Remembering the Black 14

If you don’t think politics and sport mix, consider what happened at the University of Missouri. Mizzou first admitted black student in 1950. Sixty-five years later, blacks are only seven percent of the 35,000-member student body. They’ve tired of the racial slurs they often hear hurled from passing whites, usually in a stereotypic beat-up old pick-up truck.

They tried traditional political routes. Attempts to speak to the white University president failed. Tim Wolfe gave the obligatory statement. Racism exists. It’s unacceptable. As for giving the concerns of the black students the dignity of his personal time, no. White boosters have backed Wolfe.

Football players backed their fellow students. Their coach backed his players. They vowed not to play another game until Wolfe resigns. He did. They will play. Their next game is today against Brigham Young University.

That ought to stir some Cowboy memories of a time when UW played its cards differently.

In 1969, Wyoming was 12^th ranked nationally. Fourteen players walked into Coach Lloyd Eaton’s office. They planned to wear black armbands during their next game, Their opponent was BYU

The school was largely Mormon. The LDS Church had then a policy prohibiting black men from entering the Mormon priesthood. Wearing black armbands during the game was intended to be a subtle objection to that policy.

 Coach Lloyd Eaton had a policy against players exercising their first amendment rights. He kicked everyone of the 14 arm-banded black players off the team. The Governor and UW board of trustees sided with Eaton. Many fans flashed “We Support Eaton” bumper stickers. Politicians and Cowboy booster clubs across the state piled on the 14.

Later, the Cheyenne Quarterback Club, according to wyohistory.org, held Cowboy Night “and a large crowd was on hand to honor Lloyd Eaton, his staff and his seniors.” U.S. District Judge Ewing T. Kerr, who was then presiding over a civil rights lawsuit brought by the 14 players, was one of the evening’s “special guests.”

Wyoming beat BYU with their now all-white football team. They won the following weekend too. But victories grew tougher and fewer. The Cowboys lost the last four games of the year by huge margins and then they lost all but one of their games in 1970, the first UW losing season in a generation. They were defeated in 26 of 38 games following the Black 14 incident and had one lonely winning season through the 70s.

Few seemed to care when the 14 lost their places on the team. Fewer cared that they had lost their educations. But when the football team lost all those games, fans couldn’t take it. Eaton was fired, his career ended.

Meanwhile at BYU, things changed. Wyohistory.org recounts a 2009 Salt Lake Tribune article saying the Black 14 incident had provoked changes at BYU. Tom Hudspeth, BYU head coach in 1969, was quoted as saying how he was “made aware that LDS Church leadership wanted him to add African-Americans to his team, and fast. The following year, BYU's team included Ronnie Knight, a black defensive back from Sand Springs, Okla."

While Wyoming’s football team continued to suffer post-Black 14 era defeats, LDS policy also changed. On June 9, 1978, LDS leaders  “announced that a divine revelation had been received to open the Mormon priesthood to African-Americans, ending the longstanding tenet.”

In the early 1990s, University of Colorado Coach Bill McCartney learned that his black players faced ugly racial taunts like those at Mizzou. He sided with the players. An enlightened white man, McCartney went to the booster clubs and other civic organizations, educating them on what the players faced and the role of white privilege.

McCartney was a winner. So was his team. Sports can change politics, but it does take enlightened leadership.

"Who is God?"

“Who is God?” This month’s question presupposes both liberal and conservative Christians believe God exists. Troll the Internet. You’ll find conservatives espousing the extreme argument that liberalism is inconsistent with believing in God. Some on the extreme left argue that conservative Christians believe in the Bible, but not in God.

Let’s start by acknowledging that liberal and conservative Christians share the belief that God exists. It isn’t the belief that God exists that separates liberals and conservatives. It’s our concepts of God.

Face it. Engaging in this debate is to be as “the six men of Indostan” of Indian legend. “It was six men of Indostan, to learning much inclined, who went to see the Elephant though all of them were blind.” Each touches a different part of the elephant, reaching a different conclusion about what it is.

“And so these men of Indostan disputed loud and long, each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong’ Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!”

The moral of the story? The poet said, “So oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween, rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean, and prate about an Elephant not one of them has seen!”

When it comes to telling others who God is, Christians should exhibit the humility that comes with knowing we are guessing. God created the ambiguity for a reason. Perhaps God wants us to search, dialogue, and guess.

Some liberal Christians take two paths to knowing God; understanding Creation, and following Jesus.

Liberals speak of the God of Creation, a significant clue in our endeavor to define God. What God created tells us a great deal about whom God is. God created the earth as a part of an imponderable universe. God created the skies, lands, and seas and placed on them the winged, finned, and four and six-leggeds. God then created humans with attributes necessary to fulfill God’s wish that creation be cared for, not exploited.

The God of Creation intentionally designed a radically diverse world. Parts of the earth were made to differ considerably from others assuring that not all peoples were the same. Skin color, languages, cultures, and religions differed. The way in which people lived and provided for their families grew out of the diversity, as did the differences in the way in which they came to understand God.

God didn’t expect the first humans would know all there is to know. God said, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” (Deuteronomy 29:29)

Creation included mechanisms for evolution. Clues to God’s identity are in the complex human anatomy, starting with the mysteries of the brain and including the miracles of DNA and genes. Some of those genes make us short or tall, blue or green-eyed. Some determine our predisposition to addiction or mental illness. Others determine gender and sexual orientation. Differences. The Lord God made them all. That’s who we are because that’s who God is.

The second path liberals find helpful in understanding God is Jesus. Interestingly, people of all faiths somehow came to share a common understanding that we are to do unto others that which we’d like done unto us. For Christians, that teaching came through Jesus. Jesus is the way for Christians to know God. What do we learn about God through Jesus? We learn that God cares for the poor, the oppressed, and the foreigners, heals the sick, accepts the rejected, cares for the widows and the orphans, shares time and meals with sinners, and will one day judge us for how we treated the least of these our brothers and sisters.

God did not create religion. In teaching us about God, Jesus didn’t divide the world into denominations and separate us by dogma. Humans did all that on their own. Thus dogmatic differences teach us about who humans are, but not about whom God is.

1960-Wyoming Made History

The Presidential campaign is rather meaningless to Wyoming. It doesn’t matter whether the Republican nominee is Donald Trump, Bobby Jindal, or Deez Nuts, Wyoming’s three electoral votes will be in that column come November. Getting worked up about it is fruitless whether you’re a Wyoming Democrat or a Wyoming Republican.

So then, why is our lone Congressman endorsing a candidate who has no chance to win her Party’s nomination? Lummis is quoted on Senator Rand Paul’s website saying it’s because “Rand Paul will do what he says.”

He says he’ll limit the number of terms Lummis and other members of Congress can serve. Wyoming’s voters won’t even do that. Paul says he’ll repeal the tax code and replace it with a 14.5% flat tax, privatization of Medicare, and a 70-year-old retirement age. Great news for Lummis. She lives in the rarified air of the wealthy. Not near so good for most of Lummis’s working family and elderly constituents as Lummis’s tax burden is shifted to them even as the federal budget deficit is increased by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Aside from that, Deez Nuts and Jeb Bush have better shots at the nomination than Senator Paul. Wyoming voters might ask, what’s in it for us to have our sole Congressman endorse him? Lummis says, “He believes in the right of states like Wyoming to manage their resources without Washington obstruction.” Which GOP candidate doesn’t? What would the Republicans talk about if a President stopped trying to “manage” the resources of a state whose lands are more than 50% owned by the feds.   

Maybe that endorsement does as much for Wyoming as Lummis’s membership in the House Freedom Caucus. Has that done anything for you lately?

Most Wyoming politicians shy away from endorsing Presidential candidates. It’s not often helpful to them or Wyoming. Although Bill Clinton came with a 5% margin of defeating George H.W. Bush in Wyoming, some might argue that endorsing Clinton in 1992 cost Governor Mike Sullivan and Secretary of State Kathy Karpan their bids for higher office two years later, Sullivan for the U.S. Senate and Karpan for the Governorship.

The real problem is that we have as close to no leverage as a state can get. There are 2,470 delegates to the GOP national convention. Wyoming has 29, slightly less than 1.2% of the total.

If that paucity of delegates ever means anything, it might be toward the end when only a few candidates remain and a handful of Wyoming delegate votes might make the difference. That happened once. It was 1960. It was the contest for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. The convention was held in Los Angeles. The candidates were many. Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, George Smathers, Stuart Symington, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Meyner, and Ross Barnett.

The roll was called in alphabetical order. Wyoming was last. In those days, national conventions were not orchestrated around preordained candidates. As the roll was called, no one could predict the winner. Wyoming had a miniscule 15 votes, slightly fewer than 1% of the total. By the time the clerk got around to asking for Wyoming’s vote, John Kennedy was 11 votes short of the nomination. Seven of Wyoming’s delegates were already committed to Kennedy. He needed just four more to become the nominee.

 If Kennedy didn’t win on that first ballot, LBJ was certain he could win on the second. JFK’s youngest brother Teddy stood among the Wyoming delegation urging them on. Until that very moment Wyoming Senator Gale McGee had refrained from endorsing a candidate despite the full-court press each had put on him.

 McGee was a historian with an appreciation of the significance of the moment. He understood the importance of the opportunity for Wyoming. There he was. Standing on a chair, holding four fingers high in the air was Senator McGee.

 John Kennedy got those four votes and with them, the nomination. The President and his family remained grateful to Wyoming for the rest of their lives.

Wyoming gambled on the lottery and lost

Wyoming has a history with lotteries and it hasn’t been all that good. According to wyomingtalesandtrails.com, Wyoming’s current lottery wasn’t the first.  James Monroe Pattee’s 1875 "Wyoming Lottery" was, they say, fraudulent. “There were many 50-cent winners, but little else.” 

Wyoming’s current lottery isn’t fraudulent. Neither is it all it was cracked up to be. Wyoming was gambling when it created the lottery. Some might argue that we lost.

Something’s wrong. It has been nearly three years since the legislature approved the lottery. The bill passed the State House by a single vote. Apprehensions haven’t lessened as the news about the lottery seems to be mostly disappointing.

Some legislators who were reluctant to agree with the scheme were persuaded the lottery would benefit their communities. Their constituents were promised proceeds from lottery ticket purchases would funnel millions to cities, towns, and schools. That’s not happening. Now lottery officials claim to be on the verge of distributing a piddling $200,000 later this year.

The lottery would have been defeated if legislators had known that nearly three years after start up, cities, towns, and schools could share a whopping 200,000-dollar jackpot. This is no laughing matter as the state is starring down a huge budget deficit that will deprive the cities, towns, and schools with badly needed funding.

But while the lottery has been unable to keep its promise to fund these programs, millions of lottery dollars have flowed into salaries, overhead, marketing contracts, and lawyers.

Worse, the so-called “quasi-government” entity the legislature created to run the show puts itself above accountability. The Corporation refuses to be transparent, setting policies as though it was a private enterprise entity that can hold proprietary secrets.

One sage said the lottery is a tax, albeit levied only on people who are poor in math. Maybe it’s not a tax in the strictest terms but every dollar comes from the public. Voters and their representatives were a bit timid about the lottery in the first place. One might think the officials who administer it would consider those opinions and bend over backwards to make sure everything they did was open to public scrutiny.

Now we learn that the Commission has taken out loans or lines of credit but it is none of our business how much and under what terms. The lottery board has a “public information policy” that keeps loan activity secret. They forgot they are playing with the house’s money and the public is the house.

To top it off, while there’s no money to share with cities, towns, and schools, there is plenty enough to hire high-priced lawyers to bring a lawsuit against Ed Atchison, a citizen who dared to question them.

When opponents raised concerns about gambling addiction, $200,000 of unclaimed prize money was earmarked to design gambling addiction programs at the Department of Health. Obviously, the legislature expected the Commission to take this issue seriously. In Atchison’s opinion, they didn’t. He made an issue of their decisions.

When one corporate officer complained about Mr. Atchison to the Wyoming Department of Health, she was told, “It's a balance between letting individuals voice their concerns, provide feedback, etc. while not letting personal agendas interfere with the larger picture.”

That, not a lawsuit, is the response of a public servant who respects the role of advocates in our system. I won’t offer opinions on the legitimacy of the lawsuit. The Court will decide those issues. But a lawsuit seems a heavy-handed alternative to dealing with criticism. What’s more, it’s an odd use of Lottery Commission resources when they haven’t yet been able to distribute a dime to cities, towns, and schools.

Given the Commission’s ill-considered obsession with secrecy and its failure to produce the promised revenue, it’s time for the legislature to reconsider the lottery or, in the very least, to seriously question the manner in which it is being managed.

As Kenny Rogers said, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em. You gotta know when to fold ‘em.”

Voting NO on city administrator

On November 10, Cheyenne voters decide whether to scrap a system that allows them to choose the person in charge of city affairs or to give that authority to a majority of the city council. I’ve listened to the debate and find no facts to support the contention that the current system is not working.

I will vote no for these reasons. First, proponents failed to demonstrate there is a need for the change. Second, the change will isolate, if not remove, the city’s chief decision maker from voter accountability.

This ordinance appears to be the product of a small special interest group who haven’t always gotten their way with the current mayor. A wholesale assault on the way the people of the community choose those who run it is not the way to address that problem.

The change-agents are asking you to give up your right to directly elect the man or woman responsible for operating Cheyenne and to turn that responsibility over to an appointed bureaucrat who will work for a majority of the council, not for the voters. What could possibly go wrong?

Proponents argue that unelected city managers are removed from politics. That’s the problem. The city manager would be ground zero in most political battles, only farther removed, even isolated from the influence of voters. Today, if the voters are unhappy with city administration, they can change the person at the top. Under this proposal, voters lose that ability. My fear is this move would concentrate power in the office of the city manager.

Supporters say that if the professional bureaucrat isn’t doing the job, the council can fire that person. Have you ever seen that process? It’s a political circus when the council tries to get rid of a city manager. The council is made up of nine individuals, each of whom will have their own personal relationship with this person in power. Just watch those who want to fire a bad one try to get the five votes necessary.

Here is the crux of the problem. Those who favor the change haven’t offered any specific evidence that the current system doesn’t work. What we’ve heard are vague, theoretical arguments about how hiring a high-priced city manager might make things better.

Supporters of a city manager system tell us mayors may not have the management skills of professional administrators. Cheyenne’s current mayor, Rick Kaysen, whom voters gave a second four-year term, is the former president of Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power Company. That position required significant management skills.

Since 1971, the voters of Cheyenne have elected their mayor. With perhaps one exception, the voters have chosen well. Without naming names, that one mistake was promptly rectified at the following election.

Over the years, our mayors have had the necessary administrative and leadership skills. The community has thrived. A handful of developers may not have gotten their way all the time, but the city is safe, attractive and well maintained. The mayor and council are responsive to the voters. Cheyenne provides a platform for economic growth and is as livable as any small city in America.

When voting on November 10, remember this idea wasn’t put on the ballot after thousands of Cheyenne voters petitioned the council to make the change. This came directly from a few special interest folks to a vote of the council. There was no widespread grassroots clamor for such a monumental change.

Councilman Dickie Shanor claims, “The most compelling reason why we need to have this election, because people are so passionate on both sides. So many people have an opinion and so many people want to have that vote to voice that opinion and it’s time we gave them that opportunity.”

That may be true of the small circle of folks with whom he drinks coffee but that “passion” is not evident elsewhere in a community that seems pretty happy with a system that allows us to decide who is in charge of city operations.