Welcome Activists !

 

When I was in college, I was going to save the world.

It started with a protest of the Cambodian invasion of 1970 that closed the St. John Fisher College campus. With the help of the staff, we carried construction barricades from a storage shed to close the college’s main drive.

One summer (1972) I interned with two radical nuns in Rochester New York’s ghetto. For three days in July of 1964 (the same summer the Civil Rights Act was passed) there had been a race riot in that neighborhood in which I was born and out of which our family moved in the middle of the 1950’s. The riot had followed the brutal police arrest of a drunk. Nelson Rockefeller called out the National Guard. Saul Alinsky came to town. (He disliked superficial flavors of liberalism and encouraged conflict — "There can be no compromise without confrontation".) F.I.G.H.T. (Freedom-Integration-God-Honor-Today) was formed. A Kodak share holders meeting was interrupted. Public housing towers began to be built. Those two sisters were put there to organize and to minister.

That year, I was also part of the St. John Fisher College newspaper staff. I ended the summer by writing an article which would appear in the paper that fall. I had asked what the Roman Catholic church was doing for blacks in the ghetto. “Shit, honey; they don’t do nothin’ for us” was the answer. That was the headline. For the photo above the headline, our photographer superimposed the face a a black child who had pressed her face into his lense, over the tower of what had been a grand German Catholic parish, St. Michael’s.

Lexington, Va. is home to Washington & Lee University and the Virginia Military Institute. From 1982 – 1985 I worked at R. E. Lee Memorial Episcopal Church in Lexington. Originally “Grace Church”, it is now that again. Virgina went “Jim Crow” in 1902. The church changed it’s name from “Grace” to “Lee” in 1903. Segregation at Virginia Military Institute ended, then women were admitted, because of the leadership of this church. The “St. Bob’s” Rector once had a cross burned on his lawn.

In 1988 as the Purdue Episcopal Campus Minister I worked with the Purdue Academic Advisors (PACADA) to “unlearn racism”; to raise “white awareness” and challenge “white innocence” and “white privilege”. Professor Manning Marable was a member of the Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the 1986-87 academic year. Reagan was president. Apartheid was the issue. Churches were “divesting”.  Our trainings were primarily a punishment university housing units received when they had done something racist. Bob Topping’s  “A Century and Beyond” was published in 1988, and in it was an ambivalent  Journal & Courier evaluation of race relations at Purdue; “it’s not good, but its not bad either.”

I find I don’t have a lot to say about George Floyd. I wish this generation well in it’s quest to save the world. Where were you all in 2016?

I have gone to every training on race awareness the left leaning Episcopal church has been able to employ for the last thirty plus years. My boss was an African-American woman. Running “The Church of Presidents” is no guarantee that you won’t be gassed by an oligarch.

Indiana has a Klan history. It’s political acts, from school funding, to property tax caps, to gerrymandering are all designed to support a cultural conservatism, those old norms and biases from the upland south that in the 1920s and 1930s attracted sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd to "Middletown."

Nobody picks Purdue for its liberality. It’s cheap to go here and live here. You want a job. I wanted a job. Purdue provides skill sets. Mostly skill sets. John Purdue was not Ezra Cornell, not Leland Stanford, and certainly not Johns Hopkins, the Quaker abolitionist. “Tyrants fear the poet” (Amanda Gorman). Purdue troubles no one.

The City of West Lafayette is a small, well run city.  It’s people generally have come from somewhere else and live here paying higher taxes because they appreciate education and love the diversity in this community that comes with the university. We are hemmed in by the river and the university, and also by those Indiana values like religion, spousal relationships, child rearing, how to grow corn, and how to build a barn, which, writes James Madison, Emeritus professor of history at Indiana Unviersity, has also seen low taxes, or no taxes, and minimal government baked into the state’s political system.

You probably want the city to fix racism. You start here because we’re easy. Defund the police. Challenge Purdue.

Welcome to that big lift.