Editor’s (admin’s) note: An lightly edited and expanded copy of my email in advance of this month’s appointment with my spiritual director, giving her a heads-up on what I’ve been journaling about (or, in this case, why I haven’t been jouirnaling) since our last meeting and, more to the point, helping me focus over time by archiving the emails with my journals on this blog. This month’s journal goes back over my memories of a 1956 race riot when the schools in my county desegregated under Brown v. School Board. It repeats content from a recent journal, but in a different context — I found the riot, and the civil rights movement in general, to be a significant turning point in my spiritual formation.
Pictured above is a memorial to the Clinton 12, the first Black students admitted to Clinton High School in Clinton, Tenn. It is located at the entrance to the Green McAdoo School; formerly the segregated “colored” elementary school in Clinton, since 2006 it has been reopened as a cultural center and museum. It is part of the Tennessee State Museum system.
Hi Sister —
Got your Zoom link (which I’m taking as a reminder to get my thoughts sorted out for our session Monday evening). Again, I don’t have much journaling to share. This leg of my spiritual journey keeps me so busy, I don’t have much time for writing or reflection. And none at all, it goes without saying, for editing! The good news is, I’m not giving you a whole lot of blather to wade through in this email.
Some good news, or not-so-bad news, healthwise. My kidney function numbers seem to have stabilized, and the eye doctors say my cataract surgery went well. Next week I’ll be going back for another checkup, at which I imagine I’ll get a new prescription for bifocals. In the meantime, I’m able to read 10- and 12-point type with my old glasses. For the first time in a year or more!
And I’ve made it through my first budget cycle as the new chair of our parish faith formation committee. As a newspaper reporter, I figured out very early in the game that you don’t really begin to understand an organization until you’ve been through the budgetary process.
And since so many of our kids are preschoolers, I’m developing an interest in early childhood education that eluded me for 83 years. I don’t know how to talk with kids — I’m more comfortable discussing, oh, say, the Christology in St. John’s gospel — but in an odd way, since I’m taking on some responsibility for parish education, I’m starting to feel like they’re my kids, even if my role is more with budgets and programming. Anyway, I’m finding out, pretty much as I had expected, the Holy Spirit can speak through revenue projections and expenditures.
What journaling I’ve done has focused mostly on what I consider the federal government’s slip-sliding into some kind of paramilitary police state. I know Chicago just well enough to be particularly upset by the obvious violations of law and due process by ICE and Border Patrol agents there, and the open racism directed primarily against Latinos, and Black and brown people in general.
In complicated ways I can’t quite explain, the racism gives me a sense of moral injury; as a white male US citizen, I guess I’m an intended beneficiary of our new Jim Crow 2.0. But I don’t want to be. It’s all profoundly conflicting and upsetting.
It reminds me in so many ways of growing up in the waning days of Jim Crow 1.0 — when the Tennessee National Guard was called out in 1956 to desegregate the schools in Clinton, Tenn., my county seat — and I journaled about it. (I’ll excerpt some of it below.) Seeing it come back hits me — with the benefit of hindsight — where I live and move and have my being.
Seeing this military “show of force” in Washington DC triggered memories of seeing tanks in the street in Clinton, our county seat where we’d go shopping, or go out for chocolate milkshakes. It is *not* a good feeling, and it’s even worse this time when I feel like the tanks (OK, armored personnel carriers this time) are on the wrong side of the issue.
The open racism I’m sensing behind the Trump regime’s crackdown on anyone who “looks like” an immigrant (in other words, Latino) is entirely as blatant and dehumanzing as the talk of “the mongrelization of our children” when Clinton High was desegregated in 1956. But this time, the troops have been called out to enforce a racist system.
A couple of excerpts from my post:
“Trump’s military photo ops in US cities bring back memories of Jim Crow, civil rights movement — but with a twist” – Sept. 22 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2025/09/22/troops/
First, to tee up the subject:
[…] the 12 Black students started school Aug. 27. While classes were relatively peaceful, crowds began to gather outside the school and the Anderson County courthouse nearby. Egged on by White Citizens Council activists (the preferred term around Clinton was “outside agitators”), the crowds grew more hostile. A violent demonstration took place Friday, Aug. 31.
Over the weekend an estimated 1,500 people rioted outside the courthouse. Local police and sheriff’s deputies were unable to contain the violence, and the Tennessee Highway Patrol and National Guard were called in to restore order Saturday night.
Clinton had only 12 policemen, and the outgoing county sheriff (who had been defeated for reelection) took no action. By a quirk of Tennessee law, a new sheriff couldn’t be sworn in until midnight Sept. 1. By that time, the situation was out of hand, although the new sheriff was able to deputize several civilian “home guards,” mostly World War II vets whom he stationed around the courthouse to protect the legal records inside.
The crowd, augmented by teenagers after a nearly Friday night football game let out, rocked cars on Main Street, which doubles as US Highway 25W. Finally, on Saturday night after prolonged dithering on the part of local and state officials, Gov. Frank Clement sent in the Tennessee Highway Patrol and called out the National Guard.
And my reaction. I think all of this is very important to my formation, and where my spiritual journey is taking me now:
Again, I wasn’t there, but in later years as a newspaper reporter [in Clinton] I knew county officials who had been part of the “home guard” that night. (I also interviewed people who admitted they had been in the mob, and said with hindsight they were ashamed; I had no reason to disbelieve them.) By all accounts, the sight of massed THP squad cars crossing a bridge over the Clinch River that overlooks the courthouse square, their emergency lights flashing, was an unforgettable moment. The state troopers were soon followed by the National Guard, and order was soon restored.
I remember seeing TV news shots of a tank set up at the intersection of Main and Market streets, to divert traffic on US 25W away from the courthouse square where the rioting was concentrated. There’s something about seeing tanks in the streets, as Thomas Zimmer said [in an article about this year’s occupation in Washington], that’s a hard punch in the gut. A Life magazine photo spread, curated in 2019 under the headline “Before Little Rock: Mob Violence Over Desegregation in Clinton, Tennessee, 1956,” brings back further memories, none of them pleasant.
What most stands out in my mind now is the overt racism.
In a remarkable piece of reporting that ran in the Knoxville News-Sentinel that Saturday afternoon (also available online), staff writer Homer Clonts noted an elderly policeman talking a teenage rioter out of assaulting a Black passer-by. By today’s standards, the violence was restrained. (I think, oddly, there may be some hopeful parallels embedded there.) But the mob at Clinton was largely unrestrained by law enforcement, and it was animated by wholly unrestrained racial animus.
And a more personal reflection, from the relative safety of a homogeneous white middle-class community 10 miles away:
I know I sympathized with the Black kids over at Clinton. I didn’t know any of them, but I did know they’d been forced to ride a bus 25 miles down to the “colored” high school in Knoxville if they wanted to go to school past eighth grade. In fact, they walked past the white [high] school to get to the bus stop in Clinton. I also had a sense — and this, I think, was generally shared — if the adults would just shut up, the kids over at Clinton High could work this thing out.
One of the youth leaders in my church liked to say he used the restroom for “colored ladies” at the Pure Oil station in the town center, because it was cleaner than the others. I took that to mean segregation was, at best, silly. But it was also a reminder we are all equal in the eyes of God.
(We could use some of that attitude 70 years later, when as a society we are again obsessed with bathrooms.)
One other memory of civil rights days stands out. It was a few years later, probably in the summer of 1960 during the lunch-counter sit-ins. One day when I was shopping with my mother at a Rich’s department store in Knoxville, we noticed perhaps a dozen college-age kids picketing the store. Rich’s had one of those upscale tearooms with linen tablecloths and dainty little tea sandwiches. I wouldn’t want to eat there (I much preferred the Krystal hamburger joints), and I thought it was ironic the Black kids wante to eat at Rich’s.
But I admired their courage.
They attracted maybe 15 or 20 white onlookers. No one said anything, and there was no violence. But the atmosphere was tense, surly, and the Black kids were outnumbered. I didn’t join their picket line — the idea wouldn’t have occurred to me till several years later — but I felt like it was a turning point in my maturing attitudes about race. I still do.
And now it all comes flooding back, 65 and 70 years later, and I feel helpless. Debi and I plan to be there tomorrow for the No Kings rally at the Abraham Lincoln statue downtown. And I’m grateful to have the associates’ SDART [Springfield Dominican Anti-Racism Team] affiliate committee to turn to for support; to learn better how to build community; and, above all, to learn from people of faith of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.
As with so many other things, I’m finding I receive as much — or more — from the group than I give. Got an email just the other day saying we’ll be reading next “The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy” by Jim Wallis, and our Zoom sessions keep me grounded in the word of God and a community of believers at what seems like a very dark time in our history. I’m grateful beyond words.
See you Monday at 6 p.m.
[Uplinked Oct. 17, 2025]
Ordinary Time 