According to the New York Times, 28 June 2024, the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Education, Ryan Walters, a registered Republican, issued a directive that all public schools, at every level, must offer courses on Biblical instruction, including the Ten Commandments, because scripture is an “indispensable historical and cultural touchstone” (Mervosh & Dias, 2024). This coincides with a mandate by the State of Louisiana that the Ten Commandments must be prominently displayed in every classroom. Separation of Church and State is the issue at hand but it is a slippery slope, not that simple. It is an act that prohibits Congress from instituting any laws sanctioning a particular religion, but it does not explicitly deny a school district or a state government from authorizing the display of religious materials or the delivery of religious instruction. Thus, lawsuits and much litigation are expected to follow these directives that should be of particular concern to members of The Black Church and the Black Community.
Another issue at hand is the implementation of Biblical instruction by an American institution that has been racist from its inception and continues to provide an inequitable educational experience for children of color, especially when spearheaded by members of a political party who have traditionally hidden behind Christianity to establish an old world order of conservatism, white-male-patriarchy, and white supremacy. White Christianity is directly culpable for constructing the notion of white supremacy and deconstructing any notion of Black equality (Jones, 2020). Christianity, in the hands of those on The Right, was used to overturn Roe vs. Wade, denying women the right to determine what happens with their own bodies and their own healthcare, and maintaining the subjugation of women. Racist zealots have used Christianity to justify discrimination in housing via redlining to establish white middle-class suburbs and impoverished Black inner city ghettoes, and it was used to justify Jim Crow Segregation, slavery, lynching, mass incarceration, voter suppression, and many other social ills that disturb the Black Community today (Alexander, 2010, Katznelson, 2005, Kendi, 2019, Pounder et al, 2003).
On the face of it, Biblical instruction in classrooms, posters of the Ten Commandments, and even the return of prayer in the schools seem innocuous, as if little to no harm could possibly come from it, especially if other religious literary texts are granted equal time in the schools; but we must beware and consider the source, their motives, and the implications of their current actions on our future. Our Lord, in the Gospel of St. Matthew, warns us to beware of false prophets who come to us in “sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” We shall “know them by their fruits.” Right-wing, Republican Christians have produced Donald Trump as their messiah, a conman who is a convicted felon, adulterer, pathological liar, and who claimed in 2017 that Frederick Douglass is doing a great job and will continue to do even more (Merica, 2017). Right-wing, Republican Christians have provided fruits of racist policies including the banning of books on social justice and America’s extensive history of racism and slavery, the eradication of the term slave master from the history books, and calling human flesh mongers and plantation owners, planters, and they have produced the Great Replacement Theory, proffering that whites are becoming the American minorities and must fight to take their country back.
A revisionist history, the propagation of alternative facts, obfuscation, prevarication, and outright denial has been the modus operandi of The Right. Oklahoma is requiring Biblical instruction just weeks after the state supreme court dismissed the case for reparations of the two surviving members of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110. The court ruled that it has no authority to order a resolution or remuneration for the allegations brought against the state and that only lawmakers hold such power. Damario Solomon-Simmons, lead attorney for the plaintiffs told The Times, “Once again, the Oklahoma court system has failed the survivors. We think the decision is wrong and the reasoning is wrong” (Burch, 2024).
The Tulsa Race Massacre occurred in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, dubbed Black Wall Street by W.E.B. DuBois. Following the Civil War, many African Americans moved west to Oklahoma to join the Cherokee and Seminole Indigenous Americans who had been forced out there between 1830 and 1850 during the Trail of Tears to land that was unwanted by free whites and considered unprofitable because it was impossible to farm and grow crops there due to the abundance of oil underground that had yet to be discovered in the mid-19th Century (DeBose, 2021; Parshina-Kottas et. al, 2021; Tulsa City-County Library 2024).
Blacks in Tulsa had accrued so much wealth and education and were so magnanimous that they drew the ire of the former master class. After World War I, Black Wall St. was one of the most affluent African American communities in the entire nation. Black people owned all of the banks, hotels, oil fields, huge farmlands, schools, and many other businesses in the Greenwood section of Tulsa. On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was riding the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third Street and Main Street with a white woman named Sarah Page. According to the Blacks who survived, Mr. Rowland and Ms. Page had ostensibly been having a secret love affair. The two lovers had an argument on the elevator and when they got down to the first floor, white people saw them and told the police that Mr. Rowland had attempted to rape Ms. Page on the elevator. Mr. Rowland was arrested and the fallacious report quickly spread throughout the surrounding towns. Black men then gathered their rifles and other weapons and went down to the jailhouse to protect Mr. Rowland. When the white mob arrived on June 1st, a gun battle ensued in which some white mobsters were shot and killed. They retreated but returned with increased numbers. The Black protectors were killed and Mr. Roland was snatched from the jail cell and summarily hung (DeBose, 2021; Parshina-Kottas et. al, 2021; Tulsa City-County Library 2024).
The mob burned down nearly every building in the Greenwood section and killed every man, woman, and child that they could find. Some of the white people who lived nearby and owned planes flew over Black Wall Street and dropped bombs on the residents and their property. The people who survived thought that the U.S. Army/Air Force had been the ones who bombed them from the planes. The federal government has denied that claim and declared that the planes were owned and operated by private citizens. During the slaughter, many whites participated in the revelry. The entire episode was a loud party, parade, and picnic in which participants ravenously and savagely, mutilated, murdered, and raped Black people with a sense of inscrutable frivolity and immunity that boggles the mind (DeBose, 2021; Parshina-Kottas et. al, 2021; Tulsa City-County Library 2024).
And now the State of Oklahoma refuses to even allow the case for reparations to be heard and claims they have the authority to provide Christian Education to our children. James H. Cone, Father of Black Theology, says, “Where human beings struggle for freedom and refuse to be defined by unauthorized earthly authorities, there, Jesus Christ is present among them. His Presence is the sustaining and liberating event in the lives of the oppressed that makes possible the continued struggle for freedom (Cone, 1975, p. 32). We must continue our struggle for freedom by voting in every election, local, state, and federal, to keep the racist, misogynistic agenda from hiding behind Christianity to take hold of our country. We are literally fighting for the soul of the nation.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State tells Mother Jones that this fight is part of a movement known as “Project 2025” which seeks to reverse population trends by ensuring that white orphans are available for white people who want to adopt, that racial and social justice protections are dismantled and roadblocks to equality are erected to limit the civil rights of gay people and people of color, and to re-interpret freedom of religion as a tool for uninhibited discrimination. Marc Elias, a Voting Rights Attorney and founder of Democracy Docket, a website focused on voting rights and election litigation, told MSNBC on 1 July 2024 that “There is a team of MAGA extremists who are working on something called Project 2025 to execute and make much more effective Donald Trump’s retribution if and when he gets into office.” The American Christian Reich, MAGA-maniacs, are ordering Biblical Instruction and lessons on the Ten Commandments in the public school system.
It would behoove The Black Church to resist all efforts of Right-wing Republican Evangelicals to be the voice of Christianity and the vehicle for Christian Education in our public schools because their ideal Jesus is a Eurocentric, conservative with exclusivity. He is not the one to turn over the tables and wage spiritual revolution through the pulling down of strongholds and the eradication and resistance of oppression with the weapon of love and the inclusivity of whosoever will, let them come. The God of the Black Church is a God of Liberation. He is the God of the Oppressed. We can be sure that Right-wing Republicans will not teach that truth.
WORKS CITED
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Burch, A.D.S. (2024). New York Times. Oklahoma Supreme Court Dismisses Tulsa Race
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Cone, J. (1975). God of the Oppressed. Orbis Books: New York
DuBose, E. (2021). The Black Wall St. Times. Tulsa Race Massacre: The truth about Sarah
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https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/02/politics/donald-trump-frederick-douglass/index.html
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