Funeral Rites – The Death of a Nation
Learn to do good;
Seek justice,
Rebuke the oppressor;
Defend the fatherless,
In the last installment of Funeral Rites, I quoted about the closest thing to an American political saint as the United States is ever likely to have: Abraham Lincoln.
There are many good reasons for this, not least of which he is, by far, most American’s favorite president for preserving the nation in its most difficult, bloody, and horrifying time in its history—the American Civil War—only to be assassinated less than a week after the enemy, a substantial portion of our own population, had been forgiven and invited back into the Union to rebuild. Largely at his insistence. Had he lived, the future of our country may have been entirely different in every respect. Because he didn’t, it could be argued that American degenerated rapidly into what it would have become before the Civil War, perhaps worse.
Fast forward 160 years, and the next great crisis approaches. We have had many since the Civil War. They seem to come in generations, or roughly so. They may be coming at us so quickly now, that our leaders are neither wise nor skilled enough to manage them individually or collectively.
Since the Civil War and Reconstruction, we have had a large number of economic, political, and military crises to keep us busy. Now, we have the added dimension of cultural crisis in the form of education, sexuality and gender, religious, and other things to keep us preoccupied and off balance. If one thinks as I do, and as a Christian there purports to be many of us in America, this has profound meaning.
Hatred and violence have been rearing their ugly heads throughout the country more often the last few years than at any time since the 1960s. In my freshman year in college, one of the first papers I wrote was about the Watts Riots in Los Angeles in 1965. Still fresh in most people’s minds in 1976, it was part of a series of riots that was part of the American experience in the 1960s that focused mainly on racial tensions, inequality of opportunity and access, and police brutality against specifically black people in ghettos that were mainly inhabited by them.
This is important because in the past, these same ghetto areas were not what they became in the 1960s. They were ethnic, but occupied by white people, of European ethnicities, who had moved to comfortable suburbs built for them after World War II. Many hundreds of thousands of black men, and women had also served as soldiers and performed other services during that war, and in Korea. They, like their white counterparts were entitled to a new reward for valiant service to their country: The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill.
During World War II, over 2.5 million black men registered for the draft, and approximately 1.2 million served in actual military units, men, and women, across all services according to the National World War II Museum.
You may be glazing over, and asking, “why the history lesson?” Well, it’s like this, kids. History called and He said, “don’t make me repeat myself!” But we haven’t been paying attention again.
The Watts Riots resulted in the deaths of 34 people in L.A. As if to repeat events, 27 years later, the so-called Rodney King Riots of 1992 resulted in the deaths of 63 people in the same city. Throughout the 1960s, rioting in the poorest areas of many major cities across the United States resulted in smaller numbers of deaths but had, at their core, the same causes.
Among them had to do with the poverty that was left unaddressed during times of expanding wealth, which could have helped those with the greatest need who had contributed to that expansion, especially after World War II.
Between the Civil War and the start of WWII, many black people had little opportunity to complete a high school education, let alone earn a college degree. The G.I. Bill was intended to afford that opportunity, as well as provide low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans, and other financial support. The number of those who served in the war formed a large percentage of the black population and would have a generational impact on the country for decades to follow.
At that time, and following after a pattern established by the Civil War, nearly 80% of the black population of the country lived in the south and were dominated by Jim Crow laws. These laws virtually assured poverty, and second-class standing for life. Segregation was enshrined not only in the south, but elsewhere in America under different names.
What happened with the G.I. Bill for blacks who served had a generational impact of a different, more insidious, kind. Rather than insure that ALL who served were availed of these services after they were discharged from the military, many banks and mortgage lenders who were charged with extending the loans refused to make the loans to black people. They did so without consequence. That meant that those 1.2 million Americans who served in the war, and in Korea, and some in Viet Nam returned to the lives they lived before their military service. If you were black and living in the south, that almost always meant a life of poverty. Jim Crow laws may have been abolished in 1965, but their effects in the south remain to this very day. One evidence of their effect can be seen in how America is policed in certain cities. Another by where people live one generation after another.
Areas of major cities where civil unrest has occurred since the Rodney King Riots of 1992 continue to be just as widespread, and for many of the same reasons, with the same tripwires related to how areas are policed. Focal points remain the same: Black, and other minority groups being clustered into the same areas they have been in for decades, when they could have been afforded the chance to improve their status through education, better housing, and vastly expanding and improving our national culture, instead of tamping it down, and smothering it as we have since the beginning of slavery here.
It started rearing its ugly head again in recent years with the George Floyd riots in 2020 and others in the years just before. Same stuff. In recent weeks, we have the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis and its aftermath, albeit much more professionally handled by leaders in that city, and with no rioting to their, and their citizens, great credit.
We as a nation have an opportunity, and a small window to take advantage of it, before things implode.
We go to far too much trouble using laws to keep our fellow citizens separate, unequal, unloved, and dependent on governments, and other entities, that don’t have their best interests at heart.
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