I’m a white Anglo-Saxon protestant, aka, WASP.
Like many WASPS, I was born into a nice, white, middle class family in a nice neighborhood surrounded by nice neighbors. My church was nice, too. My situation was nice, because the people I knew in the neighborhood were mostly like me. That was nice.
One African American family attended my church. They were the DeHart family and they were nice, because like me, they were Episcopalians – although of a different color.
Truth is, I knew little about them. I liked them, but I had no contact with them outside of church. It occurred to me in my middle years that their surname was the same as my mother’s ancestral family. My mother was a DeHart who belonged to an old Staten Island family. DeHarts had been white landowners of a large farm on Staten Island’s north shore during the American Revolution. Slaves often worked northern farms. Could it be, I wondered, that the DeHarts might be a more intimate part of my own lineage or I of theirs? Segregation, as we’ve all learned from history, when it came to gender, was practiced selectively.
My sense is that WASPS like me, at least in my day, knew almost nothing about blacks one way or the other since any social contact was rare. Most northern WASPS like me would usually say we were “tolerant,” a patronizing way of expressing our limited awareness of others or perhaps indifference.
My first substantial engagement with the black community was through Habitat for Humanity in its early days here in Talbot County. Habitat, and subsequently Talbot Mentors, provided me with opportunities to meet and work with individuals of the black community. With Habitat, blacks and whites grew to know each other as people as we performed the hands-on tasks of constructing houses. Through Talbot Mentors, I began mentoring a young boy 18 years ago. My fondness for the boy and the family has grown over time. Mutual trust was eventually earned, but it required maintaining regular contact with the boy and his family through some hard times, which eventually led to significant bonding for all of us. Taking the time was the key. Trust builds when we know others as people.
I have lived to see one of America’s greatest historic moments. I have witnessed what’s redemptive in religion and noble in the American dream as they met in one person who shaped the destiny of our nation. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visionary inspiration gave a voice to black America and it’s grievances. Because institutionalized racial discrimination was systematically oppressing blacks, white America was on the way to losing her soul. Martin Luther King, Jr. saved white America’s soul.
Dr. King, a clergyman, was an astute politician and deeply spiritual. As a Christian clergyman, he knew Judaism’s story of the Exodus and understood the non-violent teachings of Christianity. King became one of the prophets of our modern era. Prophets speaks truth to power. A minister’s task is to heal the broken, welcome the stranger and reconcile the alienated. Dr. King confronted America’s racial injustice while offering a vision that inspired hope for a future. We know that vision from his speech. “I have a dream.” The speech stirred America’s heart and, in my judgment, dignified all of us.
Dr. King’s defining metaphor for the Great March on Washington, D.C., was the story of Israel’s exodus from its bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. As Moses had once said to the pharaoh in Egypt, Dr. King admonished the powers of Washington, D.C. to “Let my people go.”
Neither Moses nor Dr. King ever saw the Promised Land. The exodus from Egypt was as long and torturous a journey for the Jews as was the journey African-Americans traveled after Dr. King died. Both Moses and King, however, enabled those who longed for freedom and justice to secure a firm foothold on the path that would lead to both. It’s been a bumpy path, and we’re still working on it.
Dr. King’s strategy of non-violence guided the movement in ways unprecedented in the world’s great social upheavals that invariably wreak carnage. He led America’s unique modern social revolution – indeed I would say one of the world’s – in a comparatively bloodless way. Considering the enormity of what white America was being confronted with and forced to take responsibility for – a long history of a socially condoned and legally supported segregation of the races – it was miraculous that the movement proceeded with as few casualties as it did.
Shakespeare once wrote: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
In the tide of the civil rights movement we saw the confluence of Judaism, Christianity and the American dream converging to create into a contemporary ideology for enabling social justice and reconciliation. Israel’s story of going from bondage to freedom is core to Judaism’s identity. Jesus’ appeal to non-violence when Roman soldiers came to take him to trial was an iconic moment in the Christian story.
I find hope in this: that a righteous man or woman informed by the best of religion and what’s noblest about America can turn a nation around. The derivation of the word “conversion” means ‘to turn around.’ I hope America’s conversion will continue realizing Dr. King’s dream so that justice will “roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
I’m grateful to have lived to see America at one of her finest hours. I’m still a WASP, but a wiser one for it.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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Lin Clineburg says
I am also a WASP (formerly Catholic). This morning, at Christ Church, St. Michaels, after the 8 AM service, we heard Rabbi Peter Hyman speak at our Adult Forum. He is a frequent and popular speaker to this after-church gathering. We discussed Biblical history, especially the Old Testament, viewed in today’s atmosphere of Middle East issues, it is eerily deja vu. We, the Western world’s blessed people, are in need of help regarding these issues, in order that we might make a start in gaining trust enough to open discussion in a peaceful manner, so that the innocent and displaced hordes of refugees we see in these regions may experience a life free of strife and hatred. We need another Martin Luther King!
Willard Tod Engelskirchen says
This is a hopeful piece. However, I worry that now we have Trump and Cruz and to some extent others such as Rubio and Carson selling a very hateful song to many of those who claim to be religious. To me it is scary. I fear for my country.
Reese S. Rickards says
Like George, I am a WASP and knew no black persons until I found myself in the U.S. Navy during the Korean war. I struck up a casual friendship with an African-American sailor, a deckhand, whom I usually found on the fo’c’sle with a broom in his hands. He told me how he longed to become a member of the fire control division, one of the elite groups on a warship. Eventually it happened, and it was some months before I ran into him again, back at the front of the main deck, a broom in his hands. I inquired about his return to often degrading deck work. Sixty five years later his answer is still with me.
“Man, you are naive, aren’t you.”
He was right. But since then God has been good enough to put me in the company of many black people and their friendship, support, wisdom and advice are among my life experiences I cherish most.