Jim Crow Jesus Must Go

Black Jesus at Sacred Heart Seminary, Linwood and Chicago Aves, Detroit, MI. White statue repainted during the 1967 Detroit Uprising, and eventually left Black by the Roman Catholic seminary as a monument to the uprising.

I.                     White Church

I was raised in a church family. My grandmother sang in the choir, my mom baked for the potluck dinner the first week of every month. My dad made sure my brother and I paid attention during sermons and even during the “dot dot dots”, lines of liturgy omitted from the folded-paper program because it would have rendered each week’s printing uneconomical.

“…we believe in the Holy Spirit/ the Lord, the giver of life/ He proceeds from the Father and the Son, and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets. We believe in…”

I didn’t meet Jesus at First Lutheran Church. First Lutheran sits atop a hill outside Burnet, the Texas Hill Country town where my grandmother moved when she left the Iowa cold behind in 1999. We visited most weekends during my time in elementary school, such that we were a regular small-town church family despite living in the city.

Like the churches in my dad’s ancestral Wisconsin, First Lutheran has an all-White congregation of Northern European descent. Lutheranism in Central Texas can be traced back to the mid-19th century settlement of Comanche land by Germans whose frontier exertions never quite wrung sustenance from the rocky soil. Burnet County’s most famous export was the rock itself, rough-hewn by incarcerated Black workers post-Reconstruction into the mighty Texas Capitol in Austin.

The same pink granite, polished, clads the Seton Highland Lakes hospital where Grandma Jan lived her final days in Burnet. In July 2005 we held her funeral at First Lutheran. The choir sang her favorite hymns. We bought a plot in a country cemetery on the far side of the lake where Austin radio stations fade to the signals of Kerrville and San Angelo, and the church drove out together in the midday heat. Wandering through the graves I found headstones of people born before the Civil War.

After that summer we found a new church home. Where First Lutheran was a country congregation, St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran is big-city, Austin’s “downtown” Lutheran church in a Midcentury Modern landmark of light-red brick. First Lutheran’s thirty-foot tower has a bell on a rope; St. Martin’s peals at the push of a button, ringing out from a cross-topped pylon which holds its own among bank towers and the state office complex.

St. Martin’s was once an immigrant church. The Deutsche Evangelische Lutherische St. Martin’s Kirche began in 1883 with services in German only, and offered regular German services well into the 20th century even as it Anglicized its name in 1920. Though forced to move twice by the expanding Texas Capitol complex, the church’s current 1960 building endures, a monument to the hegemony of assimilated White Protestant Christianity at the end of the first German American Presidential administration. Here I went to high-school youth group, was baptized and confirmed. But I didn’t come to know Jesus at St. Martin’s either.

II.                   Egypt Land

Rosa Parks wasn’t a Lutheran. The activist and advocate was a lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the historic denominations of the ‘Black Church’. From Denmark Vesey’s freedom dreams to Aretha Franklin’s soaring voice, this institution is central to the political, cultural, artistic and social currents of the United States. The Black Church includes Black denominations like the AME Church and Black congregations within White denominations like the Lutheran Church, often established as ‘missions’ in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow-era South.

One such mission church, Trinity Lutheran, hosted meetings of the NAACP Youth Council for which Parks served as secretary in the mid-1950s. Trinity’s White pastor, Robert S. Graetz, and Ms. Parks were friends, veterans of the venerable Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Pastor Graetz was one of the few White ministers who spoke out in support of the bus boycott initiated December 5, 1955 by Parks and her collaborators on the Montgomery Women’s Political Council.

Graetz’s parsonage was bombed. White friends rebuked him and his wife, Jeannie. White children called them “n-----lovers”. In 1958 his superiors transferred him to a church in Ohio. One Montgomery parishioner told him, “We didn’t want you to leave, but we knew if you didn’t, sooner or later you’d be killed.” Ms. Parks and her husband Raymond left, too, finding themselves unemployable because of her activism. They settled in Detroit, Michigan, where she did constituent work for Congressman John Conyers until her retirement in 1988. Ms. Parks passed in October 2005, a few months after my Grandma Jan.

My mom isn’t a Lutheran, either. She was born in Montgomery in December 1956, 390 days into the Boycott, and grew up in a synagogue whose rabbi kept his mouth shut about it. My Grandpa Ralph was a young child at Temple Beth Or when the previous rabbi, Benjamin Goldstein, was fired for organizing in support of the Scottsboro Boys and striking Black sharecroppers in 1933. I didn’t know about Rabbi Goldstein until 2019, three years after Grandpa Ralph’s death and a year after my Grandma Ellen’s.

I don’t know what motivated them to join the interracial community organization One Montgomery, formed in the aftermath of a horrific 1984 incident of police brutality inflicted on a Black family in the city. But they did join, and at some point, they met Pastor Graetz there.

Grandma Ellen once told me her community did not speak out in the 1950s or 60s for fear of reprisal. As Jews who felt they had recently gained the privilege of Whiteness, they did not want to put their position of safety in jeopardy. Late in their lives Ralph and Ellen bought many books on the Movement. One, Montgomery: A White Preacher’s Memoir, tells Pastor Graetz’ story in his own words. It’s signed, “To Ellen and Ralph Loeb: Let us work together to keep the dream alive,” by the author on the 40th anniversary of the Boycott, December 5, 1995.

Ralph and Ellen practiced a Judaism that saw too few parallels between Old Testament Hebrews, modern-day Palestinians, Black Americans and other oppressed peoples. They were born and raised in Jim Crow Judaism, a religious lie no less corrosive than White Jesus. But they saw what happened in the world around them and they began to change. Late in life, but yet alive, they organized. They bought books, which they could not have planned to give to a grandchild then too young to read. Without knowing, they planted seeds that grew into me.

I didn’t know what to ask when they were here. Now I have so many questions they can never answer. I chafe at my parents’ apparent lack of understanding before I remember they were raised in the same White churches and temples I was. They grew up on Jim Crow Jesus and White prophets just like I did, amid a pantheon of gilded idols.  

III.                 White Jesus

In the dying years of Jim Crow an artisan carved twelve White Disciples and a White Jesus into the altar at St. Martin’s. He’s the same Jesus in the painting outside the pastor’s office at First Lutheran, whom I was told in Sunday school loved the little children. I was a high school sophomore in the St Martin’s Senior High Youth Group in 2010, when Detroit police murdered eight-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in her own home. That same year a 16-year-old boy, Devin Contreras, was shot in the back by a police officer in South Austin. I was a 17-year-old senior looking forward to the church’s graduation celebration in 2012 when George Zimmerman hunted and killed Trayvon Martin, also then 17. I don’t remember a word from White Jesus or his representatives on Earth, the kind and well-meaning Sunday school teachers and pastors of St. Martin’s, about any of these children. Did He love them, too?

White Jesus was silent. The White Church is silent. In the post-Civil Rights era, no longer subject to kneel-ins or callouts by jailed Black ministers, much of White Protestant Christianity is settled comfortably in segregated communities. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is one of the nation’s Whitest denominations in terms of its membership and theology alike. Its congregations are centered in the nation’s mythical White ‘Heartland’, settler-colonized land stolen from Native people now displaced and murdered by police at shockingly high rates.

German American Lutherans like my dad’s family were once immigrants in a United States that had no love for them. They took menial jobs because they didn’t speak the language, and crowded into church every Sunday to hear the Word in their native tongue. Then they were advanced into the middle and upper classes through the White affirmative action of the GI Bill and FHA loans. Jim Crow policies like redlining, racist policing and employment discrimination kept Black Americans at the bottom. The small number of Black Lutherans have always been peripheral to the White church’s priorities, as documented painfully by Black Lutheran minister Lenny Duncan in his 2019 book ‘Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US’.

I met White Jesus at First Lutheran, and I came to know him at St. Martin’s. Now I know White Jesus is a lie created by European colonizers and perpetuated by Jim Crow Americans. White Jesus leaves Lazarus in his tomb, laughs at the leper’s pain, jails the prostitutes and tells them they deserve it because of their dark skin and the dresses they wear. White Jesus throws protestors down the front steps of his church. White Jesus doesn’t love Black children, except as a human backdrop in photos of his mission trip. White Jesus died on the cross so that White children like me could attend segregated schools.

Whiteness is not natural. It didn’t exist 2000 years ago. It was created in this country to justify the subjugation and enslavement of people Europeans racialized as Indians and as Black, to rank and subjugate all the other people of the world somewhere in between. From the harbor at Ouidah to the plains of Minnesota, White Jesus was created as a tool to further this effort and he remains so today. My Jesus does not sanctify genocide, enslavement, lynching, segregation and incarceration. My Jesus spoke through John Brown, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Pastor Graetz, Malcolm X and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

I grew up with Jim Crow Jesus, in a Jim Crow Church, in cities and towns segregated by law and custom, in a nation founded on the genocide of Native people and the denial of humanity to people racialized as Black. Jesus was the child of an unwed brown mother born in a colonized land, who fought against an oppressive system until it murdered Him. I see now why my Church did not teach me about Jesus.