Juneteenth, Ida Wells, and Adelaide Case

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

DFMS Noonday Prayer via Zoom 

Adelaide Case, June 19, 2020

May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

On the recommendation of her fourth grade teacher, we got Katherine a book called “The book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience.” It was created by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. It is stories of women from all around the world who have been gutsy and done remarkable things. It arrived yesterday. I was looking at last night. Katherine looked over my shoulder and said, “Will you read about Ida B. Wells, she’s a favorite?” And so I did. I read about Ida’s refusal to give into the organizers desire for a segregated Women’s March in 1913. I read about her work as a journalist to tell the stories of the lynchings of friends and strangers. Of her work to help found the NAACP. Of her efforts to ensure that the voices of women and of black people were heard. 

I guarantee that when I was nine years old I did not know who Ida B. Wells was. It gives me great hope that Katherine already did and wanted to learn more. She is growing up with a more accurate and full understanding of our complicated American history. I had childhood books about women who did great things, but they were largely or exclusively about white women. Ida wasn’t there. 

I have been thinking about that contrast of Katherine’s and my childhood books on this day, this day that is Juneteenth and a day we honor Adelaide Case, the first woman to teach at an Episcopal Seminary. It is a day we celebrate the end of chattel slavery in the United States. We celebrate that the good news of the emancipation proclamation finally reached the state of Texas. And it is a day we honor the importance of education in our tradition. 

But these two celebrations also highlight the failures and shortcomings of our institutional system. Here we are 155 years after the end of the Civil War, after the end of slavery was finally realized in all the States, and the vision of equality that was celebrated on that day has not been realized. Ida Wells marched in 1913, over 100 years ago for women’s equality. It took seven more years for women to get the vote, and even longer, decades in some places, for women of color to get the right to vote. And we know that getting the right vote and actually being able to exercise that right are not the same thing. To this day, 100 years after women got the right to vote, there are still problems with voter suppression, often based on race or age. Adelaide Case became a seminary professor in 1941, almost 80 years ago. And if you look at the current landscape of theological education, the faculty is still overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white. The dreams of Juneteenth, the dreams of Ida Wells, the dreams of Adelaide Case, have not been realized. We still have work to do - we who hold positions of power and privilege have work to do. We who are white have our own internal work to do. Our own education, our own transformation, our own personal unlearning of the structures of white supremacy. AND we have work to do as leaders and those who sit at the tables of power to change our systems and our structures. 

I have hope for the future, because I am watching my children grow up with a different mindset. I have hope because they are learning things now that I didn’t learn until I was an adult. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. often reminded the world that the arc of history bends toward justice. On this historic day, when we see how much work there is still to do, 155 years later, that bend can seem very slow indeed. But then I look at my children, and I think that it is possible for that arc to bend further, and faster, because the generations coming up behind us are strong, resilient, and motivated. They are going to push us, and inspire us all, into a more just and more beautiful future. AMEN.