Part Six: A Reason Not to Hate

[Often what we experience at the hands of others, causes us to hate, but what is more powerful than hate, is to instead find a reason to love in spite of the hate.

In this chapter from my book, Black Eyes Shut - White Lips Sealed, I share how as an African American Republican, I arrived at this decision.]


CHAPTER FIVE

A REASON NOT TO HATE

“Never hate those who hate you, because in doing so, you also become infected with their contagious, deadly, and self destructive disease.”
Golden Nuggets of Wisdom to My Daughter LaShunda__jhh


When God first said to me, “I am calling you into politics to make a difference”, immediately I thought I would become a successful democratic elected official who would champion the cause of the poor, children, the elderly, the down trodden, and those suffering injustices. However, once my political ambitions took a Republican turn, there were immediate hindrances to accomplishing this mandate.

It was hard for those who grew up with me, and particularly those who went to undergraduate school with me at Wheaton to believe that I had become a Republican. Not me! The person who thought hard about becoming a Black Panther during my college days? “Free Huey Newton”, was on my lips, and Rap Brown was a brother who moved me to action.

Back then, I could identify with Angela Davis who was seen as a brave black sister, who was not afraid to fight the system to force it to change.

We had seen peaceful demonstrations end with violence, and with us being the sole casualties. My generation refused to sit back any longer and wait for White America to make up its mind to do the right thing towards us. We were the generation of forced change. We were tired of being openly humiliated, beaten, lynched, and castrated, while the laws that were in place to protect us, offered us no justice or legal recourse, and were not worth the paper they were written on.
I was very fiery, and issue oriented back in those days. My recollections of some of the horrors and injustices of living down south spurred unabated anger that was penned up inside of me. That anger slowly turned to hate.

It was never in my heart to hate, but I did not know how to channel that anger into positive courses of action, until one day I remembered the words of my most admired two teachers from my high school years, Brenda Strong Nixon, and Connie Mitchell. They told us to stop being so angry, and use our brains to fight with, and to use what was up here [pointing to the head] instead. These words were powerful tools for fighting the racial injustices of our day. I will never forget their words.

“They can take away your social liberties, and even enslave your body, but if you get a good, solid education, they can never enslave your mind. Because nobody can ever take away from you what you got in your head!”

What a profound and provocative insight.

In later years I took that advice, and from that point on in my life, my quest was
for knowledge, and my anger was re-channeled into positive courses of action. I realized that I did not need to take on the violent and unjust nature of my enemy. Neither did I have to take it upon myself to seek revenge. Instead, I learned to curb my temper, cool headedly observe my enemy, devise a plan, intelligently wait for the right time to implement it, and fight with my head. This coupled with prayer, and seeking the wisdom of God, provided me with the strongest of weapons to defeat the wrongs and ills of society.

As I look back on that period, which I call “my angry years”, now I realize it wasn’t hate that kindled my anger, so much as it was pain and despair.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s had given us hope in the 70s of changing the face of America so that it included and looked like us. We were the children of the Civil Rights Movement, and were determined that we would never again be enslaved or treated less than human, simply because of the color of our skin. If it took dying, we were ready to die for freedom. We had made up in our minds that there would be no more lynchings and killings of helpless and innocent black folks. With what blacks had endured, enough was more than enough, and we were willing to lay down our lives for the cause of freedom.

I had seen and witnessed so much injustice that it generated a pain within me, which seemed to only subside with protest and anger.

I thought about the times, my father a Baptist minister was called “nigger” and “boy” instead of his name. I remembered seeing him go around to the back of restaurants to order food for us because they did not serve niggers inside with the white customers, who were no better than we were, and whose money was no greener than ours.

I thought about the times this white man named Mr. Gunner came to our house, ate at our table while insulting us with “nigger” and “tar baby” jokes. You would have thought he was somebody important or rich and wealthy. But he was just another poor, uneducated, white southern man who had the nerve to think himself to be better than the nigger company he kept. Part of the reason why he visited us was because he was so poor that he had to eat the scraps from our table just to be fed.
Once my Mama was in the kitchen straightening my sister’s hair. Mr. Gunner seemed to always gravitate to the place where my Mama was. We watched him, as he tried to flirt with her. She was young and very beautiful, but that did not give him the right to look at her the way he did. He often made remarks about our nappy hair, which because of the mixture of Indian and Caucasian blood in us on my mother’s side, our hair was not nearly as nappy as most blacks. Nevertheless, he found it amusingly funny to degrade us because of our Negroid features.

Each time he told his insulting jokes, as a young child, in my mind I silently thought about how cruel his words were, and how bad they made me feel. With every insult, I became more determined that when I got big enough, if a white man ever looked at me the way he looked at my Mama, or if he ever spit on me, touched me, or even as much as called me a nigger, I would try with all of my might to make sure he was one dead white man!

I did not dare tell my parents what I felt because they always had taught us to love everybody, treat everybody right, and to turn the other cheek if we wanted to see Jesus. So the only reason why I abandoned and repented of the thought of putting a hurting on him for all his insults to us was because I sure enough wanted to see Jesus! I had heard so much about Jesus, and had already had a powerful spiritual introduction to him at an early age. Therefore, I sure as heck wasn’t going to let this one white man make me miss the chance to get to heaven where I could see Sweet Jesus, face-to-face!

But I thought, when I got to heaven, and if I saw him up there, I was going to let him have it! Thank God for getting to know him at an early age. This played a huge part in smothering the anger, and the many reasons whites had given us to hate them. I guess this is why God gave me my first spiritual experience at the age of four. To keep me from displaying that anger in violence.

Following the pastoral footsteps of my father, and his lineage of preachers, I held church services outside during the summer. I stood upon a box crate and a wooden picnic table, using them as my pulpit. Those who came to hear me preach were just as old, as they were young. I preached and preached until I worked up a good Baptist sweat, with one sock up, and the other worked down into my shoe. Then after each sermon, I would reach over and pull the hat off Mr. Herman Evans’ head, or anyone else’s hat I could get, and passed it around as the collection plate.
With what was given in the offerings, I gave it to my mother to buy kool-aid and cookies for my congregation. After all, like Jesus, after I finished preaching, I had to feed the multitude of famished parishioners.

Recently my Mama told me the story again, and handed me an old faded picture of me after I had finished preaching. Sure enough, there I stood after preaching, with one sock up, and the other down!







Sure enough, there I stood after preaching, hair frizzled with one sock up, and the other down!

Different preachers tell of when they received the call. For some it was in the field, in a dream, in a vision, or as they rode or walked along. But for me, I received the call at the age of four, while sitting on the toilet, swinging my tiny little legs, singing and preaching to my imaginary congregation. Until I started preaching to the neighborhood, my favorite place to hold church was in the outhouse.

Once my family moved from the community of New Tyner to Shepherd, I stopped preaching in the outhouse, because then we had inside plumbing. However I continued to preach, but now to the neighborhood children, and escorted them to and from the weekly Camp Cedine Bible Class.

I was grateful for the solid bible teaching that came from home, and from outside that kept me anchored, and always brought me back to knowing what was right; and hating someone, even if they hated me for no reason, just wasn’t the right thing to do.

Even with my solid teachings, knowing how difficult it sometimes was for me to turn the other cheek without first drawing the sword, God removed me from the south in 1967, and did not allow me to be there during the assassination of my hero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I was living in Washington, D. C. when they assassinated Dr. King. I remember it well.

The days following his assassination, I woke up, and there was an eerie feeling in the air. I got dressed and preceded to head out the door for my daily walk to McKinley High School. As I got to the intersection of Bryant Street and North Capitol, I saw nothing but tanks moving up and down North Capitol. I looked up into the sky and could see clouds of smoke billowing in the distance. The smell of burning was in the air. I wasn’t sure if I should turn back, and go home or keep going. But feeling the aching pain from the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, kindled my own inward and outward burning.

The tears streamed down my face. I could not retain my sorrow mixed with anger. It was hard to believe that this deeply devoted, meek and forgiving man was now dead, who had believed so strongly in turning the other cheek. I did not want to believe in non-violence any more! I was so hurt and confused that I found myself running.
I ran so hard that I was completely exhausted by the time I reached 2nd and T Street. As I entered the doors of McKinley High, I could feel the emotional charge of everyone around me. All I wanted to do was empty myself of the anger I felt inside. I was different from the other students. What they felt was from a totally different prospective. I was a southern girl who had just recently moved to Washington D.C. I knew by experience, all too well the terror of racism. Suddenly it all began to flash before me: My father almost being lynched. My family moving from Georgia to Alabama, and later to Tennessee, stripping me of my Georgia birthright. The racist and cruel insults of my childhood, and the many times I had been called a nigger, or had to ride in the back of the CARTA bus. I thought about having to drink from the “colored only” water fountain or using the “colored only” bathroom in Woolworth and S.S. Kresses in downtown Chattanooga. I thought about how hard my mother had labored washing and ironing for white people, while they barely paid her. I thought about them allowing their children to address her and my father by their first names, forbidding them to place a Mr., Mrs., or Rev. in front of their names, while insisting that we call them Mr. or Mrs.

I thought about many things, and the more I thought, the hotter the fire kindled within me! I could smell my blood boiling. There were blacks turning over cars, and setting fire to anything in sight that they thought belonged to the white man, even without thinking, and destroying that which was black owned.

For the next several years, what happened that day impacted upon my life. It wasn’t until my senior year in college in 1974 that I began to smother the angry fires within me. Prior to that, during my college years, I proudly expressed my black pride, and did everything I could to show my defiance for the racism not only in the South, but also across America. At first I thought the answer was to become a Black Panther. Angela Davis became my hero. I identified with the free Huey Newton posters hanging in my dorm room. Black power and the red, green and black Motherland symbols were vividly displayed on everything I could find.
I rinsed my hair each week with vinegar to change the wavy texture, so that I could form it into the biggest afro I could style.

I clinched my fist in the black power sign, and chanted, “beep, beep, bang, bang, ungawa, Black Power!” This was more than a chant. The power and force of it awakened the cries of freedom from the blood of my ancestral lineage of slavery that ran thick within my veins. The more I chanted it, the more bitter and angry I became, and less tolerant of racial injustices. Arthetha Franklin’s song, Young, Gifted and Black became my personal song of identity. But in all of this, I realized that it was nothing more than an emotional response to my painful frustrations, and quest for true freedom and equality. It was a freedom cry, and my inner most desire to see things change and be different. Coming to this realization, I made the most important decision of my life. Instead of picking up arms, and fighting in the streets, believing that the time for the revolution had come, I decided to wage my own revolution. It was a revolution of the intellect. I made use of every opportunity I had to get an ivy league education, and to equip myself to make a real difference.

The words of my teachers, Brenda Strong Nixon, and Connie Mitchell were my inspiration. “Use your head, use your head to fight with”, was all I could think about.

These two faithful teachers did something for the 1970 graduating class of McKinley High School that affected all of our destinies. They kept telling us to go to college and get the degree, because no matter what racist people did to us, they could never take away from us what we had in our heads. Not only this, but they made sure that over 76 percent of the graduating class went to college. These were the golden 70s for us; an opportunity to use our heads filled with knowledge, instead of venting our anger physically and through violence.

I was determined to obtain something that racism could never take away from me. So I prayed and asked God’s help to overcome my bitterness and anger, and to enable me to re-channel it into mighty streams of knowledge. This resulted in me being the first in my family to graduate from college, and the first of many blacks to overcome the hurdles of getting a law degree. But this was just the beginning.
There were many more hurdles to overcome, and many more situations up the road that would try my method for overcoming evil with good, and cause me to be tempted to take the anger route once again. However, I remained steadfast to the resolve that I had a far greater weapon to fight with that was more powerful than my raw emotional response of anger or hate. So even though I had every reason to hate those whites who had unjustly wronged me, and those of my race, I never resorted back to anger again. Neither was I ever tempted to hate in return, those who hated me, simply because of my skin being black, and my blood being of African descent.
I saw what white hatred was doing to not only those they hated, but to their own souls and lineages, and I chose not to be tormented by their demons, or to condemn my soul to their eternal fate and damnation. Therefore, I chose the example set by their self-destructive hate and racial violence, as a reason not to hate, and become the brutal and inhumane beast of racism, violence, terrorism and social evil.

End of Six Part Series from my book, Black Eyes Shut - White Lips Sealed.