“I am not you.”
Those four words have stuck with me for over the last fifteen years.
Let me take you on a quick journey to explain.
A medical student in North Carolina, I decided to use spring
break to create a Civil Rights pilgrimage, gathering a diverse group of
undergraduate students in a rented van for the journey.
I had grown up studying the places and faces of the movement
in the 1950s and 60s, impressed at how these freedom fighters worked for change
at so many levels of inequity – ballot box, lunch counter, schools, buses, and
legislature.
Over the previous spring breaks, I had made a few trips from NC south to Birmingham, Tuskeegee, Montgomery and Selma and had gotten to know a good number of veterans of the marches and activism of many decades prior. Fred Gray, who defended Rosa Parks and Dr. King, used his law degree to litigate for justice. Johnnie Carr, a close friend to Rosa Parks who helped lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Congressman John Lewis, who led a pilgrimage of his own each year to teach members of the U.S. Congress about the civil rights history that he had helped lead as a young man.
For a medical student stuck far too deep in books, the trip to Alabama where history was alive with these heroes was invigorating.
So, in 2005 the pilgrimage was set. Using my contacts from
the previous years, we headed south. Selma,
Alabama was the center of our attention, in part because of the annual Jubilee
celebration held each March to commemorate “Bloody Sunday”. Joanne Bland (pictured below with John Lewis) who marched with
her sister on that fateful day, was our gracious host, finding enough spare
rooms for us to have a place to stay.
Bloody Sunday
On March 7th,
1965, 600 marchers set out from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, led by John
Lewis and others, a march to protest the systematic ways
African Americans were kept from voting. (In Dallas County where Selma sits,
more than 50% of the population was African American, yet they made up only 2%
of registered voters.)
The marchers met a violent attack on the Edmund Pettis Bridge that day, a bridge named after a leader of the KKK. The scenes of crazed officers attacking peaceful protestors shown on TV sets across the country and world. (Side note: ABC interrupted “Judgment at Nuremberg”, a film exploring Nazi bigotry, and the moral culpability of those who followed orders and didn’t speak out/up, to show breaking footage from Selma...interesting parallel for Americans watching that evening to consider).
Bloody Sunday awoke the nation to just how strong racism’s chokehold
was in the deep south, galvanizing support for the Voting Rights Act that
passed in August 1965.
Back to those four words.
The scene is a packed Brown Chapel AME Church for Jubilee
2005, and at the pulpit is Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth,
a leader of the Birmingham civil rights movement. He is one of many heroes who
stood with Dr. King on the frontlines.
Reverend Shuttlesworth is a very different orator than Dr.
King. Soft spoken, in a way that almost makes it hard to imagine him leading
marches. But soft in a way that begs you to listen, to inch toward the edge of
your seat. He commands respect in a remarkably calm way, not needing volume or
intensity.
As he began to close his sermon, he used that gentle voice
to say.
“I want to tell you one more thing before I get out of here.”
He described the 16 sticks of dynamite placed within feet of
where he slept at night, presented to him on Christmas night of 1956. A terrific
explosion rocked the house and neighborhood. Remarkably, the wiry hero walked
out of the house un-harmed, amidst a house that was reduced to rubble.
A police officer at the scene known to be a KKK member
approached Shuttlesworth and said, "If I were you, I'd get out of town as
quick as I could."
Fred paused in telling the story, as all elders do at those
perfectly timed moments.
“I looked at the officer and told him simply and firmly…”
Another pause as he looked out to the audience.
“I am not you.”
He went on to tell the officer that he should relay to his
fellow Klansmen that he had no intentions of leaving town.
Those four words say so much. They fit so perfectly with a
spiritual leader steeped in the methodology of non-violence.
In those four words, there is more said than if the good
Reverend had proceeded to put the officer in his place with an all-out sermon.
“I am not you.”
Embers of your house smoldering behind you, your life having
just flashed before your eyes at the hands of bitter racists, imagine the words
you might have come up with for that same officer.
Brothers and sisters, that voice is very much alive in our
2020 moment. It is on the news, in our politics. Fight, fight, fight. Divide,
divide, divide. Us vs. Them.
But listen close. The loudest voice telling us “If I were
you…” is likely between our ears. It may have even grown louder as the pandemic
wears us down.
When we hear that voice, internal or external, we might just
pause. We might just imagine Reverend Shuttlesworth 64 years ago on that dark
night.
Our response need not be lengthy.
It need not be spoken with great presence or poise.
“I am not you.”
May the best you
rise up, today, this week, and this year.
May the best us
rise out of the rubble as we collectively heal injustices, divides, and our ailing people + planet.
