From the 16th Street Church to the Sidelines: Racism’s Long Home Games

Normally we don’t do this, but certain circumstances merit a shared post. 

This morning Lora woke up and was presented with a memory from 8 years ago on Facebook, where she quoted the Atlanta Constitution (the newspaper before the merger) the day after the Birmingham bombing. Today is the 63rd anniversary of the Birmingham Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Lora’s visited the church, and Eric is originally from the Birmingham suburbs- Homewood to be exact. We find Birmingham to be a delightful town with a thriving hospital, shops to patronize, and delicious restaurants to sit in a spell. And for Pye’s sake, we have to mention FurnaceFest. The history that has happened there is not meant to shame her. Atlanta unfortunately has its own Temple bombing history. In recent years our household has visited Selma and Montgomery as well. Beautiful Southern towns, all with rich history.

But we’re not the type to miss the eerie echoes of the past when they rear their ugly heads in the present. Not us. We love our sazeracs at the Roosevelt and boiled peanuts on the side of the road. Eric swears by the guy who used to be, and may still be, posted up at the Walmart on Augusta Road outside of Columbia, SC.  We come from a place that paints our porch ceilings with “haint blue” and as Faulkner wrote in Requiem For a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past”. Scholars and therapists might now say this is something like generational trauma where we still feel a pull of the pulse of what our previous generations’ fingers pressed. We just call it Southern culture. 

But this post seems more meaningful today than it has in the past. Continuing from Eric writing about the segregated proms that were still happening in 2013, thankfully in 2014 Wilcox County had its first integrated prom a full 60 years after Brown v Board.

Last Friday a group of kids from Maynard Jackson High School (APS) went to Jefferson High School to play some football. Just kids playing kids.

Our APS kids were greeted with hate, slurs, and spit.

We’re all about good ‘ol competition in football. Hell, we don’t even typically watch football together because we both feel so strongly about it! We understand how tempers can be flared. 

But that’s not what happened Friday night.

Kids shouldn’t have to be told that they need to travel in groups to go to the bathroom or concession stand for their own safety. Kids shouldn’t have to deal with n-bombs dropping like the rain of a summer storm. Kids shouldn’t have to deal with some neo-klansman spitting in their food because they are black.

We hope we can all agree there will be no shelter for this hate. It should be snuffed out, its fire extinguished before it spreads to others. It’s not allowed in our home nor will it ever be accepted anywhere we visit. 

This is doubly true when it comes to kids.

Because when you come for our children, you have removed all doubt that you do not possess any human decency about you.

This isn’t Birmingham in 1963, but these ARE our babies and we’re unwilling to allow further harm to occur. Not on our watch.

We’d like to think Georgia has learned from its own past and the mistakes of others. Hell, we seceded over the idea that it was morally correct that whites be able to legally own other human beings because they had more melanin. Spare us the Lost Cause revisionism,it’s plain as day in the first paragraph of the Ordinance of Secession.  Southerners LOVE to tell you it was “states’ rights”, but leave off the part that this was the “state right” they were specifically fighting over. We also have Governor Lester Maddox  in our history. The Talmadges had their problems too. But we also have Jimmy Carter who publicly broke with the Southern Baptist Convention over segregation. He lost to Maddox in ‘66, but on a cold January morning in 1971 he declared in his inaugural address that “The time for racial discrimination is over.” Jefferson County seems to have been living under a rock for 55 years and missed the memo. 

So as APS parents, we ask:

1. That GHSA sanction Jefferson High School football team in alignment with their Sportsmanship Policy.
2. Any individual who provided concessions at Jefferson High School concessions that night, be prohibited from doing so going forward. If people are going to spit in food, that is a health code violation and they should be barred from interacting with any food going forward.
3. That GHSA, APS, and Jefferson High School administration work together to outline a policy regarding reporting, responding to, and investigating events that impede the safety and enjoyment of high school sports. We understand there were other instances at other APS games. We want all instances and allegations to be investigated.
4. Jefferson High School Principal, Jenny Hardy, issue a public apology and issue a plan to prevent this sort of unacceptable behavior in the future. 

We love the South and that’s why this is unacceptable.

Footnote: And before someone calls Eric a carpetbagger, his third great grandfather served in the 2nd Infantry Battalion C Company out of Bibb County, and he is eligible for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Another third great grandfather in the 58th Infantry, commanded a battalion of freedmen in Mississippi for the Union. Lora’s roots are a bit deeper and harder to locate. While she can go back several generations in Walton and Morgan counties in GA, portions of her family on both maternal and paternal sides are indigenous, and she hasn’t yet successfully traced her lineage on the Dawes Rolls.

Signed,

Scarlet Hawk & Eric the Younger