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We Have Not Prevailed
Rev. Sharon K. Dittmar
May 4, 2003

Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger (Genesis, 25: 23).

The Hebrew Scriptures tells us that this is the Lord's response to Rebekah when she wonders about the pain of her pregnancy.  Rebekah is pregnant with twin sons, Esau and Jacob.  They are born with Jacob holding Esau's heel.  Throughout their adult lives they struggle for power, as Jacob tricks his older brother into giving away his birthright and blessing.  Ultimately they live apart for over twenty years before Jacob comes forward in fear and hope, seeking reconciliation with the brother he wronged.

Several years ago a colleague said to me that in America "race is the wound that will not heal".  Through centuries first of occupation, slavery, and violence, and then bogus racial theories, poll taxes, reservations, ghettos, and immigration restrictions, race continues as the wound that will not heal.  It is our American burden. 

In America we have two brothers, one generally non-white and poor, the other generally white and wealthy, and the white, wealthy brother has more power.  Haltingly, the process of reconciliation has begun, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, restitution to Japanese Americans interred during World War II.  Haltingly, but not fully.  There has not yet been a moment when a majority of white America has been fully contrite and committed to generous equality.  The arc of the universe may be bending towards justice, but we have not arrived at the moment when non-white and white brothers weep together in relief.  In America, Jacob has not yet crossed the river of reconciliation.

Last week John Fox, the editor of City Beat, challenged clergy to redefine the Cincinnati boycott as a moral issue about right and wrong.  This intrigued me.  When the boycott first began, initially as a boycott of the 2001 Taste of Cincinnati, I was a vocal supporter.  As the boycott continued I stopped speaking in support of it, first because I became confused by different groups and demands, and then because I believed that the boycott had gone awry.  The most painful irony though, the boycott has gone awry, but the issues of injustice that brought it to our city, live.

City council member John Cranley was recently quoted saying "Since the boycott is fundamentally unjust, it can't be resolved by validating the boycott."[1]  I respectfully disagree.  The boycott may be fatally flawed, but not fundamentally unjust.  Fundamentally unjust is slavery.  Fundamentally unjust is pitiful and punitive economic development in Over the Rhine.  Fundamentally unjust is the asphyxiation of Roger Owensby, Jr., an unarmed black man, by Cincinnati police officers who were later acquitted. 

Fundamentally unjust is a city charter that prevents the city from protecting gays and lesbians from housing and employment discrimination, protected rights for every other "group" in the city.  Fundamentally unjust is white America living on the shoulders of non-white America, living in the best houses created by the labor of others.

Boycotts are supposed to be difficult in every way: ethically, financially, morally, and physically.  They are supposed to challenge systems with discomfort and division so that change occurs.   The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground.  They want rain without thunder and lightening; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.  This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.  Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will.  Find out what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice which will be imposed upon them.

Boycotts are about agitation, lightning, thunder, roaring waves, power, struggle, injustice, and demand.  Boycotts are also about reconciliation.  In his essay The Power of Nonviolence, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes:

Another thing we had to get over was the fact that the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding.  This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past.  The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness.  The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community.  A boycott is never an end within itself.  It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.

This is the greatest challenge, boycotters need to be better than those they struggle against.  To hatred they bring love.  To violence they bring peace.  To enemies they bring friendship.  Boycotters needs an intense boycott education, lots of support, frequent reminders of the vision, and trustworthy leadership in order to talk the talk and walk the walk.  Where do you go when someone turns the dogs, or the hoses on you?  Or as John Fox explains, where do you go when:

A rich (white) football team owner can threaten to move his/our franchise to another city if his demands aren't met, and the city and county officials negotiate with him.  An upscale (white) department store can threaten to leave downtown if its demands aren't met, and city officials negotiate with its owners.  But ordinary (black) citizens threaten to boycott downtown events if their demands aren't met, and city officials say, "We don't negotiate with economic terrorists."[2] 

Where do you go when city council and Mayor Charlie Luken say they won't negotiate with economic terrorists, a term that becomes relative depending on the participants?  Where do you go when the Cincinnati police begin a work slowdown that causes crime to explode in Over the Rhine?

The story of Jesus was never so well used as it was by the black church during the Civil Rights era.  Christianity is shared across color lines, and Jesus, the savior, challenges the Roman authorities, turns over the money changers in the temple, tells us the weak shall inherit the earth, promises salvation in sacrifice.  Boycotters need private space and faith to sustain them with hope, courage, and forbearance, and they need leaders to remind them of the vision, to keep their eyes on the prize by some means.

This week Linnea Lose wrote to me of Cincinnati, "It's like the boycott has let itself become its own issue, rather than spotlighting the issues."  Her comment reminded me of King's insight "a boycott is never an end within itself."  In the last two years, this vision has not sustained our local boycott movement.  One of my disappointments has been with the boycott leaders, their vision and articulation of purpose. 

As City Beat columnist Kathy Wilson notes with raw clarity:

Blacks, make choices.  Choices cannot be predicated on intra-racial classism or on our unsuccessful subjugation of other minorities.  No Jew hating, and no Jew-hating on behalf of the "cause."  Was Mayes' perceived anti-Semitism on Fountain Square in fact the real-deal Holyfield or just a half-baked attempt to lance a bigger boil?  Yep.  Nope.  When you're not smart enough to pull off a fete of that magnitude, attempt it first at home.  That move laid bare the ineptitude and divisiveness driving the boycott.[3]

Wilson, of course, refers to the incident last fall when Amanda Mayes, respected co-chair of The Coalition for a Just Cincinnati (CJC), walked around Fountain Square with a sign that said "Jews killed Jesus."  After than public relations disaster most members of the CJC walked out to form Cincinnati Progressive Action. 

But it isn't just Mayes.  The various boycott groups are riddled with name-calling and protests against one another.  To my utter dismay, several of the current clergy boycott leaders are the least able to channel vision and integrity into a successful boycott.  All, that is, except Reverend Damon Lynch III.   And being just about the only exception is lonely, and impossible in a boycott situation.

Reverend Lynch III may not be the best coalition builder, but he is a clergy person with vision and integrity.  He says the same things now that he was saying two years ago, and not for profit or gain.  He has also been unfairly vilified in the media from the very beginning.  This was one of my greatest shocks when participating in the original boycott, how quickly I, and any other boycott leader, especially Lynch, was presented as deceptive, misguided, selfish, insignificant, and destructive.  I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I was and am sobered to realize the power of the business community and political establishment within Cincinnati, and their subsequent impact on the media.

In 2001 Lynch said, "Cincinnati would rather develop a brand new housing development on the riverfront where nobody lives, rather than invest $600,000 into Over the Rhine where people already live."  A recent City Beat issue quoted Lynch saying:

What they're building are suburban playgrounds on the river.  We've asked for revitalized communities.  We did not ask for an Underground museum.  We asked for housing in the "hood"…They are hell bent on giving us a museum, remembering our struggle from years gone by and ignoring our struggles today.[4]

We might not like what we hear.  We might not like the roaring waters, the thunder and lightning, the demand against our museum, but Lynch has his eyes on the prize, the struggle today.  Why is Over the Rhine a gutted housing carcass, the "inferior" son?  When the police slowdown began in Over the Rhine after the riots it re-devastated the neighborhood.  Why was it allowed to happen?

Let's never forget who has the most power here, the business community, the police, Mayor Luken, white Cincinnatians.  We negotiate, slow down, speed up, vote up or down at our own discretion regardless of who suffers, and at times, who lives or dies.  We are the Jacob who has not reconciled with his brother. 

Wilson also clarifies another boycott stumbling block:

The demands.  Fuhgedaboudit.  Speak to and solve the systemic issues that bled like Timothy Thomas and dropped us off here in the first place.  Second, try truth-telling.  It's wintry fresh.[5] 

Although the demands currently appear on one piece of paper, at times they have been longer, and they have certainly changed.  When I became a supporter of the Taste of Cincinnati boycott there were the four demands, one for economic change, and three to improve the systematic mother of all flashpoints in Cincinnati, police community relations.

The current list of demands covers these themes and more (although I am still somewhat confused because City Beat published a list that is similar to but different from another current list I have).  One demand is for the federal prosecution of the officers involved in the Roger Owensby, Jr. case, a demand I whole-heartedly support. 

Every day I drive by the gas station where Owensby was murdered.  An unarmed man in cuffs, police custody, five officers, one asphyxiation.  I don't believe this was pre-meditated, but Roger Owensby, Jr. did not asphyxiate himself.  How long does it take to choke a man to death?  Wouldn't you notice as you squeezed the life out of him?

Every day Roger Owensby, Jr. lives with me.  I drive by the gas station and wonder why this man, this parent's son, this friend, had to die.  And I wonder when justice will be served.  It was a cruel day when the officers in the case were exonerated.  It is one thing to steal a blessing.  It is another to kill.  This is why there is a boycott in Cincinnati.

There are also other demands on the list though, some that are truly impossible for the city to meet.  On the same list that mentions Roger Owensby, Jr. there is a demand to increase "funded activities in schools to improve educational achievement."  This is an admirable demand, but it is not up to the city council or mayor's office.  This is an issue for the Cincinnati School Board. 

After looking at the current demands Dot Christenson said to me "City schools, hospitals and infant mortality.  It's a political platform we've got here.  There's no way to end it."  Dot is on to something here.  These demands are not specific enough for us to know when we have achieved something. 

This makes the boycott endless, un-winnable for any side, it's own eternal issue, an end within itself that keeps the sides warring, and I have been wondering if they are just more comfortable that way.  As John Fox puts it, "Two years later, Cincinnati slides slowly into Hell, stalled temporarily perhaps in Purgatory.  Purgatory is the pro-boycott and anti-boycott sides hardening their positions, refusing to acknowledge progress from the other side.[6]   

Of the four original demands from the 2001 boycott of the Taste of Cincinnati, there has been improvement in each area. The original demands were: 1) $50 million in funding for CAN, 2) A federal decree outlawing racial profiling, 3) Charter amendment that opens the police selection process to candidates outside the city, and 4) Subpoena and investigatory powers for the Citizens Review Panel.

CAN received city funding.  In the now struggling collaborative agreement the Department of Justice required the Cincinnati police department to keep statistics on all stops.  As Nate Ford, Director of the Citizen's Complaint Authority  told me, "Our local racial profiling system is too cumbersome, but it is in place."  To the best of his knowledge, even if the collaborative entirely fell apart, he believed that the police department would still be bound to this Justice Department agreement on racial profiling statistics.

Cincinnati voters amended the city charter to permit the next police chief to be selected from outside the city.  Granted, the FOP has tried to roll this back in their contract negotiations, but it still holds.  And finally, the Citizen's Complaint Authority, formerly known as the Citizens Review Panel, has full investigatory powers.  As Citizen's Complaint Authority Chair Nancy Minson explained to me, the subpoena issue is irrelevant today because the Authority has so much more power to call witnesses, including officers.  Minson said "I see changes in the leadership.  The rank and file have to accept it and that is more difficult.  CCA receives information much sooner.  It's happening."

The strange and powerful thing that no one mentions, the original boycott goals have largely been achieved.  Some of them are in danger of slipping, others were not fully granted.  But there was progress on every single one of them, particularly on issues of police community relations.  Boycotts raise awareness, and when specific, they work, even in Cincinnati.

In her column, Wilson also has pointed advise for white Cincinnati, "Whites, stop making the same choices.  You don't get to keep enjoying lap dances to the hit, "Ain't No Black Leadership."[7]  There are problems with boycott leadership and demands, but this is not the end of the story or responsibility.

John Fox notes that city council and Mayor Luken negotiate with sports teams and department store owners, but not boycotters.  I am most disappointed with city council and Mayor Luken, because in this situation they have more power, power to influence the business community, the media, the voters, the power to begin negotiations, the power to make necessary and needed change, and the responsibility.   It's their job.

An April 30, 2003 Enquirer article quotes Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) President Roger Webster saying "We're the bastard step-child of this whole agreement, and we're not going to take it anymore."  If the police were truly the bastard step-child of the agreement, they would not legally carry guns that they are legally permitted to use.  It is the pretense of their powerlessness that I find difficult to accept and trust.

An honest, fair, professional police force is essential to the success of civil society.  Simply put, we need our police.  Even more importantly, the police operate at the discretion of the citizens they serve.  In Cincinnati we have forgotten this truth, and at times it is difficult to determine who polices the police.  A great hue and cry rises at the idea that officers should testify in front of civilian panels or prepare statistics for the Justice Department.  But it is their job to honestly testify, compile statistics, regularly participate in training, and review because they serve not at their own pleasure, but at ours, and everyone needs supervision.  The Police Department’s continual resistance to supervision erodes trust and professional integrity.

After a recent disagreement with collaborative Judge, Susan Dlott, "the two police union leaders [VP Fangman and President Webster] left for the studios of WLW (700 AM), where they went on a half-hour harangue about Judge Dlott's two cocker spaniels.[8]

Talk about the misuse of power, the highest police union leaders went on a tirade, slandering the collaborative judge on our most vitriolic, white radio station.  Sometimes there "ain't no white leadership" either, and we have the most power.

This week I spoke to Peggy Sandman about the boycott.  She noted, "You shoot one white boy in my neighborhood, and I tell you it would never happen again.  There would be rings a hundred deep surrounding city hall."  It comes back to Roger Owensby, Jr.  Why is his life more expendable?  Why does he have to pay for being "the second son" with his life?

In the story of Jacob and Esau, Jacob chooses to reconcile.  Jacob, the one with the birthright and blessing, the title of "lord" over his brother, the one with the most power, Jacob returns seeking forgiveness and reconciliation, admitting his wrong.  Jacob is not certain of Esau's response.   He does not choose reconciliation because he knows Esau will forgive him.  Jacob lives in fear.  He sends emissaries ahead of himself.  He separates himself from his family in case Esau seeks vengeance on him, and by extension, them.  In the midst of his isolation and anxiety, Jacob wrestles with himself and God, and the nation of Israel is born.

Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.  Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking.  But Jacob said "I will not let you go unless you bless me."  So he said to him, "What is your name?"  And he said, "Jacob."  Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed. (Genesis, 32: 24-28).

Transformation in facing power, doubt, mistakes, isolation, limitations.  Transformation in reconciliation. But any move toward reconciliation hurts.  Do you remember the self-doubt and pain we went through prior to hosting the Carter Reconciliation service here?   Now most of us remember what a great success the service was.  Maybe you remember listening to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", or how we fit 300 people into our sanctuary, or how 110 members of the Carter family attended, or how Todd O'Neal played the piano with his elbows.  What I also remember is the incredible anxiety and resistance that led up to this service, not because we are bad people, but because reconciliation hurts.  We had to admit, to apologize for the fact that our association, faith, ancestors had done wrong, not lived up to our professed values.

 Reconciliation requires wintry fresh truth-telling, responsibility, self-awareness, and discipline.  It requires recognition of our own ignorance and intolerance.  It puts some things out of joint.  It is a struggle because it shifts the balance of power from lord and servant, closer to equals, and fellow humans.

The last part of the Carter Reconciliation Weekend was a graveside service for Beulah and W. H. G. Carter.  While leaving the graveside service, W. H. G. Carter's son, Andrew, said to me:

My father chose to minister in the valley.  He could have left, but he had no intention of moving up onto the hill.  There is still a lot of suffering and poverty.  You have built a house on a hill with a roof but no foundation.  The people in the valley are the foundation.  This is just the beginning.

In Cincinnati we live in a house on a hill with a roof but no foundation.  And it is up to those of us with power, through skin color, or money, or relationships, to make the first steps towards reconciliation.  Mayor Luken and city council must negotiate now because it is their job.  Mayor Luken and the city council must articulate higher expectations for the police department, reminding all that they serve at our pleasure, not their own.  We are not excused from this responsibility because leadership in the black community is weak.

 Through an injustice of prejudice those of us in power (whether white or non-white) have received blessings of education, money, stability, and health.  So what if boycotters are insulting.  Why should their sons gasp their last breaths in the backseat of police cruisers at Sunoco gas stations while if just one of ours was shot, protesters would ring city hall?  Jacob didn't apologize to Esau because it was easy.  He did it because he needed and wanted to go home, and he knew he needed to set his house in order before he arrived.  He had to right his wrongs.

I want to go home.  I want to right the wrongs to my brothers and sisters.  No matter how limited they are or appear to be, boycotters are still fundamentally right on justice issues.  As the boycott stands now I do not support it.  But, if the demands were goal oriented and specific, if credit was given for progress, if credible leaders were selected, or a close enough approximation therein, I would join.  A special bonus would be if boycott groups included the repeal of Article XII, another civil rights travesty, in their demands. 

I would boycott the Underground Railroad Museum, my new love for the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, the opera.  I would boycott it all because my love of history and the arts is not worth the life of someone else's child and justice for all.  Regardless of my position on the boycott, I challenge those of us in power, particularly our city leaders, to take the first steps toward reconciliation.  Negotiate now.  We have been wrong for too long.

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