When the Nazis March, We Must Confront Them With Moral Significance
Last edited Tue Aug 22, 2017, 01:02 AM - Edit history (1)
Rev. Peter Johnson knows firsthand how hard it is to be nonviolent in the face of violence.
Jim Schutze
The Confederate statues debate is coming at us so fast that nobody in Dallas should feel embarrassed about having to change footing, alter or even flip a previous position. I know I’m not.
Did what I said about it a month ago even make sense back then? I wrote that taking down Confederate memorials might deprive us of a useful historical context. Whatever that opinion may have been worth when I offered it, it’s inane now.
I’m serious about something here. I’m not citing my own words about the statues a month ago as some kind of false modesty. Believe me, there is nothing false about my modesty right now. I feel stupid. How did I find out I was stupid? This moment in history came along and blew me down like I was a bug in a tornado. I’m still choking on the dust. This is how history teaches us sometimes. So I hope the mayor will find it in his heart to change his mind about del
Last week, I spoke with an old friend, the Rev. Peter Johnson, a Dallas black leader who spent most of the movement years in the 1960s at the side of MLK, at first as a young body guard and later as an advance man for the SCLC. He told me a story once about how hard it was to be nonviolent, and I asked him last week to tell me again.
He was 19 years old when this story took place in Selma, Alabama. James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, was walking from a restaurant meeting with MLK and other movement leaders when he was attacked by white men, one of whom struck him a savage blow in the head with a club.
You had to be taught how to do that.”
“Rev. Abernathy was begging them to let that hearse out. I’m 19 years old. I’m standing there on the steps. I’m listening to this shit. Rev. Abernathy said, ‘If you don’t let this man get to the hospital, he’s going to bleed to death.’
“What he [the Alabama state trooper] said was, ‘Let that nigger-lover bleed to death.’ When he said that, I just turned around and went straight to the back of my car and got my shotgun. Chambered a round.”
Johnson says he would have shot the policeman “if [Young and Abernathy] hadn’t seen me, tackled me and wrestled that gun from me. It’s lucky I didn’t shoot one of them
Think about it. Think how much harder nonviolence was than punching a Nazi in the face, how much more bravery and selflessness it took.
So as the moment rushes down on us, while I do my own midcourse corrections and mea culpas to keep up and prepare, I hope the people who intend to confront the Nazis will give serious thought to how they’re going to do it. Confronting the Nazis is good. Acting like them is bad. It’s that simple, and it’s that difficult.
Reeb, age 38, died at the hospital.
http://www.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2017/08/19/when-nazis-march-here-for-confederate-statues-ant-fascists-must-think-hard-about-response
I also know Peter. I spent all nite at Dallas jail waiting for him to be released after a protest at Kay Bailey Hutchinson's office.
Peter has shared many stories with me, never this one.
Everyone should read this.
Please everyone go to the link and read the whole article.
I read it yesterday and I am still crying.
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