Readers will note the differences and distinctions established in the results set forth in this installment’s description of the relationship between Sheila Walker and me and the description, as set forth in the immediately preceding installment, of the failure for the father of Black liberation theology and me to achieve racial healing. It would therefore be beneficial at this point to explain, with a concrete example, how one can indeed know racial healing. Toward that end, the relationship I shared with Sheila Walker will illuminate the means by which our friendship facilitated reaching that goal, which began several months following the four lunches with Dr. Cone.
The work between Sheila and me continued for seven years until her death, after a long illness, in 2021. I know Sheila’s family – her husband, Ivor, and their two children – believed in the efforts Sheila and I exerted for the purpose. They, along with my wife and daughter, encouraged the depth of friendship and personal commitment Sheila and I expressed toward each other. In retrospect, it was therefore not surprising that Sheila’s family asked me to give the eulogy at her memorial service. Moreover, following Sheila’s death, Ivor and I have become quite close, talking and emailing every few days. His own authentic passion for racial healing and equality has remained sharp, insightful, and always compassionate.
Nearly a hundred years after the Elaine Race Massacre, separate, but parallel examinations by Sheila Walker and me into the brutal attacks by whites against Blacks brought us together in early 2014. Of course, there was an antipodal contrast in our personal histories related to the violence – her ancestors as victims and my grandfather’s role as perpetrator.
From an outsider’s point of view, Sheila and I were the unlikeliest of great friends and allies. She grew up Black, deep in the urban life of Chicago, Illinois. On the other hand, the first two decades of my life were spent, as a white boy, living principally in rural, southeast Arkansas. And yet, the magnetic force of the Massacre, one of the deadliest of our nation’s racial assaults against Blacks, brought the two of us together. Notwithstanding the contrast which Sheila and I faced, our relationship blossomed to be one of the most important in my life – and I believe she would have said the same for her.
As part of our independent examinations of the Massacre, we both crossed paths with Robert Whitaker, author of On the Laps of Gods, a well-regarded, detailed book about the white onslaughts against Blacks in Phillips County. Sheila had been particularly drawn to Whitaker’s extensive work as a result of the special treatment and attention it had given to Sheila’s ancestors. Around the same time, I sought his help for an article of approximately 10,000 words I wrote on the event for a national literary journal. In this connection, I asked Bob several questions to achieve clarification for my long, nonfiction piece. In turn, he asked if I would meet a Black woman, descendant of a family that experienced virulent white onslaughts during the Phillips County conflagration. I agreed. Sheila had also agreed to meet with me.
For our first communication in early 2014, Sheila and I held a telephone call lasting two hours. We shared much personal information about our respective ancestors – victims and perpetrator. While each of us was pleased with the phone conversation and we each had said so, we both wished to come together for a longer time and to share more of all we knew about the Massacre and our antecedents. So, on Saturday, March 15, 2014, Sheila and I met for the first time in Boston at the home of Sheila’s son, Marcus.
Upon greeting each other as I entered the home, Sheila and I embraced for a very long time. From the beginning, we meant to be the obverse, the alternative to the attitudes and episodes that so characterized those early fall days of 1919 in Phillips County. Her welcome and, later, her forgiveness of my grandfather, Lonnie, opened the road to racial healing. She removed the possibility of a continuing pall – that is, Lonnie’s role in the white attacks, which, I felt, could intervene adversely in our journey.
After we became friends and began our commitment to racial healing, a symposium about the Massacre was held on September 20, 2014 at the iconic St. Paul’s Chapel in downtown New York City for which both Sheila and I made presentations. Forgiveness represented an essential part of Sheila’s being, and as she spoke that September day in St. Paul’s Chapel, Sheila emphasized that she had forgiven Lonnie more than I had, a comment that gathered everyone’s attention.
Being white, I could largely accept that the whole concept of forgiveness – its power and rectitude – would be novel and mostly unexplored by me. So much seemed new, but I was willing to learn – to be gifted with redemption, not for Lonnie alone, but for the way I could endure the weight of the Massacre, that one, inexplicable and horrifying episode I unwittingly received without an escape. Of course, I didn’t participate in the Elaine Race Massacre, but as the day is long, I surely acquired it, and if I didn’t deal with the Massacre, then all I had done was foist it forward for the next generation and possibly for succeeding generations.
Following a period when particulars of the Massacre and Sheila’s 1919 antecedents in Phillips County, combined with the respective perspectives we took toward my grandfather, had been vetted, we moved on to fresh ground. Enough confidence and trustworthiness permeated our words and sentiments that we left the Massacre and related topics behind, which would allow us to build on our friendship, away from the nucleus of the catastrophe. We traveled further and deeper into the realm of authentic passion and allyship.
It did not take me long to acknowledge that Sheila possessed remarkable gifts beyond her attention to the influence of forgiveness: her directness, her comfort with herself which made us all comfortable around her, and her unlimited empathy. A word, used infrequently, linked me to Sheila’s reservoir of good will; the word, co-inherence, derives from the concept that we, as individuals, reside in others, who, in turn, also reside in us, for Sheila seemed to walk in the shoes of everyone she met – Black, white, or any other color and ethnicity or condition.
In April, 2017, Sheila and I were invited by the Delta Cultural Center, a State of Arkansas agency located in Phillips County, to talk about our reflections on the Massacre and on the process and progress of our racial healing. There, we emphasized the path Sheila and I had taken to racial healing for a locale that had suffered too long without a common acknowledgement of the tragic event and without any major effort by the local Black and white communities to engage in racial comity.
Although Sheila and I recognized important breakthroughs in our conversations before this presentation, the Arkansas colloquium solidified a depth in the relationship. We had been on a mission previously, but the mission took on even more coalescence and mutual vision thereafter. One of Sheila’s close friends, Dr. Barbara J. Love, who taught social justice education for decades at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and who attended the colloquium to support Sheila’s role and to offer constructive commentary during the question and answer period, had sensed this drama and acuteness in the commitment Sheila and I had made to each other, which Barbara would later reflect in an email sent to me, almost immediately upon Sheila’s death:
“I think that you have some idea of your significance in Sheila’s life, and how committed she was to you and to the healing and unity work around the Elaine Massacre. To Sheila, you are a near miracle – a white man with the personal knowledge and experience of that history, and the care, compassion, and commitment to engage in healing. I don’t know whether she told you or not, but she thought that the work with you added years to her life.”
Sheila and I never fumbled for topics to fill our conversations. The dialogue always flowed naturally like rapid streams of water. The subjects were routinely weighty and interesting (certainly, for me), consisting of personal, crucial, and racially based topics. There always seemed to be a desire for a fulfillment of that goal of authentic passion as we pursued fundamental elements of communication to understand, empathize, heal, love, and co-inhere. The subject exceeded conversation itself as we left the conventional and sought something “beyond” where only the seekers of truth can rely on each other to try to achieve a meaningful conclusion that would be illuminating to us both, for each of us, but which we charted together – Black and white, for something was at stake, this representation of authentic passion, our pursuit of the unique that was only unique because we sought it together.
Her experiential stories and testimonies had the effect of altering a series of preconceptions I brought to our conversations. I believe this effect will always be an effect, both directions, Black and white, in a successful one-to-one, authentically passionate relationship that includes conversations like the ones Sheila and I enjoyed.
We began to realize that our collective narrative carried a distinctive voice that many Americans should hear. Our story could help to serve as other voices to many Black and white people, who also believed in authentic passion and the way it conveys deep friendship and healing across races and as an antidote to racial separation. Our combined voice and this relationship expanded to many who desired emulation of Black and white harmony, respect, and friendship. We had, in effect, established by our commitment to and belief in authentic passion and resultant allyship a more expanded family beyond the normal contours of expectation for Blacks and whites. The mission, the advent, the communion held a certainty that could not be denied nor diminished, and its clarity allowed us to describe and promote its dimensions for others.
Many were drawn to this place of discovery, as more than one commented that if a small constellation of Americans could adopt our adherence to authentic passion and allyship, the racial enigma that the country confronted day after day would be measurably less acute and less insolvable. The story within the story – the story of our racial healing and friendship within the story of the Massacre and its aftermath – became a missionary commentary that Sheila and I believed we should and could convey. Both Blacks and whites approached me, asking for advice toward this type of participation in racial healing, not on an institutional basis, but dependency on a personal one, reflective of the course that Sheila and I had taken, relying on the message of authentic passion, which inevitably did lead to allyship.
Sometimes, one simply has to turn from everything he or she has known and heard, and follow a completely different course; and if one doesn’t, then there is a loss of absolutely everything of one’s own integrity of self. There is then no recovery. One can grow up to be one kind of person, and then turn around, thank God, to be another. These were topics of conversation that Sheila and I routinely explored on the phone or in person to examine the walls or opportunities for correction that authentic passion, antiracism efforts, and allyships can confront and conquer.
Prior to the dedication of the Elaine Massacre Memorial on September 29, 2019, which was held in Helena, Arkansas, there was an event in Elaine itself where Sheila and I were each given a plaque that bore the title, “Authentic Reconciliation”, and stated, in part, these words:
“Sheila Walker and J. Chester Johnson are the living definition of reconciliation. . . Their reconciliation, friendship, and cooperative efforts represent the hope for the future.”
While the words of authentic passion and racial healing surrounded the relationship that existed between us – and rightly so – we regularly characterized our bond as allyship, mindful of the strong obligatory charge that allyship required of us in broader, social terms. Not surprisingly, people have now encouraged an espousal for the multiplication of Black-white friendships, allyships, and racial healing in building an improved Black-white environment. If we, Blacks and whites, cannot be allies personally, as individuals, for and with each other, then can we be true allies within the larger, more public, and political world in which we also live?
Following Sheila’s death, David P. Solomon, who organized, funded (along with other members of his family), constructed, and took all required steps to bring the Memorial into being and who was the chief executive officer of the Elaine Massacre Memorial Committee, wrote a piece in May, 2021 as he saw the effects of the allyship between Sheila and me:
“Chester and Sheila did something I think will eventually be recognized as far more valuable than the Memorial itself: they embodied reconciliation, they modeled reconciliation, they preached reconciliation, and they demonstrated reconciliation in their presence, in their deeds, in their joint lectures, and in their written words. They showed the world an extraordinary act of love and acceptance that I think was far more inspiring than the Memorial. . . Sheila and Chester showed a way forward.”
We Blacks and whites are finally left with each other to work out results one-to-one, and maybe that’s the way we knew it would and should be all along. It is time for individuals of goodwill, Black and white, to find each other in missions that foster public expressions of authentic passion and allyship, depending instinctively on each other for the sentiments and humanity to address obstacles embedded in so many past ways.
Next Time: U of Michigan Study Finds White Men More Prejudicial Than White Women Against Blacks