The video shows one of the bikers slowing down in front of the Range Rover for reasons unbeknownst to us. Maybe the driver was following the group or one particular biker too closely? Maybe the biker was practicing his defensive biking skills? We don’t really know why the biker and SUV driver came so close to one another, but what we do see is that the driver, Alexian Lien, bumped the back wheel of one of the bikers, which lead to the bikers crowding around his truck and Lien running over several bikes and/or people. (Allegedly, right before Lien took off, the bikers dented his truck and slashed his tires.) Yet, following this Lien sped off and the bikers followed him through New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway to a city block in Harlem where they swarmed the SUV and three of them smashed the driver’s side window and yanked Lien out of the car in order to beat him up. Lien was taken to the hospital where he has since been released and one of the bikers, Edwin Mieses, is now in critical condition and possibly paralyzed from the neck down. One of the bikers who retaliated against Lien turned himself in, while another, Christopher Cruz, was arrested on a number of charges including reckless endangerment.
According to police, Lien says he was trying to protect his wife and 2-year old daughter. Seemingly this is the logic for running over a couple of bikers and starting a high speed chase. But one must wonder what kind of protection a 2-year-old sees after her father runs over a few people and doesn’t seem to pull over to check and see if they are okay? Was Lien speeding down the parkway to get police? To rush to the hospital? Shouldn’t Lien be wrong for not only his first collision with the bikers but for running over more bikers as well? His actions resulted in a man being in critical condition and a community being deeply discouraged. The fact cannot be erased that he hit and injured a few people. But the fact also cannot be erased that the bikers violently retaliated against Lien causing him personal and property damage.
So the bikers and their community are hanging in the balance of mourning Edwin Mieses who seems lost to them, and fighting for charges to be pressed against Lien for causing this damage. Should Lien be let off scot-free when he has caused another man injury? Lien caused damage to a group of people who are hurting just as much as he is hurting for what they did to him. This may sound retributive justice to some, but what I am aiming for is equal justice–and maybe there is a more accurate term for what I am suggesting. It just seems that there should be some consequence for Lien’s actions just as there were consequences for the biker’s action. This doesn’t strike me as an either/or situation but a both/and situation. Both parties have some level of blame to take and it would be an injustice to only punish one side for their part when it took two for this entire drama to unfold. But I want to hear from our readers. Having watched the video and followed the news, do you believe this is an either/or or a both/and situation?
Earlier today, Bossip.com posted this video of Bobby Wingate, a Florida man who was punched in the face and tased by a police officer because he was walking on the wrong side of the road. As these stories go, Wingate spent the night in jail–because after the uncalled for beat down, he charged with resisting arrest on top of walking on the wrong side of the street–while the police officer was free. When the case went to trial, it was dismissed because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. Wingate is currently filing a lawsuit against the Jacksonville sheriff’s office but claims he is doing so as a matter of principle.
In general there is nothing encouraging about this situation and it is almost commonplace for us to expect that somewhere in America–especially if its in Florida as of late–a white police officer is using (read “abusing”) his authority against a black man. But there is a silver lining in this story. Though Wingate is filing a lawsuit, he offers a glimmer of hope through non-retributive justice. Of this he says, “If I ever see him again, and he needs my help for something, I’ll help him.” There is no eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth here, just some old-fashioned good will toward men. I am encouraged by Wingate’s outlook when he could be enraged given our current climate and I hope that others might find some level of encouragement. Indeed we wish that incidents such as this will decrease and that less perpetrators will go unpunished but, for now, let’s celebrate one man’s decision to find some good will to give to a man who thought to give none to him.
“March,” the multi-book graphic novel about the life of Congressman John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement has been five years in the making. That’s five years of late nights and weekends that Congressman John Lewis, his staff person Andrew Aydin, and the book’s illustrator Nate Powell committed to retelling, writing, and sketching the story of Lewis’s life and the Civil Rights Movement for the current and next generation of activists. Aydin spoke with UrbanFaith about how “March” was born, his experience working with Congressman Lewis to plumb the depths of some of America’s most pivotal moments, and what he hopes readers will gain from the book.
How did “March” come to be?
It all started in Congressman Lewis’s primary campaign in 2008 when I was working as his press secretary. It was coming to the end of the campaign and he started talking about what I was going to do after. I freely admitted that I was going to a comic book convention. You know, in professional politics that gets you some looks—there’s a surprising amount of comic book fans but I think they’ve always been told that it’s not something you admit. So amidst the jeering, jokes, and snickering, Congressman Lewis stood up for me. He said, “There was a comic book during the Civil Rights Movement and it was incredibly influential,” that comic book was “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story.” When he told me that I was captivated by this idea of a comic book because I was a lifelong comic book fan. I was captivated by this idea of something that I cared for, as a fan, being impactful on something that I had come to make my career of. So I looked it up.
I read this story again in the Congressman’s memoir “Walking with the Wind” about the Greensboro Four, two of them reading the comic book and having that be the moment of inspiration that lead them to sit-in for the first time on February 1, 1960, and how that taught them nonviolence. It was that moment that gave them the inspiration. And so, being 24 years old, and not knowing any better, knowing that “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” was about the Montgomery Bus Boycott and having heard so many of these stories from Congressman Lewis’s perspective about what happened after Montgomery—you know the national sit-ins or the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, the March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer or Selma…I just asked, “Why don’t you write a comic book?” At first he thought I was a little out of my mind. This is John Lewis, an immensely respected congressman who built a life’s work on very serious topics that few will ever have the courage to broach, and so doing a comic book may have seemed a little out there. But I think something sort of resonated in him. I’ll never know what the moment was that changed his mind, but I wouldn’t give up. I kept asking and to my complete shock, one day after I asked it again, before the campaign was over, he said, “You know what? Let’s do it, but only if you write it with me.” And that moment changed everything because, here is this man who is having, not just faith in my idea, but faith in my ability to make it happen.
Did you know a lot of history about the Civil Rights Movement beforehand or was a lot of it what you learned from sitting with Congressman Lewis and diving into the books?
I learned, you sort of learn about these things in the abstract like most students do. They teach you about it in history class, they teach you about it in civics, and so in that sense I knew of these stories. But it wasn’t until I heard the congressman say them in his own words and tell these stories to kids and hear the way they reacted when they heard these stories and me going through my own childlike reaction to them—disbelief at first and realization at the utter horror that he lived through and yet, he stuck to his principles. I definitely learned a different side of history hearing his story because its not the sort of simplified version that a lot of school kids hear and that’s a big part of why I thought this book was so important to do. Hearing it changed my life. Learning these stories made me look at being a citizen in a whole new way. It made me look at my ability to live freely in this country in a whole new way. And every generation, not just ours, but generations, decades, if not centuries from now, should hear these stories and learn this history. So that’s why I had to do this, that’s why it is so meaningful.
What was it like co-writing with Congressman Lewis?
A big part of what made this such a great experience is that Congressman Lewis is such a kind and wonderfully generous person. I’d worked with him closely both in his congressional office and in his campaign, so we had a very good working relationship and it was very natural to extend that to this process. I would interview him to have him tell me the stories and then I would get research materials—“Walking with the Wind” was basically my Bible—and just write it out as a script. I got some of Scott McCloud’s books, I looked at other writers scripts to see how they did it, and I just started writing. And that’s the thing, something like this or any challenge where you’ve never done it before, you can’t be afraid to just do it, to just try. That’s sort of the mindset that I had to have this whole time. Part of that really was terrifying because it’s not that I was afraid that other people wouldn’t like it, but I was afraid that I would let the congressman down and that meant more to me than anything. I just wanted to do the right thing by him. He did the hard part, he lived this story. I’m just a messenger, in some respect, trying to tell the story in a new way for a new audience, and so, it’s been an unbelievably special experience because I’ve gotten to hear this from him. So many moments I’ve gotten to see him share his story and see how people react and I always felt like I shouldn’t be the only one to see this, everybody should have this. This is important history not just for our nation, but also for the world.
You see people all over the world protesting and starting to really push and pull to change their own circumstances and the Civil Rights Movement is an important example of how you do that and how you do that properly. Non-violence is the most powerful tool that oppressed people have and with so many people being left out of our system and our society, they need to know that they have a recourse and they need to understand how they can take advantage and use that recourse. If it’s worked once before, if a comic book was able to reach those young people and inspire them to make themselves vessels of nonviolence, then why can’t we do that again? Why shouldn’t we do that again? It seems almost obvious now looking back on it, but at the time it was not an idea that people necessarily heard and thought was a good one based on their own experiences. But, for the congressman, this is a man who has been on the right side of history for a very long time and he understood the idea and he understood very much the potential for the idea and he sort of gave me the freedom to pursue this with him.
Do you hope that “March” will become a tool of social change just like “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story?”
I think a graphic novel has a potential to start a conversation. It has the potential to make people think about things differently and perhaps to see things that maybe were right in front of their noses that they didn’t see for some reason. The book can inspire people but they have to be the ones to act. What I hope this book does above anything else is that it shows them how to do it, that it uses a story of how it has worked before and it gives them a model to follow for the future. The book is dedicated to the past and future children of the movement. I think there’s a movement again in America that needs to happen and I think it might not just be in America that it needs to happen but maybe all across the world. And so, it’s my hope that “March” will inspire these young people to make the world a better place, a more just place, and a more fair place for everybody. We need a level playing field in America because it will make everything stronger. It’ll make our institutions, our economy and our culture stronger. There’s a reason in the Constitution that they put you have a right to the pursuit of happiness and if the society becomes such an unfair place then do you really have that right to the pursuit of happiness anymore? These tools allow young people who are so much freer than folks older, or even my age to get involved…If we’re lucky, it might work that way.
1. “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” Nelson Mandela
Tuff is honest about being terrified during her interaction with Brandon Hill. She has no delusions of superhero grandeur. But instead of letting that terror stunt her ability to respond in crisis, she worked through it. In connecting with that feeling of terror she may have also connected with Brandon, a young man whom we have some reason to believe felt some terror of his own and was fearful. Here we see Mandela’s words in action, indicating that courage is not the absence of fear but triumph over it. It is okay to acknowledge fear but after that we must push through it with courage.
2. The tools we need in a time of crisis are sometimes within us.
In an interview with WSB Channel 2 in Atlanta, Tuff said that she reflected on a current sermon series on anchoring that her pastor is preaching to help her engage with Brandon Hill. She remembered how it taught her how to console people who are bereaving and, through this reflection, she discerned that Brandon-Hill was a young man who was hurting and in need of care. Sometimes we think that we need particular credentials in order to affect change in someone’s life–and sometimes those credentials are necessary. But at other times, we have what someone needs within us, be it a scripture, a sermon, or as we will see in the next lesson, our story.
3. Our story could pull someone else through, if we are willing and able to share it.
Following the reflection on her pastor’s sermon, Tuff mentioned that she shared her story with Brandon Hill. Tuff recently lost her husband of 33 years—the only man she has ever known, has a son with multiple disabilities, and a daughter who is preparing to head to law school. Given this, she felt like she was at a low point and that nobody loved her, but last year she experienced a turning point and shared with Brandon Hill “Life can still bring about turns but we can live from it, in spite of what it looks like.” Upon hearing this, Brandon Hill began to open up to her, confessing that he hadn’t taken his medication and sharing his concerns about the consequences for the crime he was considering committing. Brandon Hill didn’t completely surrender at that moment, but he was comforted and calmed through the realization that there was someone going through similar struggles. Tuff reminds us that we never know how our stories might connect or change someone else’s life and we have a responsibility to share that story. As some might say, “Our testimony is not our own.”
4. Make your judgment but decide to give people the benefit of the doubt.
When Brandon Hill came into the administrative office at McNair Tuff’s stated, “He had a look on him that he was willing to kill.” He stated as much as he warned Tuff and her colleagues that this wasn’t a joke and had Tuff announce the same over the school intercom. But rather than treat Brandon Hill like a common criminal, she treated him like a normal person or, better yet, her neighbor. She seemed to espouse Jesus’ second great commandment in Mark 12: 31, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (NRSV)” Despite what she knew Brandon Hill was possible of, she chose not to let that define the way she treated him. This too is our responsibility, to not let our behavior be dictated by who someone is or what they have done–or will do, but be guided to love them because of the common humanity we share and the fact that we are all created in the image of God.
5. Be humble.
It seems that Tuff has been humble from beginning to end in this situation. She is not interested in being called a hero; rather she wants to give God the praise. It is through God’s grace and mercy that Antoinette Tuff believes and knows she “got over.” It is that humility that guided her through it, acknowledging that this might not have been something she could do on her own. It is that humility that is taking her through the countless interviews and making her a living testimony of what faith in the midst of fear can do. Tuff’s humility leads her and us to God and reminds us that God is with us, working through and among us. We may not always see it or understand it, but God is still working.
Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker in “The Butler” (Photo Credit: Anne Marie Fox)
Last Friday night I joined the droves of people across America who went to see “The Butler” over the weekend. I was both excited and nervous to see this historic fable about Cecile Gaines, a man who served eight presidents during his time as a butler in the White House. I was looking forward to watching some of my favorite actors morph into historical figures but I wasn’t too excited about stepping back into history. Less than two minutes into “The Butler” I was faced with “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree” and I, like an over-ripened fruit spills its spoiled juices once it hits the ground, was emotionally hit and tears fell down my face. I wanted to look away but I knew that I shouldn’t. Next to those dangling bodies appeared a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.” And with that, director Lee Daniels provided a little light, as much as could be seen through the graying eyes of his main character, Cecile, who was seated in the foyer of the White House ready to take us on his retrospect for life.
Cecile takes us from the cotton field where he was visible worker among his parents and others–visible enough to not only be seen but to see the violence that took his father and sense the sexual violence waged against his mother–to the houses and hotels where he learned to be a domestic, an invisible worker who lived to serve and not say much. Cecile, played by Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, is an affable servant who masters smiling with his eyes and being disarming despite his 6 foot 2 inch stature, yet all of this was uncomfortable. I didn’t want to watch Cecile be an agreeable butler. In comes Cecile’s son Louis, a young man whom you can sense has a problem with his father’s career complacency. He doesn’t say much in his initial onscreen time, but he has eyes that speak volumes. Here we begin to see some of Lee Daniels’s best work in the film, which is the study in contrasts he sets up between father and son, mother and potential daughter-in-law, those just trying to survive and those striving in the fight for justice.
This study in contrasts plays out in the context of Cecile serving in the White House and Louis serving on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. It begins most poignantly with Cecile’s revelation of the “two faces” every black person must wear, the face worn to operate around white people and the one worn around black people–which is most likely an authentic reflection of self. When Cecile spoke of the two faces, I and the rest of the predominantly black audience let out a collective moan, no doubt because we knew the two faces too well. Cecile was speaking from a context 50 years earlier and yet, 50 years later, the two faces still exist and play a role in the daily functioning of some black people. Cecile wears two faces, but his son refuses and instead Daniels sets him up as one of the young faces in the Civil Rights Movement. The film switches between Cecile’s quiet life of service to Louis’s rowdy life of shaking up the system and the astute viewer will begin to wonder, “Am I about the quiet life of just working with my head down to support myself and my family? Or am I about the loud life, the activist’s life of shaking up the system to expose injustice, sacrificing myself?” The movie deals with the sacrifices that were made so that we could have equal access and rights. Sacrifices that were made by the people on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement and those that were made behind the scenes by people such as black domestics. Daniels includes a speech by Dr. King to Cecile’s son on the importance of the black domestic and their subversive nature, which was poignant in the moment and spoke truth to the black domestic’s power in a way that is rarely considered in the dominant narrative of American history. Yet, regarding subversion, I wonder if the black domestic fell into it by circumstance instead of by explicitly choosing it as a political strategy to break down racial barriers. I wonder if white people people saw their black servants as agents of their change of heart or did they merely tolerate their presence which made it seem like a change was coming. I state this not to critique Dr. King’s words, but to set them against the narrative Daniels provided which does not present Cecile as someone who was actively trying to do anything other than survive and casts the various presidents as those who, sometimes, just wanted a negro’s perspective to bolster their own success in office. But I welcome correction on this matter. Nevertheless, the film can show us something about ourselves and makes us sit with the question, “What side of the struggle am I on?”
Lest I take up this review with talk of male power, I can’t neglect the role of women in the film. Media mogul and sporadic actress Oprah Winfrey plays Cecile’s wife, Gloria, a stay at home mother. At once I wanted to be happy that she wasn’t the one serving because that would perpetuate the trope of voluntary surrogacy among black women in post-Antebellum America—this is not to say that it didn’t exist but it is to say that portrayals of women in such roles have been exhausted in cinema. But, in exchange for this trope, we get the long-suffering black woman. Gloria takes care of home and the children but has a husband who neglects to take care of her because he is too busy with work. This trope appears frequently in black film and also, if we think about it, haven’t we seen Oprah play this role before? Isn’t there a bit of the longsuffering gene in “Beloved’s” Sethe, “Women of Brewster Place’s” Mattie Michael and “Color Purple’s” Sofia? I’ll not divulge how Gloria got over, but I will ask those who have seen and will see the movie in the coming weeks to examine their feelings toward her. What, if any, power does she have throughout this film? Juxtapose her with Yaya Alafia’s (formerly DeCosta) Carol Hammie, the young headstrong friend turned love interest of Louis. In taking up the concept of the study in contrasts I mentioned earlier, we butt heads with two types of women, the one willing to stand by her man despite not getting her core needs met and the one willing to ride or die—or kill—without her man. Gloria serves a fundamental role in keeping her family together at all costs and Carol comes onto the scene as a woman who sought out a cause for herself, not for a man. She doesn’t follow Louis, she marks her own path and Daniels’ direction allows her character to stand on her own in a room full of men and with a face full of spit.
Brief character sketches and analysis aside, “The Butler” is a worthwhile film for people from all walks of life to see. It recounts many of the pivotal stories of our history in a way that leaves room for us to insert ourselves and wonder where we would have fit in the story. With the film’s long list of stars from a front-toothless Terrance Howard playing a philandering husband and a dead-on Nancy Reagan played by Jane Fonda to David Banner’s cameo appearance which makes me pray he is out of the rap game and into acting forever, I enjoyed watching all of these stars embody their characters in ways that displaced their larger than life celebrity selves. As cliché as it is to end this way, I laughed, I cried, and I was deeply moved by “The Butler.” Like any movie, a number of critiques can be made, but more than that, I hope that every person who sees this film will reflect on their role in making the world a place where all are truly free and acknowledge that there we are still in the midst of that struggle toward freedom.
