This is a complement to last week's reflection, "Have We Learned Anything At All?"
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s accomplished a dramatic change in our culture through the strategic use of law.
It
started in 1948 when President Truman issued an Executive Order to end
segregation in the military. The Supreme Court dealt a death blow to
segregation in the public schools in
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954 in a strategy led by NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall. Other
legally-sanctioned segregation began to crumble when Rosa Parks was
arrested for failing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery on
December 1, 1955, which led to legal desegregation of public
transportation in that city a year later. The Little Rock public
schools were forcibly integrated in 1957 when President Eisenhower
called in the National Guard in support of the courage of the Little
Rock Nine. President Kennedy established the Committee on Equal
Employment Opportunity in 1961, and sent federal troops to enforce a
court order for the admission of James Meredith to the University of
Mississippi in 1962. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed. President
Johnson strengthened affirmative action by Executive Order in 1965. The
Supreme Court ruled that state laws prohibiting
interracial marriage were unconstitutional in 1967. Segregated housing
laws were addressed in the Civil Rights Act of 1967. The Supreme Court
made busing part of the remedy to historic patters in Swann v.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971). Congress overrode
President Regan’s veto to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act in
1988. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 was passed despite presidential
opposition.
There
have been legal setbacks, too. Most recently, the Supreme Court in
June eroded the Voting Rights Act. There are legal victories for Civil
Rights still in need of protection and others yet to be won. These are
the sorts of things and the sorts of needs that inspired me to want to
be a lawyer.
Still,
one of the things I believe is true in light of the death of Trayvon
Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman is that law has about
brought us about as far as it is able. This is the reality that
inspired me to want to be a priest.
It
isn’t that I think law has no place in this battle. We cannot afford
to take it for granted. It also is not that I think law has nothing to
do with the contents of the human heart. I think what one thinks often
follows how one behaves and that the practice of ethical behavior can,
over time, yield a moral character.
But
I think there are limits, and I think we have now run into the limits
like a brick wall. Democratic government, because it necessarily
reflects the existing will of the people, is not much set up to be a
leader of moral change. It is, though, inherently responsive to change
that begins with the people. Indeed, the legal steps that led to
progress in Civil Rights over the last 65 years were in the main forced
on the government by the political pressure exerted by a moral
movement.
The
main thing for us to remember now, I believe, is that it was a moral
movement led by the Church. It was not universally embraced by the
Church, especially the white Church, but it was a movement of the Church
nonetheless. When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of the arc of the
moral universe, he was speaking of the prophecy of the Old Testament and
the new creation promised in Christ in the New.
The
tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death has made plain to me what, in truth,
was there to be seen for many years. What is needed is another moral
movement in our society, and I believe it is a moral movement, though
not the exclusive possession of the Church, that can only be effectively
led by the Church.
This
time the work is harder. The venue is not Oval Office, the
legislature, or the courts, which are relatively easily known with
established rules and where our predecessors have walked before us. Now
the venue is the human heart, an almost inscrutable mystery, but the
particular concern of the Church. It is what we do. It is slower,
harder work, but it is also surer.
Only
when it is accomplished can we be secure that progress is not
endangered by judicial review of the Voting Rights Act. Only when it is
accomplished will affirmative action be unnecessary. Only when it is
accomplished will black teenage boys be able to walk the streets at
night in equal safety to their white teenage neighbors. This is hard
work, but there is no one else to do it. And there is no one better at
it than we. Indeed, it is God’s gift to us, God’s grace.
So
if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has
passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who
reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry
of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the
message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ,
since God is making his appeal through
us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (2 Cor. 5:17-20)
Law
has taken us as far as we can go. Now conversion is up to us. And
conversion is a matter of grace. The Church is to be its instrument.
It
is up to us to recommit ourselves to building what King spoke of as the
Beloved Community. The conversion of the world must begin with our
own. And the first step in that, I am convinced, is some hard
conversation using all the tools at our disposal. I am convinced of it
because conversation and conversion are, at their roots, the same word.
And I am convinced of it because conversation and conversion, if the
Civil Rights Movement taught us anything, is where moral movements must
begin. The only difference this time is that we have now moved from the
realm of the law to the real of the Spirit.
Peace,+Stacy
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