Rambling Thoughts On Race

Shown is a picture of a stained glass window in the predominantly black 5th Presbyterian Church of Blacksburg, VA.  It lovingly depicts the death scene of legendary Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.  The window was commissioned by the sons and daughters of slaves who were taught to read and write, in violation of the law, by Jackson when he was a professor at VMI.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It would seem that every conversation in America today is dominated by race and every issue is tainted by race. I'm tired of hearing about it.  I make no apologies for the color of my skin nor do I expect anyone else to.  I make no apologies for my Confederate ancestors who served bravely in a lost cause but firmly believe, along with Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Patrick Cleburne, that slavery was an evil institution that had to end.  I make no apologies for my frequent criticism of race hustling and the gangsta lifestyle and for that matter racial politics whether they are practiced by the new "majority rule" in South Africa or the stealth Muslim race hustler now occupying the White House.


I was brought up in a Southern society that was by nature racially prejudiced.  But when those race relations were reduced to a personal level the details became a lot more complex.  Those folks were our neighbors.  We worked alongside them.  Unlike the rich and northerners, we had to live with them.  Some of my earliest memories of colored people come from the cotton fields.  I remember my mom and dad picking the long rows right alongside black people, brown people and other poor white people.  We all worked together because we all had to buy groceries and gas.  There were no segregated cotton fields or spinach patches ... just day work for folks on the bottom rung of the employment ladder.

When I was older, I learned the story of my father's adoption.  My grandmother, crazed by pain, tried to cure her kidney stones with a medicinal dose of arsenic, a common home remedy at the time.  She got the dose wrong.  It didn't kill her but it did reduce her mental faculties to those of a six year old child.  In those days, the mere hint of suicide brought deep shame on the family and mental illness was social anathema.

One side of my family looked the other way while my grandfather tried to care for two toddler boys and a sickly baby. The Cherokee side of the family did not look the other way however and my half Cherokee great aunt and her full blood Cherokee husband took my father to raise as their own.  I never really knew the socially prominent side of my father's family but I have fond memories of smiling brown faces and big hugs from my Cherokee great aunts.  When Dad needed help getting the farm going it was one of those Cherokee great aunts and her full blood Choctaw husband that loaned us a tractor ... for several years.  They didn't seem to care one bit that I was a lot fairer than them.  They just treated me like a member of the family.

Only recently, I learned a fascinating story from my mother's childhood.  As I was growing up, we had an interesting relationship with an old black man.  He was the best horseman in the county in his prime and until his death the only veterinarian that many poor people could afford, black or white.  He doctored our stock when asked and charged what we could afford.  My mother treated him with great respect.  I knew there was more to the relationship than met the eye but southern people learn to live with secrets.  I got the answer only recently while talking to the last surviving member of my mother's people of that generation.

I knew that my maternal grandfather was a socialist political organizer, a rambler, a talented itinerant  musician and a drunk.  I knew that one evening in the mid 1920's, the local Klan came visiting with a horsewhip because, on top of the rest of his errant behavior,  he was also not supporting his family.  I even knew that when he saw the Klan coming he took off running through the fields half dressed, left the state and did not come back for several years, leaving my grandmother in a sharecropper's shack with small children and a poorly tended crop in the fields.  It was all a major scandal and it left my grandmother destitute .... and isolated.

What I did not know that was that that old black man that my Mom respected so much was a well to do neighbor at the time of my grandmother's abandonment by her husband.  This kind black man let the poor white "grass widow" and her hungry kids work in his fields so that they could put away a little money for the winter.  When they worked for him, he fed them well and paid them the going wage when everyone else was ready to take advantage of them. He took a terrible risk letting a needy white woman and her brood of kids work for him in a day when black men were lynched and burned for just looking the wrong way at a white woman.

When I was in the military, I wound up being AWOL because my flight back to the ship was delayed by a massive snowstorm.  I was AWOL because I had manipulated the system to be gone longer than  allowed and traveled farther than allowed by regulation.  Everybody did it when we had several days of in port stand down, you just didn't want to get caught at it.  As I was walking back up the dock to face the music, our short, fat, black, career Navy Personnelman grabbed me aside into the shadows and said "Here Kumpe.  Quick.  Sign these."  He had made out a leave request, backdated it and gotten the XO to sign it without realizing what was going on.  He then escorted me back on to the ship and had the OD log me in as returning from regular leave.  He literally saved my stripes.  Later, I remembered that a while before while on Shore Patrol duty, I had cut one of his best friends, another black career Navy man, loose without charges after he got roaring drunk and made public advances on a stripper.  I most certainly saved his stripes if not his career. 

In midlife, I did a stint doing "special projects" on contract for a large insurance company.  My helper needed to be street wise, have free time to travel on an irregular basis on short notice and be good company during the long drives.  I wound up hiring a black ex-cop turned Pentecostal preacher who always needed the extra money and was free to travel.  During the two plus years that project ran, we traveled all over the United States.  We ate together, drank together (two beers per day "for our stomach's sake," non-alcoholic if we could get it) and, to save expenses, slept in the same hotel room.  We got to know each other as well as two men who work together ever will and frankly I can't think of anyone I would PREFER to work with under those conditions. To me he wasn't a black man.  He was just a good solid man who did a good job for me.  I knew I could trust him to watch my back.

Every human being is created in the image of God.  Jesus taught us to look beyond our natural, carnal differences and be like Him.  We are supposed to strive to be like Christ in all things, including our relationship with people of other races. Like my hero Gen. Stonewall Jackson, I believe that there is no place for racial division in the body of Christ.  Jackson risked arrest by teaching black men, women and children to read and write in illegal Sunday Schools while he was a professor at VMI.  If there is any place where brothers and sisters in the Lord should be able to look past the circumstance of their birth and share the brotherhood of their common faith it should be the church.

Flawed as he was, Dr. Martin Luther King taught an invaluable truth about race relations.  We should judge each man by the content of his character not by the color of his skin.  I strive to do that.  It is the "Christian" thing to do.