Peggy Dobbins.net

April 4, 2020:  Facebook's algorithm's are amazing. A picture  of Mary Norwood watering Rue plants  April 4, 1999, popped up when I opened my computer yesterday.  I had begun a letter the day before to my Congressman, John Lewis  who is  very ill and was before the virus.  I want his blessing to have the Rue Bricks relaid along a Path for Pilgrimages of Repentance between Coretta and Dr. King's tomb and graves of men who died for the Lost Cause of slavery.   I worked on the Rue Project from 1996 to 2002 in Atlanta.

 Background of the Rue Project

I worked on the Rue Project from October 1996 until November 2, 2002

 In Birmingham I had begun organizing a Children’s Service  in 1987 as part of SCLC’s Celebration of Dr. King’s Birthday becoming a national holiday.  We wanted to realize Dr. King's Dream "that someday, down in Birmingham, little Black children and litte white children would join hands."  Black churches brought busloads of children to hold out their hand.

But there were far too few white children to take them.   The Reform Synagogue sent a group, but most of the few white children were brought by parents I had recruited one by one.  

Puzzling on how to get white Christian churches to participate in an annual civic observation  — for the Sunday of Labor Day closest to September 15, the day Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church by the Ku Klux Klan,  I began to imagine the following: 

The adult and children's choirs from at least one black church and at least one white church, coming through the streets of downtown Birmingham,singing stanzas of Amazing Grace in call and response, to meet at the foot washing pond in Kelly Ingram Park, across from 16th Baptist Church where the children were killed.

As each black adult and child meet each white adult and child on the bridge crossing the pond,  each little white child gives each black adult  flowers of Rue (for repentance); each little black child gives the white adult flowers of Loosestrife (forgiveness). Then they re-pair, black and white children, black and white adults to finish the pilgrimage down the walk, across the street, into 16th St Baptist Church for an ecumenical ceremony many faith leaders had participated in since 1987, but not their children.

 No one, Black or white whom I approached, ever indicated it wasn't a good idea. But no one ever volunteered to help, much less to talk to their choir master.

We moved to Berkeley in 1993 and came back South in 1996, this time to Atlanta.  One day, trying to tell Glenda Minkin why I wanted to try again, I'd said "while Catholics have confession, Jews' highest holy day is for atonement, and Muslims devote a whole month to repentance, the only ritual path provided in the religion of white protestant slave owners and their heirs is 'The General Confession’; and it is so general it covers everything from forgetting to write a thank you note to throwing your fellow humans into the bowels of a ship to survive in their urine and feces." (The General Confession is in the Episcopal prayer book -- my father's side.   My mother's side, Presbyterian predestination, is even better adapted to guilt denial) Glenda, who is Jewish, replied, not exactly in these words, but this is the import I recall: "Peggy, when you enter the path of Atonement, there is no guarantee you will be forgiven, and certainly no little white gal who just wanted to be part of The Movement is going to choreograph when and how black people choose to forgive." 

So, I set out to find a path to confess the racism I'd recognised in myself and to express repentance for the fruits of racism I continue to receive as racism continues to mutate; and to get other white southern women I knew who'd made efforts to free themselves from racism, to join me. Instead of competing with each other to prove  to our black friends how anti-racist we were, we would make a path for other whites to admit and renounce racism by admitting and renouncing our own.

I did not have making Reparation on my mind in 1996, nor 2002. I think that tells how far I still had, and have yet, to go. It merely opened my heart to the idea that reconciliation requires reparation, something beyond expression of repentence for and acknowledgment of wrong.  It also forced me to accept that it is not for me to say what constitutes reparation, nor how, when and where it is made.

I do not think I am alone. Commitment to anti-racism is not the same as being freed from racism if you're white, any more than winning victories against racism frees you from being a victim of racism if you're Black. The most that making a pilgrimage of rue, ie of repentance, can do is "renounce the sins that purchase pride and dignity NOW as before." This means quit denying that they are sins. Confess. Try to repair one's soul by repairing the consequences suffered by others of greed that one's ancestors' creed justified, minimised, and overlooked as easily as an unwritten thank you.

Maybe it's about time I think of Reparations as long overdue I.O.U. thank you notes. Taking note of some specifics of what for, for rather far more than "a lovely evening. the charlotte russe was to die for" Renoucing precludes erasing. And if you erase, you can never repair.

July 5, 2020  My thinking has been changing since I wrote the above.  See later.

That year, 12 white Southern women from Birmingham and Atlanta  planted a Labyrint of Rue, for pilgrimages of repentance just  inside the gate of Oakland Cemetery, where the Atlanta Ladies Memorial Association, precursor of the Daughters of the                Confederacy had obtained permission from the Union Army to rebury soldiers killed in the Battle of Atlana in 1864