Saturday, 8:30 AM. January 20, 2018.
Valencia College,
West Campus. Orlando
A handful of academics and
community activists from Valencia’s Peace and Justice Institute have come to
campus this chilly morning. We are here to plan a series of public scholarship events designed to bring to consciousness the atrocities that occurred in
the small town of Ocoee, some 10 miles northwest of this campus, in 1920 on Election
Day.
It is an endeavor to own a
community’s Shadow long repressed. The ultimate goal is healing.
This series of events is part
of a much larger project which began with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) of
Montgomery, AL two years ago. EJI is an organization dedicated to commemorating
the lives of those victims of lynching and massacres during the long dark years
following the end of the Civil War and continuing through the early 20th
CE. For an extended period in the early 20th CE, Florida had the
most incidences of lynching and massacres in the nation. Our own Orange County led
Florida counties in that deadly tally.
Many of us present carry
stories – our own and those of family and friends - of dealings with Ku Klux
Klan as well as the harm that the structural violence of Jim Crow laws caused
to the lives of loved ones. All of us are here to see that those stories do not
die with us.
The event in Ocoee began with
a denial of African-American men seeking to exercise their right to vote in
the 1920 election. It was a right constitutionally guaranteed since the
ratification of the 15th Amendment but rarely exercised after the
departure of federal troops at the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim
Crow.
By nightfall, the conflict at
the polling place would shift to a local African-American neighborhood where it escalated into a
full-scale massacre. How many local residents joined area Klansmen in that fiery
holocaust which would consume the entire neighborhood is not clear.
Ocoee’s black residents were beginning
to be economically successful and now sought political equality. The threat to
Jim Crow Florida and its racist white power structure was undeniable.
What is clear is that by the
following day, the North Quarters neighborhood of Ocoee would lie in smoldering
ruins. And within a year, its counterpart, the South Quarters, would be
abandoned out of fear of a similar result.
Stirring up Souls
We began the morning with a
Yoruba priest. He prayed to the Energy in which all that is finds its existence. He prayed for guidance from the
Creator from whom all being comes.
That being includes the souls
of human beings incinerated in their homes in Ocoee in 1920, punished for
crimes they had not committed. And it includes the angry white men wreaking of
cheap whiskey, men who ordinarily hid behind costumes when they came out in
public.
Except this night.
This night they came with
torches. And guns. And before the night was over, an untold number of innocent
living souls would be lost.
“Be careful about stirring up
souls,” the priest told us. “Time alone does not heal all wounds.”
And the wounds decidedly
remain.
·
Wounds to the land, a once fertile landscape from which citrus trees and
sugar cane once sprang, now an industrial zone swept free of any traces of a
once burgeoning neighborhood. There African-Americans who tilled the land were
beginning to experience the American dream, much to the chagrin of their
working-class white fellow townspeople. Today, it is marked by landscaping materials
yards and small appliance repair shops.
·
Fatal wounds of shotgun blasts delivered into the backs of those who fled the carnage,
those not lucky enough to escape into nearby cane fields and woods.
·
Wounds from rounds of shots fired into a black body swinging from a tree. Their target
was a black labor broker, wounded in the initial onslaught, transported to the
county jail. He was taken from his jail cell in the middle of the night and
drug through the streets of Orlando behind a car before meeting his end in that
tree of death, a demonic parody of the tree of life his African heritage reveres.
·
Smoldering wounds of
those burned to death in their homes. Wounds marked by flickering cinders where
Masonic halls and churches once served a vibrant community.
·
Psychic wounds of
those lucky enough to escape, leaving behind their homes, their land, their
memories, their hopes, and in some cases the bodies of loved ones, bearing
trauma that would never completely go away.
“Be careful about stirring up
souls,” the Yoruba holy man said, “But know that these are souls waiting to be
freed.”
A Calling to Atone
I am drawn to the work to
commemorate the Ocoee Election Day Massacre like a moth to flame. It is
horrific work. It is painful to read, ghastly to imagine. The stories dominate
my thoughts by day. Their dark images haunt my dreams by night.
But I am called to be here,
now, to stand with others as we awaken these souls, as we excavate these
memories from our collective Shadow. I am here to help in whatever small way I
might to gain the freedom they seek all these many years later.
I am called as a member of a
community that has buried its past, seeking to avoid the memories that linger
in a festering Shadow. I am here to emphasize that we cannot “just move on,”
that time does not heal all wounds without confronting them. I am called as the
holder of unearned privilege to recognize that my privilege as a white male has
often come at the expense of many, many others with stories like those we seek
to memorialize, stories whose time have finally come to be heard.
Call it commemorative
atonement, long overdue.
As we stand in the circle,
holding the hands of fellow task force members, I pray that my voice, my words,
my thoughts, my own dreams can serve as a medium for those whose time has come
to be heard. I pray that our community
can atone for its past. I pray for healing for all the wounded and those who
wounded them. And I pray for courage and strength for all of us who are called
to this time of accounting, repentance and reconciliation.
It will prove a very fruitful
morning.
Sunday, 8 AM. January 21, 2018.
St. Richard’s
Episcopal parish, Winter Park.
I got up early to attend the 8
AM Eucharist at St. Richards. I always feel the need for both the spiritual
grounding that this parish represents as well as the vibrant, loving community
it provides. While I find much of the theology of the Rite I service to be as
antiquated as the Elizabethan English in which it is cast, there is a
simplicity and quiet about this spoken service that my soul needs this – and most
– mornings these days.
There is no music, no families
with children. Sometimes there are families with disabled loved ones present
and at 64 I am often among the youngest parishioners present. But I have come
to love the odd assemblage that forms this community each week for this quiet,
peaceful early morning rite. And this morning I very much need to be here.
As always, at the beginning of
announcements our priest recites our mission statement: We are on a mission to discover G-d’s grace, to change our lives and to
change the whole world. And the
parish takes that quite seriously, its parishioners involved in work from
feeding the local hungry to periodically housing the homeless at the parish and
travelling overseas to help create solar lighting for companion parishes in
Africa.
I believe it is essential to
be grounded in spiritual community in order to engage in peace and justice
work. The reality is, such efforts frequently are frustrated. The holders of
power and privilege do not readily relinquish it even in the face of atrocity
demanding redress. They often fight back in any way possible.
And yet the calling to
transcend the default paradigms that mark a dominance and control culture and
to work to create a better world does not end because any one given aspect of
that paradigm proves resistant to transformation. If one is to persevere in
this reality, grounding in a spiritual community is absolutely indispensable.
Sunday, 2 PM. January 21, 2018.
Winter Park Library
It is Sunday afternoon. Holly
Mandelkern is a friend who has published a beautiful though unsettling book of
poems and biographies from the Holocaust including original illustrations by a
local artist. She is presenting her work at the Winter Park library.
Holly was kind enough to give
me a copy of Beneath White Stars, Holocaust
Profiles in Poetry, for my own enrichment and for use in my classes. I was deeply
moved by these poems which allow the
reader to enter into the lives of those in ghettos, prison camps and in hiding.
The Holocaust is a deeply
troubling subject. But like the events in Ocoee a century ago, those events
remain in our collective Shadow awaiting their turn to be excavated, examined,
owned and learned from.
We are here today to dig some
of them up.
This day Holly spoke of young
boys who wrote short stories and first-hand accounts of death camps, In each
case, their writing formed their resistance to the darkness that had consumed
the western world in the early 20th CE.
She spoke of poets who could focus
on the momentary beauty of a butterfly before it flitted away among the souls
of so many innocent lives in a world gone mad. His words would eventually be excavated
and spoken at the Nuremberg Trials of war criminals in the years after the
camps were finally liberated.
I have been a student of the
Holocaust since my days in seminary over 25 years ago. I have studied at the US
Holocaust Museum and twice visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It is a grim
subject to consider. But, like the events in Ocoee, I have long felt called to
wrestle with the implications for humanity of this darkness, to mourn its genocidal impact. There are many lessons
to take back to my own Christian tradition which must account for its role in those
dark times and the many dark times which preceded and gave rise to it.
The last figure Holly discussed
was Fr. Patrick Dubois, a French Catholic priest who works in the Ukraine.
Prior to the German efficient death camps of the Third Reich, Nazi elimination
policy impacting a wide range of designated “undesirables” including Jews was
carried out by the death squads of the occupying German army called the Einsatgruppen. Thousands of victims were
rounded up, taken to remote areas where they dug the pits in which they would
be shot and buried in mass graves.
Dubois has made his life work
to excavate the memories of those swept away by the Nazi paramilitaries. “The
sanctity of life was violated so deeply here. Human beings were shot in mass
and thrown into pits. These acts are so immoral they demand a response.”
A fellow priest, whose
tradition had made a pact with Hitler to protect its priests and religious
during the war, Dubois arranges memorial services with Jewish rabbis to honor
the humanity of those killed. His efforts have helped local children of nations
occupied by the Third Reich, who were pressed into service, to finally speak
their painful truth.
Together they uncover this
history, unbury its atrocities, own the dark Shadow and lay it to rest..
Digging Up Wounded Spirits
What struck me as I listened to
all these stories was the role that burial had played in insuring these
atrocities would one day be addressed. The burial of these writings meant they would survive even as most of the writers would not. The villagers’ burial
of their stories deep within their own souls insured that these many voices of atrocity
would finally be heard.
“Even in the face of danger,
the threat of death, spirit will not die,” Holly said. “Our life experience may
not survive. So we bury these memories, waiting for the day when they can
safely reemerge.”
Like the souls of the Ocoee
massacre victims, they have lain silent many years, waiting for their time to
come out of the darkness back into the light.
Now that time has come.
Those of us who are called to once
again bear witness to atrocity long after the immediate suffering has ended have
the unenviable task of excavating the horror and the pain of events which have
long gone unaddressed. We must dig up wounded spirits. They must have their
say.
Time has not healed these
wounds. They have only festered in the darkness.
There is no way to simply
“move on.” The past cannot just be the past.
This history which lies within
our collective Shadow must be faced before any healing can occur. Until then,
the souls of those living lights extinguished by fear, cruelty and hatred cannot rest.
And ultimately, neither can
we.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding. Most
things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
Do not be daunted by the enormity
of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are
not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi
Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston 2018
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