My sermon on June 18, 2023 at Bluegrass United Church of Christ in Lexington, Kentucky.
You can hear the audio version at kennybishop.com/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Galatians 4: 7 (KBV)
… you are no longer a slave but child of God, and if you are God’s child, then you are also an heir through God.
In 1890 the state of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act. The law required all passenger railways to have separate train accommodations for Black and white people. Even though federal law said the cars had to have equal accommodations, the state law was clearly intended to keep white people from having to interact with Black people.
Black passengers who sat in seats or spaces designated for whites only were liable to be fined or even sent to prison if they refused to comply.
On February 24th, 1892. Daniel Desdunes is at a train station in New Orleans. Decades before civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman John Lewis would challenge us with the phrase, Mr. Desdunes was ready to get into some good and necessary trouble for the cause of fair treatment and justice.
Daniel Desdunes was a light-skinned man of mixed race, and that meant he was forbidden to sit in the train’s whites-only compartment. In the eyes of the law, even being one-eighth Black meant that Daniel was not white. And that meant he couldn’t sit in a seat reserved for a white person - and he knew it.
Daniel was a volunteer for a local civil rights group that was trying to set up a test case to challenge the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Separate Car Act. The plan was for Daniel to be arrested and, if tried and found guilty, to take the case all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court.
Just like the plan was counting on, when the train’s conductor demanded that Daniel move from his seat and he refused, he was arrested. But savvy attorneys for the state of Louisiana who knew what was happening were able to find a loophole that would clear Daniel’s charges and prevent the case from moving through the courts. That meant the constitutionality of the law would not be challenged.
Then, a few months later, on June 7th of that same year, another light-skinned man of mixed descent, another volunteer for the Citizens Committee, the same local civil rights organization that Daniel Desdunes had volunteered for, bought a first-class ticket and made his way onto the part of the train reserved for whites only.
What made this attempt to challenge the discriminatory state law different from the last attempt was the train that was used. Daniel Desdunes’s case was able to avoid being challenged in the state courts because the train he boarded was an interstate train that traveled to other states. This time would be different. Homer Plessy would be sure to break the law on an intrastate train that traveled only within Louisiana. That would put his offense under the jurisdiction of state laws.
And sure enough, the plan worked. Homer was arrested for violating the Separate Car Act and taken into custody. He’s put on trial and found guilty. His legal team appeals and his case is sent to the Louisiana Supreme Court where it is hoped the higher court will overturn the lower court’s decision and declare the Separate Car Act unconstitutional. But the court does not overturn Homer’s conviction, and the law stands.
That was not in the plan.
Homer’s case, and the rights of every person of color in the state of Louisiana, and effectively the nation, will now be in the hands of the eight justices who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC. One of those men would be Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan.
John Marshall Harlan was born and raised just a few miles from here - down in Danville, Kentucky. He came from a prominent slave-holding family there and enjoyed a pretty quick rise in Kentucky politics. Even though he didn’t support the Emancipation Proclamation, he did support the Union during the Civil War. In 1863 he ran for Kentucky Attorney General and won, and a few years later he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Rutherford B. Hayes. He served on the High Court for over 30 years and because he often disagreed with the court’s majority, he became known as “The Great Dissenter.”
Sometimes that’s what you need in places like that - places that tend to become vacuums occupied with people just trying to protect their own power and interests. Sometimes you need a great dissenter.
Tomorrow is June 19th. It’s a special day in our nation’s history, and it’s a day that I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t know much about until just a few years ago. As a kid in school back in the day, I don’t ever remember hearing anything about Juneteenth. I also, in all my years of primary and secondary education, never had a teacher who was a person of color.
For generations, Juneteenth has been recognized and celebrated by Black Americans as a great day of independence. Truth is, it’s a much more honest “independence day” than July 4th.
Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and renowned Black abolitionist called out the hypocrisy of our nation and its early leaders who declared that “all men were created equal” while they denied rights and liberty and dignity and equality to men who were not white.
In 1852, he was invited by his hometown to attend a July 4th celebration and address the citizens there. I’m not sure that the people of Rochester, New York were expecting to hear the truth he’d speak.
“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”
-Frederick Douglass
What makes Douglass’ words even more indicting is the truth that many of those founding fathers who hypocritically declared righteous parity among men from their lofty powerful positions also professed to be men of faith who practiced Christianity.
If nothing else, it’s proof of our nation’s long history, especially by those in power, of distorting and manipulating the scriptures to support racist, misogynistic, homophobic, classist, and prejudiced rules and laws that are intended to repress certain people instead of relieve their struggles.
To this day we have politicians who thrive on using the bible and Christianity as a weapon - as a sidearm. They assume the role of God’s sheriff and draw it out of their holster and they aim it at anyone that they’re scared of or find offensive and then assume that because they’re offended, God must be too. Then they threaten God’s wrath if they don’t get full allegiance, compliance, and repentance.
Our nation has a long history of misplaced righteousness and fake faith. And to the chagrin of some who don’t want it exposed, a lot of that history is a part of the official record. Call it critical race theory or anything else you want; try to silence it in classrooms, ban it from libraries, whitewash it in the public conversation, and bash it on biased media; do everything you can to keep it from being told, but racism is a big and ugly part of our nation’s past - and it clearly still exists in our nation today - even in the halls of power - even in many of our churches.
It happened then, and it’s happening now, and we will talk about it and fight against it with all of the authority we have as citizens and as followers of the Jesus who never condoned but always condemned the exploitation and mistreatment of the abused and the marginalized.
If the words that Paul wrote to those folks in Galatia are true; if it’s true that God sees us, all of us as family, as children that belong to the Holy, how can it also be true that the children of the Holy can be enslaved, abused, belittled, mistreated - how can the God who is Holy think that it is good?
It was only two years ago that our nation finally officially recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday. Several states also recognize the importance of the day. Unfortunately, Kentucky is not one of them - not yet. A governor can commemorate and declare an honorary day, but only the state legislature can create a state holiday.
Juneteenth should be a holiday in every state - but especially in Kentucky - for at least a couple of historic reasons.
It was a president who was born here in Kentucky who issued the Emancipation Proclamation that would free all enslaved people in the Confederacy. Juneteenth is a celebration of that freedom finally reaching the last of the remaining slaves in the South. But that’s only partly why we celebrate Juneteenth.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but it couldn’t be enforced until the Civil War ended in 1865. And there were those slaveholders who kept the news from the people they enslaved.
That was the case in Galveston, Texas. Then on June 19th, 1865 Union Major General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived and read General Order No. 3 which said,
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
-General Order No. 3
The other historic reason I think Kentucky’s legislature should make Juneteenth a state holiday is because that Union messenger, Major General Gordon Granger is buried right here in our city at the Lexington Cemetary. Juneteenth should be an official state holiday in Kentucky.
As we know, racists will be racists and will do everything they can to make their racism the law of the land. That’s why decades after slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment states and local governments found other ways to oppress people of color. That’s why Louisiana made it illegal for Black people and white people to sit next to each other on a train.
As the case of Plessy versus Ferguson that challenged Louisiana’s Separate Car Act was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, eight white justices - all men - spent weeks listening to arguments for and against legal racism. The goal from the beginning by Homer and the Citizens Committee of New Orleans was to challenge the law’s constitutionality and to put an end to that kind of lawful discrimination. They knew if they could get it this far, they could change things and make things better for every person of color in America.
But it didn’t happen.
When the decision finally came the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the Louisiana law was not unconstitutional. Legal racism would remain the law of the land. Every justice on the Supreme Court would hold that view. Every justice but one.
As a former slaveholder from Kentucky, Justice John Marshall Harlan would’ve agreed with his colleagues that the Separate Car Act was not about racism. As one who held slaves of his own, he would believe that the Louisiana law was true to the Constitution. He opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, and after the Civil War ended, he opposed civil rights for freed slaves.
Then something happened. His perspective shifted. As white supremacy grew across America and violence toward people of color increased, as they were brutally beaten, lynched, and abused, John Marshall Harlan’s perspective shifted. He started seeing people of color as people.
In the end, Justice Harlan’s lone dissenting voice was not enough to put a stop to the injustices of the Separate Car Act. After the court’s decision, the “separate but equal” doctrine would rule for decades and legitimize all kinds of legal discrimination that forced people of color to walk through separate but equal doors, drink from separate but equal water fountains, eat at separate but equal tables, watch movies from separate but equal sections, and ride buses in separate but equal seats.
But Justice John Marshall Harlan was now on a crusade to try and right the wrongs he saw happening in our states and in our nation’s halls of power. He stayed on the Court for over thirty years so he could try and make that change.
It was six decades later when Plessy v. Ferguson was finally overturned, and even after he’d been long gone from the Court, many of the points made in Justice Harlan’s dissenting opinions were used to make the case. As a matter of fact, many of the Great Dissenter’s words in several cases were used to right some of our nation’s worst discriminatory wrongs - laws that impacted people of color and the economically disadvantaged.
Most folks these days have never heard of Homer Plessy and John Marshall Harlan. After the Supreme Court’s decision in 1896, Homer went back to Louisiana and was punished for his “crime.” No one really heard anything from him or about him after that.
Justice Harlan was pretty much forgotten too once he left the court, and especially after he passed away in 1911. However, years later, when many of his dissenting arguments on the bench were understood as powerful and effective at making the case to overturn discriminatory laws, people started seeing him as a compassionate jurist who was ahead of his time.
But the argument that always rose to the top, the one that was used so many times as cases against racial discrimination made their way through the courts, was the one that started on a train way down in New Orleans. That would be the case that would change a lot of things for the better for millions of people of color in the U.S.
And that was thanks to two mostly forgotten men, Harlan and Plessy.