On Independence Day weekend
1999, as I was preparing to enter my final year of seminary, I was working the
Friday night shift as on-call chaplain at Evanston Hospital. As I was about to retire for the evening in
the chaplain’s room when I was paged by a nurse in the Emergency Room. “Would you please come down here?” she asked. “There’s been a drive-by shooting in Skokie.”
I’ve never followed basketball
much, and we had only lived in Evanston for two years at that point, so the
name Ricky Byrdsong was not one that I recognized. I was only aware, when I arrived in the ER,
of a distraught African-American woman who could not understand why her husband
had been gunned down randomly as he was out walking with his children on a warm
summer evening. Neither I, nor anyone
else, was aware that the horror that was to unfold that weekend was only just
beginning. I was struck by the fact that
this woman and her young son, who had been with his father and had witnessed
the shooting, were surrounding by whites: a white doctor, white nurses, white
police officers, a white social worker, and me.
And as she did her best to
encourage her son to cooperate with the police detective while shielding him
from the pain and shock they were both experiencing, Mrs. Byrdsong kept repeating
over and over that she couldn’t understand why her husband had been
targeted. “He’s not a drug dealer,” she
said over and over. “He doesn’t do
drugs.” I thought about the assumptions
many of us make when we hear the term “drive-by shooting”: we may think of
innocent victims caught in the crossfire; but we also think of gangs and inner
city violence and illegal drugs and other sorts of criminal activity; we think
about people not like us. And I remember thinking at the time that I
couldn’t imagine that a white woman in a similar circumstance would feel that
she had to make such excuses or such denials for the benefit of the hospital
staff, so ingrained are those stereotypes about drive-by shootings, and also,
of course, about race.
We were told at the time the
Mr. Byrdsong’s injuries did not appear to be life-threatening, so I left her in
the care of her own pastor, who had just arrived, and excused myself. About 3:00 a.m. I responded to another page
from the ER nurse. “You’d better come
down here again,” she said. “The
‘drive-by’ died.” I returned to the
Emergency Room and discovered that in addition to the attacks on Mr. Byrdsong,
there had been shots fired at Jews in Rogers Park as they walked to and from
Sabbath services. An Asian-American
couple had been fired on here in Northbrook.
Police were looking for a light blue Ford Taurus, but had not yet found
it. I attended to Mrs. Byrdsong, her
family and her pastor as best I could, and they left the hospital.
As Saturday morning dawned I
drove home to our family’s apartment on the Seabury campus. I turned on NPR’s
Weekend Edition, only to hear Scott Simon telling the nation about a tragedy I
now felt a part of, albeit a very small, insignificant part. A young man named Benjamin Smith, a disciple
of white supremacist Matthew Hale and his World Church of the Creator, had gone
on a shooting spree that we would soon learn was not yet over. Police still did not know the whereabouts of
that light blue Taurus; was Smith still in the area? Our young daughter was
upset by the events and terrified at the thought that such a man might still be
nearby. I wanted so badly to tell her
that people like Benjamin Smith don’t go after blonde, fair-skinned, blue-eyed
children like her; but I knew that if I used race as an excuse not to worry or
fear while others were threatened and suffering, I could not face my friends of
color, as well as my Jewish and gay and lesbian friends. I later learned that one of my seminary classmates,
a young African-American man, had taken the elevated train from the city to
Evanston late that night and when he heard the news reports about the shootings
had sprinted the entire 2-1/2 blocks from the station back to the seminary, all
the while fearing the sight of that light blue Ford Taurus. I cannot imagine what that kind of fear must
be like. And of course before the
weekend was over, a Korean student would be shot to death in Bloomington,
Indiana; and Benjamin Smith, finally caught and cornered by police in Salem,
Illinois, would take the coward’s way out, committing suicide rather than
allowing himself to be arrested and brought to justice.
When Jesus sent the apostles
out two by two and in the process of proclaiming the Good News, and asking all
to repent, and spreading God’s peace, we’re told, the disciples “cast out many
demons”. We may think of demons as
Satan’s minions, ugly, violent, tempting us to give in to sin; we tend to
personify them. But the demons we face seldom
present themselves that way, and that makes exorcising them all the more
difficult. Demons like racism and
xenophobia and homophobia need to be “cast out” just the same, but they are
still very much with us. Freedom to act
on our fears and prejudices in violent and threatening ways is not a freedom
guaranteed by our Constitution.
I think about the ethnic prejudices
that still manifest themselves far too often in the land of the free and the
home of the brave. I think about the
deplorable way so many Muslims in this country were treated after 9/11. I think about the murder of Ricky Byrdsong. I think about our Church’s own saint of the
civil rights movement, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a young white Episcopal
seminarian gunned down more than forty years ago while protecting a young black
girl from a gun-toting, white racist Alabama shopkeeper who was acquitted of
his murder by an all-white jury. I think
about all these tragedies and so many more, and I wonder when it will ever
end. And then I think about our own
sending out, every week, and the power we have to effect change in the name of
the gospel: power we are reminded of and sent out into the world to use in the
name of Christ to live out our baptismal vows by speaking out against prejudice
and hate, by challenging those who practice the kind of habits that wound the
psyches and often the bodies of our neighbors.
Strengthened by Eucharist and by the Word and by the strength of our
Christian community, we do have the power to begin to effect that kind of
change. In the name of Christ, and in
thanksgiving for the blessings of freedom, we can do no less.
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