The Children’s Crusades

July 15th, 2014  |   

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,

Turn me ‘round, turn me ‘round

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,,

I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’,

Walkin’ into freedom land.

Civil Rights Song

I have been thinking about wailing, walking, white, black and brown-skin children.

In July, 111 years ago, Labor organizer, “Mother” Jones, led the “March of the Mill Children” from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s summer home in Oyster Bay, New York. It was to call attention to the harsh conditions surrounding child labor, and to demand a 55-hour workweek.

Her “Wail of the Children” speech still stings. “Fifty years ago,” she said, “there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black  children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.” 

Roosevelt refused to see them; nevertheless, the “March of the Mill Children” was a step forward in the struggle for human rights in the workplace. 

In May 1963, thousands of black young people in Birmingham, Alabama, participated in a series of nonviolent demonstrations against segregation. It was called the “Children’s Crusade.” Children, some as young as 7 or 8, were met by hateful anger, attacked by police dogs, sprayed with powerful water hoses, beaten with batons, arrested, and expelled from school.   

The battle continued for months, during which bombs planted by white supremacists at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four little black girls. Nevertheless, the “Children’s Crusade” became a pivotal event in bringing about the end of segregation in Birmingham, and the eventual movement toward civil rights.  

And now, this side of The Fourth of July, we see another Children’s Crusade taking place, as thousands of Latino children, many accompanied by adults, crossing the Border  into the U.S. from Central America. They are seeking asylum from poverty and violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, three countries where our nation has a history of sowing the seeds of war and political and economic devastation that have contributed to the migration of these refugees.  

The Hebrew Prophet, Isaiah, writes of a time when “a little child shall lead” the people into a Peaceable Kingdom, where a lion and a lamb would lie down together. Today that might mean Democrats and Republicans in Congress working together to see that these children, and their families remain here. On top of that, they must pass a long-overdue immigration bill.

When the political powers-that-be are stuck, incapable of moving the nation past a crisis, children somehow lead us into a place, a just place, where adults fear to go. I pray that that will be the case with the children who have walked here from Central America.

El Norte Revisited

In 1983, I saw the movie, “El Norte.” It was partly funded by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Netflix has this film, and I suggest that my readers watch it.

El Norte tells the story of Rosa and her brother Enrique, two Guatemalan young people who flee Guatemala in the 1980s because of the ethnic and political persecution taking place there. They go north, traveling through Mexico and across the border into the United States, a promised land in their eyes. It depicts their harrowing, arduous and dangerous journey.

Rosa’s words to her brother, as they move toward the border, speak relevantly to what is taking place right now at the border. They capture the persecution they are fleeing as well as the disappointment they feel after a less than hospitable welcome in the U.S.

“In our own land, we have no home. They want to kill us…In Mexico there is only poverty. We can’t make a home there either. And here in the north, we aren’t accepted. When will we find a home, Enrique? Maybe when we die, we’ll find a home.”

How’s this for a modest proposal? Perhaps these children arriving here, along with their families, will not be sent back, but be able to be moved from detention centers into the homes of people all across the nation. I remember back in the 1970s when St. John’s, the church I served in Charleston, sponsored a Laotian family. Parishioners, living just down the road from where Judy, our children, and I lived, opened their home to this family. They were here because of the war we had waged in Southwest Asia.

Having welcomed that family from Laos years ago, I would love to see Charleston, and other cities across the country, welcome these refugees who have walked here. It beats denying them entry and sending them back to the poverty and violence from which they’ve fled. We’ve done that many times, and we can do it again.

Crossing The Line

As many of my readers know, I came back to Charleston after working on the Delmarva Peninsula. The Diocese of Delaware was desirous of involving the Episcopal Church in difficult social justice work in Sussex County, and a good portion of that work involved Latinos. They had walked and swum the river to come to the United States to find work.

When I left there in 2001, immigrants from Mexico and Central America, most of them classified as “illegal immigrants,“ made up about 50 percent of the population in the little town of Georgetown, Delaware, where I had my office. 

While there, I worked with a variety of people in order to begin a Latino center, a place where some 1,000 people a month could find help far from their homes south of the Border. We were able to get funding to begin La Red, a medical clinic designed to serve this population, a child care center, and the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance, an organization designed to deal with the labor and environmental problems Latino folks encountered in the poultry plants in the region. Working with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was a regular part of the work, as was work with the local jails when people were arrested.

The population, without legal papers, was in trouble because they had crossed a line, the Mexican-United States border. They had come for jobs in the poultry plants, jobs that most Americans wouldn’t accept. They had come to make money to send back home to their families who were living in poverty.

Local folks who were angry about the influx of this population, the fact that they had broken the law by crossing the border without proper papers, were a challenge to me. I often would draw an imaginary line, positioning myself on the side of jobs and money, and the other person on the side with his poverty stricken family. “Even though it’s illegal to cross that line,” I would say, “would you still cross that line anyway, in order to save your family?”

Therein lies a subject worth exploring. I am talking about lines.

Impermanent Borders

When thinking about lines, a good place to begin is with those lines we call borders. They’re the lines referred to when we hear the comment, “We must secure and protect our borders.” Think of the countries in turmoil in the Middle East. All of the lines that have been drawn there, the lines that established the countries in the region, were drawn by colonial powers—for example, France, Germany, Britain, America, and Italy. Those borders were frequently drawn after wars in which the winners drew the lines.

If you still own an old atlas, it’s easy to see how the lines drawn were not indelible. Like photos in a family album, the lines that have defined countries have changed over the years. Libya, once a collection of tribes, did not come into being as a country until 1951. Here at home, West Virginia, didn’t even exist prior to the Civil War.

The land now designated as Israel was defined as Palestine when I was a child. That’s what the map on the wall at my church said, and the globe at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, where I checked out books. It wasn’t until May 14, 1948, that the State of Israel came into being. I can still remember vividly the movie newsreel coverage of David Ben-Gurion announcing the Zionist dream-come-true, and the hell that was unleashed between Arabs and Jews as a result of that declaration. The lines defining the State of Israel have been drawn, redrawn, and fought over countless times for centuries.

That hell continues today as we watch the battle between Palestinians and the State of Israel. And always, it is the children that feel the pain and death because of the adults who seem unable, often unwilling, to resolve the ancient feud nonviolently. The recent killing of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinians, followed by the killing of a Palestinian boy by Israeli Jews has set in motion the ongoing, seemingly endless life-for-a-life cycle of reprisals that have fueled the violence there. Revenge rather than restraint rules the day in a land that has been fought over, claimed, defined, countless times.

What is taking place in Gaza is particularly troubling to me. I was in Gaza in the fall of 1987. I visited Jubalia, the Palestinian refugee camp two months before the First Intifada began in December. It is the largest refugee camp in the Palestinian territory. Over 100,000 people live there, twice the size of Charleston, in an area that is less than a mile long, the distance of five blocks from my house.

Gaza has no bomb shelters. Israel does. There is no Iron Dome to protect people from Israeli air attacks. Israel does. Told by Israeli leaflets and e-mails that people in Gaza should flee the Israeli attacks, Palestinians there have nowhere to run to for safety. Pictures from Tel Aviv show people moving about and traveling in their cars with no damage to the city. The film footage out of Gaza show rubble from which Palestinians  are trying to extract the dead and wounded from homes that have been destroyed. The death toll in Gaza is nearing 200, with a large number of children having been killed.

The median age in Israel is 29.9, while in Gaza it is 22.4. The powder keg in the entire Middle East is the large number of young people there who are becoming more and more radicalized as the violence continues. Tribal loyalties, religious allegiance, and political alliances are the new lines being drawn as the regional and national lines are obliterated. The effects of globalization are easy to see as borders dissolve.

The Middle East is coming apart, and we should not be surprised. It had to come apart. The old lines no longer serve the people confined within them. Like Humpty Dumpty, the region cannot be put back together again, not by all the imperial king’s horses, and all the king’s men. Insisting that the region be what it was will only result in more violence and war. The chief ingredients in a resurrected Middle East will require not king’s horses—rockets and missiles—nor king’s men—military boots on the ground—but a diplomatic approach to peace that is rooted in nonviolence.

The Tired, Poor And Those Yearning To Be Free

While at Washington & Lee University, I traveled to England with our lacrosse team for a summer tour, playing English teams. It was a roundtrip adventure traveling on a Holland-American ship. I shall not forget leaving the New York Harbor, saying goodbye to the Statue of Liberty and then returning to be greeted by her when the tour was over.

Like all trips in and out of that harbor, we passed by Ellis Island, the beachhead on which so many immigrants had landed, many in flight from oppression and poverty.

Inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and emblazoned on the American Psyche are the words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Those words, written by Emma Lazarus in 1882, are being spoken now as justification for welcoming the children, the refugees who are flooding across the Mexican Border from Central America. 

I imagine that most people today know who Donald Trump is, but do not recognize the name of Emma Lazarus. Born into a prominent family of Sephardic Jews, originally from Portugal, she was related to Benjamin N. Cardoza, a Supreme Court Associate Justice. A novelist and poet, the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty were lifted from a sonnet she wrote in 1883. They were close to her heart because of her efforts to help Jews who at that time were fleeing to the United States for protection from Russian persecution and anti-Semitic violence.

A member of the Zionist movement, she argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl used the term Zionist. Emma Lazarus died in 1887, well before her words on the Statue of Liberty were to be tested here when Jews were persecuted and killed in Nazi Germany. Looking for a safe haven, from what was to become the Holocaust, these refugees were turned away.

Americans at that time thought that these immigrants would take their jobs and pollute their culture. Politicians who campaigned for immigration policies that would allow these Jews to become citizens condemned themselves politically. In one opinion poll, 82 percent of Americans opposed letting large numbers of Jewish immigrants into the country. On the eve of World War II, a bill was introduced into Congress that would have admitted Jewish refugee children above the regular quota limits. Without President Roosevelt’s support, it died in committee.

Many Jews died as the direct result of the failure of the United States to admit them; among those not admitted were 20,000 refugee children, who would have been allowed entry into the country twice a year, under the provisions of the Wagner-Roger Bill. And then there was the ship, the St Louis that was turned back to Europe with its Jewish passengers.

The children, once again the children become the victims of war. And we best not forget those who fight these wars. Kurt Vonnegut  offers a vivid description of them in his book about WW II, Slaughterhouse-Five. “You know we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. ‘My God, my God,’ I said to myself. ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’”

Is There A Responsible Bull In The China Shop?

Someone has asked me recently, if our country is responsible for solving the crisis along the Mexican border, the situation involving the flood of children that has occurred. I mean, after all, should we have to pick up the pieces created by these unstable countries in Central America—Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala?

When that question arrives on my doorstep, asked by a Christian, I see red, and then I have to think of a bull, with its own eye for red, to rescue me from my own discomfort.

You won’t find a lot of references to children in the Gospel stories about Jesus, and nothing about Jesus as a child, except the baby-birthing narrative. But what is there is significant. The Gospel stories from Mark are informative.

Jesus is said to have taken a child in his arms saying, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me. (Mark 9:37) A radical incarnation, don’t you think? Welcome a child, you are actually welcoming God. Turning away a child, you are turning God away.

And, if that weren’t enough, Jesus speaks of children as “little ones,” warning people that if they cause them to “stumble, it would be better for those people if “a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42) Thinking of the children who have drowned in the river trying to cross over into the United States, that kind of hyperbolic literary analogy reminds me of those folks in Dante’s Inferno who were forced to suffer a punishment that mimicked their crime.

Here’s where the bull comes into play. How much responsibility should we Americans assume for these children from Central America? My answer, with the bull in mind: As much responsibility as the bull in the china shop must assume for the damage he has done in that shop. That kind of thinking, however, would require us to see ourselves as the bull that has been a major cause of the poverty, war, and economic ruin that has cursed the people of Central America, causing them to flee their homeland.

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped Archives

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed


Calendar

March 2024
M T W T F S S
« Jan    
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Most Recent Posts

Nations will hammer swords into plows, their spears into sickles, there shall be no more training for war. Each person will sit under his or her fig tree in peace.
Micah 4:3 - 4