Address: “Where’s the Justice?”©
The Rev. Sarah Lammert, USR, January
14, 2007
On Thursday my 11 year old daughter
handed me an essay to read that she had prepared for her English Class. The piece was a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., and it was well done, if her proud Mama might say so. She talked about the injustices faced by
African Americans due to segregation, and the violence that was caused due to
racial prejudice, citing examples to back her case. Like a good UU preacher’s daughter she even
talked about the tragedy of The Rev. James Reeb, a
Unitarian Universalist minister who heeded MLK Jr. call to join him in Selma,
Mississippi, only to be beaten to death by white racists outside of a barbeque
restaurant where he had ventured with some colleagues. My daughter ended her essay by measuring the
progress we have made as a country, and in conclusion she wrote, “Dr. King’s
dream has come true.” Then, as if
trying to wrap her mind around the fact that racism still exists, she put an
asterisk next to that sunny assessment, adding “even though prejudice against
African-Americans continues today.”
I’m not sure what Martin Luther King
Jr. would make of the state of our nation today, but I’m fairly sure he would
not claim that his dream has come true.
I’m certain he would be aghast about this week’s escalation of the war
in Iraq. Towards the end of his life, in
December of 1967, King caused an uproar by speaking out against the tremendous
violence of the Vietnam War. Even many
black leaders called him anti-American, and some of his closest supporters
abandoned him, fearing that he would harm the cause of civil rights by taking
such a controversial stand. In response,
Dr. King explained that for a shining moment it had seemed like there might be
real promise for the poor, through the poverty program. Then came the war in Vietnam, and he watched
the program “broken and eviscerated as if it were some political plaything of a
society gone mad on war” and he knew that so long as war drew away the money,
energies and skills of our nation, America would never invest what was needed
to achieve full racial and economic recovery in our own nation. He called the war in Vietnam a “demoniacal destructive
suction tube” that whisked away the necessary resources that would have his own
dream for America come true. He began to
see the war as a moral outrage, and an enemy of the poor, both here and abroad.
I suspect Dr. King would have
experienced a tragic kind of déjà vu this week as he joined the marchers in New
York, in Trenton, in Paramus, in Montclair, and across our country last
Thursday protesting the escalation of the war.
I imagine that he might even have a choice word or two to say about
sending an army made up disproportionately of poor people and young men and
women of color, who pay “the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death
and corruption” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dr. King would remind us of how difficult it is for leaders in inner
city communities to preach about nonviolence as a means of change to angry,
rejected, and hopeless young men and women, while our government models the use
of massive, violent attacks as the only means of securing the peace. He would challenge us to stop this
madness. He would say now, as he said
back then: “The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours to.” Looking beyond the war, I can’t help but
think that Dr. King would be dismayed at the state of our nation today. “Where is the Justice?” he might ask. Where is the justice, in a nation that sends
100 Black men to prison for every one Black man who graduates from college? Where is the justice, in a nation in which
legions of invisible and innocent men and women of color like Curtis Knight
watch their lives drain away behind the bars of our prisons for crimes they
never committed? Where is the justice in
New Orleans, where nine people have already been murdered in this New Year:
where neighborhoods still lie in ruin, the educational system is broken, people
have no hopes for employment, and little is being done by police to ensure the
public safety? Where is the justice for
Sean Bell, shot fifty times for the crime of leaving a bar while Black?
In the words of Dr. King, “How long
will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?”
We can only hope that the arc of the moral universe he put his faith in
is still bending towards justice. Some
of you have heard this story before, and I apologize if I have now been here
long enough to begin repeating myself – I comfort myself that Dr. King himself
often did so quite effectively! Many
years ago, at a gathering of my UU ministerial colleagues before the annual
General Assembly, we watched a film together of four men having a conversation
about race. One was White, two
African-American, and the fourth was the Chinese-American filmmaker whose
project this was. What became obvious in
the film, was how invisible the experience of racism was for the White man,
while for the others it was an everyday reality that could not be avoided. To illustrate this, we were asked how many of
us present had ever been arrested and booked into jail for traffic violations. Every single one of my African-American
colleagues in the room stood up, while the rest of us remained seated.
I was stunned. Here were my respected and beloved
ministerial colleagues, all of who had been hauled down to police stations for
things like pulling over to the side of the road to look at a map in a wealthy
white neighborhood. I had been thinking
that I was pretty aware of what it
was like to be a person of color – after all, I had been active in racial
justice issues in college and had already attended at least 4 or 5 racial
justice trainings within UU circles; and I had also read the complete works of
Toni Morrison, and “Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelo. I had good credentials as a racial justice
advocate, having marched in my town to rename a street for Dr. King.
Well, I was clueless as it turns
out. And I am still clueless, not
because I don’t care, but because my white skin affords me a sort of cloak of
privilege that filters my reality. I
like many well meaning liberal White people continue to find myself shocked and
stunned whenever a wisp of reality floats across my consciousness.
About three months ago, for
instance, I made a wrong turn trying to find an address in the Oranges, for
instance, and got a good look at some pretty hard neighborhoods in
Irvington. I locked my doors and turned
my car around so fast you’d think I’d wandered into a war zone, which is what
it looked like around there. I was
shocked at what I saw, but for many people this is daily reality.
In preparation for today’s address,
Margaret White loaned me a book about men from New Jersey who have been
exonerated called “Innocence Lost in New Jersey.” In it you can read the story of Curtis
Knight, who was convicted on the faulty testimony of an addict who offered up
Mr. Knight in order to gain leniency for her drug crimes. You can also read about Earl Berryman,
convicted because the young woman who had been violently raped was so
traumatized at the police station that she simply picked three men out of the
“B” photo sleeve at random and left it at that.
Michael Bunch wasn’t as lucky as Berryman, who was exonerated 10 full
years after his arrest, because he died in prison before his innocence could be
established. You should have heard me
while I was reading this book, gasping in horror over and over again, appalled
by the incredible poor evidence provided for conviction upon conviction, and
the lives destroyed in the process.
Clarence Moore, falsely convicted of rape but served 15 years in prison,
during which time his wife divorced him, his son died, and his home and
business were sold.
Larry Peterson, James Sweeney, John
Schuyler, George Parker, William Olman…. these are
names that mean nothing to most of us here, because we don’t see them. Wrongfully convicted due to eyewitness error,
false testimony, false confessions, prosecutorial and police misconduct, junk
science defense attorney incompetence, and racial prejudice, these men are
invisible to most of society because they are poor and African American.
Writes David Cole in his book No
Equal Justice: “…we have established two systems of criminal justice: one
for the privileged, and another for the less privileged. Some of the distinctions are based on race,
others on class, but in no true sense can it be said that all are equal before
the criminal law....When significant sectors of a community view the system as
unjust, law enforcement is compromised in at least two ways. First, people feel less willing to cooperate
with the system….
Second, and more importantly, people are more
likely to commit crimes, precisely because the laws forbidding such behavior
have lost much of their moral force…. It should be no wonder that black
America, which has been most victimized by the inequalities built into the
criminal justice system, is simultaneously most plagued by crime and most
distrustful of criminal law enforcement.[1]
In the fall, Anita Young and I
shared the pulpit one Sunday, sharing with you our varying perspectives on what
it means to live out the promise of the Welcoming Congregation. Many of you commented to me and to Anita that
her talk had been enlightening – that for straight people it is difficult to
understand what it means to constantly deal with the decision of whether it is
safe to come out of the closet – at work, on the street, in the hospital, with
one’s various family members, at a restaurant.
It is also hard to understand what it means to be told that you have
equal marriage rights except that you can’t call it “marriage” – for gays and
lesbians it is a “civil union” here in New Jersey. Is it just me, or does it lose something in
the translation – here I am on bended knee, ring in hand: “Honey will you civil
union me?”
Right next to our gilded Welcoming
Congregation declaration on the wall there is our claim to be an Anti-Racist
congregation. But as with our advocacy
and welcome for the GLTBI community, it is a lone few individuals who are
bearing the burden of trying to bring this statement off the wall and into our
lives. It isn’t that we aren’t at work
on some fronts: we have regular educational programs on race, we offer adult RE
programs, we do outreach to asylum seekers who are jailed in Elizabeth, we have
dedicated volunteers who mentor children at CAMP in Paterson, and we work to
link our issues, such as reproductive choice and race. But in terms of responding to police
brutality, or supporting groups like the Innocence Project which reaches out to
prisoners who claim to have been falsely convicted, or supporting efforts to
achieve reparation at the legislative level, we fall short. That is why we partner with groups like POP,
which carries out this difficult justice work, in service of Dr. Martin Luther
King’s dream.
Dr. King’s vision has of course not
been completed – until we can sit down together as brothers and sisters, and be
measured more by our characters than our color or our economic success, we will
still be at work on his dream. Until
names like Jimmy Lee Jackson, an African-American man whose brutal murder by
white policemen in Marion Alabama led Martin Luther King Jr. to call for the
march on Selma roll off the tongues of our children as easily as the signers of
our constitution, because their stories are held up in their history classes as
people whose lives changed the course of our nation; until “the only normalcy
that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true
peace, the normalcy of justice;” until the stories of men like Curtis Knight
are told in neighborhoods like Ridgewood, and our eyes are opened to a world of
hurt just beyond our tree lined streets; we will still be at work on the
dream. Until we all begin to see the
problem of inequality in our justice system as our own, we will still be at
work on the dream. I only hope that one
day, justice will roll down like water, and peace like a mighty stream. May no lie live forever, may truth crushed
down rise again, and may the arc of the moral universe, like the promise of a
rainbow after a storm, bend toward justice, here on earth.
Amen.