Politics and Bigotry

            I read a wonderful old book recently.  It is The Man by Irving Wallace, written in 1964.  It was made into a movie starring James Earl Jones, but the book is a rich, full story of a senator who because of the death of the president and the speaker of the house, and the fact that the man who was Vice President had died earlier, is forced into the presidency because he is the president pro-tem of the Senate.  The crux of the story is that the man who has become the president happens to be black and the complications arise primarily from that issue. 

            In the course of the story, President Douglass Dilman comes to understand that others in the government are keeping him out of the loop and he fires his secretary of state.  This brings down the anger of the party, particularly the southerners on his head and they impeach him.  They offer four articles of impeachment, but at the trial in the Senate, his lawyer offers a fifth article that he says was inadvertently left out:  that Douglass Dilman is an African-American who has illegally occupied the White House.  The Presiding Officer, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, refuses to allow this article to be introduced, but it has been subtly put forward on the television screens to all of the country.  When President Dilman appears at the trial to testify, his color is certainly prominent.  In the end, the impeachment fails, but the story is certainly powerful. 

            It reminded me of what we have in this country today:  an African-American president who is stymied in every way possible by a reluctant opposition who see his color as an issue before us all and who oppose everything that he does, good or bad, simply because they don’t like him at all.  Here in the twenty-first century, it seems to me that we perhaps ought to be a bit less bigoted, but we have our history behind us, and it won’t go away easily.

            Fifty years ago this Sunday, on September 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by Ku Klux Klansmen and four little Sunday School girls were killed.  This was a terrible tragedy that happened five years before the assassination of Martin Luther King.  This was an awful time in this country’s history.  Our blatant racism was laid before all of us.  Those four little girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair were young martyrs in a terrible struggle that isn’t really over yet.  We still have a lot of work to do to ease the bigotry that lies in each of our souls and to be the inclusive church that our Lord created. 

            When I was in Seminary in Virginia, I worked for a while out of a Lutheran Church at Sixteenth and “V” street in Washington, in the area north of Thomas Circle that was burned out after the King assassination.  I walked those streets and saw the hate and the poverty first hand.  I understood very well what our racial bigotry has done to us and how it has kept good people out of the marketplace of ideas and continued to make us leery of each other.  This still needs to change, and has needed to be changed for a long time.

            In the letter to the Galatians Paul tells them that since we have put on Christ, that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free; neither male nor female, that we are all one in Christ Jesus.  To that we ought also to add black or white, red or yellow; that our races also have ceased to divide us because we are united in Christ.  That is a hope, not a fact.   Certainly we are divided and it always gets in our way.  The moment we can truly put aside our differences and receive each other for who and what we really are, that is the moment that the Kingdom will finally be realized on this earth.  May God move us in that direction and help us to put aside our hurtful bigotry and learn to love each other in the way that our Lord intended.  May God bless us in this important and necessary work.