The Shame of Contra Aid

By W.W. Finlator

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 18-19

The Old Testament prophet called down woe upon those who said that darkness was light and light was darkness. We today fall within the shadow of that prophetic judgment since, led by our super-patriotic President, we have come to call what is truly American, un-American, and what is truly un-American, American. Consider the contras and Nicaragua, for there, our President would have us believe, the former Somoza death squads can be likened to George Washington’s freedom fighters at Valley Forge.

To achieve such self-deception requires a leadership skilled in the art of misconstruing the American dream. From the Monroe Doctrine, to the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt, to the present crisis, we have been assured that our relationship with Central and South American nations has been one of justice, freedom, and democracy. Actually, we have treated these countries as US colonies. We have set up and maintained repressive, despotic, governments. We have frustrated and defeated movements by the people of these countries to achieve justice and freedom for themselves. Nowhere has America, while believing its motives pure and unmixed, been so cynically and systematically un-American than in its dealings with these nations. Nicaragua is now exposing the sham and shame to the world.

Millions of Americans are waking up to these dark chapters to our history and we are angry at what our militaristic President is doing to the people of Nicaragua, angry that a spineless Congress supports him and, in the South, particularly angry that our timid representatives fall such easy prey to his jingoistic rhetoric. It is for us to hold these Southern politicians to strictest account, as one day all of us surely will be held in account for what we are doing to that suffering nation.

But, it is what we are doing to ourselves in the name of Americanism that concerns me for the moment. In supporting the contras and keeping alive the war and destruction in Nicaragua we are violating the heart and soul of our nation, in several ways.

First, we are in violation of the spirit and letter of our Declaration of Independence when we try to crush the yearning and striving of Nicaraguans for justice and

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freedom. It is as though the loyalists, following the American Revolution, and after leaving or being driven out of colonies, had regrouped on the Canadian border and with reenforcements from a hostile European nation, resumed the conflict as “freedom fighters.”

Secondly, we are in violation of the spirit and letter of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Rather than attempt to understand and support the strivings of Nicaraguans who wish to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” to themselves and their families,” we support a war of terrorism while hypocritically decrying a communist take-over and international terrorism. When you think of the kidnappings, tortures, burnings, maimings, pillage and murder, you have to spell it terrorism, pure and simple, underwritten by the US Government. This is not only deceitful and hypocritical, it is also plain un-American.

Thirdly, we are in violation of the spirit and letter of the Charter of the United Nations. The World Court, which we helped to set up and have appealed to in the past, has found our involvement in Nicaragua in violation to the UN Charter. We have become, as it were, an international outlaw to our own structure for justice and peace. The Oval Office seems to exult in this outlaw posture.

The final violation is theological. Millions of our citizens insist that America is a “Christian” nation. That such a designation contravenes the state-church separation principle is an argument I should like to push on another occasion. But, assuming, for the moment, that we are a “Christian nation” we have to define what is “Christian” and then we must decide who does the defining. This could lead to endless mischief and controversy. Perhaps most Christians would agree on the centrality of John 3:16 where we are told that God so loved the world that he sent his Son into the world to save it. From this we deduce that Jesus in His incarnation identified himself with all people, and apparently with a special option for the poor and lowly. The classic passage for this is the one in which Jesus tells us that he was hungry and we fed him, he was thirsty and we gave him drink, naked and we clothed him, sick and we visited him, imprisoned and we came to him, and then he added that inasmuch as we did these things for others, even the least, we did them also to him.

It takes no effort of imagination to see that these are literally the same basic needs of the vast majority of the people of Nicaragua, and indeed of all nations south of our border and the third world. But they are needs that neither their government, nor their church has met. When at long last the people have undertaken for themselves to achieve a just and peaeful and compassionate society, “Christian” America is prepared to use every means to prevent them. We are, I say, in violation of our religious faith!

For these reasons a moral outrage in America is in order. And this is why we cry shame, shame upon so many of our Southern members of Congress and why we must hold them to strict account.

Rev. W. W. Finlator is the retired pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, N. C.

A View from Death Row.

Reviewed by W.W. Finlator

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 16-17

Last Rights by Joseph B. Ingle (Abingdon Press, 1990).

Seldom do I have the honor to review a book written by a personal friend and respected colleague, and I welcome the opportunity to identify myself with the prison ministry of Joseph Ingle and his eloquent presentation of it in Last Rights.

Dr. Frank Porter Graham, former president of the University of North Carolina, U.S. Senator, and U.N. Ambassador, used to tell us that when a person, born and bred in the South, steeped in and loyal to the best in its traditions, yet possessing the capacity for transcendence, emerges with an open mind and a heart of compassion, you have the true, the authentic liberal. In Joe Ingle, behold the man! The brief account of his spiritual pilgrimage in the first two chapters is worth the price of the book. Southern Presbyterian background; graduate of St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, N.C. (religion and philosophy); the wretched and anguished stint at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, which has long been a solid institution to prepare solid ministers to serve the solid South and during the years of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, no fit place for the likes of Joe Ingle; Union Theological Seminary in New York where at last he could breathe a freer air and indulge his social conscience; the assignment to the Bronx House of Detention where he came to the realization that his “call” was not to the parish but to the prison ministry; and, finally, his growing conviction that it was in Dixie Land that he must take his stand and hence his return “home,” to take part in the founding of the Southern Coalition of Jails and Prisons. Quite a pilgrimage.

The jacket of the book describes the author’s involvement with twelve men and one woman who have been executed since 1976 as “13 fatal encounters.” The phrase is on the mark. There is a sad inevitability in each story, for the reader is painfully aware that in spite of all the heartaches and hopes and heroism the curtain of doom will fall at last and that in no case will there be an “and they lived happily ever after.” Knowing too well the tragic endings, I don’t want to see King Lear or Othello again, and though Joe’s friends on Death Row show genuine character development through his loving ministry, their tragic ends don’t bring cleansing to my soul, as such dramas are reputed to do.

But there are unforgettable services Last Rights offers. The state refers to capital punishment as execution. Joe Ingle always terms it “killing,” and he calls governors, judges, and D.A.s murderers–in our name. However legal the case, no matter the quantity of due process and exhaustion of appeals, the governor who will not grant clemency, the judge who will not set aside, the D A. who will not relent, is a killer.

This hard ball stance by a tender hearted man can only be understood in light of the life affirming nature of Joe Ingle. Throughout the hectic, frenetic pace of the narratives there is time to notice the laughter of little children, to hear the song of identified birds at morn or eve, to admire the lush produce of the fertile soil of eastern North Carolina, to listen to, smell and feel a Mississippi night, to remember to carry two roses to Velma Barfield during her last hours on Death Row. Just the man to affirm with a passion the lives of those who have been condemned to die.

Without exception he demonstrates in each fatal en-

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counter the humaneness of his approach and wins the love and confidence of every prisoner by embracing their full humanity. Our government, whether in war with the Vietnamese, or combating drug lords, or dealing with unfriendly dictators, or executing the men and women on Death Row must first strip these people of their humanity. He and his colleagues, standing almost alone, force the world out there to see these victims, as he would call them, as human beings, as God’s children who, regardless of the heinousness and atrocity of their crimes, which he neither denies nor dwells upon, have come from backgrounds of emotional disorders and faced daily deprivations with which they were unable to cope. Yet, despite their sad and sordid histories, they can and do change and mature and love and forgive. Joe Ingle is a man of simple Christian faith and the grace of God is in his book. As a subtitle I would suggest “The Humanization of Death Row.”

I am uncomfortable, however, when he uses the Christian faith to pressure judges and governors, reminding them of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery or of their Presbyterian backgrounds, etc. In the first place it’s ineffective. These “Christian” magistrates are far more aware of votes and constituents and their political futures than they are of the Bible. In the second place such a practice can be counter productive.

If I were Catholic, I would deeply resent the threats Cardinal O’Connor would visit upon me if I failed to vote “Christian” on the abortion issue. And should the Fundamentalists some day come to outnumber the rest of us may Heaven and the Constitution preserve us from a “Christian America.” I dare not presume to counsel Joseph Ingle in his prophetic and courageous ministry, but I hope he will put a major emphasis upon justice and equity and due process and, yes, outrage.

And indeed the author could counter my reservations by pointing to those frequent passages in his book that tell me that 90 percent of all people on Death Row are too poor to hire lawyers to defend them, that court-appointed lawyers are not given to hot pursuit and often tend to incompetence and neglect, that blacks who kill whites are eight times more likely to be executed than whites who kill blacks, that the number of executions is disproportionately high in the South, and that the majority of those on Death Row are poor, unschooled, and have serious emotional disorders–figures to suggest that the death penalty is used as a method of social control.

Some day the pendulum will swing. Some day America will reclaim its conscience and refuse to stay in company with South Africa and Iran as the nations with the largest number of executions. Some day we shall live under a government that refuses to kill its citizens. And a major factor in this return to sanity and humanity could be these 13 souls who were put to death by the state and who Joe Ingle has here kept alive.

W.W. Finlator, preacher, prophet, man of justice, lives as he long has in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Multum in Parvo

Reviewed by W.W. Finlator

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 30-32

Providence, Will D. Campbell (Longstreet Press, Atlanta, 1992, 292 pages)

Providence opens with a visit in 1955 by the Rev. Will D. Campbell and Professor McLeod Bryan of Mercer University to a place called Providence in Mississippi where Sherwood Eddy and Reinhold Niebuhr had set up an experiment in integration, a visit that cost Will his position as chaplain at the University of Mississippi and launched him on his strange and eventful spiritual Odyssey.

Who is Will Campbell? After writing 10 books and, for

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half a century, preaching, lecturing, protesting, agitating, singing, counseling, and traveling far and wide, we still ask who is this brooding, prophetic, and gifted man, Will Campbell. It’s easy to answer that when the Lord made him he threw away the pattern, but how would you describe the “pattern”?

Perhaps in Providence, Will, while writing of lots of others, lets us in for a heap of indirect self-disclosure, and we begin to see through a glass less darkly into the inner workings of this marvelous, multi-faceted, dreaming personality.

I mean by this that the author of this well researched history of Choctaw Indians, fur traders and pioneers, early settlers, missionaries, poor white farmers, slaves, Plantations, Civil War, Reconstruction, share-cropping, integration and the Civil Rights movement—all related to a parcel of land he repeatedly identifies as “a square mile of earth, Section Thirteen of Township Sixteen, North Range, in Holmes County, Mississippi”—is not only meticulous researcher and careful historian but also inadvertently, and certainly unintentionally, autobiographical.

And what a felicitous title! The book is about Providence Plantation, and no man in our day to my judgment has through a checkered and unchartered career of love and service been more under the guidance and governance of Providence than Will Campbell. He’s had to be.

The book is also about love. Will Campbell loves the American Indians individually and collectively, but he hates what the European Americans have done and continue to do the Indians.

He loves black Americans individually and collectively, but he is pained and outraged by the scars of slavery and segregation. He loves Southern poor whites, even when they are called rednecks, but he utterly rejects every expression of their racism. He loves the plantation elite, but he calls down the wrath of God upon their exploitation of both the poor whites and the blacks while remaining pious leaders in the church.

He loves his Baptist faith and heritage, but decries what Baptists have done to it. He loves democracy, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian, but he can never forgive Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson for their shameless parts in the forced removal of the Choctaw from Mississippi. He loves the good earth—and when it comes to a square mile of it in Holmes County, Mississippi, he venerates it—but his heart and his flesh cry out in agony and anger when the barbarians, whether individuals, corporations, or the Department of Interior, rape it.

A word we toss around today is holistic. Matthew Arnold wrote about seeing life steady and seeing it whole. Many authors in many books have told us the story of our Southland and from many points of view.

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But when it comes to telling us about 160 years of joys and griefs and despairs of red, black, and white Southerners across the sweep and surge of history from the perspective of a preacher, theologian, social prophet, philosopher, guitar singer of country, reformer, whiskey-drinking, tobacco-chewing Baptist, farmer and home maker, totally in love with life and people, providentially we have Will Campbell. Multum in parvo. So much stirring history packed in that little parcel of land in Holmes County, Mississippi.

You really ought to read this book. Some people think it’s his best.

W.W. Finlator of Raleigh, long-time Baptist Pastor and A.C.L.U. leader, is an absolutist about the Bill of Rights and the original principles of his Baptist faith (principles now despised by the heretics who control the Southern Baptist Convention.)