Category: race riots

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Utopia, derailed

Queensboro Bridge construction, 10X8, by Carol L. Douglas. Cities were once the highest expression of civilization. What happened?
I had intended to write about the beauty of boreal bogs this morning. But then I came across this, from the Economist:
The bigger problem for Baltimore is that lawlessness is not limited to nights like tonight. As one young woman standing taking photos said to me, West Baltimore is “always like this. Well not like this, but you know, shootings”. This is a city where a young black man is killed almost every day—not by police officers, but by other young black men. The failure of the police in this city is that they cannot enforce the law even at the best of times. At their worst, as the death of Mr Gray seems to suggest, Baltimore’s police are simply another source of the lawlessness.

Whenever I am totally disheartened, I wander over to Mt. Hope Cemetery to commune with my heroes.
On Monday I wroteabout returning from Maine to Rochester’s daily violence. As Baltimore descended into chaos, I was following a local story:  the (Rochester) Regional Transit Service’s decision to end a 37-year relationship with the Rochester City School District (RCSD). That means the district needs to figure out how to move 9,500 students around, and 144 jobs will be cut. The problem is a simple one: a small percentage of the kids in the district are abusing their bus privileges with fighting, and the usual correctives haven’t worked.
Beneath the Queensboro Bridge, 14X18, by Carol L. Douglas
“As being an older adult, it can be intimidating at times because you never know when you’re going to be caught up in a situation,” Elmyra Crawford-Brown toldTime-Warner News.
I have concluded that the Rochester story is really the same as the Baltimore story: a city skittering on the edge of chaos resorts to extreme measures to protect the law-abiding majority of its citizens.
Toya Graham, the mother who yanked her 16-year-old son out of the fray in Baltimore, said, “A lot of his friends have been killed. I just want to keep him in the house, but that’s not really going to work.” At the end of the day, the National Guard will leave Baltimore, the RCSD will find some other way to move its students, and the killing fields will get back to business as usual.
What would Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass make of the mess we have today?
Tune in tomorrow for the boreal bogs.


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Rising from the ashes

End Times Deliverance Church, Rochester, NY, by little ol’ me.
A few years ago, I wrote about painting the old Corn Hill Methodist Episcopal Church. I’d learned a little of its history by talking to passers-by and looked up a little more online, and I thought I’d go back and do a more complete painting another day. Like most of my ideas, it faded into the woodwork.
Corn Hill Methodist Episcopal Church in its glory days.
This week, historian Emily Morry wrote about the building in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle’s Retrofitting Rochester column. The graphic is one of those fascinating “then and now” sliders. It is the first time I’ve seen what the church looked like in its glory days. It was built of red Medina sandstone in the Romanesque Revival style. It was massive, squat and imposing; in fact it looked a lot like my own childhood church in Buffalo, Delaware Baptist Church.
As a long-time churchgoer, I know how precious and rare the truly desegregated church is. We cling to the “faith of our fathers,” but one unanticipated legacy is that we worship with people who look and sound the same as us. Several years ago, that started to be a problem for my family, which is how we ended up at Joy Community Church on North Goodman.
And as it stands today.
So I was amazed to read that Corn Hill Methodist was an early mover in trying to break the race boundaries in church:
Beginning in the 1950s, the ministry made a concerted effort to develop an interracial congregation to better serve its changing community. The campaign cost the institution some parishioners, but as Reverend G. Kenneth Tuttle remarked in 1959, those that chose to continue with the denomination “are spiritually stronger,” adding that, ““segregation is not a true expression of Christian fellowship.”
Seeking to meet both the spiritual and social needs of Corn Hill residents, the institution partnered with the Mount Olivet Baptist Church to run an annual interracial summer program for black and white youth. Further dedicating itself to the cause of civil rights, the church invited Malcolm X to speak in 1965. (Emily Morry)
That would be the last speech Malcolm X ever gave; he was assassinated five days later.

All of which makes the fate of the old church even more suspect. The original congregants, unable to make a go of it in the rapidly-changing neighborhood, gave the building to the Corn Hill A.M.E. Zion church in 1969. Shortly thereafter, the building suffered a series of fires, the last of which destroyed the main sanctuary.  The new congregation, restricted by finances, put up the modest frame sanctuary that is there today.

The empty bell-tower.
In the 1960s, the United States was galvanized by a series of race riots, set off by President Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act in July, 1964. Among the very earliest was one in Rochester, just a few weeks after the signing. Racial tension was very high. While the blame for those fires has never been established, in the context they seem very suspicious.
But fifty years later, there is still a church on that site. The mainline congregations of my youth are in decline, replaced by evangelical churches. And these evangelical churches—unrestricted by tradition—are far more integrated than the historic church. God is never the author of evil, but he can work in the ashes.
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