It's Complicated

My father, the late great Champ Ruffin, was a good man.

He loved the Lord, he loved his family, he loved his church, and he loved his country.

He served in the Navy during World War II. After the war he married Sara Abbott. They brought me into the world in 1958.

That means I grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s. School desegregation finally came to our small town of Barnesville, Georgia, which was located more or less halfway between Atlanta and Macon, about the time we transitioned from one decade to the other.

It was a complicated time.

I grew up surrounded by racism. But my parents weren’t racists. They taught me to respect all people. When a family member made a racially insensitive comment, my parents reminded me that we didn’t think or talk that way in our house.

I never heard my parents say that school segregation was good or that desegregation was bad. I never heard them say a negative word about another person on the basis of race. When the time came for me to attend my first integrated school with my first African-American teachers in my seventh-grade year, they treated it as just another school year.

I’m grateful.

But then there’s this: both of my parents voted for George Wallace in the presidential election of 1968. I know this because my father told me he did, and my mother, using the excuse that she didn’t keep up with politics, always voted for whomever my father did.

She wasn’t exactly liberated.

My father died in 1979. I was newly married and getting ready to head off to seminary. I wasn’t yet at the point in life where I wondered enough about his thoughts and choices to have deep conversations with him about them.

But now I wonder: how could my father, good sensible Christian man that he was, vote for the racist George Wallace?

My best guess is that, while he didn’t like Wallace’s racial views, he felt threatened by the social changes brought about by opposition to the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and even the Civil Rights movement. I imagine that, in a time of great civil unrest, he liked Wallace's "law and order" emphasis. I suspect that he liked Wallace’s stance against the pointy-headed liberals who were trying to impose their will on the South. I think he was frightened by the changes that seemed inevitable. I suspect he just wanted to slow things down.

Times were complicated. Circumstances were complicated. My father was complicated.

I try to remember how complicated things and people always have been, are now, and always will be.

My father died before his only child turned out to be a pointy-headed liberal, so I don’t know what he’d think about me now.

My father was a good man whose fears led him to cast a bad vote. He wasn’t the first or the last person of whom that could be said.

The good news is that Wallace lost.

The better news is that my father later told me he regretted voting for Wallace.

Good folks recognize and admit their mistakes.

On the other hand, he said he should have voted for Nixon…