorant racist monsters. I need you to not give up on your friends and family members who don’t get what’s happening right now. If you don’t take time and patience (instead of Full-Stops and Outrage) to slowly work through relationship with your friends and family who you deem to be racist, how will you ever expect their hearts to change?  I need you to put your money where your mouth is and start funding organizations that make a difference in the black and brown community. Give to mental health for the poor. Give to the black church. Buy from black and brown business owners. Give your time to organizations that mentor those struggling from the opportunity gap (commonly called the “achievement gap”). You can’t do it all, but you can pick one or two ways to give, and then give it your all.

Make Mistakes for Jesus

There’s no real blueprint for how to do this time of history the right way. We can learn from the past, but our time is unique, and we will all make mistakes. I drew my icon of Hamer holding Martin Luther’s hammer, the symbol of a humble beginning for reformation. The symbol of the Trinity reminds us that God is relationship, and that black and brown bodies are not excluded from the community of God’s kingdom and kindom.  Maybe you are afraid to #defundthepolice. But what can you learn from the truth of our present reality that leads you to meaningful change? If you don’t believe in easy answers and catchy slogans, what are more nuanced ways you can take action to collaborate with the God who shows no favoritism?

“At some point you must act.  Go forth not in fear but in faith that even your mistakes will increase your capacity to disrupt racism.”

-Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise

Creator of the Wesley Bros cartoon, the Rev. Charlie Baber, a United Methodist deacon, serves as youth minister at University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C. His cartoon appears on United Methodist Insight by special arrangement.