Confronting Ed King

Helms Deep in Jackson Mississippi

My friend Quinby is from California. That’s not her real name, but then I often call people things that aren’t their real names—ask my friend Gabby. When I explained to her why it’s a big deal whether I would or would not attend the Mississippi Pride Festival in Jackson in alliance with the people I love who have been treated unkindly by Mississippi because of who they loved, Quinby said, “No offense, but I really hate the Bible Belt.”

That you can define the South by a sense of false religiosity is something I’ve struggled with for quite a while. When I respond that there are true Christians here, that they’re not all the people you’ve read about, they generally counter with “your God’s not real.” which I can’t refute with facts, only faith, and that’s often not enough.

For every story about horrible false Christians who live here, I counter with stories about Ed King, who risked his life on the premise that Jesus would love people equally regardless of their race, and he carried a great scar that ran down from his eye to his jaw to prove it. I can’t prove that Jesus exists, but I can easily prove that Ed King does.

There came a time when a great mass of out-of-state abortion protestors were coming to Jackson to lay siege to the South Jackson abortion clinic and shut it down. If you’ve ever seen photos of these events, it absolutely was a siege. It resembled the Battle of Helms Deep in The Two Towers, but no Gandalf or Rohirim were coming to our rescue.

Some women’s rights groups were planning an organized defense of the clinic, including one woman I was doing my best to know better. Looking back at photos of this Mississippi and Greek creature, I remember how beautiful she was, but I now notice how enormous her hair was.

We were grossly outnumbered, and the stories I heard about the men coming to Mississippi disturbed me. There had been nail bombs, firebombs, and pipe bombs left at abortion clinics. This was not a trivial matter. I hadn’t yet developed strong feelings one way or the other about abortion, but I had VERY strong feelings about Yankee foreigners coming to Mississippi to menace our women.

When my raven-haired friend invited me to have a drink at Scrooges, where she very politely asked for my aid, I responded in the only way I knew how. “Let this be the hour when we draw swords together. Fell deeds awake. Now for wrath, now for ruin, and the red dawn. Forth, Eorlingas!”

Her group wanted to rent the Heritage Room at Millsaps College to hold clinic defense classes one Saturday. I agreed to help run interference with the college administration and help raise the two-hundred-dollar room rental fee.

Having just graduated from Millsaps, I got a call at work from Stuart Good, the Dean of Students and my dear friend of many adventures. He said that a higher-up in the Mississippi Methodist Church was upset that Millsaps was renting a room to abortion rights activists, and he would like me to come to a meeting at his office to help smooth the waters. I would have gladly fought a jaguar for him, so I agreed.

When I got there, the head of Millsaps Security, Stuart Good, Reverand Ed King, and my Greek friend were sitting in Stuart's office. Even though I was a few minutes late, I assumed that the yet unnamed “higher-up” in the United Methodist Church had yet to arrive. I also assumed that Ed King was there to represent the faith interests of Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church and Millsaps College, even though I was expecting to see either Don Fortenberry or TW Lewis in that capacity.

I turned down a free cup of coffee when Dean Good asked. With that out of the way, he said, “Now that we’re all here, may we begin.” I thought to myself, “Oh, no.” Ed King was the unnamed higher-up in the Methodist Church.

I was prepared to do a lot of things, but I was not prepared to square off with Ed King over a moral and religious issue. My position on abortion, then and now, is that I can’t quite grok the entirety of the moral issue, but that it shouldn’t matter because I am a man, and this is an issue that should be decided between the women of Mississippi and their creator.

Some people think that’s a cowardly position. Even though I can’t gestate a child, I once was one, so that gives me purview on the issue, they say. Ed King had risked his own life on the proposition that all lives were precious and loved, and he was now extending that Christian protection to the people not yet born. I was in very deep water and clearly outmatched.

“Look,” I said. “You and Dean Good, Cheif Miller and I, we’re all men, and this is a group of women wanting to rent space from Millsaps to help defend what they sincerely believe is their rights. If we men were to make a decision to block that from these women, I just feel like we’d be judged for that. I don’t want this to go down as a fight between Methodist men and Methodist women.”

I’m sure some of the great hams of muscle hanging on my body were twitching in terror. I was standing up to a man whose moral strength terrified me on a moral issue. I was avoiding taking a stance on this issue so that people with more at stake in the conflict could make their stance count more than mine. I feel like that’s pretty convoluted logic to a fairly straightforward moral issue, but I feel like it’s right, at least right for men. It’s probably not fair for women to bear the weight of this moral decision alone, but as their lives hang in the balance, I don’t know a better option.

Ed King is not the kind of man to be quailed in any argument about Mississippi Methodist Issues or Millsaps College because my name is Campbell. It might have pissed him off some that they called me to a meeting in a building that bore my name. It would have pissed me off if I were he.

I think Reverand King knows that his moral strength and intensity have intimidated me since childhood. I think he also knows that I deeply, deeply admire and respect him. At least, I hope he does. He didn’t allow me an inch of ground on the morality of the abortion question, but we agreed that women should have the right to make their own case on this issue, and as long as their presence didn’t constitute a tacit approval of abortion on the part of Millsaps College, we could proceed.

The next issue was that, since there was literally a caravan of abortion protestors with a history of violence coming to Mississippi, were we in danger of them showing up at Millsaps to put forth some sort of protest to the clinic defense training?

I turned to Wayne Miller, the Millsaps head of security, “Look, we’ve worked together before. Tell me honestly what you feel about your guys’ ability to deal with this.” A former cop and not an intellectual, Wayne was often overlooked at meetings. I brought him into the conversation, as much as anything, as a way to say I appreciate the job he does. I also wanted to assure everyone that the chances of this blowing up in our faces were pretty small, and that depended largely on Wayne Miller and his staff.

When the meeting was over, I went by George Harmon’s office just to make sure he was cool with what we were doing.

“Did you talk to Wayne Miller?”

“yeah.”

“Did you talk to Stuart Good?”

“yeah.”

“Why the hell are you bringing this to me, Boyd?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were ok with what we were doing,” I said.

“Look, y’all just act right and do what you gotta do. Tell your daddy I said hey.” and that was the end of my meeting with George Harmon. Most of my meetings with George Harmon were just about that short. He didn’t believe in using more words than he needed to.

Continuing with the Two Towers metaphor, the clinic defense training wasn’t very different from the scene where they put rusted armor on old men, toothless women, and little boys to defend Helms Deep from the Orcs. There were a few people in it who looked like they could fight, including a fifteen-year-old Jimmy Beville, but based on what I’d heard about the people coming to Mississippi, I felt like we may be lining up lambs to block cannon fire.

On the day of the protest, buses from as far away as Pennsylvania started showing up at the South Jackson Women’s Health Clinic. Henry Holman had asked both sides not to use his parking lot in this matter. Our side respected his request, but that school bus from a church in Pennsylvania didn’t.

The South Jackson Clinic was surrounded by a chain-link fence erected when the clinic bombings began. The City of Jackson came in the night before and erected temporary traffic barriers in front of the chain-link fence. I might have had something to do with that.

Our side of the fence was woefully outnumbered. A lot of women were afraid to show up for fear it might damage their career or their relationship with their husbands. That left us with post-menopausal lady tigers, young lesbians, misfit men, and a few women my age who were more brave than they were afraid.

My size and my face made me noticeable to the people on the other side of the fence. A Yankee, a few years older and considerably larger than I, said to me, “I love you because I’m a Christian, but I’d cut your throat to save a baby.” By nature, Campbells are very violent people, going back centuries. With a threat like that, I could feel the blood building up behind my eyes. I didn’t say anything. I just stood up taller and flex-compressed the hams hanging on my bones. If this fella came over the fence, I wouldn’t be caught flat-footed.

I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed an abortion protest. Their principal tactic is to be as shocking and as horrible as possible. The graphics they use, their words, and their faces are among the most unchristian things I’ve ever witnessed. I believe that God fights with love. I’ve seen it. This was not love. What can men do against such reckless hate?

For three days, the protests began an hour before the clinic opened and ended two hours after they closed. Clinic defense volunteers provided sandwiches, sweet tea, and lemonade, but I didn’t partake. I didn’t want to leave my post to go pee. I stood as tall as I could in front of as many of the other protestors as I could. I wanted to make the point that if anyone came over that fence, they’d have to go through me before they got to anybody else. I kept an eye out for anything that could be a pistol or pipe bomb. That’s not just Boyd being dramatic. People were dying over this. I spoke as little as I could. This wasn’t a battle that would be settled with words.

Ironically, one of the things that led me to do this kind of thing was hearing the stories and seeing the pictures of what Ed King did when he was my age. Standing up to a bunch of Yankee abortion protestors who wanted to cut my throat wasn’t as elegant or as profound as Ed King standing up to the rest of Jackson to make the point that Tougaloo students should be able to drink coffee at Woolworths, but it was a different time, and a man does what he can.

I don’t know where the issue of abortion will end up in this country. I do know that my position hasn’t changed much since 1989. On a moral ground, I believe this is something to be settled by women. Making moral decisions for other people isn’t something I’m willing to do. I can’t say that we won the battle because abortion is now illegal in the state of Mississippi, but I don’t think it’s over yet. I do believe it wasn’t a battle won by a bunch of Yankee orcs who wanted to cut my throat.