James M. Redwine

Race

The Best Celebration

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The Church at 9th and Prudom with side balconies. Picture taken by Peg Redwine

The Fourth of July has slowly gained prominence in my pantheon of special commemorations. Once all seasons paled next to Christmas with the memories of the autumnal aromas of oyster dressing and pumpkin pie fading away to electric trains and baseball mitts. Easter was okay because school would soon be out and girls in pink dresses with blue satin sashes would dash about exposing their laughter and crinoline. But the Fourth of July brought ice cold pop, firecrackers and roman candle battles. However, as a commemoration it seemed to mean a great deal to my elders, but for me it just presaged a return to a regimen of school that broke into my summer freedom.

I am not sure when the trappings of the Fourth began the metamorphosis into my imperceptible awareness that America and I had already struggled through numerous radical stages and, alarmingly and expectantly, might face many more as a man and a country. I think the true reasons the Fourth deserves its place at the head of commemorations began to seep into my consciousness the first time my large and gentle father took me with him to collect a Metropolitan Life Insurance Company policy monthly premium from a Colored family who lived across Bird Creek in a two-room clapboard house with a front porch held up by blackjack oak saplings.

We drove across the Bird Creek bridge in our family’s 1954 Ford sedan. On the way we stopped at Henry’s Bar-B-Q to buy what Dad called heaven’s own ribs. Dad was called “Mister Metropolitan” by Henry and Dad made sure I called the old Colored man “Mister” too. The two sections of two ribs and two Grapette pops cost about a dollar. Dad had bad heart trouble and Mom would not let him eat those beloved fatback pork ribs unless he sneaked over to Henry’s. They were worth any old heart attack as far as Dad was concerned.

After we savored that hickory smoked ambrosia, we drove about another quarter mile up the dirt road of Colored town to Dad’s customer’s house. He told me to stay in the car but I was already out and on the porch before he got the words out. A skinny Colored woman wearing a yellow flour-bag gingham dress and a denim wash rag as an apron opened the screen door and said, “Lord’a mercy, Mr. Metropolitan, is it premium time again already?” Her eyes were downcast.

Dad said, “Son, run back to the car and get my debit book. I must have made a mistake”. I hustled to the front seat to get Dad’s account book and returned just in time to see him taking his hand from his hip pocket.

Then he gently said, “Alright, boy, we better get back before your mother figures out where we went”. We left and I realized somehow the premium had been paid. I think that was my earliest understanding of what possibilities America afforded. Our family was about like all white families in our little town yet Mom and Dad knew from their own Great Depression Days that in America there is always hope if we all help one another. I like to think that that Black family paid forward some of the money that came from that life insurance policy to help someone else.

It took several more years of living with a slowly changing society of segregated schools, restaurants and churches, but I finally learned what the Fourth of July truly meant in 1964 when I returned from where I was stationed in the United States Air Force to attend Dad’s funeral. Our church had a large sanctuary surrounded on three sides with a balcony. When I walked into the church with Mom and looked up, the balcony was filled with Black people who stood in respect for Mom and Mr. Metropolitan.

Black people had never been allowed in our church, but the woman I saw that day years before with Dad was there with her family as were numerous other Black people from across Bird Creek. Later my sister told me that Black lady had come by our house and asked Mom if Colored folks could attend Mr. Metropolitan’s funeral. Mom had to get Church Board permission which was granted only after Mom threatened to leave the church. Coloreds would be allowed that one time if they sat in the balcony, but that was a sea change many years in the making.

That day was when I knew America had the capacity to atone for past sins, and that was when the Fourth of July became my favorite holiday.

The Aft Balcony.
Picture taken by Peg Redwine.

 

Honor

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Gentle Reader, I was recently invited to address a group of high school honor students. I prepared the following remarks and hope they and you find them worthy of your interest. The theme given for the ceremony for the honor students was, “Write your own story”.  I designed my remarks around that theme.

HONOR

“Honor Students, as you write your life’s story you really only need to keep in mind a few elemental rules.

First, remember you are fortunate to have your American birthright to always guide you. When our son, Jim, first went to the old Soviet Union in 1992 he found complete strangers would pick him and his fellow Americans out and ask them if they were Americans. Jim decided the Americans stood out because they were the ones always smiling.

Then, when I taught judges in Kiev, Ukraine and Volgograd, Russia and the country of Georgia that had once been in the Soviet Union, people would stop my wife, Peg, and me on the street and ask us about America. We simply stood out from those around us. The reason was we were happy and smiling, but most of the natives were dour and stern. What we decided was that we were happy because we Americans had options; our freedom of choice was the difference.

So, Honor Students, as you write your life’s story never lose sight of the essence of being an American, that is your freedom to choose your own path. Of course, your freedom of choice has always been part of your lives. You have learned it at home and in school.

While I learned countless lessons of immense value in high school, I will share just three with you. The first involved the United States Constitution. Now you might think someone who had been to several colleges and even law school might know the Constitution through those schools. However, my most indelible lesson in the U.S. Constitution came from my high school American history teacher.

One cold autumn day our teacher came to class without his regular plaid sport coat. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a flowery tie. He asked us in the class, “Why do I have the right to wear this short-sleeved shirt?” Naturally, none of us had a clue. He called on me, “Redwine! You should know the answer. The 2nd Amendment, you know, the right to bare/bear arms”. And I never forgot the 2nd Amendment after that.

Then there was our principal who taught me a lesson in sentencing. As a judge for more than 40 years I have been called on to devise many sentences that are fair, follow the law and do good, not harm.

I have many times remembered the wisdom of my high school principal who devised a “sentence” that perfectly fit the crime, that is, the football players including me who got into an out-of-control snowball fight during a lunch hour.

Our principal had us line up outside his office and ordered us not to move or talk while we waited for him to deal with us one by one. We stood in line dreading our punishment for 2 hours until he came out of his office and said, “Alright boys, no more brawls, now go to practice”. I have often thought back on this fair and imaginative “sentence” when I have had to make a sentence comply with the law but show mercy too.

Another lesson that helped guide me through several difficult sociological dilemmas involving the fair and equal treatment of people who came before me in court, was taught to me by my two high school football coaches when we played a game against another high school in a nearby town.

After the game our coaches put us on the bus and we drove to a restaurant in that downtown. Now, I realize to you Honor Students today, segregation is like something from a foreign country and a by-gone age. I assure you it was real.

I did not go to school with African American kids until after Brown vs. The Topeka, Kansas Board of Education in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” in U.S. education may have been separate, but it was not equal and it was unconstitutional even though it was written to be the law.

My high school integrated my freshman year in 1957 and we had 3 black players, called coloreds back then, on our football team. So, when we stopped at that restaurant after the game our whole team went in, but the restaurant owner refused to serve our black players. Our coaches said, “If you won’t serve our whole team, none of us will stay”. So, we all returned to the bus.

This lesson in choosing the harder right over the easier wrong made a life-time impression on me as to what choices really matter. This experience made a better judge, and better person of me. It also helped me to recognize the major difference between American judges and the many foreign judges I have observed and taught. Foreign judges often refuse to devise a way around an unjust written law, but American judges will choose the harder right over the easier wrong and apply a legally acceptable but fair alternative to a tough case.

So, Honor Students, please write your own story knowing you have the right to choose where you go and what you do, what you believe and what you find invalid.

As Professor Joseph Campbell who taught at Sarah Lawrence College said, there is only one unpardonable sin, “To be unaware”. Therefore, pay attention as you write your story, do not let your life pass you by.

Also, Socrates told the Honor Students of Athens 2,500 years ago, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. In other words, be curious, challenge the status quo. As Alexander Pope cautioned in his poem, A Little Learning, “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring”. That is, do not be fooled by too little knowledge or those who espouse it.

The poet Robert Frost advised us to take the road less traveled, or as that great philosopher Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.

Honor Students, remember the sage advice of your mothers and “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all”.

And most importantly, as you write your own story, always “Choose the harder right over the easier wrong” and your life story will have a happy ending! If you follow these guideposts, I predict each of your life’s stories will be of great satisfaction to you and of great benefit to everyone else.

As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said in his poem, A Psalm of Life, “Lives of great [people] all remind us, we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time”.

Honor Students, write your own story your own way and keep smiling!”

You Say You Want A Revolution

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Photo by Peg Redwine

The Beatles sang:

♪ You say you want a revolution
…
You say you’ll change the Constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You’d better free your mind instead ♪

I do not know why those British songsters were singing about changing America’s Constitution during the Viet Nam War. Perhaps they were just selling a song or perhaps they felt it was a return to 1776. Regardless, today in the United States it seems a lot of Americans seek to remake America in their own image and the quickest way is a revolution. Of course, not much thought may have gone into what a revolution would truly mean in 2025 et. seq.

On the other hand, James Madison of the small body and the gigantic brain gave the written word to the revolution he had just participated in and the possible future ones he wanted to prevent by designing a United States Constitution based on a theory that all humans seek to expand their power as much as they are allowed. Therefore, for a democracy to continue existing, the bedrock of our country had to be a government made up of separate functions controlled by competing separate and equal powers. As a people we have had a history of teetering from side to side with only occasionally tipping completely over to any one branch gaining too much power.

The Civil War broke out because all three branches chose conflict over compromise on the issues of slavery and the human rights of African Americans. On other visceral issues, such as Native American rights, Women’s right to vote, use of alcohol or marijuana or wars such as World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, we have managed to let the struggling of the separate governmental powers find a way to come out in an acceptable equilibrium.

We have had countless opportunities to lose our democracy but have eventually stepped back from the brink. The United States Supreme Court has taken more than one foray into excessive power, such as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). During Chief Justice Earl Warren’s reign (1953-1969) the Court’s ultra-liberal rulings had much of the public up in arms. There were even billboards on the highways calling for Warren’s impeachment.

And the Legislative Branch has had its attempts at being the conscience of America also. For example, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy set himself up to be the ultimate determiner of what a “true American” was. During the era of “McCarthyism” in the 1940’s and 1950’s the American public generally bought into his “Red Scare” tactics until the facts overcame his allegations.

But it has usually been the Executive Branch where the abuse of power has been the most obvious. The most salient example was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was president from 1933 until his death during his fourth term in 1945. Even though a great majority of both Congress and the American people objected to American involvement in WWII, Roosevelt manipulated the United States into the war. Of course, he had the aggression of Japan to help his argument.

It was Roosevelt’s long-term in office and some of his unpopular policies that brought about the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that forbids anyone from serving more than two terms as President. Although some supporters of President Donald Trump have advanced the possibility of an exception to this amendment for President Trump. Such moves on behalf of Donald Trump and the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court are raising concerns among anti-Trumpers. There exists the possibility that neither the Supreme Court nor the Legislature may provide a proper balance for our democracy as both may be biased in favor of President Trump, especially as about one-half of the electorate has supported him and his policies.

While a revolution may be extremely unlikely, so have been numerous other shifts in power in America throughout our history. There is no need yet to call for extraordinary action by any branch nor from the news media or the public. However, it is the fabric of our democracy that may be being tested once again. There is no harm in remaining true to the wisdom of our nation’s charter and there could be harm from failing to reference it.

Photo by Peg Redwine

Passion vs. Purpose

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In October 2022 Posey County, Indiana finally erected a memorial to the murders of five Black men on the courthouse campus the evening of October 12, 1878 and two more Black men earlier that week. For years numerous persons called for such a monument but it took the hard work and dedication of a Mt. Vernon, Indiana teenager, Sophie Kloppenburg, to get it erected. A one-year commemoration ceremony has been organized by Ms. Kloppenburg for 21 October 2023. The public is invited.

Of the thousands of lynchings that have occurred in America over the years most have been the result of mob violence. A group of men, it was almost always white men fueled by prejudice and often alcohol, would rather spontaneously agree to “exact revenge” or “solve a problem” or some other ill-conceived motivation and proceed to use Judge Lynch instead of asking the legal system to address the situation with due process of law.

However, occasionally some of a community’s citizens would organize and carefully plan the murders and a coverup. That truly frightening situation is what occurred in Posey County, Indiana the autumn of 1878. As reported in the October 17, 1878 edition of the Western Star newspaper by owner and editor John Leffel who was an eyewitness to the events:

“Your reporter and one or two others privileged to enter the jail ran out into the beautiful Court House yard, shaded with heavy locusts. The night was clear, and a bright moon pouring its light down, made the scene ghostlike and impressive.

The crowd, consisting of two or three hundred, fell back across the street. For ten minutes it appeared to be a false alarm. But then was heard the steady tramp of two hundred feet, and a few minutes later fifty men entered the east gate and fifty men entered the north gate. The miserable guilty wretches on the inside began to pray and call on God to save them. But the one hundred men, the best of the county physically and probably in reputation, marched into the yard in files of two. Every man had on a long black mask, falling from forehead to chin, like the inquisition of old. All had changed their coats, some were turned inside out. Not a word was spoken until the leader demanded the keys to the jail.”

After the murders, Posey Circuit Court Judge William F. Parrett, Jr. convened a Grand Jury that returned a verdict that the seven Black men had been murdered by “a person or persons unknown.” Such a denial of justice defied credibility but was given lip service and silence by Posey County’s entire legal system as well as much of the populace.

While the actions of a disorganized mob would have certainly been awful, the well planned and disciplined murders and cover up bring to mind the terrifying evils of governmental power corrupted. When editor Leffel printed that JUDGE LYNCH had held court, the irony remains poignant. To judge in a court of law is everything a lynching is not. It is an oxymoron that the events of October 1878 and judging were juxtaposed.

 However, thanks to the memorial marker that now stands where the locust trees upon which four of the seven murdered Black men were lynched, at least the great injustice is now publicly recognized.

The Briar Patch

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Photo by Peg Redwine

Joel Chandler Harris, AKA Joe Harris (1848-1908), was born in the state of Georgia before the Civil War and worked on a slave-holding plantation as a teenager. After the war he became an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution newspaper. Harris had lived and worked around the evils of slavery and he had absorbed the folk wisdom of slaves who were prohibited by law from formal education. Harris created his fictional writings using Uncle Remus as a wise and shrewd observer of human nature hidden within animal behavior.

Harris intended his writings as compliments to the ability of Uncle Remus to explain human foibles by giving animals human failings such as arrogance. In the story of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox contained in Harris’ Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the meanness of the Fox is used by the Rabbit to escape by getting the Fox to “punish” the Rabbit by throwing him into a briar patch. Of course, that is exactly what the Rabbit really wanted.

Unfortunately, due to our current misguided wokeness in many areas, the slave dialect used by Harris now interferes with the appreciation of the literature of The Song of the South and a great number of those pro-African American folk tales are no longer read. However, for those of us whose time of birth helped us escape the ravages of the current misguided ignorance in the area of children’s literature, Uncle Remus is still imparting wisdom, such as enjoying a proverbial briar patch. Or in my case, Peg’s banishment of me to the solitude of our bunkhouse when I got COVID and Peg did not.

At first, I was offended when Peg handed me my toothbrush and a set of clean underwear and locked our cabin door behind me after she forcefully shut it. It was not that I wanted Peg to share in my experience of a sore throat, lethargy and endless amounts of crud being expelled from my body. It was more the feeling that a one-person leper colony was a rather lonely possibility, plus I really missed my favorite recliner and ready access to the refrigerator. Oh, and Peg too, of course.

Be that as it may, Peg sentenced me to two weeks of quarantine with the same lack of ceremony she would have exhibited if a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman had appeared with a sample case. You remember encyclopedias don’t you, Gentle Reader? You know, those things with pages, tables of contents and indexes that went the way of the dodo bird after Google came along. Well, that may call for a different column.

Anyway, here I am alone with the piles of books I never read, the piano I used to play and old photographs of friends and relatives I barely recognize. I have been rummaging through boxes and drawers filled with the most interesting stuff not seen by me since high school. What a strange looking dude I was with dark colored hair and a discernible jaw line. Who was that and who are those undecipherable young people around him wearing weird clothes?

Say, Peg, what is this thing that says Maytag on it? Is this where my clean clothes came from? It must be a miracle machine. How does it operate? By the way, there is no stove out here and after several days of eating the leftovers you sent with me, I am ready for some real food.

By the way, I have done my Paxlovid and am pretty sure I am not Typhoid Mary anymore. On the other hand, the bunkhouse refrigerator is stocked with leftover beer from our Fourth of July Family Reunion and the TV is constantly tuned to Gunsmoke reruns. The bunkhouse is the answer to every boy’s escape from his mother and every husband’s escape from constant inspection by his wife.

Clothes are in a pile where I take them off. The bed never has to be made to drill sergeant standards and every door knob and chair back is a hanger. But the most serendipitous of all? Peg is afraid to step foot in my little slice of heaven. I may claim to be eternally toxic. Bring on that Briar Patch!

A Limited Tenure

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President Biden has announced his intention to nominate an African American woman for the Senate to advise and consent for service on the United States Supreme Court. At the risk of being embroiled in a Whoopi Goldberg “Jewish is not a race issue type of discussion”, I suggest neither race nor gender is the issue for whomever is nominated.  Politics is always what membership on the Supreme Court is about.

From the highly political John Marshall (years on Court 1801-1835) to the highly political Ruth Bader Ginsberg (years on Court 1998-2020) the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have often worn their politics on the sleeves of their robes. Marshall was nominated by President John Adams. Ginsberg was nominated by President Bill Clinton. Americans who agreed with Adams’ political positions generally agreed with Marshall’s decisions and those who leaned in Clinton’s policy directions championed Ginsberg’s. We should not be surprised if a president nominates someone whose political tendencies match the president’s. It is not a justice’s race or gender that matters; it is their philosophies.

Sometimes when a president, liberal or conservative, chooses a justice, that justice turns out on the opposite end from the president’s philosophy. President Eisenhower, a conservative, chose Earl Warren (years on Court 1953-1969) who led a liberal revolution from his position as Chief Justice. And President George H.W. Bush nominated the African American Clarence Thomas to the Bench; Black Clarence Thomas may be to the right of former slave owner Roger Brooke Taney (years on Court 1836-1864) who decided the Dred Scott case. Although it is not likely Thomas would have agreed with that particular decision.

Supreme Court justices are just like the rest of us. We carry our beliefs and prejudices throughout our lives. They change from time to time and sometimes we can overcome them. But the U.S. Supreme Court is just another political branch of our three-branch political democracy. Politicians are placed on the Court by politicians that we elect. As Plato might have said, “Only the naïve believe otherwise.”

Instead of our long-time national self-delusion that the Supreme Court is not a political force, we should acknowledge that the justices are just humans and accept reality. The best we can hope for is term limits instead of a life-time appointment. I suggest one ten-year term would be about right.