Diocesan Chancellor Diane Sammons, Esq. gave this sermon at her home parish, St. George's in Maplewood, on March 22, 2015.
Good Morning. It is a privilege and an honor to be invited by the Absalom Jones Committee for Black History and Culture to speak to you today and offer some thoughts about the Voting Rights Act.
For me, as a 25 year plus member of this congregation being here is like coming home. You have always provided me with the support and guidance to reach for goals that integrate my spiritual life with my professional career as an attorney. I am forever grateful for your support.
In today’s readings, we hear about God’s plan to “redeem” us through a transformation wrought in God’s love, forgiveness and in sacrifice.
In Jeremiah, God speaks of an old covenant between God and the Jews whereby they were bought out of bondage – but yet now there is a new covenant – or law – which God promises to write on “their hearts, forgiving all transgressions.”
In John, reality is setting in and we find Jesus in his final days with his disciples mustering the courage to face his death. Jesus tells us – in a passage seemingly in an effort to convince himself as much as his listeners – that redemption and forgiveness come through death. God promises our redemption (as one community) through Jesus’s resurrection: “When I am lifted, I will draw all people to me.” Key to this reading also, is Jesus’s followers have now grown to include the Greeks (outsiders) who have traveled to attend the same festival as Jesus and who are seeking an audience with him.
My talk today lands us in a time – some two thousand years later – and in a place, half a globe away: Selma, Alabama, where Dr. Martin Luther King and his disciples, similar to those in John, are mustering the courage to face their destiny in a final, harrowing march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. This march comes in the wake of vicious murders and brutal, inhumane beatings, with the marchers facing the same terrifying reality as Jesus: the prospect of their own potential death.
They too, like in John, must have been terrified, seeking to contain their raw, visceral fear through their faith – a faith that redemption would come through their sacrifice. Not just redemption in the form of a secular change in laws, but a deep-seated, spiritual redemption rooted in a transformation written on their hearts and the hearts of all those who witnessed their actions.
Dr. King, eerily prescient, fully embraced this sacrifice. He tells us:
“If physical death is the price I must pay to redeem my White Brothers and Sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, than nothing can be more redemptive.”
And again like in the Gospel – at Selma – Dr. King and his disciples were seeking to redeem us all, including the outsiders (The Greeks). For in 1965, African Americans – by virtue of their skin color in a post-slavery society – were also outsiders. Like the Greeks in John – they were seeking a seat at the table – seeking the fulfillment of a promise from a 100 years earlier – a promise that until this time remained illusory.
What was that promise?
With the end of the Civil War, Congress passed the 13th Amendment (1865) ending the enslavement of African-American Americans, the 14th Amendment (1868) equal protection of citizens under the law and the 15th Amendment (1870). It reads: “the right of citizens of the US to vote shall not be denied or abridged by any citizen or by any State on account of race, color, of previous condition of servitude”…. It further gives “Congress the power to enforce the article by appropriate legislation”….
As part of Post War Reconstruction, federal troops moved into the South and dissolved all governments of the Confederate states dividing the territory into 5 military districts. The military ushered in elections which allowed for the voting registration of an estimated half a million formerly enslaved men also known as Freemen. The result was dramatic: In ten formerly Confederate states, Freedmen collaborated with other voting blocks to form bi-racial governments. So while in 1867, no African-Americans held political office in the South, within 3-4 years, African Americans accounted for 15% of all office holders.
The victory was short-lived. Short-lived, indeed.
W. E. B. DuBois laments this when he writes:
“The slave went free; stood a Brief moment in the Sun and moved back again into Slavery...”
What happened? Within a few short years from 1870-1877, Reconstruction came to an abrupt and violent end through the wholesale terrorizing and murder of Black citizens by marauding paramilitary groups including the Redshirts in Mississippi, the White League in Louisiana . And in a history I was never taught in school, there were a series of massacres in the South, resulting in an estimated hundreds to a thousand deaths at the hands of these groups:
Colfax Massacre of 1873 in Louisiana – Between 63-153 Freedmen were killed after their surrender in a confrontation over the control of local government offices. Their bodies were thrown in the River with further reports of mass graves;
In 1874, the White League turned out six Republican office holders in Coushatta, La. Now remember, during this time, the Republican Party was the liberal/progressive party (the party of Lincoln) and the conservatives were the Southern Democrats. These Republican office holders were told to leave the State, but before they could, they and as many as 5-20 Black witnesses were murdered.
Lynching was another method specifically designed to evoke racial terror as a means of control. In a recent February 15 article appearing in the NY Times, author Campbell Robertson notes tells of recording the names of almost 5,000 victims who were lynched in the South between 1877-1950, increasing the number on previous lists by 700.
The political group who promoted and advocated reclaiming the South from the Reconstruction Republicans, ironically, coined themselves the REDEEMERS.
These violent methods were so effective that by 1876 the Southern Democrats had taken back all but 3 formerly confederate state houses. The final blow came after the disputed election of 1876 where – in a rumored deal, the Southern Democrats ceded the election to Rutherford B. Hayes, as President, in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South.
The violence gave way the passage and enforcement of voter suppression laws including poll taxes, literacy tests, and citizenship tests – all designed to ensure that the Redeemers remained in power.
So effective were these methods of voter suppression, that in NC by 1906, there was the complete elimination of Black votes, with an estimated 75,000 losing the franchise;
One writer estimated that the percentages of Black voters in the South was reduced from 90% during the 1870s to 6% by 1892.
1965
The Act itself mirrored the language of the 15th Amendment in its primary section 2, “there will be no abridgement of the right to vote.
Section 3 provided a mechanism whereby the government could seek injunctive relief in Court for violations,
However, Sections 4 and 5 provided a far more potent remedy, namely a preclearance by the Justice Department before implementation of any change in a state or political sub-division’s Voting Procedures. Generally, these provisions would apply to states/counties that had a history of voter suppression in the past or had created some sort of test or other pre-voting requirement.
One of the key benefits of Sections 4 and 5, is it shifted the burden of proof on the state to show the voting practices being addressed were non-discriminatory. It also stopped a discriminatory practice before it started, not waiting for an election cycle or two to be poisoned by a discriminatory policy.
Upon its initial passage in 1965, the sections that dealt with preclearance were subject to expire after 5 years, but Congress continued to faithfully to renew the provisions over the next 40 years and in some years strengthened some of its core provisions. The most recent renewal occurred in 2006 where Congress reauthorized the Act for another 25 years. (Expiring in 2031)
GOOD NEWS: VOTING RIGHTS ACT AS AMENDED AND AS ENFORCED WAS ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE TOOLS OF VOTING EQUALITY. Over the last 50 years, the percentages of African American voters in the South often equaled and in some cases exceeded their white counterparts – resulting in an increase of 1,000% of the number of African-Americans elected to office since 1965.
BAD NEWS:
In 2012 a county in Alabama, Shelby Co, moved to declare the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court in 2013, in Shelby Co. v. Holder, with Justice Roberts writing for the majority opinion – struck down the heart of the Act – its preclearance provision – claiming that its purpose had been largely accomplished, citing some of encouraging voting statistics to which I referred.
But as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg aptly pointed out in her dissent opinion – the progress made was ONLY sustained by the enforcement mechanism of preclearance: which from 1982 (last renewal of the Act) to 2006 (most recent renewal) resulted in DOJ blocking 700 voting changes proposals, all of which were found to be discriminatory. AGAIN, DOJ blocked 700 discriminatory proposals.
In addition to the 700 blocked proposals, another 800 proposals where either amended by the DOJ because they were discriminatory or were withdrawn by the submitting state or subdivision.
Justice Ginsberg, in her dissent, quoting from Shakespeare warned that “The Past is a Prologue” and from G. Santayana that “those who cannot remember the past are bound to repeat it.”
Sadly, since the 2013 decision, Ginsberg’s warnings have been realized. There has been a blizzard of new voter ID laws in 21 states – burdens that will again inevitably fall most heavily on minority voters. In a recent Harvard study reported in the Star Ledger, researchers sent emails to 7,000 local election officials in 48 states asking for voter registration material information. They sent identical materials from fictitious names that sounded white and names that were clearly Latino. The Latino names received fewer responses, less information and often no response.
Hence, we are left with a stark reality, the battle that we thought was won in Selma, is being once again threatened. We cannot escape the reality that we are still bound by the tragic legacy of our past:
As Obama said two weeks ago in his speech at the Edmund Pettis Bridge:
“We need to open our eyes, ears and hearts to know that our racial history still casts its long shadow.”
It is indisputable that glaring inequities still exist. The New York Times recently reported that Blacks are incarcerated 8 times more than Whites and, if illegal drugs involved imprisoned 49 times more than Whites.
What does our Bible teach us today about those who are invited to the table and those who are not? What does the Jesus teach us about our role in Christian community to those who are outcast, dispossessed? Who are those who are truly redeemed and how? How does Jesus transform us into a living community of one body united in Christ?
This topic took on significance in my life some 12 years ago, in 2002, I led 19 other attorneys, in the filing nine class action lawsuits around the country on behalf of a potential class of 35 million African American against 16 corporations that our research established had a connection to profits for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The representative plaintiffs were those who could establish themselves as descendants of enslaved African-Americans.
I am not here to discuss with you the legal aspects of the case, but how the case transformed me and profoundly affected me: our efforts became as important as breathing.
By far the most incredible and life-giving experience was the stories of the descendants of enslaved who initially included the grandchildren of slaves, but as the case moved along – came also to include the children of slaves and then remarkably, several who were formerly enslaved up until the 60s, that’s right, the 1960s:
Richard Barber, our New Jersey plaintiff who was the grandchild of a master slave carpenter and son of a sharecropper. As a boy Richard delivered papers for the owners of stately homes that his grandfather had built. He recalled the story of his great Aunt Anna’s emancipation from slavery.
Mrs. Hannah Hurdle Toomey. In her 80s. She told the story of her father’s enslavement and of witnessing the whipping scars on his back and her father’s description of his brother being sold off at an auction block.
Emma Clark, a 95 year old woman from Texas who while lying incapacitated in a nursing home, said she was willing to undergo taped questioning by defense attorneys to retell her story of having been enslaved on a dairy farm in Texas in 1930… yes, 1930. When one of our attorneys asked her the question of why she did not leave, she said, “I could not; I was chained to my bed at night.” She died on the fourth of July 2003, a week before her deposition was to take place. Her story was told by her sons and later aired on NPR.
Mr. Cain Wall: a 101 year-old man, and his 8 children who came to us to tell us his story of remaining enslaved in the backwoods of Louisiana up until the 60s. Ted Koppel on Nightline aired his story.
Mae Wall: Mr. Wall’s daughter described how she was fed from a bucket of scraps left outside the landowner’s house.
Some stories I have not even been able to repeat verbally, they are too painful…. but they shaped me.
What I came to learn from this honored vantage point was that Richard, Ms. Hannah Toomey, Mrs. Emma Clark, the Wall family, Dr. King and everyone who walked across that Bridge in Selma, were each chosen by God and they carried God’s message clearly to me: they survived, they endured; that endurance built character and that character produced hope. That hope is palpable. Their faith was every bit as deep as those disciples who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus. And their courage feeds me, restores me and redeems me day after day.
I urge that if you study our country’s true history and stay open and vulnerable to the stories of the dispossessed, the powerless, the less powerful, you too will be transformed. That transformation can breathe new life into us and into a social movement, giving Dr. King’s march a new and powerful resonance:
Donald Payne Jr, a U.S. Congressman, representing some of us in Maplewood, this week spoke on the floor of Congress for an hour on the VRA urging legislative action in the wake of the Supreme Court’s action and in February., Rep Conyers (MICH) and Sensenbrenner (WISC) introduced for the second time, bi-partisan legislation in (THE VOTING RIGHTS AMENDMENT ACT) designed to restore the heart of the Act.
The Administration is doing its part in continuing to bring injunctive actions in Court under Art. 3 of the Act;
A quick search on line of the words “restoration of the VRA” shows a coalition of 88 religious organizations who wrote a letter to Congress urging action.
I URGE YOU TO FIND A MEANINGFUL WAY TO MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD ON THIS CRITICAL ISSUE.
Dr. Pamela Cooper-White, an Episcopalian theologian tells us our goal is:
“The restoration of right relation in community, through truth telling, healing of the wounds in this part of the Body of Christ and reconciliation.”
She describes this reconciliation as something extraordinarily difficult, not in the sense of premature or cheap forgiveness, but in the sense of the whole community, the whole church. She states,
“We are called by baptism to be re-concilers, that is, restorer of the concilium-the whole community of God, called and blessed as God’s children and equally precious in God’s sight.”
Critics have decried that these painful stories of our nation’s past should not be told; they are divisive and, rather than heal, they will foster disquiet. Well, I guess it’s no secret on which side of the debate I stand.
In 2008, the Prime Minister of Australia offered an apology to Aboriginal people for the involuntary taking of their children, there were hundreds of thousands who showed up in the streets to hear the words repeated, “I am sorry, I am sorry.” And they counted the number of times it was said. There was crying, there was mourning, but there was also jubilation and there WAS TRANSFORMATION AND NEW LIFE.
For in the end, what we are striving for is something so sweet – so beautiful… For what I have seen and learned – in this place called St. George’s and in the years I prosecuted the slave descendent case – about our capacity for love and forgiveness and hope, often overwhelms me with its power and grace.
Manning Marable tells us when we confront the truth of history and the damage that occurred and when we set out to set it straight through the truth AND THROUGH ACTION – we free the soul… moving towards a deeper and greater understanding of our shared humanity. He writes:
For it is in this process that we find the “living water” which Jesus promised: the water that will quench our thirst and that will fill us spiritually. IT is that water that allows us to endure our sufferings, to build character and find hope. That hope can never disappoint because we find that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Diane Sammons, Esq. has served as Chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark since 2004. In that role she serves as special legal adviser to the Bishop and oversees legal matters for the diocese.
