This Land

by Dan Barry

  County officials explain that the segregated plaques continue to hang because state law says no publicly owned memorial dedicated to veterans of the United States—or of the Confederate States of America—shall be relocated, removed, concealed, et cetera, et cetera.

  “Fifty-dash-three-dash-one, subparagraph B,” recites Edward N. Davis, the county attorney. It is up to the state legislature to change the law, he says. Besides, he and other county officials say, some people like the plaques the way they are, and not all those people are white.

  The names on these honor rolls—from Adams, Guy Smith, on one plaque, to Woods, Jesse, on the other—call upon you to imagine the lives lived. For example: Who was this man listed among the “colored,” this Snipes, Maceo?

  “Our favorite uncle,” says Lula Montfort, her hair white, her memory sharp. He stands before her still: in his mid-30s, with brown eyes, a powerful build and a sixth-grade education supplemented by experience.

  In early 1943, Maceo Snipes set aside his civilian ways—categorized by the government as “Farm Hand General”—and joined the Army. He served 30 months, including six in the Pacific theater, was honorably discharged, and received $100 in muster-out pay and $9.35 in travel pay. He returned to his mother in Butler, and began summoning his dead father’s farm back to life. Cotton, peanuts and corn became his life again.

  Ms. Montfort, whose family were sharecroppers on a nearby farm, remembers Uncle Mace’s challenge to embrace education: a trip to Macon, 40 miles to the northeast, if you got good grades. Soon, she says, she and her brother Ulysses were in the back of a bus bound for the big city.

  Mr. Snipes reasoned that if he fought for this country, he should be able to vote in this country. On July 17, 1946, he was the only black person in his area to vote in the Democratic primary for governor—a bold move in a segregated state, where the candidate vowing to restore all-white primaries would eventually win.

  The next day, white men in a pickup pulled up to the Snipes farmhouse, where even the floors, Ms. Montfort says, were kept “bright and shiny.” They called for Maceo Snipes.

  He came out. One of them, Edward Williamson, a fellow veteran who had stayed stateside, shot him. Then they drove off.

  Ms. Montfort, then 13, remembers what she was told. Her favorite uncle stumbled back into the house. Bleeding from the abdomen, he walked miles to get help, alongside his mother—her grandmother, Lula, for whom she is named.

  “Couple days later, they told us he was dead,” Ms. Montfort says.

  Mr. Williamson, who was related to a politically powerful family in the county, told a coroner’s inquest that he had gone to collect a $10 debt. He said Mr. Snipes pulled a knife. He said he grabbed a gun from the glove compartment and shot twice.

  The ruling: self-defense.

  “Oh, please,” Ms. Montfort says, 60 years later. “Really.”

  Fear, then, thrived like a healthy crop. A few days after the coroner’s inquest, two married black couples were shot dead by a crowd of white men at the Moore’s Ford Bridge, about 140 miles north of here. So no funeral for this veteran, no public mourning; he was buried in the woods.

  That fall, with the crops harvested and fear alive, Lula Montfort’s family said, Enough. They sneaked out of Butler, with Lula and other children hidden under canvas in the back of a truck, and went north, to Youngstown, Ohio.

  The flow of time rubs against fact and memory. No one knows where Maceo Snipes is buried. Edward Williamson killed himself with a gunshot to the head in 1985, feeling bad about what he had done, or so some say.

  And on Wednesday, an old farmer named Walter Snipes tried to share what he knew about his cousin’s killing. But with heart failing and speech affected by two strokes, he could not. As his sister Nonie Gardner wiped his brow with a wet cloth, about all he could say was:

  “Lord. Help. Poor. Me.”

  His prayers for relief were answered the next day. He was 84.

  As communal memory fades, vilification of the dead becomes easier. A county official who does not want to be identified—and who recently and mistakenly maintained that Mr. Williamson had served time for the killing—suggests the deadly dispute concerned gambling and moonshine, not voting. When pressed, the official says, by email:

  “Neither of them were exactly fine upstanding church-going citizens of the community.”

  “Oh, please,” Ms. Montfort, a fine upstanding church-going citizen, says again. A citizen who took to heart an uncle’s emphasis on education, and now has four college graduates for daughters.

  She and other family members, along with several civil rights activists, especially John Cole Vodicka, director of the Prison and Jail Project, are pushing to have the Snipes case reopened and those segregated plaques in the courthouse taken down.

  Ms. Montfort, who returned to Georgia a few years ago, says the plaques may have been well intentioned; after all, the county could have chosen not to recognize black veterans at all. “But this is 2007,” she says. “If they’re historical, then put them in a museum.”

  Last month, the three white and two black county commissioners came up with a compromise. They hung a third, integrated plaque beside the other two.

  Now, among the hundreds listed together, are the names of Williamson and Snipes, two men who left one war to engage in another.

  A Time of Hope, Marred by an Act of Horror

  SPRINGFIELD, MASS.—NOVEMBER 17, 2008

  As Election Night made way for a new day, a pastor named Bryant Robinson Jr. clicked off his television to accept a sleep of sweet promise. His mostly black congregation now had two blessings awaiting it in 2009: the inauguration of the first African-American president and the finished construction of a new church.

  Give praise.

  He could not have been asleep two hours before his telephone rang. It was his brother Andrew, whose home abuts the blessed construction site. “They’re burning our church,” shouted Andrew Robinson, who still doesn’t know why he said “they.”

  Soon Bishop Bryant Robinson, pastor of the Macedonia Church of God in Christ, was standing at the grassy edge, as firefighters sprayed arcs of water meant not to save the building but to contain a fire clearly set. Black embers the size of fists shot skyward, only to float down like broken pieces of the cold New England night.

  Someone eased him into a chair—he is 71, with bad knees and high blood pressure—and placed a blanket around his weary shoulders. He stayed there past dawn, when this new day’s light revealed a smoldering test of faith: a skeleton of scorched steel and a cracked foundation upon which a church could no longer be built.

  Sitting there, stunned, emotional, Bishop Robinson sought context for what had just occurred: A black president is elected, a black church is burned. He thought of dreams realized and dreams denied.

  “It was so close I could taste it,” he says. “I could just see it.”

  You could say that dream began more than 60 years ago, the moment his father, Bryant Robinson Sr., left Alabama for a place where his children could drink from fountains of their choice. As soon as he arrived in Springfield he wanted to flee, so foreign was the place. But his train ticket, courtesy of a local pastor, was one way, so he settled in this community known as the City of Homes and sent for his family.

  Though working as a parking attendant and then as an assembly-line worker, he found his true calling in the Church of God in Christ. Eventually the church’s revered leader, C. H. Mason, resolved tension within the Springfield flock by directing the elder Robinson to start his own congregation, one that would be called the Macedonia Church of God.

  For a while the congregation shared a storefront with another church, until it raised enough money to buy a former synagogue that featured rooms used for transitional housing. “Housing for people coming from the South,” Bishop Robinson recalls. “Escaping segregation.”

  Finally, in 1961, the elder Robinson, now working as a stain spotter at a dry cleaners, persuaded his congregation to buy a
n old Episcopalian church that sat on a small corner lot on King Street.

  For decades he juggled the dual tasks of cleaning clothes and saving souls. He immersed believers in the baptismal pool, presided over their weddings, talked Bible to them on Sundays, led others in prayer after they had gone. Years of footsteps formed grooves in the red stone steps leading to the church’s wooden door.

  The elder Robinson died in 2001 at age 86. Bryant Robinson Jr., his co-pastor and the oldest of his five children, took over the congregation, switching gears after more than 30 years as a civic leader and educator; at one time he had served as the city’s interim superintendent of schools.

  Bishop Robinson soon decided the church on King Street, now more than a century old, could no longer meet the congregation’s needs. Parking was minimal, the maroon carpet old, the windows small and high; Oh Lord, could it get hot in those pews on a late-summer Sunday.

  We deserve a church meant for us, built by us, he told his congregants, and they agreed. The weekly tithing and special offerings took on added urgency, as the bishop reminded people that when you invest in Kingdom’s church, you cannot lose.

  The church eventually bought four wooded acres on Tinkham Road, about five miles away, from Andrew Robinson, both a brother of the bishop and the congregation’s music director. (“We got a favorable rate,” the bishop says, smiling.) Where others saw tall pine trees and sandy soil, he envisioned a soaring church with plenty of parking.

  As time passed, enthusiasm flagged; the project sometimes seemed to be nothing more than an architectural sketch hanging in the back of the old church. As it changed in scope and required the purchase of more land, Bishop Robinson tried to re-ignite interest and to convey his commitment by announcing that he had long ago stopped drawing a salary.

  The response, he says, was “marginal.”

  Still, the project inched forward, thanks in part to the guidance of the church’s lawyer, Bradford Martin Jr. He helped to secure a $1.9 million construction loan, and worked to allay the concerns of neighbors opposed to having a church in their backyard.

  Finally, in April 2007, dignitaries and elders joined Bishop Robinson in breaking ground with shovels painted gold. “I was so elated that day,” he says. “At one point I said we may be standing in the sanctuary. And you know where we were? In the parking lot.”

  Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr.

  After a while, though, parishioners who previously visited the site to mutter “This is too small” and “That’s not right” would gaze upon the 18,000-square-foot structure and say only, “Wow.”

  “That became the descriptive word,” the bishop says. “Wow.”

  Hardly a day would pass without a visit from the bishop. He would sit in his car, watch the workers—and visualize.

  You would enter a foyer large enough for people to chat with one another after services. To the right, a men’s room; to the left, a spacious ladies’ lounge with large mirrors, because he remembered his father’s fear of the sermon he would have to give if women stopped attending: “Finally, brothers, farewell.”

  A large meeting hall in the back, suitable for weddings and church gatherings. A row of prayer rooms to the right. A pastor’s office in the left corner. A food prep room. A chandelier one day, but not now. And, of course, the 500-seat sanctuary, designed to be intimate, with video equipment to project the full-immersion baptisms on a screen for all to see.

  Oh, and plenty of parking for a congregation sure to grow.

  By Election Day, 75 percent of the construction was finished, with the entire exterior nearly done and construction workers planning to lay the water line in the morning. The bishop could taste it. He watched the election returns, felt pride in his country and turned out the light. And during his short sleep, someone set fire to his dream.

  Investigators say the cause was arson, but so far they have no suspects or evidence that the crime was rooted in racism. Still, the bishop cannot shake the timing of it—timing that will now forever link two events, one of joy and pride, another of loss and horror.

  As Election Night melted away, as memories of the past tempered thoughts of the future, the bishop sat in that chair, thinking, praying. Behind him were stacked five gold-painted shovels from the groundbreaking; in front of him, the fire; above him, the mysterious pitch of the night. And the thought came to him: Build again.

  EPILOGUE

  Two months after an Election Night act of arson demolished the new Macedonia Church of God in Christ, three white men in their 20s were charged with burning down the church to express their rage at the thought of a black president. Two pleaded guilty, and the third was convicted after trial, in a case that The Republican newspaper of Springfield, Massachusetts, described as a “blot on the whole city.”

  But Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr. and his congregation followed through on their vow to rebuild. In 2011, the smoke lifted to reveal a 20,000-square-foot church standing on top of an old crime scene, its sanctuary walls painted the color of a clear blue sky.

  Bishop Robinson, now in his 80s, said that the church has nearly 400 congregants on its rolls. “Our challenge is to get them to all show up at the same time,” he said, half-kidding.

  Police, Protesters and Reporters Form Uneasy Cast for Nightly Show in Ferguson

  FERGUSON, MO.—AUGUST 22, 2014

  Late on Wednesday, a young man with a megaphone led a modest band of protesters in yet another loop around the traumatized commercial strip that is the stage for the nightly street theater of outrage here. But as the group passed an illuminated tent, the leader interrupted his chants for justice to say through his loudspeaker:

  “Hey, Don!”

  And Don Lemon, the CNN news anchor, preparing for yet another live shot, looked up and waved.

  The fleeting moment, light and familiar, captured the Groundhog Day feel that now infuses these exhausted but edgy productions, known as the Ferguson Protests, that began after the shooting death on Aug. 9 of an unarmed 18-year-old black man by a white Ferguson police officer, a few hundred yards from this strip.

  Exhausted, because the protests, deep into their second week, feature reporters and protesters with little new to ask, or say; everything seems stipulated. Yet edgy, because these nights also have included improvisational flashes—a protester’s thrown water bottle, an officer’s raised assault rifle—that can instantly transform an orderly protest into a jostling frenzy.

  Then, whether conclusion is reached by consent or by force, the participants—protesters, reporters and officers—exit from West Florissant Avenue, prepared to see one another the next evening for a production with no clear closing night.

  In the first days after the shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson, a murky event under federal and grand jury investigations, the violence and looting conveyed a sense of no one in charge. But now the nights follow a ragged, rule-bound routine that begins before dusk, when reporters check batteries, officers check weapons, and protesters prepare to repeat their calls for accountability.

  At the nearby Northland Shopping Center, the packed parking lot would suggest robust sales at Target and the supermarket Schnucks, except that the vehicles are police cruisers, National Guard buses and news trucks, now that the space has been claimed for a command center.

  Still, shoppers have adapted to seeing people carrying riot shields rather than grocery bags, and to navigating the many National Guard checkpoints—so much so that a maroon sedan rolled right past a checkpoint the other evening, causing an armed guardsman to shout: “Hey! Hey!” The stopped driver shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “Oops.”

  As the sun descends, many reporters, some carrying gas masks, begin the long walk north along West Florissant, reserved now for armored vehicles, police cars and the occasional news truck. The people you pass say, “Y’all be safe,” the preferred Ferguson greeting these days.

  Soon there appears the asphalt stage: a quarter-mile cut of West Florissant, bordered by Ferguson Avenue
to the south and, to the north, Canfield Drive, the road on which Michael Brown died. In between are many stores with boarded-up fronts bearing spray-painted messages that have been tweeted around the world.

  “We’re open,” says Northland Chop Suey. “Our Prayers Go Out To the Michael Brown Family,” says Sam’s Meat Market. “Black Owned,” says Yolo! Boutique.

  By sunset, the production is well underway, as a procession of protesters—whose numbers can swell one minute and shrink the next—follows a loop, its members growing hoarse from their determined, ever-changing chants, including, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”

  The procession can never pause, per police orders. Officers who stand not quite at ease, sometimes holding rifles or long batons, frequently step out of their still poses to say keep moving, keep moving.

  “Keep walking,” an officer kept saying. “That’s all I ask.”

  According to Ronald S. Johnson, the Missouri State Highway Patrol captain who was brought in by the governor to oversee security, the rule is intended to thwart stationary clusters that might give cover to agitators. “Because what happens is, the peaceful protesters gather, and the other element blends in,” he said this week in response to a question from The Huffington Post. “Now they blend in, and that’s what’s been causing us some issues.”

  So the protesters, the reporters, the yellow-shirted observers from Amnesty International—everyone but the police—walk around and around. They might take a break in a designated area, or pause to study a glowing Anderson Cooper, his black shirt offsetting his shock-white hair, as he delivers his report. But then it’s back to walking the oblong path, like exercisers on a high school track, or inside a mall.

  There is a psychic loop as well, experienced by the many reporters, photographers and videographers populating the scene, looking for that moment, that shot, to justify their long night. But the weariness of the familiar has taken root; one reporter recently began interviewing a local man, only to realize in mid-interview that he had heard the story, almost verbatim, before.