William H. Lamar IV: It is our victory

William H. Lamar IV: It has been the site of nurturing the spiritual joy and passion of Black people and all people. It has been a site of intellectual foment, because we hosted the Bethel Literary and Historical Society, and through that extraordinary society, persons like William Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune all spoke from the pulpit. On the day that the church was dedicated, sitting in the pulpit, and possibly in the same chairs where I sit, were Henry McNeal Turner and Daniel Alexander Payne. It is an extraordinary place.

Many took ancestral journeys from Metropolitan. There’s a picture from A. Philip Randolph’s funeral of Jimmy Carter and Bayard Rustin in the pulpit of Metropolitan. Frederick Douglass’ funeral, Rosa Parks’ funeral. It goes on and on and on. We’ve been a place where Black people have nurtured our joy and spirits. We’ve been a place where Black people have mourned. We’ve been a place where Black people have strategized.

The thing that makes me most proud about our humanity is this: The National Cathedral is right down the street. The National Cathedral was built by persons so morally small and so consumed by the American ethos, and not the ethos of Christ, that they built a church that was not designed to welcome my ancestors. The founders of Metropolitan, so large of spirit, so extraordinarily human, have never excluded anyone. That is the heritage of the Black prophetic tradition. That is where all Christianities, plural, must go if we are to be faithful to Christ and do the work we’re called to do in the world.

F&L: In December 2020, a group of white supremacists, members of the Proud Boys, tore down and destroyed a Black Lives Matter sign from your church during a night of violence and vandalism. Can you describe what happened?

WL: We were in COVID and not able to physically gather for worship. I am sitting in the basement at home getting ready [to record a service], and my phone starts just doing all kinds of stuff. People were reaching out saying, “How are you?” Giving their support, offering their regards.

I was like, “What’s going on?” And someone finally said, “Have you seen what the Proud Boys did to Metropolitan?”

I looked at the Proud Boys’ Twitter feed, and there they had posted tearing up our sign. They posted trespassing onto our property. They were chanting the most vile and vitriolic racist epithets. It was awful.

But here’s the thing — this is what is different about what my community has cultivated in me — I am never surprised by American violence. Never. America was birthed in the womb of violence. American political violence is apple pie and baseball. For those of us who think that it does not exist, pay attention to what happened on Jan. 6 and see.

As in the Lost Cause mythology those traitors and those purveyors of violence were forgiven and deified, same thing is happening with Jan. 6. This is who we are as a nation. And unfortunately, native persons, persons of African descent, poor persons, queer persons, have often been at the wrong end of American white supremacist and fascist violence.

Some people say, “It was just a sign. Why the ruckus? Why the kerfuffle?” And that, too, is ignorant and ahistorical. This is related to burning crosses. This is related to swastikas. They did this to intimidate us as they were preparing to take away an election from someone who had been duly elected. They were planning that. They knew that we come from a tradition that stood and stands in the way of that type of criminality and political violence. And they were right.

What they were wrong about is that we would do nothing. When Africans came here through the Maafa, during the period of enslavement, we fought and resisted the whole way here. There have been uprisings, like the New Orleans revolt. The revolts led by Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser. We have always fought. Elizabeth Freeman, who sued for her freedom and the freedom of others in the 1700s. We have been unrelenting and unceasing in our demands to be free.

The blood of our ancestors still circulates through our veins. That is apparent, not only from what Metropolitan has done, but it is apparent in so many other communities, movements and organizations who refuse to go quietly into the night of no longer being considered full citizens.

When they did what they did, our church leadership took a vote, because I did not believe that I could make a unilateral decision. I got a unanimous vote among the leadership that we will pursue legal means against the Proud Boys. One lawsuit, the judgment has grown to about $3 million, they did not pay. So we sued to take from them something of value whereby we could get what the judgment awarded us. And that was their trademark. Judge Jones Bosier of the D.C. Superior Court awarded us the trademark, the rights to the trademark and other affiliated imagery that they own, that they market to make money and to recruit.

We now own the trademark, and we’re going through the legal means necessary to make sure that the trademark is solidly ours legally. We are also using the trademark through merchandise, where we take what they use for evil and repurpose it for the good of our work. We’re looking to seed into other movements and organizations that are doing the work as well.

What’s interesting is that people are embracing me around this, saying, “We just felt like we were losing and losing. And this victory feels like ours.”

I’m telling them, “It is ours.”

The Proud Boys are of a legacy. Ida B. Wells told us, this is white envy of Black joy and Black progress. You need only pay attention to what happened in Tulsa, where Black people were prospering and not bothering anybody, and they came and they killed our mothers, our grandmothers and our children because we were prospering. The government killed us in Wilmington, North Carolina. A coup destroying us. Rosewood destroying us.

We did nothing but be beautiful and extraordinary and care for one another. There is something so small in these white supremacists that they cannot stand to see us thrive. The government has given us nothing. We have built for ourselves. Whatever we get, we are owed. When they freed the enslaved in D.C., they didn’t pay us. They paid the white men who owned us. This nation is sick.

If you think about Obama, now Obama was no revolutionary; he’s a centrist Democrat. Some would argue a corporate Democrat, and they couldn’t stand eight years of him. The Trump movement is a reaction to that very thing. Ten million people who voted for Joe Biden would not vote for a Black woman, because of the nation’s misogynoir, and would rather be sacrificed on the altar of kakistocracy than allow someone who actually has the skills to guide the ship of state.

F&L: When I heard about the court ruling, the first thing that occurred to me was the lynching of a teenager in Alabama, Michael Donald, whose mother, Beulah, bankrupted a branch of the KKK by doing what you all have done — taking them to court to take something that mattered to them, their money. Were you mindful of Mrs. Donald’s actions and legacy?

WL: Womanism tells us that the caring by and for Black women and the work of interpreting faith through them frees us all. God knows, I believe womanism is right. What we are doing is following in the paths of ancestor Beulah Donald, who could have been made small. She did not even want to inflict pain upon them. She wanted to know why they did it. She wanted them to be held accountable. A type of beautiful humanity that just seems like it is from another place, and it is. Beulah Donald and the Chattanooga Five, five other Black women who sued the Klan, the strategy of the Southern Poverty Law Center — all of these things were in the mind of our attorneys, from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee and from [the law firm] Paul, Weiss.

Incidentally, Paul, Weiss, the extraordinary, high-dollar, white-shoe firm who represents us pro bono, also represented the Scottsboro Boys, and assisted Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board. They have a century’s history of fighting the good fight of justice.

When we do this work, we are not doing something new. American culture is very young and addicted to novelty. We are clear that where we are going is a path that has been tried. As we follow ancestors of light, like Mother Beulah, they follow shadow ancestors, ancestors who play in dim and dank places.

People like Andrew Jackson. It is no accident that Trump valorizes and had iconography of Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson was a vile human being, racist, imperialist, destroying native cultures and people. You learn what you need to know by understanding the ancestral names and energies that are lifted up by persons.

Let them lift up those shadow energies. We will go forward in the spirit of light, which is the spirit of Christ, which is the prophetic tradition, which is the tradition, not just of those who are Christians, but it is the tradition of justice fighters around the world who are led by the light of freedom and truth.

We are entering a period that will get worse. Americans are also addicted to a childish eternal optimism, or the lie that American history is always in a straight line, moving progressively. It is not. There have been steps forward and multiple steps backward, which we see right now. That is indeed the American story.

I am one of those who will not abandon the bones of my people that rest in this place, because we built this place. I will go nowhere. I will love to the end. I will fight to the end. I will not leave this place. We have built the place economically, culturally, intellectually.

We will not be intimidated by these very, very small people. Our prayer is that they will learn to grow into the full beauty of their humanity and stop shrinking and embracing their worst impulses and rise to the joy and love that is the portion of all who would receive and walk together as fellow humans.

F&L: Given what the Proud Boys have done, what they continue to do, what else is your prayer for them? And could you talk about forgiveness? I feel like “forgiveness” is a word that is being used superficially these days.

WL: I get sick of this thin definition of forgiveness. They always want us to forgive them. It is really a theologizing of the magical Negro trope in literature and film, that we exist for the moral awakening of white people. There is no forgiveness for you walking into Mother Emanuel and slaughtering our grandmothers. There is no forgiveness. I will not forgive you for what you have done to our grandmothers, for what you have done to our grandfathers.

Forgiveness, for me, must be sought, and they have not sought it. Forgiveness comes with some form of reparation, some form of repair. There is no American spirit for forgiveness. They break treaties with the natives. They will not even consider true reparations for our people. This is where anti-Blackness is such a foundation of everything that we see. It is such a foundation.

So no, you get no cheap forgiveness from me.

My grandparents taught us to be human. The towering example and achievement of them morally was teaching us to remain human and to not visit inhumanity upon those who have visited inhumanity upon us.

We have always also believed in protecting ourselves. We will not be your target practice. We will not give to you the safe harbor of thinking that it is OK to kill us. They kill us with bullets. They kill us by refusing to extend the human being’s universal health care. They kill us by not giving living wages and by wage theft and extracting still from the labor of those who make this nation what it is economically.

My prayer for them is that they would understand that they are being used by autocrats, oligarchs and plutocrats. They are being used by corporatocracy. Proud Boys are related to the poor white cannon fodder that the Confederacy used to preserve the wealth of the few who owned the enslaved.

It is still poor white people today who are being pimped by the wealthy oligarchs who know that they can use race to get these people to do their dirty deeds. They are the grandchildren of the poor white men who were cannon fodder in the Civil War, who fought for people who did not care about us or them.

I want to ask poor white people, “Why would you think that they care about you or your labor when they made us work for free?” They don’t care about laborers. They never have. You support the very ones who use race as a cudgel and who have hypnotized you that there is value in what Du Bois calls the “wages of whiteness.” There is no value in being white. You can’t eat white. You can’t sleep in white. But they believe it.

What they have always done is figure out how to keep the masses from coming together. They killed Fred Hampton, because Fred Hampton understood, when he built the Rainbow Coalition in Chicago [to] bring poor Black people, poor white people, poor brown people together [because] we were all being used. This is why Jesus was dangerous. His healing was organizing against a system that was made powerful by sickness and death and extraction, and they had to kill him.

My final word is this: The poetry of resurrection is that God says no to their death. The purpose of resurrection is for those who are believers to not be afraid of death. God says no to every one of their death-dealing schemes. I may die, but I will rise again. We will rise again. We keep coming. They need to understand that.