“I thought about the people of St. Lawrence…”

On Dec.7, 2001 NPR’s This American Life broadcast Lanier Phillips’s story. You can go to the site and, using the “search this site” function, find lanier. You’ll get a short synopsis of the broadcast along with an audio link, which is well worth taking the time to listen to: use the fast-forward button to jump to Lanier Phillips’s story, which is about 30 minutes into the broadcast. Phillips is the only African-American survivor of the destroyer USS Truxton, which during a blizzard on Feb. 18, 1942 crashed into 100-metre (300 foot) high cliffs off the coast of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. Waves were 25 metres (75 feet) high and the ship literally broke in half. I missed the 2001 broadcast, but my local paper ran his story, which he presented last Wednesday (Feb. 18, 2004) at the CFB Esquimalt’s Pacific Fleet Club. Phillips was speaking in Esquimalt at the Canadian Navy club in honour of Black History Awareness month and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which takes place on March 21. The article just struck me at a visceral level. Lanier Phillips was the grandson of slaves, born in Georgia on March 14, 1923. He grew up in a racist society run by the Klan. His future was limited to sharecropper, shoeshine boy, drone. He joined the navy in the hope of having a better life, but discovered that here, too, segregation was the determining force: African-Americans could be mess boys and serve white officers, but their future was limited because the fighting forces were as racially segregated as the rest of society. If you take the time to listen to the NPR broadcast, you’re in for a riveting history lesson. Anyway, off to Newfoundland. When the Truxton broke up, five African Americans clung to the ship’s wreckage, afraid to try to get ashore for fear of being lynched or hurt because of their skin colour. Phillips was the only one who took the chance, the other four died at sea rather than risk being lynched on land. He dove into the icy water, experienced a jolt of pain, made it to shore, and passed out. “I thought at least I’ll die fighting” by trying to get to shore, Phillips (now nearly 81) said. I’ll quote from the Victoria News article:

Once he reached the land, he decided that he might as well lay down and die. But it was then that a huge crowd from St. Lawrence came down to the shore, Phillips said.
What happened next completely changed Phillips’ outlook on life.
“I was looking at this man and his white face. I thought, here is a white man who wants to save my life,” he said.

Phillips was aided by the townspeople who had descended on the beach to rescue the survivors — nearly 300 died and just under 200 survived from the wreckage of two ships, the USS Truxton and the USS Pollux. He passed out again and woke up in a room surrounded by a group of white women who were bathing him — many of the rescued sailors had jumped into cold ocean waters covered with a layer of heavy black bunker C oil, which then coated the men. All were in need of cleaning. Phillips noted that if he had woken up in Georgia, naked and surrounded by white women, he would have been lynched (and the women branded and run out of town). At this point the Newfie joke aspect enters the story: one of the women helping with the rescue had never before seen an African and was puzzled that the crude oil seemed to have soaked his skin to the point of colouring it. She was determined to scrub it off, and Phillips had to tell her that, no m’am, that’s the colour of my skin. She carried on, undeterred, but at the end of the day Phillips went home to her house (if I heard the NPR interview correctly) and was disoriented when he found himself sitting at the family table, using the same china cups and plates that the family used, and was dazed (and appalled) to find himself in one of the family beds, looked after by the lady of house who didn’t seem to be afraid of being in the same room with him. He said he didn’t sleep all night, it terrified him. The next day he was given a coat and hat belonging to one of the men of the family, and he went out to inspect the scene. A photographer was taking pictures, and she insisted that he join the group of four or five white sailors she was photographing. This, too, struck Phillips as downright incomprehensible. He was being treated like a regular human being, and it completely discombobulated his world. In a good way. Back in Georgia and Florida, and still in Navy uniform, his experience became “normal” again, but it never again seemed normal to Phillips after his experiences in St. Lawrence. Once, for example, on his way to a Navy base, he stopped at a prison for German and Italian POWs, and was nearly killed by a white American officer for daring to enter the prisoners’ all-white canteen. He had wanted to enter to ask where a “coloured” gentleman could get a meal. That sort of racism was “normal,” but Phillips kept repeating, “I thought about the people of St. Lawrence” who had treated him as a normal human being instead of a sub-human. He eventually became a civil rights activist: “They taught me that I was a human being,” he said, as opposed to all the racist teaching his white “superiors” had received at home and in society. It’s all a matter of what you’re taught, in other words. A news site article points out that “The kindness of the people of St. Lawrence, the total color-blindness of the town, led young Lanier Philips [sic] to question what he’d always believed about himself.” And this business of what you believe about yourself is key to building the internal parameters for how you allow yourself to function in community. Googling Lanier Phillips I came across a couple of Christian sites that refer to Phillips’s story. In fact, one is a sermon for Ash Wednesday (which is tomorrow, as today is Fat Tuesday) — Feb. 18, 1942 was Ash Wednesday? The 2002 sermon is called The Heart of the Matter:

They rescued him from the freezing ocean and bathed him and clothed him and fed him and gave him a bed in one of their homes and checked on him throughout the night. That experience gave Lanier Phillips a new vision of how people with different skin colors could be neighbors together. That experience gave Lanier Phillips a vision of what Martin Luther King Jr. would later call the “beloved community,” in which every person would be honored as a child of God and judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. On Ash Wednesday in 1942, the people of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland made their own contribution to the increase of the love of God and neighbor in the world, as they became neighbor to Lanier Phillips.

With that in mind, a final look at a website from the Downtown United Presbyterian Church in Rochester, NY, dated Jan.13, 2002, a church that goes out of its way to welcome gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered people. Lisa Larges, DUPC’s Regional Partnership Co-ordinator, used the NPR broadcast to teach a lesson in recognising the humanity of GLBT people:

“It is not too much of a stretch to say that transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay people remember the Downtown United Presbyterian Church as Lanier Phillips remembers St. Lawrence. In the history of our movement for justice, countless women and men and many congregations large and small have contributed significantly to our this work of bringing the realm of God closer. (…)
“What Jesus knew after meeting John was the sweet, holy taste of grace. Once that divine truth is in you, you cannot go back. You cannot go back to that place when you did not know. There is an inextricable link between divine grace and human dignity.
“Suddenly we are awakened to the burden of grace. Isn’t it simpler, far less frustrating, and less exhausting, not to know of an injustice than to insist on justice in a system that refuses to yield it. . . . “Amendment after overture after debate after dialog, we run head long into that wall of our denomination’s stubborn and willful resistance to God’s wildly inclusive love. Preaching that the realm of God is at hand, Jesus preserved a special ire for those who willfully refused even to hear of it. ‘Having ears, do you not hear?’ he would say.”

…insist on justice in a system that refuses to yield it, recognise God’s wildly inclusive love, and a vision in which every person would be honored as a child of God and judged not by the color of their skin […or the orientation of their sexuality…], but by the content of their character: what interesting and useful ideas today, in the wake of fundamentalist panic over marriage licenses issued to people of different sexual orientation and the Bush Administration’s outrageous attempt to amend the Constitution to isolate and define and exclude an entire population of citizens on the basis of sexual orientation.