“It is not enough to resist with confessions; we must confess with resistance.” —William Sloan Coffin Jr.
Hard . . . Hard . . . Questions
On the evening of July 9, 2018, I attended Jeff Bigger’s talk at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, to hear him discuss his newly released book, Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition. This gave me opportunity afterward to speak with him about the resistance movement taking shape across the nation in response to the first imperious presidency of Donald Trump.
Asheville had once been Cherokee country until the White man invaded. A small number of Cherokees still remain. One of them, Yona FrenchHawk, led the weekly invocation of the four directions of the earth for the ceremonial commencement of Sunday celebrations at the Jubilee Community.
Yona’s Cherokee people had known, as had Black Americans, the overwhelming challenge it was to endure in the face of more than four centuries of oppressive measures inflicted upon them by White kings and queens, governors, generals, masters, overseers, and mobs armed with weapons.
During Trump’s first few years in office, a diversity of faith communities within and around Asheville formally organized to provide sanctuary for undocumented immigrants and families subject to the stalk-and-arrest tactics of ICE.
Neighboring Henderson County’s largely Republican stronghold was the high-hay pasture from which Mark Meadows obtained fodder for feeding national unrest as chair of the Freedom Caucus and subsequently Trump’s chief of staff.
Henderson County had a Trump-friendly sheriff who considered himself eminently qualified and entitled to “ride shotgun,” so to speak, whenever ICE undertook seizures of migrants in the interest of fulfilling Trump’s Jacksonian-inspired immigrant removal policy.
Following upon the precedent set by the Spanish from whom General Andrew Jackson had learned what it was like for Natives to be “conquistadored,” it was now the Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans whom Trump loathed and set about with “zero tolerance” to catch and capture.
At that time, a portrait of Andrew Jackson hung on the wall behind the “Resolute desk” in the Oval Office. “Resolute” was Trump’s fanny-whipping attitude about ridding the country of foreigners he dreamt to be criminal, be they Muslims arriving by air or “invaders” inching northward by land and foot from the southern hemisphere, making their way through Mexico to the U.S. border and into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and, not least, into the xenophobic recesses of Trump’s paranoia.
Once Trump got wind of Thomas Homan’s and Stephen Miller’s sinister plan to separate children from their parents at the border, Homan being the “intellectual father” and Miller the “driving force” behind the presidential order, Trump was not going to play second fiddle to Jackson’s 1830s removal of the Cherokees and four other tribes in a forced march along the “Trail of Tears.”
Jacksonian historian Robert P. Remini described the blueprint.
“From the very start of his administration, President Andrew Jackson knew exactly what he wanted to do. He said he would institute a policy of ‘reform and retrenchment and economy.’ Convinced the government had become corrupt over the past decade, he promised to cleanse the ‘Aegean stables,’ inaugurate a system of rotation in distributing the patronage (his enemies called it a ‘spoils system’), and practice fiscal conservatism to pay off the national debt. A democrat to the core, he believed his program would ‘protect liberty,’ ‘restore virtue in government,’ and ensure ‘obedience to the popular will.’ The people are sovereign, he declared. Their will must be obeyed. ‘The majority is to govern.’”
Elaborating further, Professor Remini said of Old Hickory, also nicknamed Sharp Knife and, pejoratively, “Jackass” by his Democratic critics who made the lowly beast the party’s mascot: “In his inaugural address, given on a bright and sunny March 4, 1829, President Jackson stood before a cheering crowd estimated at twenty thousand and addressed these goals. He also raised the issue of the Indian. But his remarks masked his true intent. ‘It will be my sincere and constant desire,’ he declared, ‘to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people.’ Anyone who knew him knew what that meant: removal of the remaining southern tribes beyond the Mississippi River.”[i]
Does any of that seem remotely familiar?
Trump, of course, lacked so much as even the questionable largesse embedded in the preface to Jackson’s Indian diplomacy of “a just and liberal policy, to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants.”
Unlike Jackson, Trump neither disguised nor temporized his desire to get on quickly with expelling those Mexican “rapists” he verbally trampled underfoot. (Projection of his own dissolute behavior upon others has always been Trump’s forte.) Had their “rights and wants” ever once entered his mind, he certainly never let them fall from his mouth. They are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he whined. To Trump, one criminal is the equivalent of a battalion, and two an entire army. Paranoia has a way of metastasizing.
General Jackson expressed at least a smidgen of paternalistic empathy for the lives and predicaments of the Creeks and Cherokees with whom he developed personal relationships in the course of conducting his military and presidential exploits.
In Trump’s universe, migrants and refugees are not human beings. They are bargaining chips on the card tables of politics, for instilling fear, gaining votes, bribing allies, and satisfying the sadistic cruelties of grandiose egos.
There is always a price tag on the heads of migrants when they travel, cross borders, seek asylum, settle in communities, engage in productive work, and when arrested, incarcerated, and repatriated are subject once again to being trafficked, robbed, raped, and murdered.
For those reasons not a single politician would ever trade places with them. But those same politicians, who call for their eviction, live off of the profits of their degradation as barter for raising campaign funds, winning elections, and appropriating tax dollars for casting them out of the country.
And so we must pause and ask some hard . . . hard . . . questions.
When Trump is in one of his tyrannical moods because certain nations have refused to take back a plane load of migrants in exchange for a bribe from the president, how will Trump dispose of those refugees in need of asylum from Trump’s uninhibited vengeance?
Will the federal prison camp at Guantanamo Bay suddenly become an American Auschwitz?
“Good” American officers, given the orders to kill, are no less capable of wholesale atrocities than were the “good” German Nazis.
“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, during demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. Trump then summarily fired Esper for refusing to aid and abet the commander-in-chief.
General Mark Milley reported that Trump called for law enforcement to “crack the skulls” of the protestors.
If Trump considers fellow Americans gathered in public dissent to be legitimate targets of his violent intent, imagine what vulnerable migrants stand to lose when they have no one to defend them on the day that Trump lets loose with the full brunt of his bellicose wrath.
What Hopeful People Do
In Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition, Jeff Biggers describes his relationship with the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin who during the 1980s had been pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, where Biggers was his young assistant.
During the Second World War, Coffin had “served as an intelligence officer across enemy lines” and in the 1950s as a CIA agent before obtaining a theological degree and receiving ordination as a Presbyterian minister.
Coffin led civil disobedience campaigns to protest the Vietnam War. And while chaplain at Yale University he was arrested three times in the summer of 1961 as a civil rights activist for participating in Freedom Rides through the South.
Biggers recalled the specific occasion in 1985 when he sat with Bill Coffin as his cellmate in a Washington, DC, jail. The two had been arrested at the South African embassy for their part in a sit-in protesting “American support of the brutal apartheid system of White supremacy and segregation” in South Africa.
Biggers said, “I realized that the African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela had spent more time in prison at Robbin Island, Pollsmoor Prison, and Victor Verster Prison than I had been on the planet.”[ii]
Years later, Biggers would relate this story to his twelve-year-old son who was concerned about whether there was any hope for him and the planet, given Donald Trump’s (first) withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords.
So there the two activists sat in the DC jail, when Biggers confessed to Coffin that “our protests seemed futile, even hopeless” because “the apartheid system seemed unshakeable.”
“Coffin smiled,” and then “told me what he had learned sitting in jail in Alabama.”
“’Hope resists,’ he said, shifting on the concrete bench. ‘Hopelessness adapts.’”[iii]
On Easter morning the year before, Coffin preached an Easter sermon to the Riverside congregation, in which he said that resistance is a “human imperative to the divine indicative.”[iv]
Coffin asked the Riverside congregation “to join hundreds of other religious institutions in resistance against Reagan’s policies to arrest and deport an estimated 250,000 refugees who had fled U.S.-backed and -funded civil wars in El Salvadore and Guatemala.” The “more than 600 being deported daily,” according to Coffin, faced “’likely torture and death.’”
During the sermon, “Coffin invoked the early American concept of ‘sanctuary.’” And, “in keeping with the spirit of the Statue of Liberty, Coffin said, the Refugee Act of 1980 required the U.S. to grant asylum or temporary refugee status to people unable to return to their country because of persecution. Fleeing an escalating war, Salvadorans and Guatemalans had earned such a status according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.”[v]
Moreover, as Coffin recalled his work as a World War II intelligence officer crossing enemy line, he said, “It behooves us North American Christians to realize now what the German churches learned too late some forty years ago; that it is not enough to resist with confessions; we must confess with resistance.”[vi]
The “Tenement” of Democracy
William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham was the British prime minister from 1766–1768. During a debate about the British parliament’s imposition of the 1765 Stamp Act upon the American colonies, Pitt said the following—he, Pitt, being no slouch of an orator.
“’I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to let themselves be made slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest!’—Then, speaking of the attempt to keep her down—‘In a just cause of quarrel you may crush America to atoms; but in this crying injustice’ (Stamp Act)—‘I am one who will lift up my hands against it—in such a cause even your success would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man; she would embrace the pillars of the state, and pull down the constitution along with her.’”[vii]
Pitt’s words of warning concerning a strongman and the constitution should be taken to heart.
Sir Edmund Burke, whom high-placed and well-financed “conservatives” in this country treat with kid gloves and utmost deference, responded to Lord Pitt with pith and kernel:
“Unlimited power corrupts the possessor, and this I know, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.”[viii]
William Pitt added another word from which Donald Trump should take no comfort.
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!”[ix]
Donald Trump had best take note. For the “tenement” of his reproach of democracy—Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, with its illustrious surrounding cast of Americans of all stripes and colors—sooner rather than later, in forthcoming elections, must reclaim the people’s house for the people, and depose the dictator from his throne.
The time has come for massive nonviolent resistance.
[i] Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (Viking: New York, 2001), 226.
[ii] Jeff Biggers, Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition (Berkley: Counterpoint, 2018), xii.
[iii] Biggers, xii. Italics added.
[iv] Biggers, 126.
[v] Biggers, 127.
[vi] Biggers, 127.
[vii] “Lord Chatham,” in Lord Brougham’s Historical Sketches of Statesmen in the Time of George III, First Series (1845) vol. 1, 37. https://archive.org/details/historicalsketch0001henr/page/36/mode/2up?q=cottage
[viii] “Lord Chatham,” 37.
[ix] “Lord Chatham,” 42. https://archive.org/details/historicalsketch0001henr/page/42/mode/2up?q=cottage