Martin Niemoller: A Living Martyr

Martin Niemöller was born in the Westphalian town of Lippstadt, Germany, on January 14, 1892. In 1910 he became a cadet in the Imperial German Navy. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Niemöller was assigned to a U-Boat, of which he was eventually appointed the commander. Under the stipulations of the armistice of November 11, 1918, that ended hostilities in World War I, Niemöller and other commanders were ordered to turn over their U-Boats to England. Along with many others, Niemöller refused to obey this order, and was, as a consequence, discharged from the Navy.

In 1920, he decided to follow the path of his father and began seminary training at the University of Münster.

Niemöller enthusiastically welcomed the Third Reich. But a turning point in Niemöller's political sympathies came with a January 1934 meeting of Adolf Hitler, Niemöller, and two prominent Protestant bishops to discuss state pressures on churches. At the meeting it became clear that Niemöller's phone had been tapped by the Gestapo (German Secret State Police). It was also clear that the Pastors Emergency League (PEL), which Niemöller had helped found, was under close state surveillance. Following the meeting, Niemöller would come to see the Nazi state as a dictatorship, one which he would oppose.

The Quotation

Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation¹ :

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

 

The quotation stems from Niemöller's lectures during the early postwar period. Different versions of the quotation exist. These can be attributed to the fact that Niemöller spoke extemporaneously and in a number of settings. Much controversy surrounds the content of the poem as it has been printed in varying forms, referring to diverse groups such as Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, Trade Unionists, or Communists depending upon the version. Nonetheless his point was that Germans had been complicit through their silence in the Nazi imprisonment, persecution, and murder of millions of people. He felt this was true in particular of the leaders of the Protestant churches (of which the Lutheran church was one denomination).

A Controversial Figure

In the wake of Nazism, Niemöller's prominence as an opposition figure gave him international stature though he remained controversial. Not until 1963, in a West German television interview, did Niemöller acknowledge and make a statement of regret about his own antisemitism.²  He was nonetheless one of the earliest Germans to talk publicly about broader complicity in the Holocaust and guilt for what had happened to the Jews. In his book Über die deutsche Schuld, Not und Hoffnung (published in English as Of Guilt and Hope)—which appeared in January 1946—Niemöller wrote:

"Thus, whenever I chance to meet a Jew known to me before, then, as a Christian, I cannot but tell him: 'Dear Friend, I stand in front of you, but we cannot get together, for there is guilt between us. I have sinned and my people have sinned against thy people and against thyself.'" 

Last Edited: Mar 30, 2012

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

 “What is the Will of God in my Life?”

“Your Will be Done; on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Matthew: 6:10

 

I don’t know about you, but for me, I have often wondered what the will of God is in my life. For most of my life, I have wrestled with this question and often have frozen up, and I don’t have a clue. I get caught up in the mire of indecision, worry, anxiety and distress. Inevitably, I decide to do something and most of the time, it is not God’s will.

 

I often have struggled with trying to determine God’s will when making important decisions. For example, what should I do when I confront my boss on an ethical question fearing that I might lose my job? Should I marry this girl, or not? Do I follow my convictions and join a protest march over the innocent death of an African American boy at the hands of the police or be afraid that my conservative friends will cease to be my friends? I am afraid that I may be arrested while practicing non-violent civil disobedience? Do I follow my selfish tendencies and want my comatose husband to continue “living” and instead of let him go?

 

Last summer, while a teaching a class, we were discussing the same topic. We concluded that knowing the will of God is not based on specific situations, such as the questions from the previous paragraph. Rather, God’s will is my decision to follow the Way of the Christ. We decide to follow Him, no matter where He leads us.

 

We have the faith to live with Him by trusting Him. Faith is belief in Him. Trusting is acting in faith for Him. Trusting Him is putting our “boots on the ground,” and following him.

 

This is what the Apostle Paul means when he exhorts his house churches:

 

“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” Philippians 2:1-3

 

What Paul means is that we align our mind with Christ. We live into the “mind of Christ.” It takes a lifetime to achieve this. Fortunately, God is patient with us, because He “first loved us,” offering is extravagant Grace. 

 

Why? Because Paul time and time again reminds his first century churches what became the earliest creed, which we repeat at Sunday worship. Christ lives. He is condemned. He is crucified. He is resurrected. He will come again.”  

 

Paul writes again and again that we are the Church, the koinonia. We are the saints as the “body of Christ” on earth. Christ is present with us when we gather with Him, especially when we celebrate Holy communion. When we eat His body and drink His blood it is more than “in remembrance of me,” as is often carved on communion tables. He is present now. 

 

Yet, Christ invites us to follow him, if we are to discover God’s will in our life 

 

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Mark 8:34-36

 

That is radical stuff. It is costly because Jesus forces us to be transformed into His image, or “metanoia.” This is radical stuff because we are transformed from the way we are in our brokenness into the way He wants us to be. Is this what Jesus means when we live into the will of God?  

 

We walk the way of Christ; living in His will. We have the “blessed assurance” that “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” (14^th century mystic Julian of Norwich)

Mr. Hannon - My Mentor, My Socrates

Donald Hannon, Mr. Hannon to his students, was my only favorite high school teacher. I was attending the American Community School in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1965 when I took his course in Ideologies. This was a college level course, using the Socratic method. There were no textbooks. Student class notes, his lectures, and mimeographed essays he handed out were our textbooks.

The Socratic teaching method was used by Socrates of ancient Greece. He taught his students while walking along, lecturing and asking them questions. This form of teaching is also known as the dialogical method. Out of the exchange knowledge, and debates, critical thinking emerged. 

Rather than a student reading from a textbook and accepting only what was on the page, then regurgitating what was there, the Socratic method encourages students to grasp ideas using their own thinking, while not accepting what they are receiving at faith value. Rather "truth" is arrived by taking several sources, analysing them, and then discerning what is “truth” and knowledge as can best be interpreted at the time. If new information and ideas come up later then the “truth” is adapted to the new situation.  

An ideology is a “system of ideas and ideals, which form the basis of economic and political theory and policy” which together, guide how  groups of people think and act the way they choose to live. 

Capitalism, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Fascism, Nihilism, and Communism are among the most influential ideologies in the modern world. Depending which ideology one is guided by, as a group of citizens they can live under a democratic government, or communist regime or under rule of divine right kings. Some ideologies as decided by the people who choose to live under them. Others, like communism or fascism are imposed on them. 

I remember we had about 12-14 students and we met every day of the school week. We set our desks in a semicircle facing Mr. Hannon’s desk and the blackboard. During each session Mr. Hannon introduced us to an ideology and the influential leaders that used them. He introduced us to them while giving brief lectures, while scribbling on 

He passed out mimeographed papers (when the xerox machine was in its primitive stages), defining ideologies and the influential persons that used them for leading people or for subjugating them. 

Capitalism was about acquiring wealth. Socialism was about citizens distributing wealth willingly for the better good. Communism was about taking wealth away by force from the people in order to create a utopian society. I really understood the communist system Mr. Hannon was talking about, as I had lived during through its early stages in revolutionary Cuba six years before.

Then, Mr. Hannon formed us into debating teams and without prior preparation would pose questions for debate, pro or con. It didn't matter which team "won" or "lost." There was no "right" nor "wrong." What mattered was that we mastered the material and knew how to argue the ideology's strengths and weaknesses, as well as to compare and contrast with the others. 

There were no letter grades. We were graded on how involved we were in the discussions, and on our written assignments, without concern of giving the "right" answers.

​

Mr. Hannon's ideologies class is the most important learning experience that has carried me through academia including my graduate work. In fact, I used Mr. Hannon's teaching/learning methods to defend my Ph.D.

I graduated from A.C.S. in 1966. I never saw Mr. Hannon again. But I had a brief telephone conversation with them while visiting Buenos Aires in 2018, 52 years later. He was near 90, as he remembered me, speaking in a frail voice. I thanked him again, and how much he had influenced my life, my learning, and teaching. 

He is my Mentor, my Socrates

Thank you Mr. Hannon 

Frederick Douglass: Former Slave, Orator, Suffragette, Advisor to President Lincoln on Emancipation

 Frederick Douglass 1817-1818 to 1895 - “What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”

A few facts about Frederick Douglass: 

He chose his last name from a poem - He taught himself to read and write - He disguised himself as a sailor to escape slavery - He picked his birthday - He married the woman who helped him escape - Douglass was an abolitionist

He was the most photographed American of the 19th century, consciously using photography to advance his political views.

In 1848, Douglass was the only black person to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights  convention, in upstate New York to pass a resolution asking for women's suffrage. This gathering planted the seeds of the future NAACP and the LWV. 

He was a member of and lay preacher in the AME Zion Church. One of the reasons he joined the AMEZ church was because he experienced discrimination in the white Methodist church. 

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Douglass used the occasion not to celebrate the nation’s triumphs but to remind all of its continuing enslavement of millions of people. 

“What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” (edited)

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. 

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. 

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? 

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. 

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. 

My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! 

It is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race, we are called upon to prove that we are men! Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. 

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. 

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of die slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; 

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery.

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen.

I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain.

Rev. Dr. Lawrence Rankin, Chair Religious Affairs Committee

 

WEB DuBois: Sociologist, Early 20th Century Philosopher of the Black Experience, Civil Rights Leader

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois 1868 - 1963) was socialist historian, civil right activist, :Pan Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Massachusetts. After completing graduate work at the University of Berlin, he was accepted in Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He became a professor at Atlanta University, a historic black school of higher education.  

 

Du Bois, along with Ida B. Wells, was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of People (NAACP) in 1909. He founded NAACP's official journal, The Crisis, in 1910. The NAACP primary mission was to seek laws that protected blacks from being lynched. A 1915 article in the journal gave a year-by-year list of more than 2,700 lynchings over the previous three decades. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites.

Du Bois published his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In this collection of essays, he described the predicament of Black Americans as one of "double consciousness.” He writes: 

"One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Dubois he attended the founding convention for the United Nations, channeling his energies toward lobbying the global body to acknowledge the suffering of Black Americans. Du Bois also turned a spotlight onto the injustices of colonialism, urging the United Nations to use its influence to take a stand against such exploitative regimes.

At the end of his life, Du Bois embarked on an ambitious project to create a new encyclopedia on the African diaspora, funded by the government of Ghana. A citizen of the world until the end, the 93-year-old Du Bois moved to Ghana to manage the project. Du Bois died in Ghana in1963, the day before the historic March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.”

Nora Zeale Hurston: Novelist, Anthropologist, Controversial Race Reformer

Zora Neal Hurston – Claiming Space, PBS American Experience

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, 62 miles from here in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.

She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

 Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston's death, interest in her work was revived after author Alice Walker 

Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published in 2018.

Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). All of her four grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper,

When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States.  Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there. 

Her mother died in 1904, and her father remarried the following year. She and her siblings were sent to a Baptist boarding school. After a year, her father stopped paying her tuition. She left school at 14 years old to fend for herself. She had three short marriages and no children.

In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University. She was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta sorority. She anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City.

In 1934, Hurston established a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression" at Bethune-Cookman University. The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy.

Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research

In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative. 

From October 1947 to February 1948, Hurston lived in Honduras.  Hurston expressed interest in the Miskito Zambu and Garifuna, people who were of partial African ancestry and had developed creole cultures).

During her last decade, she was contacted by Sam Nunn, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, to go to Live Oak, Florida to cover the murder trial of Ruby McCollum. McCollum was charged with murdering the white Dr. C. Leroy Adams, who was also a politician. McCollum said he had forced her to have sex and bear his children. McCollum was convicted to death, and later committed to the state mental hospital at Chattahoochee. 

Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for both cultural and political reasons. The use of African-American dialect, as featured in Hurston's novels, became less popular. Younger writers felt that it was demeaning to use such dialect, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature. 

Since the late 20th century, there has been a revival of interest in Hurston.[32] Critics have since praised her skillful use of idiomatic speech.[59]

Hurston, who was a Republican, argued that New Deal economic support had created a harmful dependency by African Americans on the government and that this dependency ceded too much power to politicians. She was also a supporter of Booker T. Washington, while criticizing WEB DuBois as an elitist.

Hurston opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt that if separate schools were truly equal (and she believed that they were rapidly becoming so), educating black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education. Also, she worried about the demise of black schools and black teachers as a way to pass on the cultural tradition to future generations of African Americans. 

She moved to Fort Pierce, Florida. Penniless, she was moved into a Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke. She died on January 28, 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave until 1973. Novelist Alice Walker found her unmarked grave. Walker commissioned a gray marker inscribed with "ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960."

After Hurston died, her papers were ordered to be burned. A law officer Patrick DuVal, passing by the house where she had lived, stopped and put out the fire, thus saving an invaluable collection of literary documents for posterity. 

In a 1957 letter, which could have been her epitaph she wrote:

But ... I have made phenomenal growth as a creative artist. ... I am not materialistic ... If I do happen to die without money, somebody will bury me, though I do not wish it to be that way. 

Jesus, the Political Prophet

                                                     “Jesus, the Political Prophet”

Most of us were brought up in Sunday school and church about a young, white Jesus, holding a lamb with meek expression on his lovely face. Unfortunately, our religious mentors have done us a great disservice, shielding us from who Jesus really was in the context of the world he lived in. 

 

Jesus has been portrayed as a savior to our souls, which he is, yet he is much, much more and his ministry has a large impact on the world we live in as it has across the centuries. His traditional portrayal as the meek savior has rendered him powerless to change the world we live in, even as we believed that he has saved our souls.

 

Jesus didn’t come only to save us from our personal sins, for he said, “I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” John 12:47. He came to save the whole world in its full context, including our lives here on earth and situations in which we live. That includes the conditions of oppression, racism, poverty, and human rights. He compels us to follow him, not only to be good persons, but to be change agents for a better world. That broader context puts us into situations where our physical lives are at risk, even unto death as martyrs. Need remind I us of how Dr. Martin Luther King gave his life for civil rights. During the terrible persecutions of the church in the first three centuries, after Christ, an early church father is quoted as saying, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” This has been the case across the centuries. In our lifetimes, we have witnessed the brutal lynchings of persons who died defending their faith, in the face of evil, from Emmet Till to George Floyd and many more. 

 

Dr. King knew of the Jesus who changed the world as the political prophet of all time King harnessed his movement to the political Christ and endeavored his followers to do the same. Time and time again Dr. King quoted Jesus, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Matthew 6:24

 

Dr. King reminds us of the consequences when we empower our faith to speak and act truth to power. “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” Matthew 5:12 History records the transformation that occurred when the civil rights movement unleashed the political and spiritual forces by millions who “walked the talk,” risking and sacrificing their lives for justice and peace.

 

Jesus began his life as a political figure at birth, when he was threatened to death, by the despot Herod, who sent his death squads to Bethlehem to massacre the innocents when he didn’t find the baby Jesus. The family were forced to flee to Egypt, becoming political refugees, and living three years as undocumented immigrants. How often have you heard that story read or preached in your church? Not in mine. 

 

Jesus was born in Palestine, a trade route which brought people from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Therefore, it is safe to say that Jesus had brown complexion, black hair, and an Arab nose. He and his family were of “low estate, raised in an insignificant village. He apprenticed from his father, in the carpenter trade, living on subsistent wages. Aramaic was his mother tongue even as he would learn Hebrew later to defend his Bar Mitzvah, at Jerusalem Temple.

 

As a young prophet, he broke the religious laws, incurring the wrath of the powerful religious leaders. Every act of breaking the law, was a political act, and he knew it. He encouraged his disciples to glean the fields on the sabbath. He healed and forgave sinners on the sabbath. He respected women as his equals by befriending Mary and Martha. He debated theology with woman at the well, which motivated her to share his messages to her fellow Samaritans, who had rejected her. He forgave the young prostitute who under the law should have been stoned. He even welcomed Mary Magdalene “the other women who accompanied him, as his disciples.

 

His actions spread like wildfire, even reaching the leaders of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus’ fate was determined long before he arrived in Jerusalem in Holy Week.

 

Three times in the Gospel of Mark, he warns his disciples, “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and on after three days rise again.” Mark 8:31

 

His arrival in Jerusalem on a donkey challenged to the political authorities, declaring without saying anything, that he really was the king over political kings. We all know about Jesus cleansing the Temple from the corrupted money lenders and the hypocrisy of the religious leaders. Jesus was so angry that he whipped them with lashes. He attacked the entrenched economic system of the Temple. 

 

Later, at his trials with Herod and Pilate, he responds to their challenges who he really is and how his kingdom is more powerful and enduring than theirs.

 

Pilate found Jesus guilty of treason against the Roman Empire. Only prisoners guilty of sedition were were crucified. The crime was so heinous that the cross was used to so that the prisoner would experience the worst form of punishment and death.

 

 Jesus suffered the cross nor only for our sakes, Jesus died for the whole world, not just for pardoning our sin for us to enter heaven. Jesus died on the cross so that we can join him to bring justice and peace into the world. His kingdom isn’t only for heaven, it is also for the world, as we confront violence, racism, and injustice. That’s why his prayer urges the kingdom to come first to earth and as it is in heaven. Salvation of the earth means the redemption of this world and the health of our planet. 

 

Jesus’ life and message are prophetic and political, and we ought to believe and act with in him as such.