All is Well

In 1972, a time of political and personal crisis, Julius Lester returned to the South, to his roots, and to the legacy his slave great-grandparents had left him:

I had to go back home, for it was in the South that I learned something of virtue from the old ones who never knew a day of ease, who accepted the indignities and atrocities inflicted upon them, but were never resigned to them. That was crucial, for they knew that ‘to wait upon the Lord’ was not to sit on the porch and rock passively. ‘To wait’ also means to serve, and serving God means refusing to hate the perpetrators of evil, because to hate the evildoers is to wait upon them. The old ones accepted their living hell, but did not serve it and were redeemed by their suffering.

All Is Well is a significant personal, spiritual, and political autobiography. It is not a comfortable book, because Julius Lester has led an uncomfortable life. It is a book graced by integrity and faithfulness, the story of a black man who is an artist, a revolutionary, and a critic. It is the story of how that man remains faithful to an adolescent call to be a monk, and the discovery, for Julius Lester, that his monastery is the world. More and more, he is in the world, but not of it.

I have come to consider Julius Lester one of the finer articulators of a theology and an ethic of nonviolence, a nonviolence he has come to, not through ethereal speculation, but through a commitment to violent revolution, and a later rejection of what he saw happen to himself and others as a result of that commitment. His is a commitment, not to a nonviolence of tactic, but to a nonviolence deeply informed by his contemplative vision.

Julius Lester was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1939 and grew up in Kansas City and Nashville, Tennessee. Son of a minister, a child of the black middle class, Lester enjoyed a somewhat intellectual adolescence. A college student at Fisk University in Nashville, he studied with the poet Robert Hayden, developing and widening his reading and his interest in literature and classical music. He was a student at Fisk when the sit-ins began in 1960, and, though moved to participate marginally in that movement, he remained some what apart from it. He argued that in his vocation as an artist, his business was not to change society, but to create masterpieces. In his imaginings of that time, he saw himself as “a black James Joyce.”

Much of All Is Well is devoted to working out Lester’s changing understanding of his role as artist. He mourns the many years he spent observing life, rather than participating in it, so that the artist might better portray reality.

Following a period at the Highlander Center, Lester moved to New York, where he began to associate with organizers from the newly emerging Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1964. Joining them, his work was to travel through the South as photographer, folk song archivist, and singer. In his personalized history of the sixties, Search for a New Land, he writes of that time:

Officially, I came to Mississippi to sing in Freedom Schools, at mass meetings, and to hold workshops on black music. Unofficially, though, I came to learn and to be born again. I came to see my family’s beginning in this country...

I want to stand in [a] road and hear field hollers and work songs change into blues. I have a collective past, a past embracing the history of this country and the history of a people. My present was shaped by it. Right now, my past and my present are a sketch in chiaroscuro; I was a slave and now I am free. But chiaroscuro omits the gradations, the modulations from one key to another, the transition from slave to freedman.

Lester continued to work as photographer and singer, and SNCC developed a more militant, revolutionary stance as the history of the sixties unfolded. In 1967, Lester traveled to North Vietnam as one of SNCC’s representatives to the investigation team for the Russell War Crimes Tribunal; he went to the Tribunal in Stockholm: he traveled to Cuba with Stokely Carmichael and spent time with Fidel Castro.

In 1968, when SNCC was no longer viable as an organization, Lester began writing a weekly column of political analysis in The Guardian. A selection of columns from that period are collected in Revolutionary Notes (Grove Press), a forceful critique of racism, poverty, imperialism, and the Left.

For three years Lester wrote, spoke, and did radio shows, continuing to be, as he later wrote, “a dummy for a revolutionary ventriloquist, an actor in a bad play.” He was caught in a public posture, that of black revolutionary; yet he mourned the fact that people assumed he was only that, that people did not see the totality of his being. All Is Well is partially an attempt to share the other side of those years.

Lester tried at all times to inject a spiritual base into a political movement, as is evident in Revolutionary Notes:

The revolutionary knows that to change the institutions, he must change himself. He and his comrades must become new men, for it is from new men that the new institutions will come which, in turn, will create the new society.

It is difficult to be a revolutionary, for to be a revolutionary means to believe in the innate goodness of man, to know that man in this environment has been programmed into nonman. Our job is to change the environment so that man can be man...

By the spring of 1969, Lester had despaired of that political movement. “When friendships cannot withstand political and personal differences, there can be no significant change. The revolution was supposed to carry the embryo of the new society, new ways of being. The embryo had calcified in our wombs.” Out of that disillusionment, Lester wrote Search for a New Land, a poetic and deeply personal history of the sixties, which contains some of his most moving writing.

We are victims, all of us now making our way through the wilderness. We are victims before we were born and sometimes our hatred of what was done to us threatens to destroy all that we want to be, all that we can be. If we hate the past more than we love the future, we will succeed in bringing the past into the future and those who come afterward will find our bones in the desert sand...

We aren’t what we know we can be, but we must not let despair immobilize us. More than anything, perhaps, the revolutionary needs faith, the faith of the Old Testament prophets, the faith of Meister Eckhart and the desert mystics...

There is no human endeavor more difficult than the search for the New Land. Well, we shall try. We may not succeed, but we must do what we can.

Our humanity demands it of us.

Lester continued to write perceptive works on social change, art, music, poetry, and the Left. Many of those works are included in All Is Well, and it was a prolific period: essays on Martin Luther King, Jimi Hendrix, and the trial of the Chicago Eight, the Black Panther Party. In 1971, he was asked to review the posthumously published work by Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action.

In 1969, Lester had written in his journal: “. . . how could I cease my revolutionary role-playing without becoming an embittered and disillusioned ex-radical, cursing the god which had failed me? How did one continue to believe, when the icon lay at one’s feet like shattered glass from a wrecked car?”

It was that renewed encounter with Thomas Merton, together with his adolescent longing to be a monk, that led Lester from despair to a radical, spiritual hope. “It seems now that Thomas Merton has always been there, standing over my life like the statue of St. Joseph which sits on the hill at the entrance to the Abbey of Gethsemani.”

In the review of Merton’s book, Lester wrote, “He did not believe that the cenobitic life was the only way. It was merely his, and it afforded him certain answers to the personal and social problems that each of us must address.”

Since 1971, in his articles (most honestly in his work for Katallagete, to which he is a contributing editor) and speeches, he has sought to share those answers of Merton in his unique understanding of our times.

Lester presently teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He reflected on his own generation, the silent generation of the fifties, and the generation he teaches, the silent generation of the seventies:

I do not have an adequate answer to the nothingness which circles like buzzards over their souls. I can only offer myself to them and hope that my life says that there is an alternative, that one believes in the Good whether or not one can see it, because only to the extent that we exemplify the Good are we human. That is what the sixties were about...For an instant, we experienced the Good and tried to make it real, given who we were. Beneath the rhetoric, the anger, and the sometimes madness, we knew what it meant to be human, though the knowing was smaller than a snowflake. It was enough, however, to transform many of us.

Seven Days, March, 1975

The posture of individuals committed to nonviolence is one of freedom: control over their own lives, and a commitment to deeper truths than popular rhetoric. The journey of Julius Lester demonstrates again and again the force of that power. His insights into what he once believed and taught are illuminating in this regard:

To call myself black was to do nothing more than to modify a definition imposed on me by centuries of Western history. If one knew himself as nothing more than black, he was simply inverted nigger, Negro and colored, not transforming himself, but continuing to live by someone else’s description of his reality. It was active participation in one’s own objectification...redefining ourselves, as blacks, we automatically redefined and imposed racial definitions on the rest of humanity. Murder is the act of defining another as separate from myself.

The latter statement is one of the central beliefs of nonviolence: one can only begin to violate another when that other is seen as intrinsically different, less than human, and therefore cap able of being violated. One need only reflect on the staggering amount of violence done to “others” in this world (black, woman, Jew, prisoner, etc., etc.) to make the radical freedom of that statement apparent.

In his reflections on the historical mission of blacks, Lester touches the essential questions of ends and means:

We were outsiders, living beyond the edge of the society and therefore able to see its sickness and defects. Inherent in being a victim is a living hindsight, because the victim is the embodiment of the society’s crimes. The victim is, therefore, the only one who can cut the way to salvation, but only if he accepts the existential pain of refusing to become an executioner. When the victim becomes an insider, he ceases to become a victim, and becomes what he previously condemned.

Julius Lester remains an outsider: not only as a black man, but as a contemplative, for surely there is none more marginal in our society than the monk. The questions we endlessly debate of ends and means, of effectiveness, of “winning,” take on new dimensions when seen with his contemplative vision. At a conference of people involved in religion and social justice, he said:

...The meaning of life is not to be found in the effect we have upon the world... We are called upon to live our lives and be instruments of God. That should be enough. It isn’t, because we cannot accept that we are not God. Only He can change the world. . .. Christians want Jesus for President. But Christianity is supposed to be an alternative to Caesar, and so intent in its virtue that Caesar will not be able to withstand the intensity of its light. Instead, Christianity has become a wing of Caesar’s Bureau of Propaganda.

In 1973, Julius Lester spent five days at Gethsemani, a deeply moving and healing visit for him. Upon leaving the monastery, he wrote these words, with which he ends the book:

I am eager to leave, to go into the world and, more and more, not be of it. I cannot save the world; all I can do is say Lord, here I am. Use me. To submit one s life to that Divine Will is not to find peace, but to struggle and suffer. God does not provide answers because there are no questions…

It is time to go back to my students, my radio show, to blacks who hate me because I love, the bills, and all the rest. It will be enough if I become so real that I am ordinary, like prairie sagebrush. And maybe, just maybe, God will set me ablaze.

If He does not, it is of no moment. All is well.

Julius Lester refuses to be defined by any of society’s expectations of him, yet I write this essay “defining” him as an articulator of nonviolence, in Revolutionary Notes Lester wrote, “I am more concerned that I always write with honesty rather than consistency. To change one’s mind is a sign of weakness only to one who equates consistency with strength.” To read Julius Lester is to see that honesty, but it is also to be challenged in the facile assumptions we make regarding our own beliefs, values and actions.

Our society is so bankrupt spiritually and politically, that the grace of Julius Lester’s life might not be seen and heard against the noise of the rhetoric. There is an obligation to share his story because I believe in nonviolence and am filled with hope when others come to that belief. It is an obligation because there are too few people of integrity in our world, and we must honor those courageous enough and caring enough to share their struggles with us.

When this article appeared, Rachelle Linner was a founding member of the Community for Creative Nonviolence and on the editorial board of Gamaliel.