I am excited this week to feature a few black leaders. They are all black men with words for young men trying to recover from the many incidents of race and injustice. A voice that is rarely featured but vital, hear their reflections and engage the conversation.
Leroy
Rev. Dr. Aidsand F. Wright-Riggins, III
Executive Director, American Baptist Home Mission Societies
Since August 1991, the Rev. Dr. Aidsand Wright-Riggins III has served as the executive director of American Baptist Home Mission Societies. Additionally, he is chief executive officer of Judson Press, the publishing arm of American Baptist Churches USA. His passion has led American Baptist Home Mission Societies to commitments of encouraging discipleship, engaging in mission and transforming the soul of a nation. He says, “We are to be an incarnate community that affirms that Jesus Christ is Lord. In the midst of our cultural, theological, racial and ethnic diversity, we want to exhibit unity as a household of faith.”
As a black man living in these yet to be United States, Langston Hughes’ historic poem, “Let America be America” resonates deeply with me. Portions of it are plaintive prayerful pleas. Others are a powerful proclamation. It reads in part:
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I naively thought that education would somehow mark me as immune to the vicissitudes of racism. I had recently graduated from seminary and was serving as the assistant pastor of a large predominantly white congregation in Southern California. I was the first and only black minister to serve in the history of that then seventy-five year old congregation. I was is some ways a manifestation of Dr. King’s dream, a child of the civil rights movement, who for a brief contextual moment, was being judged by the content of my character, rather than the color of my skin.
That illusion lasted until I made a pastoral visit to the home of one of our elderly members. I drove my car to her home, walked up the driveway and knocked on the door. As I mentally rehearsed the words of the institution for the Lord’s Supper that I was about to share with her, a loud and angry command bellowed behind me, “Turn around nigger, and put your hands in the air!”
I dropped my communion kit and turned to see a white police officer with his gun drawn, aiming right at me, who then demanded to know, “What the f#%k are you doing in this neighborhood?” For almost forty years now, with less colorful language, I have asked myself a similar question about the context in which I live my life, do my work, exercise my ministry and seek to raise my children and grandchildren.
The lessons my father taught me and the lessons I try to pass on to all black boys when it comes to navigating dangerous and potentially hostile environments are these: Exercise Reserve, Exorcise Resentment and Exert Unrelenting Resolve.
Physical survival often depends on knowing how to speak respectfully, move cautiously and act courteously in highly stressful situations. Like the three Hebrew boys in the fiery furnace, black males have to learn how to keep cool in intense situations. Psychic, spiritual and emotional survival is also critically important.
Unless we find ways to exorcise the demons of rage and revenge, we will be taken over by a bitterness that consumes us. I find no greater resource for expunging the existential poison we are forced to drink almost everyday of our lives than the antidote of the Christian gospel. Our cruciform faith gives us the courage to forgive, the freedom to choose alternative futures and audacity to hope, even in the most hostile of situations.
Having attended to the best possible chances of physical survival and daily addressing the human stressors through spiritual development provides us the best opportunity to practice unrelenting resolve in contributing to creating a New Community. That takes resolve. America did not get sick overnight. Nor will its healing occur overnight. Our country has existed much longer as a slave-holding, slave-owning country than it has as a supposedly free society. We still have much work to do. That requires repentance, reconciliation efforts, and restoration. It will not be fixed in my lifetime. Yet, our mantra must be that of our foreparents, “Through many dangers, toils and snares, we have already come; ’tis grace has brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home.”