Sincere Ignorance and Enthusiastic Stupidity
By Johnny White
Recently I visited the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. You might recall the recent controversial dedication. Notable civil rights leaders who knew and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., refused to attend with President Trump. Over this past MLK Weekend 2018 there have been unprecedented further reasons to question whether the president of the United States is racist. Just like the vast majority of Americans, without taking sides, never did I expect that question to be asked about a sitting president.
Following President Trump's most recent alleged race-tainted remarks, former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, a colleague of Dr. King who became mayor of their home city of Atlanta, was interviewed on Meet the Press. When asked about the president's remarks he rather graciously offered, "We were all born in a very complex multicultural situation…" which he preferred to call ethnocentrism.
He quoted Dr. King who said: "We were born in an unjust world, and none of us can take any virtue in being born black, white, liberal, or conservative." Young quoted Dr. King further: "Nothing is more dangerous in all the world than sincere ignorance and enthusiastic stupidity."
I could not help myself! Along with Chuck Todd, moderator of Meet the Press, I began to laugh out loud at the presumed implications about President Trump. But then Ambassador Young quickly added, perhaps admonished, most graciously, "That could be applied not just to one person, but to everybody."
Asked by Todd if he felt President Trump was redeemable, Ambassador Young again graciously responded: "I'm a Christian. I have to believe everybody is redeemable." I could not help but feel that Dr. King would have been very proud of his former colleague in the civil rights movement. On multiple levels, he remained true to the noble cause.
More than ever, given the unexpected turn of events in our day, I recommend to anyone and everyone that they visit the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. It will be an educational and perhaps spiritual experience. For those of us who actually lived in Mississippi during the 50s and 60s, this museum arouses memories that are painful truths about the heroes, the villains and the complicit bystanders of the civil rights era.
Most of the heroes, with an exception or two, remain unknown to most of us. Many of the villains, lamentably, were at one time heroes to many of us who lived in Mississippi. Then there are the complicit bystanders. I don't know if that is the kindest or the harshest descriptor I can muster, but it represents the majority of us. However, we were far more than just complicit. We did far more than just stand by and watch while the civil rights movement was happening. In Dr. King's words from the Birmingham jail: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Our complicity was far greater than mere silence.
This is the main message I took away from my visit to the museum: We were all victims of an evil system whether we realized it or not. There were no innocent bystanders. That included President Kennedy who finally stood up to segregationist Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. And it included the paperboy who delivered newspapers in a "Leave It to Beaver" segregated neighborhood. President Kennedy and that paperboy occupied only one-half of the unapologetic segregated world that existed at the time. We knew little about the pain of the other half.
In one small video vignette in the museum, I watched uniformed Jackson police officers confiscating boycott signs from black protestors outside the downtown Woolworth store. The year was 1963 when I was age 13. One afternoon after school, I witnessed a similar sit-in incident at the Woolworth's in west Jackson. I shudder to remember what I thought and felt at that time. I was definitely a complicit bystander in the evil system.
It struck me as I watched that brief video: Some of those police officers, ostensibly the villains, were the parents of friends I grew up with. I knew some of those men. They were community leaders and church-going family men. Their wives were active in the PTA. They were acting on behalf of an evil system, but they were not evil men. Whether they would agree or not, they were also victims born into that evil system just as Dr. King said.
I cannot help but wonder: If those officers were still living, and if they saw those black and white video images of themselves, how would they feel? What would their explanations be? How do their children, my childhood friends, feel if they see those video images of their dads? It really wasn't so long ago.
Those questions remind me once again of what I have known for a long time. I grew up in what I call "The Mississippi Paradox." Good Christian people who did really bad things—just like everybody else. Sincerely ignorant. Enthusiastically stupid. Always redeemable.
Johnny White, recently retired senior pastor at the Interdenominational Church at Horseshoe Bay, TX, and who, as a boy, delivered newspapers in the "Leave It To Beaver" segregated neighborhood in west Jackson, MS.
