Four Louisville Ministers Proclaim ‘War on Fear and Racism’
The Rev. Kevin Cosby
The Rev. Chris Caldwell
The Rev. Joseph Phelps
The Rev. Bruce Williams
Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when news of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation finally reached slaves in Texas, two and a half years after it was delivered.
True, news traveled slowly in those pre-internet days, but not that slowly. This liberating news was suppressed, denied, hidden.
Despite today’s internet speed, the terrorist assassination in Charleston reveals how our human liberation continues to be suppressed, denied, hidden. It seems some have not fully heard or internalized the implications of that 1863 proclamation — that all persons are equal, possessing by virtue of birth enough sacredness to elicit gratitude and wonder.
What keeps this proclamation of our human oneness from becoming the normative narrative of our land?
What deep-seated fears foment dread and even hatred in otherwise beautiful human hearts?
Why, 150 years after the ratification of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, do some of our self-proclaimed law-abiding kindred continue to resist the providence of God in freeing blacks from second-class citizenship, while also freeing whites from the myth of superiority?
The events in Charleston, while tragic beyond words, are but the latest in a string of recent stories revealing how, despite the 1860s Herculean effort to changes our country’s laws, the spiritual truth behind these laws has yet to reach the literate and religious hearts of white Americans. Events in Charleston, Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island and, quietly but potently, in Louisville reveal patterns of fear fueled disdain that continue to inform the experience of black Americans in 2015.
It is time for another war — a war on fear and racism.
This war will not employ guns and grenades, but the non-violent tactics of the 1960s civil rights movement, targeted at capturing hearts even as it liberates cities like Louisville from the residual effects of slavery.
This war will liberate white Americans chained to subtle and not-so-subtle patterns of material and emotional dominance over black Americans. These patterns justify racist business decisions that keep black communities poor. They retain “us” and “them” thinking that becomes the seedbed of competition, disdain, and eventually demonization and extermination.
Our battle cry is not new, but it is renewed.
American slavery left most black persons educationally and economically destitute. One hundred and fifty years later the effects are still evident. Jim Crow laws perpetuated the pattern, but today’s new Jim Crow laws continue to imprison black communities who have few options and understandably give in to despair.
Tour certain streets of West Louisville and you will find yourself in Zombieville: a community of living people in whom hope has died. These are not bad or lazy or evil people, but people robbed of their institutions, whose communities are stripped bare of the means of economic vitality, who
are displaced from one neighborhood to another based on decisions in which they have no voice, and whose family systems are profoundly compromised by despair and destitution.
Enough is enough.
We have been brought together “for such a time as this.” As such, we will move from truth-telling to action and, when necessary, strategic confrontation, as we assess who is our ally and who is, for today, our enemy.
We will not be co-opted by either armies of domination or armies of unholy anger. Because the human heart is our central domain we will fight to free all hearts enslaved by racism, including our own.
We will fight to transform educational and economic opportunities for Louisville’s black community until there is a level playing field, where “every valley is lifted up and every mountain made low.”
We seek neither popularity nor personal gain. We pledge our pulpits, our positions, and the remaining years of our lives to proclaim our one united and sacred humanity. We seek the truth which can set all free.
In short, the suppression, denial, and hiding of Juneteenth must finally, like the Confederate flag, be put away forever. And when our prison walls collapse brick by brick, we will join the mighty chorus singing through all time and space, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.”
A statement to the public by The Rev. Kevin Cosby, St. Stephen Baptist Church; The Rev. Chris Caldwell, Broadway Baptist Church; The Rev. Joseph Phelps, Highland Baptist Church; The Rev. Bruce Williams, Bates Memorial Baptist Church. And published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, August 2015.
