The Tragic Tulsa Massacre of 1921

There seems to be no end to the need for acknowledging the violence done to African Americans in this country. Two months ago, I wrote about the shameful Easter 1873 massacre in Louisiana. This weekend is the 100^th anniversary of the tragic massacre of Blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Basic Facts of the Tulsa Massacre

It all started on a Monday morning, May 30. Sarah, a 17-year-old White elevator operator charged that Dick, a 19-year-old Black man grabbed her arm as he entered the elevator. It is not known what actually happened, but the next day Dick was arrested for attacking Sarah.

By mid-afternoon on May 31, threats of lynching Dick surfaced, and Blacks begin to gather to protect him—but they were far outnumbered by the Whites. About 10 p.m., a White man attempted to disarm a Black man. The gun fired in the ruckus, and the massacre began.

Beginning around 5 a.m. on June 1, Black homes and businesses were looted and set ablaze. At 7:30, Mount Zion Baptist Church was set afire.

Most of the killing and the destruction of property was over by noon, but by then Tulsa’s prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, known as the “Black Wall Street,” was completely destroyed.

According to the large, impressive book The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, “Perhaps as many as three hundred Tulsans” were killed.

Moreover, “Upward of ten thousand Black Tulsans were without homes or businesses, their lifetime possessions either consumed by fire or carried away by whites” (p. 271).**  

Why Remember the Tulsa Massacre?

One of William Faulkner’s most memorable lines comes from his 1951 novel Requiem of a Nun: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

Faulkner’s words were paraphrased in "A More Perfect Union," a speech delivered by then Senator Barack Obama in March 2008. He argued that many of the difficulties in African American communities could be traced to the sufferings of previous generations under slavery and Jim Crow laws.

Or, he might have said, traced back to events such as the 1906 lynchings in Springfield, Mo., and the massacre in Tulsa 15 years later.

For decades and decades, evil racist acts of the past were overlooked, disregarded, consigned to the dustbin of history—or so it was hoped.

Just 35 years after the tragic Tulsa massacre of 1921, I took an American history course in Bolivar, Mo., just over 200 miles from Tulsa. I’m quite sure no mention was made of the Tulsa massacre.

According to the online Britannica, “Despite its severity and destructiveness, the Tulsa race massacre was barely mentioned in history books until the late 1990s, when a state commission was formed to document the incident.”

Nor was there any mention of the lynchings of African Americans fifteen years earlier in Springfield, Mo., even though that city was only about 30 miles away. My small Baptist college had no Black students, and there was little, if any, interest in Black history in the classroom or on campus.

But the past is never dead—and in 2019 the city of Springfield finally, after 113 years, erected a historical marker in the city. And now, 100 years after the massacre in Tulsa, the country is finally paying some attention to the tragic events there. The past, thankfully, is no longer forgotten or concealed.

There is hope for the days ahead if the nation learns from the living past in order to create a livable future with liberty and justice for all.

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** The book of photographic history was written by Karlos K. Hill and published in March of this year. Another important book on this subject is Randy Krehbiel’s Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre (2019). (Both of these books were available in my local public library.)

Pondering Pachyderm Perambulation

You will soon learn as you read this blog post about an old story, a new book, and the ongoing issue why I have used such an enticing (and puzzling?) title.

An Old Story

John Godfrey Saxe was an American poet. Saxe (1816~87) is now known mainly for his re-telling of the ancient Indian parable "The Blind Men and the Elephant” (1872), which introduced the story to a Western audience. 

Many of you know that old story, but it is worth reading again in its entirety, so please click here and take a couple of minutes to read what poet Saxe called “a Hindoo fable.”

Early versions of the old tale go back to at least  500 BCE, and its origins were probably far earlier than that. References to it are found in ancient Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain texts.

That old story has often been used in what the poet Saxe called “theologic wars,” but interestingly, the old fable has been used in teaching about the Peace Corps, in discussions of systems engineering (see here), and in a 2020 Psychology Today magazine article, to give but a few examples.

A New Book

John J. Thatamanil is Associate Professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary. His new (2020) book is titled Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity.

Thatamanil, born in India and a U.S. resident since the age of eight, is an impressive scholar and his book will be appreciated most by scholars in the academic field that used to be called “comparative religion.” Most others will likely find reading/understanding the book quite demanding.

The book begins with “Introduction: Revisiting an Old Tale” (pp. 1~19). In the first thirteen pages, Thatamanil briefly summarizes the old story and discusses some of the criticisms leveled against it.

He informs his readers, “This book is a Christian exercise in pachyderm perambulation” (p. 11). In more common words, it is about circling the elephant, the author’s metaphor for how he “seeks to make theological sense of the reality and meaning of religious diversity” (p. 12).

The first chapter begins with a discussion of the question “Should Religious Diversity Be a ‘Problem’ for Christians?” (pp. 21~29)—and for the next 230 pages Thatamanil argues that the answer to that question should be No.

The Ongoing Issue

So, how do people of one religious faith relate to people of other faiths? Traditionally, the usual stance of Western Christians was the “we are right, they are wrong” position.

But through the years, interreligious contact increasingly morphed the views of many Christians toward inclusivist, as opposed to exclusivist, views—and then more and more toward pluralistic views.

Thatamanil critically examines those three positions in chapter two. He wants to move beyond all three of those widely held viewpoints—or at least to what he calls “relational pluralism,” as elucidated in chapter three.

And then the concept of religion itself is discussed in the fourth and fifth chapters. This prompts us to raise questions such as, In comparing Christianity to other religions, what form of Christianity is chosen? And what form of, say, Islam?

Do we compare the Christianity of the Quakers and Mennonites with the Islamic jihadists?

Or do we compare the Christian militants through the centuries with the Buddhism represented by people such as Thích Nhất Hạnh–or the Muslim family that lovingly cared for my Christian friend Delores (see here)?

In spite of all that Thatamanil wrote in his scholarly book, and the ongoing intellectual issues that he dealt with so admirably, perhaps the most serious religious issue today is not how the various religions “see” the “elephant” differently but how people increasingly don’t see the “elephant” at all.

And even those who do argue most about the various facets of the “elephant” increasingly belong to the same religious tradition—and those embracing significant agreement increasingly belong to different religious traditions.

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** I received the book introduced above under the auspices of the Speakeasy book review plan that is headed by Mike Morrell. In addition to this article, I have posted a much fuller summary of the book on my supplementary blogsite (see here).

Rep. Liz Cheney: Speaking Truth to Power

My May 15 blog post was about columnist Michael Gerson, whom I called a man of integrity. This post is about Rep. Liz Cheney, whom I see as a woman of integrity. But please note: being a person of integrity doesn’t mean that such a person’s ideas/opinions are always correct.

Rep. Liz Cheney, a Woman of Integrity

The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives met on the morning of May 12 to consider Cheney’s leadership role in their Party. The candid Wyoming Representative spoke briefly at the beginning of that meeting and led a short prayer, closing with these words:

Help us to speak the truth and remember the words of John 8:32 — “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” May our world see the power of faith.  

Rep. Liz Cheney on May 12, 2021

Less than twenty minutes later, Rep. Cheney was set free from her powerful position as the chair of the House Republican Conference (HRC) because of her unwaveringly speaking the truth about the lies still being propagated with regard to the 2020 election.

A person of integrity is one who consistently speaks and acts in harmony with their core beliefs in spite of the negative consequences that might result. In other words, a person of integrity tells the truth when it would be to their personal advantage to lie or at least to keep quiet.

Rep. Cheney is a woman of integrity because she is speaking the truth to power, denouncing the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election even though, as she knew well, continuing to do so would likely lead, as it did on May 12, to her ouster as the third ranking Republican Representative in the House.

Rep. Liz Cheney, an Opponent of the “Big Lie”

During the entire four years of the Trump presidency, Rep. Cheney was a loyal supporter of the President. She voted in line with Trump's position 93% of the time. But she consistently disagrees with his persistent position that the 2020 election was stolen and that he was actually re-elected.

To support his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, DJT and his allies repeatedly and falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had really won the election.

U.S. Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz subsequently contested the election results in the Senate. Their effort was characterized as “the big lie” by then President-elect Joe Biden—and that designation has, for good reason, been regularly used in this regard ever since.

On May 16, Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday asked Rep. Cheney if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Elise Stefanik, Cheney’s successor as HRC chair, are “being complicit in the Trump lies.”

Cheney’s straightforward response was: “They are, and I’m not willing to do that.” (See a 40-second clip here.)

Rep. Liz Cheney, a Proponent of Problematic Ideas

Those who are not conservative Republicans find much objectionable in Rep. Cheney’s political views and public statements about political matters. To give just one example, she is sometimes called a “warmonger,” and not without reason.

A May 16 post on NewYorker.com states that “Cheney, like her father [the Vice President from 2001 to 2009], is a committed hawk and a believer in the aggressive use of American power.”

Rep. Cheney has a right to her own opinions and political views, but there is a difference between opinions and facts. We can either agree or disagree with someone’s opinions, which cannot be objectively verified to be either true or false.

But it is different with facts: they can only be acknowledged as being true or denied by lying. Rep. Cheney accepts the facts about the 2020 election and speaks that truth to the powers that oppose her.

So, in spite of her problematic ideas, Cheney’s championing the truth about the 2020 election is a mark of her integrity. And in this regard, as one D.C. newspaper headlined on May 14, “Incredibly, Liz Cheney Is on the Right Side of History.” That is because, in expanding words MLK, Jr., made famous:

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward truth.

Michael Gerson: An Evangelical with Integrity

Today (May 15) is the 57^th birthday of Michael Gerson, the well-known columnist for The Washington Post. Happy Birthday, Mr. Gerson! And thank you for being an evangelical Christian with integrity.

Michael Gerson, the Evangelical

As I have noted a number of times, there has been, and continues to be, considerable criticism of white evangelical Christians (WECs)—and for good reason. But, as I often have said to my “old codger” friends, not all WECs are the same. We must acknowledge significant differences among them. 

There is little question but that Michael Gerson has been a lifelong evangelical Christian. As he himself explained in “The Last Temptation,” an April 2018 article in The Atlantic, he “was raised in an evangelical home, went to an evangelical church and high school, and began following Christ as a teen.”

In that same article, included in full in a 2020 book titled The American Crisis, Gerson states that his experiences as a Christian through the years make him “hesitant to abandon the word evangelical. They also make seeing the defilement of that word all the more painful” (p. 258).

Gerson was named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America.”

Michael Gerson, the Writer

Although he has done other things, Gerson is chiefly known as a writer. For example, he was a speechwriter for Bob Dole and a ghostwriter for Charles Colson. Then from Inauguration Day in 2001 to June 2006, he was the White House Director of Speechwriting. As such, he helped write the second inaugural address of Pres. George W. Bush.

After leaving the White House, Gerson wrote for Newsweek magazine for a time, and then in May 2007 he began his tenure as a columnist for The Washington Post.

In 2010, Gerson also was the co-author of the book City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era. The Foreword was written by Timothy Keller, the well-known evangelical pastor, and it was issued by Moody Publishers.**

Michael Gerson, a Man of Integrity

In his opinion pieces for The Washington Post, it seems quite clear that Gerson writes as a man of integrity. Here are examples of what I mean.

On October 28, 2019, Gerson’s WaPo opinion piece was titled, “White evangelical Protestants are fully disrobed. And it is an embarrassing sight.” In that article, he writes, “Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they [=WECs] have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself.”***

Gerson’s opinion piece for January 7 of this year, the very next day after the ill-fated events of Jan. 6, Gerson’s piece was titled, “Trump’s evangelicals were complicit in the desecration of our democracy.”

He pointed out in that piece, “As white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, misogynists, anarchists, criminals and terrorists took hold of the Republican Party, many evangelicals blessed it under the banner ‘Jesus Saves.’” Further on in that article, Gerson wrote,

It is tempting to call unforgivable the equation of Christian truth with malice, cruelty, deception, bigotry and sedition. But that statement is itself contradicted by Christian truth, which places no one beyond forgiveness and affirms that everyone needs grace in different ways. There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.

And then on May 3, Gerson’s opinion piece was “Elected Republicans are lying with open eyes. Their excuses are disgraceful.” (More about this later.)

And please note: Gerson still is listed as a Republican, so he not only is an evangelical Christian with integrity but also a Republican with integrity. This country badly needs more WECs and more Republicans like Michael Gerson.

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** A good reminder in a May 7 tweet by Tim Keller: “Less than 2/3 of evangelicals in the US are white and less than 10% of evangelicals in the world are American. (And not all white US evangelicals are the same). So, when you say, 'evangelicals have done this' or 'claim this'--keep this variety in mind.”

*** For those who cannot access The Washington Post articles by Gerson because of a paywall, click here to see those opinion pieces by Gerson. (If you don’t have time to read all three, at least see the first one, which was posted on May 3.)

Across the Pacific, and Asia, with Love

May 2006 was a special time for my wife June and me. We made our first visit back to Japan, where we had lived from 1966 to 2004. One of the many special events that month was the release of a new book planned and published by Japanese friends in our honor. It was a wonderful tribute.

Across the Pacific with Love

Kimura Koichi was a former seminary student of mine and my successor as pastor of Fukuoka International Church. After our retirement as missionaries in Japan for 38 years, it was his idea to produce a sort of bilingual Festschrift for me. It was financed largely by a very beneficent church member.

Fourteen Japanese colleagues, former students, friends, and scholarly acquaintances wrote essays for the book. One was by Murasaka Masatoshi (Japanese names are written with the family name first), my long-time friend and colleague at Seinan Gakuin.

Murasaka-sensei’s essay was titled “A Man Who Crossed the Pacific Ocean with Love.” The title of the book, Across the Pacific with Love, was adapted from the title of that essay.

In addition to Kimura-sensei, two of my good friends served as co-editors: Yamanaka Sakiyo, a professor at Seinan Gakuin University with whom I had worked closely in the Department of Religious Activities, and Kanamaru Eiko, one of my outstanding former students.

The book was completely bilingual. The Japanese part, printed from right to left, was 201 pages long and the English part was 182 pages. The essays were all written in Japanese. Several Japanese friends translated them into English, which was polished up by some ex-pat American friends.

The first two essays in the book were by the last two people on my chronological list of “top ten” influential personal acquaintances: Kaneko Sumio, our former pastor and friend since 1968, and Otsuka Kumiko, also our friend since 1968 and for several years my Japanese teacher and translator, office assistant, and advisor.

There are also essays by Hoshuyama Teruto, a university student of mine in 1974 who became a leader of the Toishikai, a discussion group I had started a couple of years earlier, and by Fukuoka Kikuko, who in 1985 was the first person I baptized as pastor of Fukuoka International Church.

I wish I could tell you more about these friends and the others who kindly wrote essays for Across the Pacific with Love.

Across Asia with Love

In May 2016, June and I made our last trip to Japan. That visit was one anticipated for decades. Long before retiring from Seinan Gakuin, I had said several times that if at all possible, I would come back for the centennial celebration in 2016. I was delighted we were able to do that.

Here is a picture of former Toishikai members that June and I had a delightful time with during our visit in Fukuoka. Next to me on the right is Hoshuyama-san, whom I mentioned above. 

During that time in Japan, I posted a blog article about Seinan Gakuin’s centennial Founder’s Day ceremonies on May 14. It was largely about Nakamura Tetsu, the featured speaker at that festive occasion.

Nakamura-sensei was a 1962 Seinan Gakuin Junior High School graduate, who years later after finishing medical school spent decades as a doctor and humanitarian aid worker in and around Peshawar, Pakistan, and then mostly across the border in Afghanistan.

As June and I had gone across the Pacific with love for the people of Japan, Nakamura-sensei flew across Asia with love for the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Tragically, Nakamura-sensei was killed by terrorists in December 2019. Earlier this year, Afghanistan issued a postage stamp honoring him. (Click here to see a short video clip about that.)

Nakamura-sensei became a Christian largely because prior to June and me, other missionaries had also gone across the Pacific with love, taught at Seinan Gakuin and witnessed to Christ’s love there.

Please join me in prayer for Seinan Gakuin as on this Saturday it celebrates its 105th Founder’s Day. 

Is E Pluribus Unum Viable Now?

In 1776, two centuries and 45 years ago, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson proposed a Great Seal for the United States. The only words on the proposed seal were E PLURIBUS UNUM, a Latin phrase meaning “one from many.”  

Viable for the United States?

According to the E Pluribus Unum Project of Assumption College (now University), e pluribus unum “offered a strong statement of the American determination to form a single nation from a collection of states.”

That phrase also indicates “America's bold attempt to make one unified nation of people from many different backgrounds and beliefs. The challenge of seeking unity while respecting diversity has played a critical role in shaping our history, our literature, and our national character.”

But is that motto still viable in the U.S.? After all these years, it seems that the nation is hardly one/unified on anything.

Oneness/unity does not depend on sameness or the denial of differences. But surely it does mean having mutual respect for those with whom we disagree and treating each other civilly. In addition, any sense of unity means people with differing views working together for the common good.

Originally, I was intending to list some of the great political, social, and religious differences now harmfully dividing USAmerican society. But perhaps those divisions are too evident to need further elaboration here.

Viable for the World?

This blog post was largely prompted by the ubuntu emphasis on the inherent oneness of humanity, which I wrote about on April 24. Even though a South African word and concept in its origin, proponents of ubuntu now speak of “the global family” and the basic oneness of humankind.

There have been many individuals and organizations longing for and working for the idea expressed by e pluribus unum to be descriptive of the whole human race.

The World Federalist Movement and One World, one of its associate members, are good examples.

The latter says on its website, “Inspired by such visionaries as Einstein and Gandhi, we regard inclusive federal democracy at the global level as a necessary precondition for justice, peace and prosperity for all of humanity.”

And they cite these words spoken by Einstein in 1945: “With all my heart I believe that the world’s present system of sovereign nations can only lead to barbarism, war, and inhumanity. Mankind’s desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government.”

That assertion takes the idea of e pluribus unum to a whole new level.

What Can We Hope For?

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Those words, based on a statement by Theodore Parker, a 19th-century clergyman, were most notably emphasized by MLK, Jr. and later by President Obama. They have been powerful words of encouragement for many justice-seekers.

But I wonder if we can also say that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward unity/oneness. Teilhard de Chardin wrote about the universe moving to a future Omega Point, meaning that everything is spiraling towards a final point of unification.

In a helpful February 20 article, a religion professor in South Africa wrote,

As a philosopher and theologian, [Teilhard] developed a unique synthesis of science and religion based on an evolutionary understanding of what he called the ‘cosmic Christ’ – the idea that the universe and everything in it is constantly moving towards a point of perfection defined by unity and love.

That is what Teilhard later called the Omega point. And that is why the author titled her article, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: prophet of cosmic hope .

Well, whether considering the current situation here in the U.S. or the world as a whole, it is abundantly evident we still have a long way to go. Omega of course is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and it seems that at present we may be no further than at beta (the second letter).

Still, grounded in cosmic hope, we can dream of and diligently work for the goal of e pluribus unum not only in the U.S. but for the whole world.