LIBERATION LECTIONARY ~ BLACK LOVE DAY

Blackness is Love

”As you do for your ancestors, your children will do for you.” -African Proverb

Music: Grandma’s Hands by Bill Withers

Grandma's hands, Clapped in church on Sunday morning

Grandma's hands, Played a tambourine so well

Grandma's hands, Used to issue out a warning

She'd say, Billy don't you run so fast - Might fall on a piece of glass

Might be snakes there in that grass, Grandma's hands

Scripture & Lesson: Wisdom’s Temple

Read 1 Kings 8 // Key Verses, 8:57-59
“May the Lord our God be with us as They were with our ancestors. May the Lord not abandon us or leave us, causing us to be devoted to Them, to walk in all Their ways, and to keep Their commands, statutes, and ordinances, which were commanded to our ancestors. May my words I have made my petition with before the Lord be near the Lord our God day and night, so that They may uphold this servant’s cause and the cause of God’s people.”

In the 8th chapter of 1st Kings, a story of celebration is given, from the days of King Solomon’s reign. The people are gathered at the temple of Solomon’s vision, a triumph of artistic skill, and a labor of love. The love of the Lord for the people is the power for our creativity. Solomon’s  creative vision was part of his royal inheritance. God blessed the vision of a safe space for all  people; a space that represented the promise of God’s presence. If only more people in power had a vision for spaces of spiritual and social safety. God’s creative vision is the inheritance of the oppressed. 

On February 12th, 1946, an army vet name Isaac Woodard was traveling long distance on a bus. He asked the bus driver to stop for a restroom break. The driver disliked Isaac. He found police officers in the place where they stopped and complained. Isaac was taken into custody at random, and the local police chief beat him brutally. He was completely blind. Later, an all white jury fully acquitted the police department. Many civil rights advocates, organizers and activists responded by demanding that structures of power in the criminal legal system be held accountable. The federal government shifted laws and officially desegregated. Isaac was 26 years old, returning home from the second world war. That fact alone makes room in crowds and earns early boarding in airports. But our status cannot save us. Demographics do not disappear Blackness. 

We are longing for the vision of God. We are longing for a place of promise. Much like our scripture this week, we are longing for a promise that we will not be abandoned. We want a place where we can be free to celebrate. We need a promise that Isaac Woodard will receive justice. That Sandra Bland’s story will not happen again. We are crying out to the God who has the power to make sure that history does not repeat itself.

Blackness is Love: The Birthday of Frederick Douglas

If it is difficult to celebrate Valentine’s Day for you this year, consider celebrating the live and journey of Frederick Douglas.

When he was emancipated, Frederick Douglas chose Valentine’s Day as his birthday on quite a journey. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass recalled his last meeting with his mother, where she presented him with a cake, before she was sold away by their enslavers. He wrote “The ‘sweet cake’ my mother gave me was in the shape of a heart, with a rich, dark ring glazed upon the edge of it. I was victorious, and well off for the moment; prouder, on my mother’s knee, than a king upon his throne,” he wrote. Historians said Douglass later may have speculated that his birthday was somehow connected to Valentine’s Day.

In 1891, Frederic May Holland wrote a Douglass biography about four years before Douglass died. “It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday,” Holland reported Douglass as saying in a private letter. “He supposes that he was born in February 1817, but no one knows the day of his birth or his father’s name,”

Late in his life, the Bethel Literary Society in Washington, D. C. decided to honor Douglass on his birthday in 1888. The event received a good deal of publicity. According to an account in the Washington Evening Star, the event was held on February 28, 1888. After the other dignitaries spoke, Douglass took the stage as he twirled his glasses.

“I understand from some things that have occurred since I came in that you have been celebrating my seventy-first birthday. What in the world have you been doing that for? Why Frederick Douglass. That day was taken from him long before he had the means of owning it. Birthdays belong to free institutions. We, at the South, never knew them. We were born at times: harvest times, watermelon times, and generally hard times. I never knew anything about the celebration of a birthday except Washington’s birthday, and it seems a little strange to have mine celebrated. I think it is hardly safe to celebrate any man’s birthday while he lives,” Douglass said.

Meditation & Prayer

Tending - Elizabeth Alexander
In the pull-out bed with my brother
in my grandfather’s Riverton apartment

my knees and ankles throbbed from growing,
pulsing so hard they kept me awake—

or was it the Metro North train cars
flying past the apartment, rocking the walls,

or was it the sound of apartment front doors
as heavy as prison doors clanging shut?

Was the Black Nation whispering to me
from the Jet magazines stacked on the floor, or

was it my brother’s unfamiliar ions
vibrating, humming in his easeful sleep?

Tomorrow, as always, Grandfather will rise
to the Spanish-Town cock’s crow deep in his head

and perform his usual ablutions,
and prepare the apartment for the day,

and peel fruit for us, and prepare a hot meal
that can take us anywhere, and onward.

Did sleep elude me because I could feel
the heft of unuttered love in his tending

our small bodies, love a silent, mammoth thing
that overwhelmed me, that kept me awake

as my growing bones did, growing larger
than anything else I would know?

Tending - Elizabeth Alexander

SOURCES

The Blinding of Isaac Woodard

Watch PBS Documentary Special /// Time Magazine /// Carolina News

The Birthday of Frederick Douglass

Constitution Center /// Douglass Day /// The Atlantic