Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.
by Guy Hewitt
Many who dismissed as hyperbole the assertion that the presidential election was a battle for the soul of the nation did a rethink as insurrection unfolded at the US Capitol.
On 6 January, a seditious mob armed with bombs, weapons and a confederate flag sought to thwart Congress’s formal count of the Electoral College votes. Lives were lost.
As the nation this week prepares to observe Martin Luther King Day and inaugurate its 46th president,
we must recognise the existence of unresolved tensions between independence and freedom in the shaping of the United States.
Consistent with the query in this Sunday’s gospel, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I want
to explore the good that came out of Georgia, the good that the USA has benefitted from.
Plains, Georgia (pop. 776) boasts a famous resident: Jimmy Carter. As if to live up to his hometown’s name President Carter had a seemingly uninspired one-term administration, branded by a cabinet secretary as a “failed presidency.”
Yet in recent years, chroniclers of the Carter presidency have shifted focus to his underemphasized successes, particularly on global peace and human rights.
It is anticipated that rather than seeking cosy relations with authoritarian leaders President-elect Biden will reemphasise human rights, a bipartisan characteristic of US foreign policy for over 40 years.
This rights-based emphasis is largely due to Mr Carter. He held that the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was akin to the US Declaration of Independence in significance and believed that the enshrined values for all individuals were descended from the Sermon on the Mount.
Carter institutionalized his human rights focus founding a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the State Department. At Camp David, he personally secured the first Middle East peace accord between Israel and Egypt.
After his presidency, rather than delivering high-paid speeches he created the Carter Centre to foster peace, promote democracy and eradicate disease.
He also worked with Habitat for Humanity building low-income homes and taught Sunday school.
His life maintained a consistent historiographical theme – that of being a good and decent man. In 2002, he won the
Nobel Peace Prize.
Stacey Abrams moved to Atlanta as a teenager while her parents pursued their ministry in the Methodist church.
In 2018, she narrowly lost her gubernatorial bid in the state’s closest election in more than half a century.
The race was marred by accusations of the suppression the Black vote.
President Carter, himself a former governor of Georgia, got involved into the election making a personal appeal to Abram’s opposing candidate to resign as secretary of state to avoid damaging public confidence in the outcome of the hotly contested race.
After losing the race, Abrams set up Fair Fight Action to address voter suppression. In September 2019, she published a 16-page document called The Abrams Playbook, calling for a large-scale investment of time and resources to get the minority vote out in 2020.
Her efforts on voter registration and turnout were a success in the state and Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in almost three decades.
While she disappointed many by refusing to run for a Senate seat, she’s credited also with the Democrats’ unexpected victories in both US Senate runoffs.
Georgia elected its first black senator – Raphael Warnock – and first Jewish senator – Jon Ossoff. Senator-elect the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock leads the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the former base of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
A native of Atlanta, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has become a symbol of the US civil rights movement. Today, a majority of Americans have a favourable view of his legacy and is remembered for his “I have a dream” and “the content of their character” speeches, often depicted as nonviolent, turning the other cheek and loving thy enemy. But the civil rights movement wasn’t seen as nonviolent
in its day.
In 1963, eight prominent, liberal, white clergymen –Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian and Jewish – released a public statement calling Dr King’s movement counterproductive.
While they sympathized with his cause, they held that his actions were too aggressive, too disruptive and drove people to violence.
Progressive white Americans, who distinguished themselves from the “bigots and hatemongers” in the South, also rebuked him when he railed against their segregated neighbourhoods and protested their racist housing practices. Labelled as an extremist, the FBI actively spied on him.
The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t fare much better, openly criticised by leaders and confronted by white supremacists and law enforcement agencies.
But Dr King increasingly saw his multiracial support base an early example of the spirit of agape love he espoused and the Beloved Community he envisioned for the whole of America – one people transcending race, tribe, class, and nation.
It took the death of George Floyd Jr. for the public to raise its head to racial injustice and police brutality in America and for the Black Lives Matter movement to gain
widespread support.
The protests picked up where Dr King and the civil rights movement left off and all over the world people, of varied races and ethnicities, took to the streets in support of the idea that all people are created equal and deserve equal treatment and towards ending institutional and systemic racism.
“I saw you under the fig tree…” The fig tree symbolizes peace, prosperity and righteousness in the Bible.
Micah 4:4 reads: “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and no one shall make them afraid.”
The image of Nathaniel a righteous person enjoying God’s peace under the fig tree can be extended to Carter seeking global peace, Abrams seeking voter rights in Georgia, and Dr King seeking equality, justice |and civil rights.
You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
At the March on Washington, Dr King asked us to believe that we could become one people judged not by the colour of our skin but by the content of our character.
He wasn’t dreaming a utopia; his was a modest dream, a point of departure. And as if from a revelation, Dr King saw “greater things than these.”
On the eve of his assassination, he conveyed that God had allowed him “to go up to the mountain.”
He stated, “I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!” His “we” I believe was inclusive, a point of departure towards “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty
and justice for all.”
Guy Hewitt is a servant of God and a proud and loyal Bajan.
