I hate to admit it, but my authorial ego was bruised by wading through the list of 381 books pulled from the Nimitz Library of the U. S. Naval Academy last week. It tallied the volumes expelled by order of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for committing the grave sins of advocating and documenting aspects of work for racial and gender justice, particularly its recent incarnation in programs lumped together as DEI.
I was bummed out because, after all, I’ve published four books on racial justice. They got several decent reviews, sold some thousands of copies, and have turned up in footnotes and bibliographies of much better-known tomes. This is a sign that at least a few serious people had taken note of them.
My books were forged from direct experience and much research on a time of wide-ranging and often violent struggle for racial justice. They covered Selma’s Bloody Sunday; the Poor Peoples Campaign; Black Power (“By any means necessary!”). Writing them, I considered each as documentation of radical challenges to an evil status quo. Surely at least one of them should have caught the sharp eye of a diligent censor.
But no.
None made the cut for the Naval Academy’s dishonor roll.
March 10 — how could I forget? How dare I fail to remember?
Nineteen years and four months ago, John Stephens and I began a blog site called freethecaptivesnow.org , as both a personal vigil and a community service, compiling and posting nightly updates of reports — or mostly the lack of reports — about the fate of four peaceworkers kidnapped in Iraq. They had been taken in Baghdad, and one of them, Tom Fox, was a Quaker and a friend of both John and me.
Marchers re-enacting in 2005 the first crossing of the Pettus Bridge 40 years earlier.
Below is a black & white news photo from late February, 1965. It turned up a few years back (hat tip to the sharp-eyed Lewis Lewis): it was taken on the steps of Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama when John Lewis (center-left, with a tie) announced the plan to march from Selma to Montgomery.
The goal of the march was winning voting rights for southern Blacks, after three generations of formal disfranchisement; but the plan was sparked by the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson. I’m at the far right, behind Andrew Young (who is also in a tie).
I had been in Selma since the beginning of the year, and the active phase of the campaign, as a rookie member of Dr. King’s staff. I had marched often, served some days in jail, and was learning a lot very fast.
That was then.
Forty-three years later, one sunny day in April 2018, I woke up again in Selma Alabama, once more prepared to go to jail.
21. 1994-1995 — In a 1994 statement to the NC Yearly Meeting Ministry and Counsel Committee, Willie wrote,
“It seems somehow odd to be on trial for heresy within the Society of Friends, when Quakerism itself was born amid charges of heresy. It is not surprising that, in Puritan England, a group that rejected creeds, depended on the guidance of the Spirit, believed in the Inner Light, taught the equality of all people, advocated a universal priesthood, and allowed for diversity of individual religious experience would be suspect. It seems almost bizarre now, however, to be put on trial for believing these very articles of faith on which the Society of Friends was founded and for which Fox and others suffered so much.”
Nevertheless, the “trial” dragged on. Still stalled over the demand for an antigay manifesto, as well as the matter of banishing Willie and the calls for a broader purge, desperate finding a way out of the impasse, NCYM leaders agreed to undertake a “Listening Project.” This would be a series of in-depth, non-directive interviews with Friends from each of its 80-plus meetings and churches, in search of enough common ground to recover civil, patient Quaker seeking.
The project took time and faced obstruction, opposition, even intimidation; nevertheless it seemed a temporary success. At least, many tempers had cooled enough by 1995 for NCYM to set aside the stalled 1992 minute (but the issue did not vanish). Much of the talk of division and expulsion seemed to subside (though a few churches did leave NCYM). Willie’s recording was left intact.
Willie finished a 1996 report on the experience on an optimistic note:
“[The Listening Project] played a key role in helping the yearly meeting avoid a serious division, drop the idea of disowning people over the issue of homosexuality, and begin the process of attempting to communicate.
Perhaps its most important contribution was that it served to bridge the gap between a complete lack of communication to the beginnings of dialogue. . . .”
Perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
22. 1995-2007 — For Willie and Agnes at least, their public, if impromptu “coming out” in 1993 as committed parents in an affirming family, may have closed many doors to them in NCYM, but it also marked a way opening into a much broader emerging community, namely that of openly LGBTQ Friends, friends of Friends, and family members. These made up a rainbow chorus of voices that, despite frequent setbacks, were becoming inexorably more visible.
In an address at the 1998 mid-winter gathering of the national lesbian-gay Friends network, Willie said,
“When homosexuality became a prominent issue in NC Yearly Meeting, Agnes and I took what was to become a very unpopular stand. There were times in the 1993 sessions when we stood virtually alone and people became very upset with us.
We’ve not only been disappointed and frustrated by the hostility of our fundamentalist Friends toward our positions on social issues; we have been equally disappointed and frustrated by the reluctance of liberal Friends to stand with us.
We were reflecting recently on the fact that so many liberal Friends have remained silent both during the social issues of the 1960s and 1970s and now during the gender issues of the 1990s.”
Yet Willie and Agnes found a renewed and deeper sense of ministry as they began to share and speak to the spiritual needs of LGBTQ Quakers. They helped to form Piedmont Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns (PFLGC). They also started a non-sectarian chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in Mt. Airy and another in Clemmons.
With all this, his pastoral work at Mt. Airy continued. He wrote gratefully that:
Mt. Airy Friends, Surry County, “Mayberry” North Carolina
“We are in a meeting that supports us. They don’t raise a hue and cry every time I appear on TV or do an interview for the newspaper. They have clearly given me not only their permission to carry out this ministry, but they have given me their blessing. . . .”
With this home support, the scope of their work kept growing:
Kathy: “Willie and Agnes partnered to minister to gay individuals and their families. They were surrogate parents to men and women whose biological parents had rejected them because of their sexual orientation. They attended Friends General Conference gatherings all over the US as they formed close relationships with Friends in the FLGC group.”
23. — In 2001, Willie retired from full-time ministry, but he and Agnes continued to participate in organizations that supported LGBTQ persons. Willie participated in “Gay Pride” events, even marching in “Gay Pride Parades.”
This closing period of broader ministry only ebbed in 2007, when Willie’s health began to give way to an advancing cancer, to which he at length succumbed in September 2013.
Their final round of wider work had brought much consolation to Willie and Agnes, especially after their hopes for reconciliation and progress within the yearly meeting they had served so long were dashed. The Listening Project’s “cooling off” proved to be only a temporary truce: at the 2014 sessions of NCYM-FUM, a year after Willie’s passing, the “urge to purge” burst out in its sessions again.
Now the demands went beyond a statement to a massive purge. Meeting and individuals who had opposed the 1992 statement or its underlying doctrines were called on to leave NCYM immediately.
Among the targets of this effort was Spring Meeting, which this writer attends. Spring had taken a public affirming position a few years earlier. We too were told we should either leave NCYM, or we would be expelled; words like “unsound” and “abomination” were directed at us.
Spring calmly but steadfastly stood its ground: we had done no wrong, violated no provision of Faith & Practice, and hoped any differences in NCYM could be patiently and civilly worked through.
A handful of the surviving meetings have formed small, loose associations; some others (e.g., Spring) continue as independents; many have simply withered and disappeared.
24– The saga of Willie and Agnes Frye remains both an inspiration for many (like this writer) and a solemn warning about the costs of pursuing authentic witness in turbulent times. Willie Frye, with much struggle, managed to keep up and complete his career of ministry through decades of racial strife, war, and continuing cultural conflict.
NCYM-FUM was once, in the early 1900s, one of the largest Quaker bodies in America. Since its founding, it had weathered the American Revolution, the Civil War, the tragedies of failed Reconstruction, deep economic depressions, a century-plus of Jim Crow, successive waves of KKK terror and many other trials. But it succumbed to the multiple-pandemics of homophobia, militarism, racism and fundamentalism after 320 years. (This sad tale is chronicled in detail in the book, “Murder at Quaker Lake.”)
But if there is hope here, it can be glimpsed in the life and witness of Willie and Agnes Frye as examples and precursors.
Such examples should be preserved, remembered and celebrate, in my view at least twice a year. Once could be around the date of a significant life event, which for Willie points to September, as Willie & Agnes Frye Month.
The other occasion would be any time those who are striving to follow examples like theirs, in the beleaguered Society of Friends or other faith communities, need encouragement and models.
Which in these days, is pretty often.
It’s been a century since this anti-Kan editorial was published. As an organization, the KKK has again largely faded from the North Carolina scene. But its “state of mind” and basic agenda are still very much present.
In the autumn of 2014, still settling into retirement in Durham, a question began nagging at me: was Barack Obama going to get shot in Selma Alabama the following March?
Now stay with me: was I just being more than normally paranoid?
The short answer is No. But what’s this got to do with Santa?
More on the latter anon. For the former, consider:
March 7, 2015, would be the 50th anniversary of the famous march for voting rights over the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, headed for the state capitol in Montgomery.
When that march was attacked by deputies and state troopers, images of the melee were flashed around the world as “Bloody Sunday.” I was there (and recount it in the memoir, Eating Dr. King’s Dinner). Even though my Bloody Sunday assignment was to march with the day’s second contingent — which didn’t happen because of the assault on the first — the experience left its marks on me as well. Continue reading Saving Obama With Santa, In Selma 2015;→
March 10 — how could I forget? How dare I fail to remember?
Yet Willie and Agnes found a renewed and deeper sense of ministry as they began to share and speak to the spiritual needs of LGBTQ Quakers. They helped to form Piedmont Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns (PFLGC). They also started a non-sectarian chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in Mt. Airy and another in Clemmons.
Nice thoughts, but no chance. The purge efforts became a struggle to the death, and the yearly meeting ultimately 
NCYM-FUM was once, in the early 1900s, one of the largest Quaker bodies in America. Since its founding, it had weathered the American Revolution, the Civil War, the tragedies of failed Reconstruction, deep economic depressions, a century-plus of Jim Crow, successive waves of KKK terror and many other trials. But it succumbed to the multiple-pandemics of homophobia, militarism, racism and fundamentalism after 320 years. (This sad tale is chronicled in detail in the book, “
