Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial justice in the Nation's Capital

"Besides, you ain't going North, not the real North. You going to Washington. It's just another southern town." Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

In 1950, five years before Rosa Parks remained seated on a bus, a party of four meet at Thompson's Restaurant in Washington, D.C. The group included  ninety-year-old Mary Church Terrell. Mary wanted to challenge the legality of segregation in the nation's capital, a tricky legal question for a city that in 1874 lost the right to elect their own governance or congressional representation. Anti-discrimination laws had not been enforced in D.C., which was "just another Southern town" under Jim Crow segregation. At an age when most men and women were content to pass the baton to younger hands, Mary took a stand for justice.

Mary was born in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, the daughter of former slaves. She had known Fredrick Douglas and died the year of Brown vs. Board of Education, her ninety years spanning Reconstruction to segregation and lynchings to activism and the legal dismantling of segregation. A college graduate, young Mary longed to make a difference. Harvard law graduate Robert H. Terrell pressured her to marry and she finally gave her hand. Mary underwent miscarriages, raised a daughter, and ran the household while juggling a career as a public speaker, reformer, and writer.

Just Another Southern Town by Joan Quigly is a biography of a woman torn between the demands of family and her desire to change the world. It is also the story of race relations in America and in our capital city, a detailed history of the legal battle of the District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co, Inc. which in 1953 ended the segregation of restaurants.

I enjoyed learning more about Mary Church Terrell. She was elegant and well dressed, with a "flair for self-promotion." Her marriage was based on intellectual equality, but she and Robert differed in all other ways, including politically. Robert was a joiner, an extrovert, and his government position as the first black American judge required avoiding controversy. Robert was friends with Booker T. Washington; Mary was friends with W. E. DuBois and became radicalized in her older years.

Quigley sets Mary's life in context of her times and highlights her role in the long march towards social equality and justice. The court cases could have been deadly reading in less capable hands. I am glad to have learned more about Mary and about this part of the history of Civil Rights.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Mary Church Terrell on my quilt I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet

Just Another Southern Town
by Joan Quigley
Oxford University Press
$29.95 hard cover
Publication Date: February 1, 2016
ISBN:9780199371518

Jim Crow Racism, Murder, and the Methodist Church

"Evil flourishes when good people sit idly by and do nothing." Attorney General Hood

As I read One Mississippi, Two Mississippi:Murder, Methodists, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County by Carol V. R. George I experienced shock, depression, and sorrow.

In the early 1970s I married a seminary student at The Methodist Theological School in Ohio. During our three years on campus I audited classes and managed the campus bookstore. I took a class with Dr. Jeff Hopper and Dr. Everett Tilson. Dr. Van Bogart Dunn was the Dean of Students. I knew Dr. Paul Minus. These four men, all with Southern roots, participated in the 1964 Easter Sunday in Jackson, MS when an interracial group of Bishops and pastors endeavored to worship in a black congregation. Local law officers arrested them at the door. Read the story here.

I was so very young and had no idea that 1964 was 'yesterday' to these men in 1972. After reading this book I better understood their courage and conviction.

+++++

I requested One Mississippi, Two Mississippi because of the subtitle Murder, Methodists, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba. The author is a history professor who spent nine years researching the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba and the relation between Methodists and the murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and John Chaney.

Goodman and Schwerner had come to the area to work for voter registration of Blacks. Chaney was a local black man. The organizational meeting to create a Freedom School was held at Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba. The young men were abducted and murdered, their bodies buried and bull dozed over, and the Mt. Zion church was burned to the ground and church members severely beaten.

If you want to know about the events the book covers you can visit the Oxford University page on the book here. Or watch the movie "Neshoba" or Mississippi Burning. The internet is full of articles about the murders.

The Methodist church is a world-wide connectional system; every four years a General Conference consisting of laity and clergy meet to vote on the denominational policies, goals, and regulations. Change does not happen quickly. The stated ideals often lag behind practice. Founder John Wesley allowed free thinking beyond basic Christian tenets. The denomination is diverse in opinion. In theory members are to think and let think. In practice, strife, conflict, and schism occur--particularly over social issues. Segregation was one of those divisive issues. The denomination showed little prophetic leadership in demanding equality, giving Southern segregationists and the status quo a nod.

This book reveals that the Southern White Methodist church laity and clergy were not only complicit in maintaining segregation but were actively involved in KKK hate crimes, murder, and a decades long cover-up.

In 1939 the denomination created the Central Jurisdiction composed of Black pastors and churches, effectively establishing segregation as official church polity until 1972 when it was finally disbanded. See more about this at:
http://www.credoconfirmation.com/Leaders/LeadersArticles/tabid/292/ArticleId/449/The-Central-Jurisdiction-and-the-Story-of-Race-Relations-in-the-Methodist-Churches.aspx

It was not until after the Methodist Episcopal church merger with the United Brethren church in 1968, creating the current United Methodist Church, that implementation of federally mandated integration began. In 1970 the Neshoba County accomplished full integration without mass violence; but there were viscous attacks and harassment that led to the (white) School Superintendent's suicide.

It took years and several trials before the mastermind behind the murder plot was convicted. In 1999 The Winter Institute began a study of global models of reconciliation, particularly the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, consulting with Peter Storey.

It was hard to read this book, the events are so harrowing. I felt angry and ashamed and disheartened. I remembered a Facebook friend's comment about the hypocrisy of the Methodist Church, which had baffled me then. Now I get it. The friend is particularly interested in Civil Rights history.

I thought about issues the church avoids today, the injustices we allow. This statement from a United Methodist Church website on confirmation materials says its all:

As United Methodists—even United Methodists who weren't alive when the Central Jurisdiction was around—we have to think critically about how a faith tradition birthed by abolitionists and weaned in part by mixed-race house churches could cling to institutionalized segregation for so long. And, as we move forward, we need to make sure that we don’t repeat past mistakes. We need to be mindful of ways in which we exclude people or create divisions within the church, whether based on race, nationality, language or culture, age, or any other factor. Paul in Galatians tells us that we are “all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). We should be sure we act that way.

In church on Sunday I could barely keep from crying. It seemed insipid, 'feel good', shallow. Last week we heard of a church being closed; the pastor preached 'too much' about acceptance of Gay and Lesbians. The world cries. Do we listen?

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Contents:
Part I
History and Memory Settling Longdale, MS and Mt. Zion Methodist Church reviews the founding of the church in 1833 through the Jim Crow Years to 1954
Part II
"The Great Anomaly" The Methodist Episcopal Church and Its Black Members looks at segregation and the creation of the Central Jurisdiction, the politicization of Mississippi Methodist church, the Methodist church's debate over segregation, the Neshoba murders and their relation to Mississippi Methodism
Part III
Mt. Zion's Witness: Creating Memories considers how Neshoba struggled to fulfill equality in church and school, the retrial of accused murderers, and reconciliation

I received a free ebook through NetGalley for a fair and unbiased review.

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Murder, Methodists, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County
by Carol V. R. George
Oxford University Press
Publication May 1, 2015
$29.95 hard cover
ISBN: 9780190231088

Healing Quiltmaking and Jim Crow Segretation: "The Colored Car" by Jean Alicia Elster

Last weekend we visited Leon & Lulu's wonderful home decor store for their annual Books & Author's fair. We visited with 18 Metro Detroit writers of all ages and genres. 10% of the proceeds from book sales went to the Oakland County Literacy Council so of course we had to buy some books.

One of the books I found was Jean Alicia Elster's "The Colored Car" based on her own grandmother's experiences growing up in Detroit and traveling from Detroit to Tennessee in 1922. Ms Elster garnered stories and recipes from her grandmother.

The Ford family lives in Detroit where Douglas runs a saw mill and his wife May uses her home economics education to put up food, sew clothes, and run the household. Several family recipes are included in the text. They live in a working class neighborhood of immigrants. May grew up in Tennessee and has not been back in nine years. There had been a terrible flood in her hometown and May decides it is time to go home and see her family again. She decides to bring her young daughters along.

Her eldest daughter Patsy is 12 years old, just taking over her brother's family chores now he is helping in his dad's business. The train trip seems a big adventure. Her mother has sewn new clothes for the girls, and they wear white gloves for traveling. They sit in upholstered seats and are served delicate sandwiches. But in Cincinnati they must change trains to ride in the "colored car". It has no cushioned seats and a stove spews out smoke. Patsy resists getting on. She had never encountered the Jim Crow laws of the south before.

How Patsy deals with her collision with a new reality is the focus of the second half of the book. Her grandmother gives her fabric to start her first quilt, a Fence Rail quilt. She tells her granddaughter that she is to put all her pain into the quilt. When the quilt is completed she will be free of the bad memories.

Patsy has been profoundly disturbed by her experience. The family faces another crisis but things turns out okay. There is drama in the book, but nothing to give a child nightmares. Ms Elster explores serious issues in context of a charming family's life.

As I was talking to the author I learned that quiltmaking played a role in the book. How cool was that? She was not a quiltmaker herself, but her family had many.

To make the Fence Rail quilt Patsy's grandmother gave her fabric to cut into 1 1/2" x 6 1/2" pieces. Patsy was given a brass thimble and shown how to use a running stitch to sew the quilt. Once the blocks were made she set them together and quilted the with a running stitch. What happens to the quilt? Read the book and find out!

For an interview with the author visit SORMAG"S Blog.

As Ms Elster notes in the forward to her book, the history of civil rights can be traced through lawsuits against the railroads. One early crusader was the formidable journalist and activist Ida B. Wells who appears on my quilt I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet. Like Patsy, Ida resisted being sent to "the colored car" and started a campaign. Read more about her here:
http://www.biography.com/people/ida-b-wells-9527635#later-career
http://people.duke.edu/~ldbaker/classes/AAIH/caaih/ibwells/ibwbkgrd.html

On a personal note, my mother told me of her first train ride from Kane, PA to Albany, NY to see her grandparents. Mom was only five and had never seen a person of color before and the porters were African American. She asked my grandmother, "Why is that man brown?" My grandmother wanted to end the discussion and told her "Because he is made of chocolate." Well, my mom went up and bit the man on the hand! It was quite a shock to all involved.

Perhaps biting that poor porter taught Mom that we all have the same color blood; we all feel the same pain.

Americans carry a heavy legacy.

The Colored Car
Jean Alicia Elster
Wayne State University Press
ISBN-13:978081336069
$14.95