John Dawson in Healing America's Wounds, chapter 9

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds..

Psalm 147:3

I first heard the thumping of chopper blades above my roof, then looking out the window saw an eerie, orange light flickering on the buildings. The night was cut with restless human sounds and I decided to investigate. From the front door I could see it: blazing gasoline flames just beyond the last house. Something sinister was going on right next to our Youth With a Mission property.

Creeping toward the fire I suddenly felt as though I had entered a temple of malice. There in our "black neighborhood" stood the terrifying symbol of the white supremacists. Three huge crosses blazed against the night sky.
Twenty men, mostly dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods, chanted racist slogans and raised their arms in Nazi- style salutes. A man stepped forward to pray. Peter Lake, a free- lance journalist who had infiltrated the group, later ,described what was said. "So long as the alien occupies your land, hate is your law and revenge is your first duty. We light these crosses in the name of our God, over the luciferian scum of the earth."^l The man praying was the notorious Richard Butler, head of the Idaho-based Aryan Nations.
Standing in the shadows was the even more famous Tom Metzger, who has since lost a $12.5 million judgment, awarded to the family of a black man beaten to death by Oregon skin- heads allegedly inspired by Metzger. Former Grand Dragon of the California KKK, he now heads the White Aryan Resistance, which advocates separation of the races and claims that the Holocaust never happened. Also present was Stanley Witek, the head of the neo-Nazi party. Lake quoted the supremacist as saying, "Los Angeles has become a mongrel cesspool of people, in which whites had to assert themselves."²
That was a rainy night in December of 1983. Sixteen years ago I moved my family to the house we now own. As a white immigrant from distant New Zealand, I was almost completely ignorant of the deep divisions that exist in American life. Black musicians had been my heroes, so the prospect of living in a black community was exciting.
I began to work with a group called "Black Ministries Unlimited" in South Central Los Angeles. I was invited to teach, but I was the one who had the most to learn. Patient Afro- American Christians drew me into their lives and told me their stories; even now I am just beginning to understand. Since then I have become part of a black church in America with a huge network of relationships from coast to coast.

In Chicago and Detroit, Miami and Atlanta, the black community seems afflicted with a common spiritual oppression. Black believers have explained to me the unique nature of their spiritual battle, leading me to ask God about my own place of service.
I began to realize that even though my own neighborhood has made headlines many times, California's problems are largely an outgrowth of the black experience in the old South. The spiritual gates-the places of entrance, authority and decision- were the great slave auctions of places such as Charleston and Richmond. So my family and I have traveled; on one occasion for two and one-half months, from city to city, responding to the invitations of united pastors. I now carry 23 years of memories on the road in America. Let's look closely at one of the key cities.

Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of this country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than any city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal and unbelievable facts.³

So wrote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his now-famous letter from the Birmingham city jail, April 16, 1963.
In the late 1980s, I met with an extensive cross section of Birmingham's Christian Leadership at one of the city's leading Presbyterian churches. I was impressed by their beautiful city and their earnest desire to transcend painful memories and walk together in harmony. I presented a lecture on how God is using His people to heal our cities through identificational repentance, and asked them to consider the categories of human conflict that have opened wounds and made room for satanic authority in Birmingham. At the end of the day I was handed a raft of books, articles and research by believers who had already been doing homework on the subject. Most encouraging was a secular book by a history professor from Auburn University, Wayne Flint, which contained a list almost identical to my own.

The New Century

In some ways, Birmingham is a microcosm of the story of America since the Civil War. It is not a city of the old South. It emerged just after reconstruction at the place where railroad lines intersected.
The years following the Civil War belonged to industry and the railroad. Ribbons of steel pushed in all directions, connecting east to west and joining teeming cities with the agricultural hinterland. Iron and steel were needed for rolling stock, rail and locomotives, and men were needed to feed the giant furnaces with coal and coke. Initially, labor was so scarce that agents were sent to Europe to recruit workers for Birmingham's mills. Between 1900 and 1910, the population increased about 245 percent and Birmingham became the third most populous city in the former Confederacy.
The town was dominated by a class of entrepreneurs, heavily influenced by the new theories of social Darwinism. They attributed their success to genetic superiority (the" survival of the fittest"), and they saw labor as an underclass of unfortunates who were to be "worked like hell" until they were no longer useful. The upheaval of the Civil War had permanently changed the old agricultural system and eventually resulted in an avalanche of freedmen and poor whites into the city.
The homogeneous blend of native-born Baptists and Methodists, Protestants common to the south, was replaced by great diversity. The religious census of 1906 revealed that the largest single denomination was Roman Catholic - 28 percent, and that the city included populations of Jews and Greek-Orthodox Christians. The second largest group was national Baptists (black) -14.6 percent.
By 1915, the number of poor whites pouring into the town had produced a politically conscious Protestant majority deter- mined to impose their moral values on the city's scandalous public life. This meant children should be in school, not factories; saloons and brothels should be closed; political corruption should be eliminated; and blacks should be disenfranchised. This clash between cultures at the beginning of the new century produced a rash of religious and ethnic violence.
In 1916, night riders burned a Catholic church and school. Weeks later arsonists destroyed two public schools and rumors swept the city that Catholics had done it in retaliation. By 1920, anti-Catholicism had reached a crescendo. The newspapers of the time reveal a Baptist pastor, R. L. Durant, trading diatribe and rebuttal with Father James E. Coyle of St. Paul's Catholic Church. On August 11, 1921, the cycle of bigotry reached a violent climax when Methodist minister, E. R. Stevenson, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, shot Father Coyle to death as he sat on the front porch of St. Paul's parsonage after a wedding ceremony. Coyle had united in marriage Stevenson's daughter with a Catholic boy. Stevenson quickly won acquittal from a sympathetic jury.
One historian estimates that more than half the city's Protestant ministers either belonged to or sympathized with the Klan. In many cases, the Klan embraced an agenda the ministers favored: enforcement of prohibition; restoration of traditional moral values; an application of pressure to stop adultery, divorce, drunkenness, hooliganism and political corruption.
A few courageous ministers publicly spoke out against the Klan's tactics, but most were silent, as they would be 40 years later during Birmingham's racial agony. Then, as later, it was the business community acting in self-interest, which tried to expose and weaken the Klan and open dialogue between contending factions.
Birmingham perfectly fit the profile of a Klan town: A rapidly growing city in which whites felt that their jobs were threatened by blacks and aliens and that their culture was imperiled by Catholics, Jews, flappers and secularists.
One of the largest events in Alabama's history took place at East Lake Park in 1924. Forty thousand people witnessed the initiation of 4,000 new Klansmen. It ended with exploding fireworks and a parade of 5,000 local Klansmen in full regalia, escorted through the streets of Birmingham by a police motorcade and a band and drum corps.
The Klan and those seeing themselves as "true Americans" made it clear that they bitterly opposed alternative values and were determined to impose their own ways, by force if necessary. After the advent of racial segregation following 1900, neighborhoods became more defined. They tended to organize around common elements such as race, class, occupation, religion or language.
On top of all this, constant strife occurred between labor and management in local industry. Mining strikes in 1894, 1907, 1919 and 1920, together with periodic steel and textile work- stoppages, frequently ended in violence. Owners and managers usually prevailed. I don't believe in "coddling workmen," said Colonel John C. Maben,⁴ president of a company notorious for wretched working conditions.

The Wounds of America

The worst period of testing was the Great Depression of the 1930's, a period that revealed what Professor Wayne Flint calls the "stress fractures"⁵ in the city's life.  Flint mentions eight conditions in Birmingham that I find are common to the American experience and define our unfinished business to this day: class division; worker grievances; racial discord; lack of economic diversity; wretched housing; inadequate provision of public services; inadequate food and fuel; and destructive patterns of localism.
Do these fractures correspond to the spiritual strongholds we encounter in modern life? I think so. If we enlarge the list a little, we get something like this.

Places of Conflict and Broken Relationship

1. Race to Race (e.g., Native American vs. European American)
2. Class to Class (e.g. Homeless Person vs. Holders of Home Equity)

 3. Culture to Culture (e.g., Immigrant vs. Native Born)

4. Gender to Gender (e.g., Working Woman vs. Male Hierarchy)
5. Vocation to Vocation (e.g., L.A. Police Department vs. Civil Rights Advocates)
6. Institution to Institution (e.g., Auto Industry Management vs. Organized Labor)
7. Region to Region (e.g., Westside vs. South Central L.A.)
8. Governed to Government (e.g., College-Age Youth vs. Vietnam Era Government)
9. Religion to Religion (e.g., Muslim vs. Christian)
10. Denomination to Denomination (i.e. Protestant vs. Catholic)
11. Enterprise to Enterprise (e.g., Monopoly vs. Small Business)
12. Ideology to Ideology (e.g., Leftist vs. Rightist Political Parties)
13. Nationality to Nationality (e.g., Americans vs. Cubans)

14. Generation to Generation (e.g., '60s Youth vs. Parents)

15. Family to Family (e.g., Neighbor vs. Neighbor)

This list could be endlessly refined. However, we need something this basic as a guide in order to begin our journey toward national healing.


Notes
1. Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, October 29, 1991.
2. Ibid.
3. Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York: Harper- Collins, 1963, 1964), p. 290. The American Friends Committee first published this essay as a pamphlet.
4 . Wayne Flint, Building a New South City: Leadership Patterns in Birmingham's History (Birmingham, AL: Leadership Birmingham, 1988), p. 26.
5. Ibid., pp. 27, 31.