The Price of Peace in Metropolitan Richmond
The Rev. B. P. Campbell
Speech at Award as Peacemaker of the Year
Richmond Peace Education Center
May 17, 2013
I want to thank all of you with the Richmond Peace Education Center for honoring me with this award. I can honestly say that I have never seen myself as a Peacemaker, and it is challenging to me that others see me that way.
It is not that I don’t want to be. I believe deeply in peace. But for me it has been what Christians call “the peace that passes understanding;” or what we would call “inner peace.” — that certainty that there is something right and true, that God is there, that I am loved, that we are called, that all of us are in some way loved, and that we can live in hope; that we need not be ashamed, that we are forgiven, that you, each of you, is forgiven and beautiful.
Peace of this sort I have known, and I know more often every day. The reason I know it is powerful is that it has been a gift to me in some of the greatest times of trial in my life, and even now. So it is not logical. It is a gift.
I also believe that peace is a foretaste of what is intended for humanity – the thing to which we work – when truth and justice rule, when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and men shall beat their swords into plowshares, and we will not make war any more.
But for the time being, peace is a foretaste, an achievement, a desire, a motivation, a hope, a vision, a spirit that carries us and tells us the truth and gives us courage.
And above all, I think, it leads us to pay a price.
There is a price for peace.
And just so I don’t deal in abstractions, and we talk about what we really need to talk about, there is a Price for Peace in Metropolitan Richmond. There is a price for Bogus Peace – and there is a Price for Real Peace. And I am really anxious that we know the difference.
The difference between Bogus Peace and Real Peace
It was back in the time of Jeremiah the Hebrew prophet that this distinction was made clearly, more than 2600 years ago. Here’s the way Jeremiah said it about Jerusalem:
Take warning, O Jerusalem, or I shall turn from you in disgust, and make you a desolation, an uninhabited land….To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear? See, their ears are closed, they cannot listen. The word of the LORD is to them an object of scorn; they take no pleasure in it. But I am full of the wrath of the LORD; I am weary of holding it in. Pour it out on the children in the street, and on the gatherings of young men as well; …For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.” (Portions of Jer. 6:8-14)
What Jeremiah is saying is that you cannot have peace without justice – that human respect and proper citizenship are necessary for it – whether you believe that is divine law, natural law, or just good observation of human behavior. And he says that Jerusalem is coming apart at the seams because everybody – from entrepreneur to worker to beggar to preacher – has given up the quest for justice and gone to seek only his or her own wealth, no matter what that has to do with others.
Right here in this town, about 238 years ago, Patrick Henry took hold of Jeremiah’s words in urging the people to revolution against the British:
According to the received written version of his extemporaneous speech on Church Hill, the Hanover County orator said this:
“It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! … Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? … Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
We can cut right to the problem:
Following Patrick Henry’s majestic words at St. John’s Church, the Virginians did indeed join a revolution to bring freedom to this city and state. But they stopped the revolution in the middle.
The price of freedom for the white Virginians was the enslavement of the black Virginians. We simultaneously established a free republic for half the population and a totalitarian slave state for the other half.
25 years after Patrick Henry, Gabriel and his colleagues were hanged by the same Virginia patriots for believing his words. In the pocket of one of Gabriel’s lieutenants was a flag that said, and I quote, “Death or Liberty.”
So in our quest for a peace based on liberty and opportunity in this city, we are the heirs of a most painful and hypocritical history. I could tell you the history back to 1500 at the Falls of the James, but it would go on forever and you might not have any incentive to read my book, which is for sale over there.
The problem to which I refer is this: When we speak of the Price of Peace in Metropolitan Richmond we have to be clear about who must pay the price. And what I have to say tonight is this: It is time we paid the price ourselves for this glorious and wonderful achievement, and stopped trying to purchase peace by displacing the price onto others.
When you purchase peace at the cost of enslaving others, you are doing nothing but living a lie.
This lie has been our shame, our difficult journey, in metropolitan Richmond.
It is not necessary, I think, to go through the history at any great length tonight – only to suggest that we have a spiritual problem, and it is this problem I wish to address.
I believe our spiritual problem is the result of our virtue. We are the victims of the power of our ideals. We have hazarded great things – the greatest, perhaps – and we are trapped in the despair, dysfunction, and disillusionment caused by our own betrayal of these ideals.
You see, we claimed here, right in this place, that all human beings were created equal and that we should build a city, a state, a nation on that principle.
Right there even in that language, as you know, we had a big problem. Thomas Jefferson said more than he meant: With the 18th century meaning of the word “men,” he said that all human beings were created equal. But in his personal life, he was discriminating desperately between persons by color.
Five years later, in order to get soldiers into the Continental Army, Virginia authorities were promising white men that they would receive a bonus of $300 and a black enslaved man that they would own.
So we proclaimed freedom but practiced slavery. What happened to Patrick Henry’s poignant words? “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!”
What is clear is that Richmond’s collective depression did not begin with the defeat of the Confederacy and the burning of the city. Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous American journalist and landscape architect of the nineteenth century, visited a number of American cities, and came twice to Richmond. In 1860, in his book entitled A Journey in the Back Country, he published this haunting evaluation of what he saw:
Richmond… somewhat surprised me by its substance, show, and gardens…. [It] is a metropolis, having some substantial qualities, having a history, and something prepared for a future as well. Compared with northern towns of the same population, there is much that is quaint, [and] provincial…. It is only the mills and warehouses, a few shops and a few private residences and hotels, that show real enterprise or real and permanent wealth…. What a failure there has been in the promises of the past! That, at last, is what impresses one most in Richmond…. [It] is plainly the metropolis of Virginia, of a people who have been dragged along in the grand march of the rest of the world, but who have had, for a long time and yet have, a disposition within themselves only to step backward.
Unfortunately, white Virginians were unable to end the slave system. It took the death of hundreds of thousands of men, and the maiming of more than a million others; it took the burning of our city and the triumph of a victorious Union army, to end slavery in Virginia. The only time the 13th Amendment was passed in the House of Delegates at the Capitol of Virginia was under the leadership of Tommy Lee Jones in the recent filming of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln in that hall.
Again we proclaimed freedom, lionized Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe, and practiced a cynical form of discrimination called racial segregation. The hypocrisy to which we had become accustomed drained our spirit.
Then, after the Second World War, the Supreme Court of the United States and the United States Congress again gave us a chance to purify our consciences and live what we believed. They gave us the integration of schools, the integration of public facilities, the Voting Rights Act, and fair housing legislation.
But our leaders turned down the opportunity. Again we proclaimed that Liberty for us meant oppression for others. The Commonwealth of Virginia’s entire political apparatus dedicated itself to “Massive Resistance” against racial equality in this state. That fight was not over in the courts until 1977, and by that time the General Assembly had established permanently a new barrier to our common life and ideals. The rigid division in finance, politics, and educational services of the four jurisdictions which actually make up the city of Richmond: Richmond, Henrico, Hanover, and Chesterfield. We are one city, but we are at war with one another. Each of us is desperately trying to purchase liberty at the cost of the other’s bondage. No matter what peace may occur on the surface, we have structured ourselves as enemies, stealing businesses, fighting over rich people, displacing poor people, legislating against one another.
It is a sad business.
And the saddest thing is that we don’t believe we can do anything about it.
I believe we are the victims of our own despair, sickened by our structured hypocrisy, refugees from the Cathedrals of Liberty. We sprawl across the landscape, dissipating what remains of our common wealth, increasingly afraid of one another.
If this were 1775, and we felt this way, it wouldn’t matter what Patrick Henry said. We would have given up. We would still be a British Colony today. ENOUGH!
It is past time to right ourselves. It is a new day, and we can tell the truth. No people can live without ideals, and we cannot live effective and joyful lives without our purpose and the hope of common victory.
The price of peace in metropolitan Richmond is that we must knit ourselves together. We need one another, of course for what we can give one another and what we can do together. Today we are maintaining eight identical governments for the same number of people that Fairfax County has. It costs us nearly twice as many dollars per person. It also costs the state nearly twice as much – and they will not be paying that forever.
We cannot compete with other cities in our region, because we are so divided, and squandering our wealth, and because we have no public transportation. Everybody knows it all over this country. We are 92nd among the nation’s 100 largest cities in access to jobs by public transportation. Only 25% of our jobs are accessible by public transportation. The minimum cost of a car per year is $3,000. The average cost is $7,000. Our lack of transportation guarantees unemployment, — just as we are guaranteeing educational inequality by concentrating all of our most distressed school children in one system, and then underfunding it both at the state and local level.
Our ideals are so out of touch with our reality, — it is no wonder we feel like it is impossible to do anything constructive. The price of peace in metropolitan Richmond is that we must knit ourselves together, whatever the cost, — so long as we are not simply making others pay it one more time. The depth of our despair is the measure of our potential victory.
It’s a moral and a spiritual problem. We have to do something right, and we have to show ourselves we can do something right, — not because the Yankees make us do it, not because the black people or the white people make us do it, not because county or city people make us do it, but because it is right, because we are Virginians and believe in our ideals, no matter how tarnished; because we know we need one another, and it is not just rhetoric; and because our God, and the true gods of all the nations demand it.
Each of us has his or her own vocation in this business of knitting us together, but I want to close tonight by suggesting at least one which we may have in common.
Let’s build a public transportation system for Metropolitan Richmond. The Brookings Institution has given us the data – Metropolitan Richmond is in the bottom 10 % of the nation’s cities in public transportation. We don’t have a system. It runs only in the central jurisdiction, with a few ineffective lines in Henrico. The Richmond Regional Planning District Commission has done data specifically for Richmond. And here’s what they found: If we were to put Bus Rapid Transit simply on Metropolitan Richmond’s four major highways going all the way through the center from beltway to beltway, — on routes 1, 250, 60, and 360, — we would immediately double the number of jobs accessible by public transportation. Bus Rapid Transit is a system that speeds up transportation – it runs every 10-15 minutes for 16-20 hours a day. It’s like a subway on the surface. If we then do the simple connectors to the BRT lines – along Parham, along Brook or Laburnum, along Courthouse Road, — connectors that already exist or are obvious, between 75% and 80% of our jobs will be accessible, not to mention recreation, education, retail, and tourism. Then we will be among the top 10% of American cities.
Just like that. We can pay for it with one-half cent on the local sales tax, a privilege the General Assembly just gave to Northern Virginia and Tidewater, and we can run it with a regional authority, like the RMA.
Why not?
Ask yourself “Why not?” and you will identify the spiritual battle we are in. We have a Sense of Impossibility which is not rational. If we were a single city we would have done this 20 years ago. If we were in touch with our own ideals, there would be no question. If we looked at our competitive economic situation we would do it right away. If we calculated what is needed for our older citizens throughout the suburbs and cities we wouldn’t wait. If we saw what is needed for placement of jobs and housing and the need for cost-savings, we’d hurry to do it. If we were proud of ourselves and thought we were as good as Denver or Charlotte we wouldn’t hesitate.
And what if? What if we were able to do this one thing? It is a major common activity that affects our common life without requiring the merging of our jurisdictions. What if we were able to do one thing together, one thing right, because we believed in it, because it made sense, because it was prophetic, because it went in the right direction, and because we were tired of purchasing our own peace at the cost of other’s oppression?
Then who knows? Who knows what we might be able to do?
“It is wrong to shout Peace, Peace, when there is no peace. The war is actually begun! … Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? … Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” And who is it who is in chains? Is it not we ourselves, enchained by our own shame at failing our ideals?
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to be friends with anyone who wants to be free, no matter what jurisdiction they live in. And I believe, if we encourage one another, and if we don’t give up, and if we listen to the spirit, if we base our confidence on the peace that God gives, the peace that is in our hearts — I believe there are enough of us to make the difference that the best of our ancestors have been praying that finally we would be able to make – to begin to knit ourselves together as one community, one metropolitan city, one people. It’s no joke. Our very life, our purpose, our being, and the lives, purpose and being of our children, and of our brothers and sisters throughout this metropolitan area, depend on it.
The Price of Peace in Metropolitan Richmond today is renouncing our history of failure and selling one another on a complete, comprehensive and effective Public Transportation system. That’s all. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The Rev. B. P. Campbell
