“Lord, How Long?”

Even before that “Red Summer” of black massacre scorched the earth with white wrath, a visionary James Weldon Johnson saw “our weary feet…treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” A new century was marked by his prophetic poem, our own “Negro National Anthem.” It was also marked by the “Robert Charles Riots,” the first racial massacre of the 20th century. In “Carnival of Fury” (1976), William Hair wrote of Mr. Charles’ shootout with New Orleans police and a vigilante mob, which had come to “terrorize every black person in sight.”

Robert Charles was an “instant hero” to some black folk, who’d heard he’d “wounded or killed 27 white people” in that gunfight, allegedly leaving 5 policemen dead. All of it was in “self-defense,” which only meant he’d be tortured worse than Sam Hose was last year, who was burned alive in Newnan, Georgia, for defending himself against just one, white assailant. Southerners, black and white, were “angered and concerned” – especially Robert Charles, who, since he’d embraced Bishop Turner’s self-defense doctrine, probably stayed “strapped” and on high alert.

Once his corpse was dragged into the street, wrote Historian, Cierra Chenier, “The crowd was allowed to fire hundreds of additional bullets into his body and stomp it as many times as they pleased” until it was “completely mutilated, nearly decapitated, and brought to the city morgue. Obsessed with more vengeance, they broke the glass. “Legend” says their fury raged until they eventually pulled his body from its shallow, unmarked grave and burned it. Still seething with that rage, a midnight mob burned down the “best Negro schoolhouse in Louisiana,” shutting down public education for black students past the fifth grade for the next 17 years (noirnnola.com, 8/26/2019).

Such savagery was typical of a so-called “dirty South.” The “Klan’s” savagery honed a culture of violence and murder, not just to intimidate Jewish immigrants and whites who supported Reconstruction. They specialized in terrorizing black men they seemed obsessed with keeping away from power and white women. Their reign of terror only reinforced a “divinely inspired subjugation” General Robert E. Lee tried explaining to his wife in his letter of December 1856.

It was “ordered,” he said, “by a wise merciful providence;” implying that God ordained slavery’s vile hierarchy. He believed the “painful discipline” blacks were undergoing was “necessary for their instruction as a race,” being “better off here than in Africa.” He believed slavery “is a moral and political evil in any country,” and “a greater evil to the white than to the black race.” He didn’t tell her that any privilege, power or prestige she enjoyed as a white woman considered superior to this “black race” was the fruit of that “moral and political evil.” He spared her a prophetic look into a future where it is a sinister and perpetual function of that “evil” to make that superiority “law and gospel,” scientific fact, and a geopolitical reality everywhere on earth.

The letter’s tone gave the impression this Confederate General was most concerned for the “angry feelings” the abolitionists’ “storms and tempest of fiery controversy” might stir in “the master.” He seemed unmoved with concern for the feelings of terror and anguish stirring in the “slave.” He was confident, nonetheless, that despite how horribly his comrades mangled it, the “influence of Christianity” would emancipate the slaves quicker. Otherwise, his letter timidly concealed the fact that in the course of this underlying campaign for white supremacist empire, the “mild and melting influence of Christianity” he said would “emancipate blacks” was mangled almost beyond recognition with false doctrine the scriptures adamantly warn against to this day.

In 1845, for example, “Southern Baptists” made “selective salvation” an official tenet of a Christian sect descending from 17th century “particular” Baptists. This false teaching also made slavery a divinely natural consequence of white supremacy. Antithetical to Christ’s teachings, it is along such lines that they separated themselves even from fellow white Christians. With these and what Dr. E.N. Elliott otherwise called “vulgar errors,” he and others published, “Cotton Is King and Pro-slavery Arguments” in 1860. The “ablest writers,” Elliott whines, made their arguments under “the onerous burden of civilizing and Christianizing these degraded savages…an inferior race,” he said, though they were “as far superior to the natives of Africa as the whites are to them.”

Christianity stayed burdened with such vulgarity throughout the 20th century, even as “Drowned Towns,” like Oscarville, Kowaliga, and New York’s Seneca Village mysteriously vanished from American history on its watch. Lynching, torture and massacre became the routine silence of “good Christian brethren,” as this “Southern Baptist” sect became the “world’s largest Baptist denomination,” and the “largest protestant…Christian denomination in the United States.” The torture and desecration of black boys like Eugene Williams (Michigan), Earnest Knox (Georgia) and Emmett Till (Miss.), and men like Sam Hose (Georgia), Will Brown (Nebraska) and Anthony Crawford (So. Carolina) became recreational “slaughter” as blacks “caught slippin’” in America’s “sundown towns” just mysteriously disappeared. ‘Massacres’ too massive to deny, downgrade or altogether delete from history were just rationalized and redefined as “Negro uprisings” or “race war.”

Having hallowed “brush ‘arbors” and other “secret places” in which to “meet the Lord,” it turns out that the predecessors of the slaughtered may have spent more time forgiving their tormentors for wielding this double-edged sword of racial and religious terrorism than they ever spent repenting for it. Black preachers, parishioners and prayer warriors did more than “endure the hardness” of it “as good soldiers” (II Tim. 2:3). They built a powerful spiritual organism that would, like the name of the Lord, be a “strong tower” into which the righteous could run for safety and sanctuary from these ravenous social evils. With no clever theological soundbites at the tip of its spear, what Dr. King would one day refer to as the “arc of the moral universe,” the people who’d been dismissed as “inferior” savages used their power to bend that arc “toward justice.”

They also kept the faith, despite their tormentors’ departure from it, leaving behind these grossly disfigured images of Christ and “doctrines of devils” (I Tim. 4:1) they presumed to teach as “law and gospel.” Because of it, there were surely some who were tempted to doubt that the God of their “weary years” would ever deliver them from this evil. Others, despite these distortions, could still see that God is “a rewarder of them which diligently seek Him” (Heb. 11:6). Those who were now “woke” could at least discern that this same God which had been obstructed by all these errors, would “go before” the “children of Africa,” just as He had gone before the “children of Israel.” It became part of a faith that was now bold enough to believe, as David had written, that this same God whose image been distorted by all these “vulgar errors” was bold enough to prepare a table before them in the presence of all this enmity (Psalm 23:5)... (Continued)