Showing Our Humanness These Days

Back in 1998 I wrote a chapter in a volume dedicated to my former graduate school professor, Dr. Harold Hazelip.  The volume was edited by three gentlemen that I respected, Gary Holloway, Randy Harris, and Mark Black. All three of us were university profs at the time. They assigned to me probably the most complicated topic I’d written on, before or after.  The topic? “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”  As a family therapy and psychologist, I knew first hand how complicated the topic was. I’d dealt with many fragile human beings and their families or their marriages.  I had seen what I thought were some of the worst of what it means to be human. I had also seen what I thought were some of the best of what it means to be human.

The first paragraph of that chapter goes like this:

“Jean Valjean, thief, victim, and saint in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, leaves prison, steals from a priest who forgives his misdeed, and eventually becomes both mayor of Montreuil and a successful entrepreneur. His life is complicated by a host of characters including Fantine and her illegitimate child, Cossette, but most of all by Javert, an incorruptible and obsessive policeman who seeks to punish Valjean for his past. In his former life Valjean symbolizes the dark side of humanity, but in his new life he represents the good in people as he recues the downtrodden, endows a hospital, protects a parentless child, and avoids the relentless pursuit of Javert. Javert, the symbol of law and order who is tormented by his own demand for perfection, eventually commits suicide while Valjean dies in the presence of those whose lives he has blessed. The contrast between the two characters is striking: one man evolved from thief to saint, while the other went from rigid orthodoxy to despair and suicide (p. 91." 

You and I may be like Victor Hugo as we look upon things these days, in our own lives and on the television screen and in the newspaper.  We see the best of people and we see the worst of people. We see those who hoard and then sell items at exorbitant prices.  Thankfully eBay and Amazon caught them. We also see those who spend all day long sewing masks for hospitals, nursing homes, and medical clinics, and even caps for physicians going into surgery. We see a range of heroes keeping people alive all the way from those who stock our shelves, pick up our trash at the appointed day and time, those who risk life and limb to save us in our more dire moments, nurses and doctors. All work is noble. All work is important. All work in valuable. Everyone deserves respect. Everyone deserves to be paid a decent wage for labor.

In the chapter that I mentioned above, I write about contemporary and not so contemporary psychological and theological views of human nature. I won’t bore you with those. If you’re interested, go to Amazon and see if you can read all or part of this chapter there. Then, I attempt to deconstruct a Biblical view of human nature. This is where it gets interesting. The Bible was never, in my opinion, designed to articulate a fully thought out theology of humankind. It makes inferences left and right, but you won’t find in one specific book, chapter, and verse a note that says, “This is what it means to be human.” We are left to search and study.

The article nuances creation, the Fall, Hebraic views of human nature, sin and its effects, and then I attempt to tease out Hebrew and Greek words of human nature. I am then left with how to put it all together? Love God with all of what? Love my neighbor as who? I boil it down to the fact that Jewish thought did not subdivide humans into parts, rather, they spun out notions around “Hebraic holism.” 

That said, are we evil, are we good? Yes. And yes. At the end, I write, “When we know that we are created in the image of God, even though we are fallen, self-centered, and self-seeking, then we are free to act……(we can therefore) live graciously with other human beings….By doing so we can understand what it means to be a human, created in the image of God, in a world which is estranged from God but never forgotten by the creator (p. 104).”

Why write that long of an introduction to simple and complicated questions?

How could a person preach the word of God on Sundays and then run the KKK? Check out Jerry Mitchell’s book, Race Against Time, and you’ll learn more about that person as well as others.

How could a person obliged to help all farmers tell Willie Head, “Yes, there’s money there but not for you people.”

How could a county official in the office of the USDA tell the Grant family, “No matter what you do, we are going to sell you out.”

How could a bank officer, the FSA county supervisor, and the owner of the local tractor supply collaborate behind closed doors to seize the farmers’ (yes, there were two of them, partners in the farming business) assets and sell them for pennies on the dollar? 

Those are just four stories. There are more. Maybe I’ll write some more about them in a day or two. One farmer that comes to mind is that of a farmer, near death, lying in his hospital bed in his living room, talking with me. His caretaker listened nearby. I had no idea about his condition before walking into his home. It was a short but poignant conversation. I wish we had met earlier.

So, we discriminate against people and then we go to church on Sunday mornings. We may even be a deacon or an elder in the church, or maybe a Sunday school teacher.

Maybe some of us can recognize our dividedness and come around to a more gracious way of living in these times.

Inspired and Inspiring

I have followed Jerry Mitchell's work for a long time. In fact, I cannot remember not following him, frankly.  So, it was prior to his speech on the ACU campus several years ago that holds marker status in my memory. He presented to the audience which included my wife and me, the cases he was investigating and the challenges that he was experiencing. He was inspired and inspiring then. We talked briefly about Black farmers and what interest I could encourage him to take in them, but, alas, he needed to keep his focus on Mississippi although he did help investigate the horrors of the children murdered at the church in Birmingham.

It has been with much interest that I followed his efforts on Facebook. Maybe you follow him, too, as he writes what each day in history covers. He has a wealth of knowledge at his fingertips.

Then, he published his book, "Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era." It was difficult not to go out on Amazon and buy it immediately, but I wanted to purchase it from whatever bookstore he was going to be visiting and talking about the book and his experiences. That was a bookstore in Dallas just a few weeks back.

He contextualizes historically each story for the reader and then he dives into the processes and the content of each case. Per a recent email from him, he recorded one long conversation with a later to be convicted murder, and then he depended on his notes, court documents, and others for the engaging conversations he had with people, all manner of people, judges, attorneys, investigators, police, FBI agents, witnesses, and those who were eventually convicted. The book was a "keep reading it until you're finished" sort of a book.

I think he was inspired and inspiring. I do not say those words lightly.

As he chronicled the years in which he worked on various cases, as he talked to people, and as the cases and the conversations at times consumed him, and as he experienced the ups and the downs emotionally, I was naturally drawn to parallels.

While his is about investigating criminal cases that were essentially cold cases, mine was that of gathering stories of Black farmers who were marginalized by the USDA, DOJ, and their communities. I resonate with Jerry in terms of the length of time when crimes were committed and when justice finally prevailed. I resonate with Jerry in terms of how the wheels of justice grind slowly and sometimes people die. I resonate with Jerry in terms of how some of the guilty get off totally free of having to pay for their crimes.

I find inspiration to keep on.  From 1994 to now has been a long time, some twenty-six years.  Some of those I've met along the way have gone on to meet their Maker. Some are suffering with their elder years and challenges that have come.  Some wear the scars in their bodies and their souls from the struggle for justice. They trusted me with their stories.

Their stories are sacred spaces and places. Their invitation into those stories was a sacred invitation. Walking into a mediation hearing in 1997 was a new world of power and dominance as I saw the machinations of injustice place more burdens upon the lives of the farmer and his wife. I saw attorneys do what attorneys do when the federal government is their client. I saw attorneys do when Black farmers are their clients. It was a war. Yes, it was a war.

Yes, there have been a couple of peer-reviewed articles, numerous presentations both solo and with students from ACU, affiliation with BFAA, and now the documentary. All have fueled my desire to do more, even to see change happen at the USDA, even to the point of helping two Democratic candidates for the presidency shape their policies for such a thing.

Over the last two years of gathering stories, connecting with people I'd known before and with people I had only heard or read about, and sitting before them with camera rolling, was at times a gut-wrenching experience.  I was asking them, with Shoun watching via the lense of his camera, to rehearse painful memories of those stories. What right did I have to do that? With whose permission did we do that?

Now, we are finishing up things on the film. We have several places which are waiting for us to screen it with them. That will mean showing it and then discussing it. Maybe we can have farmers with us.  After all, it is their story that we are telling.

Jerry Mitchell has inspired me to keep going, keep gathering stories, keep "investigating" so to speak, and eventually in multiple settings and in multiple ways, tell those stories of justice denied and justice found. Certainly the farmers inspire me. Ues, they certainly do.  Trust can be an inspirational thing.

At the end of the book, Jerry honors "the One" who gave him strength and guidance in the telling of those stories.  I am inspired that he would honor God in such a way.