Word Truth on a Greenfield, Mass. Sunday

All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, formed  in 1824

It turned out to be a wonderful weekend  during a music festival in July. On a morning walk for coffee, Sunday, July 12, 2015, I passed a beautiful, historic building with a banner, “# Black Lives Matter,” stretched above the entrance.   

All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church had suspended its summer Sunday services, but still, the banner was hanging with significant  impact in size and words on a main street of a town with about 17,000 people, 92.4 white, according to U.S. Census State and County Quick Facts. On the traditional, permanent outdoor announcement board, All Souls announced a reminder to resist institutionalized racism. When I arrived at the pleasant coffee shop just a few feet away, I sat looking at the back of a man seated at a polished wooden counter. He was wearing a t-shirt with lots of words across the back. The words announced that he was a defender of Southern culture including, the food, the music, family, the rhythms etc.  He walked out of the cafe at such an angle that I never got to see what was on the front of the shirt. But I did wonder, “Where are the defenders of southern culture that are honoring the culture, music, rhythms and traditions that include those of Africans who loved life and were made to suffer beyond the limits of humanity in the South, but created beautiful and uplifting expression, courage, grit, and raw-boned bravery through music, words that were poetry, ancient spirituality and the loving embrace of family, friends and strangers in need.”   

Looking at the words on the t-shirt man’s back, I became more alert to his movements, although it didn’t interrupt my conversation of the moment. Yet I kept him in the corner of my eye for my own sense of safety. I wondered if the Confederate Flag was on his chest. That flag whose history and culture is one of  hate: ferocious racism that stole the labor, skills and freedom of African slaves for centuries; and waged terror on men, women and children with lynching before and after the South lost the war. Lynching on Sundays in the South brought out whole families after church, carrying picnics to witness the torture-to-the-death of human beings. The Library of Congress has done a fine job of keeping the visual, grisly documentation of such activity with its archive that includes lynching postcards ( actually mailed out as souvenirs by the lynching party audience), photos and news clippings. Nineteenth century, African American journalist, Ida Wells Barnett’s “Red Record,” gives detailed, witness accounts and statistics on the epidemic lynching of Black people.  

Had I not passed the All Souls banner just around the corner, I would have left Greenfield in a very sour state of mind.  I still wonder what was on the front of that Southern culture t-shirt. It would be nice to think that there was something positive, something that said, “what”?   You imagine it