The eCrozier

My German ancestors were carpenters and brick masons. They arrived in the Over the Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati in 1872. By the time my grandfather was born in 1898, German was no longer spoken in the family home. They were thoroughly Americanized. My grandfather worked on the line for General Motors assembling cars.

One of my earliest memories of him was on August 28, 1963, when I was six years old. My parents had dropped me off at my grandfather’s house while they ran a few errands. I spent the day with him. I remember him giving me a booklet to read. I recall vividly sitting on the back stoop of his house and looking at the wild pictures in the booklet: men dressed in white sheets, burning crosses, and the like. My folks pulled into the driveway and saw what was in my hands. My father and grandfather exchanged loud, angry words and I was placed in the car’s back seat and we drove off. The whole incident was never talked about in my family.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned that my grandfather was a member of the Klan and that day, August 28, 1963 was the day of the March on Washington when Dr. King delivered one of the most important speeches in our nation’s history. I share this with you because my story is no different than millions of other white people. This is part of our cultural DNA. It’s America’s original sin passed on to each generation.

Years ago I was working as a consultant with a large parish. I asked the parish leaders to take a roll of newsprint and stretch it horizontally across the wall of the parish hall. On one end I wrote the date of the parish’s founding in the 18^th Century and on the other end I put the word “today.” I then asked them to fill in their history. Many knew details of what happened centuries ago. They even listed a Revolutionary War hero buried in their parish cemetery. When they finished, I noticed there was a decade gap in the 1960s. Many in the room were members of the parish then. Why was it, I asked, that they had no history to record about that time? There was stone silence.

During a break, an older member took me aside and said in a hushed tone: “That was when Father [Name] was rector. He was an alcoholic. We don’t like to talk about that time in our history. It was unpleasant for everyone. We’d just as soon forget it.” I felt like sending them all en masse to an AL-ANON meeting. They were in total denial and in co-dependent silence about how that period in their history had continued to adversely affect their common life even to the present day.

America is like a large alcoholic family when it comes to race. We’re complicit with one another in our silence, or when we do talk, we talk past one another and don’t listen. To preserve the family peace, we just don’t talk about it when it begins to hurt, or when it hits a little too close to home. 46 years ago today Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was martyred because he insisted America face this peculiar and particular original sin in our national life. As Mark Twain famously said: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” We, as a people, are still a work in progress with a lot of unfinished work left to do.

+Scott