Pamela Jean Owens off-line

When I first started a personal blog last year, not having any real plan in mind for it, someone who had meant a lot to me had just died. Not surprisingly, I decided to write about her. I was blogging every Sunday night, or that was the plan, and by the following weekend I had gotten news of the deaths of three more people important to me. And again the next week. Suddenly it seemed like, one after another, all my teachers were dying. Then I realized that I was experiencing the same thing that everyone my age must be experiencing.

I had already known that my Aunt Eva, who died in 2004, was the first of what will inevitably be eight deaths of beloved relatives from the World War II generation. Since all my aunts and uncles are now in their eighties, most likely their deaths all will come in the next ten to fifteen years. Since nearly all of my ancestors lived long lives, well into their eighties or nineties, I’m not expecting any less of my immediate aunts, uncles, or parents. But they are only eight of many elders of their generation who have enriched my life and made me who I am. (more…)

Monday, April 24, 2006
On the death of William Sloane Coffin
Another one has died. Another of the giants.

William Sloane Coffin — Bill Coffin — has died and is being mourned by all kinds of people who never agreed with him but sure don’t want anyone to know it now. He is being called a prophet. Maybe he was. He definitely was an icon, a symbol — a model for what all activist preachers and pastors wanted to be like.

I met Bill Coffin twice. I was more impressed the second time than the first.
The second time I met him was at the Disciples Peace Fellowship meeting at a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) General Assembly. I don’t remember the city or the year, but I haven’t been to one in at least ten years, so it wasn’t any more recent than the mid-nineties, and it may have been earlier than that. Bill Coffin was the speaker at our breakfast (and I don’t do breakfasts well, but more about that later). I don’t really remember much about the breakfast. What I remember was a smaller get-together in the late evening, just a group of people and Coffin sitting around talking. He made a statement that night which I have quoted countless times since. (more…)

What am I doing here anyway?

I had not intended my blog to be about dead people.

I had expected to record my intellectual wanderings, my political brainstorms, and maybe a bit of old-fashioned story telling, for posterity, or whatever passes for posterity these days.

I hoped, probably vainly, that my blog might interest some people and get popular. I’ve always wanted to be one of the popular crowd, even though I know they are usually pretty shallow and even rather boring sometimes.

But I couldn’t be part of that crowd anyway, because I was just never willing to permanently move to the other side of the tracks. I get uncomfortable there and come back as fast as I can. Here in Omaha, the other side of the tracks for me is west of about 102nd street, or even west of 90th or so. I’m even a bit uneasy west of 82nd and Dodge. And I think it looks like Mars out Radial Highway past 90th. Or at least what I imagine Mars looking like once we colonize it. I know for sure west of 680 is the other side of the tracks, the popular side. I practically have an anxiety attack when I have to drive that far west. People drive like maniacs over there. And there are just way too many scarey white people west of 680 for me. (more…)

Sunday, April 9, 2006

We are fast losing the giants.

Yesterday I received my copy of the newsletter of Texas Baptists Committed and learned of the deaths of two of the giants in the struggle to preserve religious liberty and uphold the separation of church and state. Earth has lost two men whose name were household names all my life, two of the men (to use someone else’s metaphor) who belong on the Mount Rushmore of Baptist heros of the twentieth century: Phil Strickland and Foy Valentine.

I sincerely doubt that anyone reading my blog regularly (if there are any of you out there, be sure to let me know!) will recognize either of those names. Southern Baptists are not common heros to most people I know. But these two men, plus a few others, including in particular James Dunn, their close colleague, and Bill Estep, who passed on in 2000, are the reason I remain proud of my strong Baptist heritage. They are examples of the reason so many Cherokee, of those who became Christians, became Baptist Christians, not Methodist or Presbyterian or anything else. (more…)

Saturday, March 18, 2006

prompted by the death of Anne Braden, July 28, 1924-March 6, 2006

Reflections of an aging soul from the “New Left”

“Who can fill her shoes?” That was what one of Anne Braden’s obituary writers asked, and he answered himself, “No one can, don’t even think about it.”   Maybe he’s right, but I pray he is not, or God help us all. I believe the God who called and strengthened Anne, will indeed help us fill those shoes.

When I assigned the names “Carl and Anne Braden” as glossary entries to be identified for my class in Religion and Social Movements, I wondered if my students would be able to find anything. Silly me!  I hadn’t “Googled”  the names, or I wouldn’t have worried. You must forgive me, for you see, I was living the history now written about the Bradens when it wasn’t yet written, and it’s hard to think of it now as history, in the past, already summarized as an encyclopedia entry.

I’m glad it’s available.  I’m glad to see how much is available. I knew the Braden’s papers were being left to libraries, and I trust scholars will pour over them at length, but as I read what is out there now, I think of so much more, so much that isn’t there, so much about Anne and Carl and about so many more like them.

I remember the way I felt when I first walked in their house. Looking around and seeing nothing but books. Books from floor to ceiling in every room, and stacked on the floor beside every chair. I remember the ubiquitous 3-by-5 index cards, the staple of every organizer’s trade in the days before computers and data bases. I remember realizing that Anne was too busy to clean house and knew what really mattered wasn’t the dust bunnies in the corners but the life and warmth in the rooms. I remember not yet thinking that Carl might be just as likely to clean house as Anne, or not. Feminism was only beginning to address housework when I met the Bradens.

I stand proudly as one of those aging radicals of the late sixties and early seventies who were the original “New Left,”  knowing full well that we stood on the shoulders and had learned our craft from the veterans of the Old Left. I was part of the younger half of what my students now teach me is called “Second Wave Feminism,” and I’m still proud of it.

We women now in our fifties and sixties invented feminism all over again, out of our experiences in the civil rights and anti-war movements, when it had been long forgotten. And we did it in the same ways and from the same roots as the suffragists who invented “First Wave Feminism” out of their experiences in the abolition and temperance movements a century earlier.

I mourn today for the loss of Anne Braden, and for the losses of so many of the Old Left who made me who I am. They weren’t afraid to be called “communists,”  and they refused to deny the name, even when they were not C.P. members themselves, out of solidarity with those who could not deny it because they were. They trusted us kids to carry on. They never allowed us to consider the possibility of NOT carrying on. The work was there to be done. Of course we would do it. How could we not?

The courageous crusaders of the Old Left knew their work was only the beginning, even while we of the giddy sixties thought the new day was dawning and the revolution was at hand. By observation we learned to do what we could not not do. We learned that when we did it, others called us “courageous,” just as we had seen our mentors in the Old Left as courageous. How strange to be called “courageous,” simply for doing what we couldn’t not do!

I have lost giants of my life already:  Carl Braden, way too early, in 1975; Jim Dombrowski who raised money to fund my work in North Carolina and wrote me the most beautiful letters; Ralph Townsend of rural Michigan, who met Gandhi as a young man and then went to jail with me and to trial on conspiracy, as an old man, and his wife Mildred; Elmer Mass of New York City Plowshares community, who taught me so much about patience in the years we served together on the WRL NC; Igal Rodenko of the WRL, and then others I never met in person, Phil Berrigan, especially.

And we dread that so many more will be lost to us in the coming years; they are in their eighties and nineties and even saints don’t live forever. Will my generation measure up? Can we carry the burden? Dare we not?

In one of her last essays, Anne wrote, “If we are serious about the challenge of the unfinished business of racism, we must start by realizing that this is not a task we must complete. It is one we must begin” (Fellowship Magazine, Jan-Feb 2005). How humbling to realize that a veteran of anti-racism campaigns going back six decades still saw the task as only just beginning. God willing, we aging radicals of the New Left will finally see the task begun. Perhaps our children can see it through to its end.

7:58 pm cst,  Omaha, Nebraska, March  18, 2006