In Defense of Vandalism

Father Robert Drinan, SJ, the contentious priest and congressman, once wrote an article explaining to astonished mothers and fathers around the country that it was perfectly OK…indeed even important….to bring your children (including infants) onto the picket lines of the civil rights and peace movements. I remember reading a mimeographed copy of the article in the National CORE office and thinking how the tactics of non-violent protest sometimes require us to do things that cut directly against the grain of our deepest feelings and beliefs.

Forty four years later I was at a dinner party when I got into a argument with my hostess …..a fierce and distinguished woman…..along a similar line. This time the subject was vandalism and its uses, both civil and criminal.

What had happened was this. A mutual friend of ours, a young black entrepreneur, had been driving along a street in nearby town when he spotted a lawn jockey, a black-faced lawn jockey on the lawn of a very handsome house with a pillared porch. He screeched to a stop, jumped out of his car, lifted the little statue into his car trunk and took it to the nearest river where he dumped it in four feet of water. I was telling my hostess this story and applauding the jockey-dunking when she sang out,

“Vandalism!”

I must quickly explain that my hostess got the best of me in the ensuing argument….she always does…I have long since lost my debating skills and when I began to explain the virtues of what we called “non violent direct action” and how I had myself committed a variety of deliberate misdemeanors back in the CORE days, she countered with a withering case for domestic law and order pointing out that lawn jockeys guard the entrance of the “21” Club in New York City.

“Why,” she said, “Vernon Jordan walks right past them all the time!”

Well I hope you can sympathize with my behavior at the time….I didn’t laugh….I was dumbfounded….I went blank. The subject changed. Of course, ten minutes later I was on my way home marshalling the arguments that she would never hear (unless she reads this) including a defense of brother Jordan who, when he lunches at “21,” passes thirty three white-faced lawn jockeys. I know Vernon Jordan slightly…he is a remarkable and honorable man, he was instrumental in getting my friend James Farmer the Medal of Freedom….a once-singular honor that the current administration seems to pass out like political popcorn.

But I stray.

Lawn jockeys, as you probably know, are particularly onerous leftovers of the ante-bellum south, usually short plaster statuettes of a black jockey dressed in the plantation colors and holding his hand with a hitching ring humbly in front of his chest. They were stationed on the lawn in front of the main house to accommodate Missee Ann’s guests as they arrived at the party.

The black lawn jockeys have pretty much disappeared (I did see one at a suburban antique store the other day) but they hold forth in memory as despicable symbols of our slave-stunted past.

So…here’s my unsung argument:

I wish I’d told my hostess that many similar acts of protest-by-vandalism have brightened our American past….it is even possible that some of her direct ancestors were among the Sons of Liberty that tossed 342 chests of tea off three ships in Boston harbor on the night of December 16, 1773.

And then, of course, there were all the “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs that we dismantled in the Sixties.

I would have admitted that tea-dumping, jockey-dunking and sign-breaking push the envelope of “non violence” but I also would have argued that we didn’t hurt anybody and that the folks I knew in the civil rights movement were prepared to take the legal consequences of breaking the peace. Many did.

Some even took the ultimate consequence.

I think, and I think Father Drinan would have agreed, that we should strike our own little local Medal of Freedom for my friend the lawn jockey dunker.

ol val







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