By Dan Bodine

 

Change. And ghosts of early White Nationalism! In a few months, it’ll be 39 years ago when as a white journalist/editor I was verbally attacked by early White Nationalists — e.g., for supporting a mixed-race Housing Project in the most affluent part of Cleburne, TX. It was Hate.

The project’s clients would include African Americans and was the leadoff item on a P&Z meeting. Could there be lessons for today’s “White Nationalists”? Feel free to comment.

It was May 1985, the last public meeting I covered as reporter/managing editor for the Sunbelt’s swept-up “Cleburne Times-Review” — a daily newspaper just south of Fort Worth in North Central Texas. The project had been put in the wrong part of town. These things are for mixed races.

And I got fried attending it. And I never said a word! It was for the prior editorial I’d quickly written, and published for the newspaper’s endorsement of the project! So much hateful yelling for it, I’ll never forget.

But, too, that might’ve been the last hurrah for that gang — e.g., what I’ll call now an earlier version of White Nationalism. Cleburne’s doubled in population since then; its economy is red-hot. If there’s any of that clan still around, they’re probably keeping their heads down.

The application was to build the mixed-race project directly across from what was then the “Whitest, wealthiest” neighborhood in Cleburne — on the west side of Coleman Elementary School.

Out of curiosity, yes, I attended the meeting! Not sure why I thought it needed media. I certainly didn’t want to write anything after getting scalded! Journalists themselves aren’t to be newsmakers! And I’d already given notice I was leaving the paper.

I don’t think there was a radio reporter there either; maybe most of the city never heard about this. I was probably curious, too, about legacy — e.g., How loud would be the No?

Had a progressive editor in this city influenced Change? Maybe just a hair? Everyone wants to contribute something, right?! Was mine just stirring things up instead? Like I’d heard? Bristling old thinking? Or had I left a positive mark?

Helping folks match strides with cultural Change means sharing personal, and spiritual progress, right? I think my generation helped move the needle a tad for many. The latest cultural and religious holdouts now in our ongoing Culture War are these angry White Nationalists!

So was this a bed of toxic roots I’d stepped off into? Who by stubbornly refusing to adapt to changing cultural times, eventually were railroaded into history’s bin of do-nothing public loathers?

Reading about what growing dangers former President Trump and surging White Nationalism pose now, I thought of Cleburne recently — and quickly turned to the internet to research the city’s racial diversity.

U. S. Census in ’21 put the African American population at only 5.61%, considerably higher than what I’d imagined, yes. But still much lower than the national average, which is doubled at 12.1%. Latinos, or White Hispanics, were at 24%, compared to 18.7% nationally.

So bits of Change may be upon us almost everywhere, it appears. But could all that be good? Especially with laggard counter-currents in a Presidential Election year? In a hot economy?!

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And why, in all this you wonder, do so many consider former president Trump a danger to constitutional Democracy because of it? Did he stir all this up, or is he merely making grumbling noises at an opportunist time for the left-out crowd? If so, he may be quietly wrenching on what’s not being told much:

“…(T)here is another cost to the spread of White Christian nationalism that no one mentions,” CNN notes recently:

The relentless coverage of White Christian nationalism is spreading a racist myth: that Whiteness is the default setting for evangelical Christianity.

This is one of the unintended consequences of the media and public’s fascination with the subject. Feeding this perception is an avalanche of books, articles and now a Hollywood film on the beliefs of White evangelical Christians — the biggest followers of Christian nationalism. In a February 2023 survey, nearly two-thirds of White evangelical Protestants qualified as sympathizers or adherents to Christian nationalism.

The constant linking of Whiteness with evangelical Christianity, though, obscures another major story. There are millions of Black, Latino, African and Asian evangelical Christians who are already profoundly changing America. They represent what one scholar calls the “de-Europeanization of American Christianity.”

And these non-White evangelicals will likely not only save the American church but transform the nation’s politics.

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HUD’s public housing, last I checked, is for poor, lower-skilled, or minority clients, generally. Including African Americans, no doubt. Most are thankful subscribers to America’s Dream, I feel — culturally dispersed.

Complicated as it is, bringing stability and lifestyle improvements to all these dream-holders are all part of efforts to eliminate historical cultural dregs like institutional racism from our systems!

Both of these efforts are important, not just to our economy but also to that varnished expression Equality — which defines our purpose.

That Spring day in the ’80s at the CT-R, after quickly glancing back down at the housing agenda item on the meeting notice from City Hall — e.g., mixed race proposed in white Cleburne — air quickly left my lungs.

“No way in hell…!” I instinctively thought, surely.

But on reflecting, I’m deeply spiritual sometimes, too — a sucker for lofty goals like this, say — aka naive, I’ve been told some. Feeling that tug, I probably thought a bit more about the merits of the housing project.

And my thinking changed! You ever have these moments: Passion as a tool of God rushing over you!? And, indeed, you mistake it as a Voice from on High and give it the nod?

Friends, quickly, I sat down and wrote this snappy editorial supporting the P&Z’s housing project — arguing, too, maybe for cover — there was some hysteria underlying the opposition. But overall, it’d be a good, progressive move for the city.

And I put that editorial, I think, in the same day’s paper as the legal notice for the meeting.

Dum, dee, dum, Dumb!

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Fighting prejudice was nothing new for our newsroom. I suspected all along, i.e., reporting by the late City Editor Rob Fraser, and dicey editorials from me, helped in the success of a nearby Keene lady in the early ’80s — fighting for homes for the mentally disabled.

Jan Hannah in 1980 purchased a house at 201 Featherston in Cleburne and applied to the city to lease it to Cleburne Living Centers, Inc. (CLC) — for operating a supervised group home for the mentally retarded. [old language]

After appealing P&Z’s refusal to the city council — which subsequently rejected it also — she appealed finally to the Fifth Circuit’s US Court of Appeals, which reversed the city’s decision. [My-Oh-My!] City of Cleburne then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And in a monumental ruling announced after I’d left, late May or early June 1985 — a declaration that smoothed out housing wrinkles in Cleburne and across the state and country, too — the Court upheld the lower appellate court on a “rational basis with bite“.

Inner cities across America for the first time were opened to group homes for the mentally disabled. [new language now]

Moreso, the humanity behind the 5th Circuit’s striking down one of Cleburne’s defense arguments — e,g, the neighborhood fear that was expressed of these children — became a striking footnote.

“The stigma of illiteracy will mark them for the rest of their lives,” the lower court’s decision reads, in arguing for Ms. Hannah and CLC. “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.”

Monumental change, indeed, this case upheld by the High Court meant! The decision swept across the country almost immediately, just a few weeks or so after this P&Z incident had floored me — on my way out of the CT-R and eventually leaving Cleburne itself.

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But in this heated P&Z meeting on the federal housing project, it was racial segregationists challenging Change.

What stung me the most was their off-handiness — e.g., attacking me for what they thought was a newspaper’s style error — a tactic they belittled me vociferously. in opposing this new project. I simply figured it was their white superiority to a dumb & blind newspaper editor!

“I’m one of those hysterical ones, Mr. President,” each of the opponents told the P&Z President as they approached to sign in at the speaker’s podium.

They then turned to stare hard at me, seated nearby, before turning back and more-or-less adding, “Ya see where I’m signing here!? It’s my name! I always sign my name! ‘Cause I’m proud of my name! …Not like our newspaper editor here!”

Should I have jumped up and nicely explained to them the difference between a newspaper editorial and a writer’s column on an Opinion Page? To explain why that editorial bore no by-line?

Throwing gas on fire it would’ve been!

My column was “Open Spaces,” I think then. But the late Gen. Mgr. Paul Griffith earlier had asked me to write more hopeful editorials — plugging the city’s healthy economic growth, and the progress being made. Hoping it would stir even more progress.

So when the opportunity arose — e.g., the inspiring, proposed housing project — I did my job and described it as a potential crown jewel.

Shake up thinking? I got scalded, instead, by what appeared to be Cleburne’s home-grown racial yáhoos.

Or, it might’ve been a Sunbelt-infused newcomer group of early White Nationalists attempting to expand their new stakes in the old city!

Regardless, I’d wrongfully convinced myself then that “Cleburne will never change — Not in a hundred years, No“.

But Lo and behold, Change has come to Cleburne, yes!!! From the looks of some random readings, Life is probably as good there now as any walk-in-the-park lifestyle offered by any of the other mushrooming North Central Texas cities surrounding DFW.

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And for White Nationalists anywhere now still clinging to their family’s Lost Cause remnants from the first Civil War  — yes, I’m for CRT, too! — i.e., recently I read an internet article on the losing’s effect on Germans after WWII.

It’s partially entitled, “Deprogramming the MAGAVerse” — posted on the culturally biting whowhatwhy.org.us-politics channel.

Talk about national reconstruction after losing a world war — and all the millions of bodies who died as a result of it — you’re left with: Could rehabilitating the MAGAs be similar to Germans after WWII’s defeat?

“…Trying to return them (White Nationalists) to sanity would be a Herculean task. Just look back in history,” reads one section of the article.

“After 12 years of Nazi rule, a lost war, and unimaginable atrocities committed in their name, it still took a decades-long ‘deNazification’ campaign (mandated by an occupying force) to deprogram the German people and root out any Hitler sympathizers who held any position of public influence.”

Could our situation with White Nationalists — before an election disaster, indeed, be a national detoxification program similar to what the Germans launched? Maybe administered in state and national courts in cases involving terror organizations or domestic violence, say?

Ideas or cheap, yes. But there may not be a better time for them than the months leading up to this fall’s Presidential Election.

 

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