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©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 1
Letter From a Birmingham Museum July 2, 2018
As regular readers of Epsilon Theory know, I may make my home in the wilds of Connecticut today, doing
my best Eddie Albert / Green Acres impersonation here on Little River Farm, but I grew up just outside of
Birmingham, Alabama. My father spent his entire adult working life as an ER doc at Lloyd Noland Hospital
in Fairfield, Alabama (trust me, about as far from Fairfield, Connecticut as the Earth is from Mars), starting
back before emergency medicine was even a thing. My mother kept their two sons from getting into too
much trouble and created a wonderful home from a (quite) modest house in an unincorporated area
that’s now part of Hoover.
Lloyd Noland Hospital itself is an interesting story for a brief Epsilon Theory aside. It was the old Tennessee
Coal & Iron employees hospital, dating back to 1919, acquired by US Steel when it bought TCI in the 1950s,
then immediately spun off as a nonprofit foundation. The Foundation sold its assets to Tenet Healthcare
in 1996, and the senior Foundation executives made a fortune. A lot of the
staff, both doctors and nurses, were fired. Funny how that works. Tenet
flipped the hospital to HealthSouth just three years later in a deal backed by
public money. Funny how that works, too. In 2004, HealthSouth imploded in
one of the largest accounting frauds in American history, and Lloyd Noland
Hospital was shuttered for good. Funny how that … ah, who am I kidding …
none of this is funny at all. At least the HealthSouth CEO, Richard Scrushy,
went to prison for a few years. A few. He’s found Jesus now, of course, and if
you’re looking for “a dynamic risk taking entrepreneur with a powerful track
record”, he’s available to speak at your next corporate retreat. Maybe you’ll
catch him on Fox Business or CNBC. Or you could buy his book. Barf.
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 2
Anyway, my wife and I took three of our
daughters down to Birmingham last week to visit
their cousins and their Nana, and we decided to
take a morning and go see the museum at the
Birminghan Civil Rights Institute. It’s been open
since 1992, and I’ve only heard rave reviews. But
I had never been to the museum. It’s been open
for 25 YEARS, and I had never been. Why not? As
my father would say, Ben, you have plenty of
excuses, but not a single reason.
Well, that’s not exactly true. I had a reason, just not a good one. My bad reason: I didn’t want to be
lectured on civil rights. I didn’t want to be served a heaping dish of cold spinach and feel like it was my
social duty to smile wanly and say “why, thank you, that was delicious. May I have some more?” What I
told myself, and this is the excuse part, is that I’m a modern, educated man. I told myself that I already
knew pretty much everything that needed knowing about the civil rights movement.
NARRATOR: He did not know.
Nope, not even close.
I wasn’t lectured. I wasn’t put down. I was uplifted.
Yes, it’s spinach. Yes, I walked through half of the exhibits with a lump in my throat. Yes, I was ashamed
for only coming now, 25 years late. And you know what? That’s okay. I deserve that feeling of shame. I
welcome that feeling of shame, because if you don’t feel shame you’re a creature of the flock, not a
creature of the pack. Frankly, we need a lot more shame in the world, not as a permanent scarlet letter
or as a bureaucratic tool of the Nudging State, but as a catalyst for the gut check that we all need from
time to time. The gut check that requires you to come to grips with the painful past or the painful present
and DEAL WITH IT as honestly as you can. The gut check that MUST be passed if you’re ever going to
succeed or move forward with ANYTHING.
That’s what the Birmingham Civil Rights museum gives you. A gut check.
What makes the museum so effective in communicating a difficult story well? Just that. They present it as
a story, as a narrative. Not a cartoon story of Superheroes, although it’s impossible to avoid some degree
of hagiography when it comes to this stuff, and not a cartoon story of Social Justice™, either, although
here, too, it’s impossible to eliminate completely the heavy-handed nudging of the Smileyface State. No,
it’s mostly a story of … people. Of the actual lives of actual people. It’s immersive and it’s real. It creates
a compelling narrative arc, but not in a way that feels scripted or forced. What do I mean? I mean that the
very last exhibit of the museum is a gigantic room, filled only with photographic portraits of African
Americans who endured the civil rights struggles of Birmingham in the 1960s. Not activists, necessarily,
just people. No one famous. No one with a statue somewhere. A chemistry teacher. A church deacon. A
housewife. Not photographs of heroic actions back in the day, but a simple portrait of how they look
today. Which is … old. Weathered. But oh my god … PROUD.
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 3
And that brings me to the point of all this. Because my gut check wasn’t just an examination of the shame
I felt in coming to this museum 25 years too late. There was another gut check, too. Where was my family
in all of this? Because unlike the people in those photographs, I wasn’t feeling particularly proud.
I was born in 1964 at St. Vincent’s Hospital, on the edge of downtown Birmingham. I think that’s where
almost everyone of my cohort and my race was born in Birmingham in those days. And unlike Lloyd Noland
Hospital, St. Vincent’s is still around. Looks like it’s going strong, in fact. I understand that lots of babies,
white and black, are born there every day.
Eight months before I was born, not
two miles distant from St. Vincent’s
Hospital, these four girls were killed in
the dynamite bombing of the 16th
Street Baptist Church, right across the
street from where the museum stands
today. It took 14 years to bring one of
the killers to justice, 38 years to convict
two more.
The girls’ names are (left to right) Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia
Wesley. I’d like for us to remember these names and not the killers’ names.
Twelve months before I was born, even closer to St. Vincent’s Hospital, Bull Connor sicced dogs on civil
rights marchers and ordered the Birmingham Fire Department to attack with high-pressure hoses.
You’ve probably seen these photographs before. They’re pretty famous. Or infamous, I guess. What you
might not know, however, is that most of the people in these photographs are children.
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 4
Yes, black children were intentionally attacked and detained by Bull Connor’s Police and Fire Departments,
specifically because they wanted “to send a message”, something that seems particularly poignant given
the “deterrence” rationale given by today’s White House in defense of its immigration policy, where
brown children have been intentionally separated from their parents and detained indefinitely.
What’s also true, of course, is that there was nothing accidental
about the Birmingham Childrens Crusade of 1963. Children didn’t
march in some organic display of civil rights awareness. They were
intentionally deployed by march organizers – “used”, if you will –
in order to galvanize national public opinion against segregationist
policies and political leaders. That, too, seems particularly relevant
given what’s happening with our immigration policy today and the
Fiat News constructed both in favor and in opposition to those
policies.
But my question remains. Where was my family in all of this? How is it possible that all of this was
happening just down the street from where I was born, just a few miles from where I would live my entire
pre-adult life, and I NEVER got a glimpse or heard a word about ANY of this? How is it possible that I would
grow up without these events touching my life in any way, shape, or form? Because they didn’t. At all.
More directly, why didn’t my father do something … no, scratch that … why didn’t my father do ANYTHING
to support the civil rights movement happening in his backyard? Because he didn’t. At all.
To be clear, my father wasn’t a Bull Connor or George Wallace supporter. He thought they were thugs. He
definitely wasn’t a segregationist or an avowed racist, and – quite the rarity – he wasn’t an unavowed
racist, either, the sort of man who mutters the n-word under his breath and laughs uproariously at the
“jokes”. I mean, I’m not going to say something stupid like “he didn’t have a racist bone in his body”,
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 5
because I don’t think you could say that about any white person born in America in 1934, like my father.
Hell, you couldn’t say that about anyone born in 1964, like me. But I’ll say this. For his day and his place,
my father was as colorblind and as woke in his personal and professional life as anyone I’ve ever known.
I’ve got a hundred memories of watching my father act with grace and humanity and camaraderie in
interracial social settings, and not one – not ONE – of hostility or a mean-spirit. But in his political life – in
his life as a citizen – he was AWOL from the defining struggle of his day. Why?
I think I found the answer to that question at the Birmingham Civil Rights museum, and I’ll use the
Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 – 1956 to illustrate.
We’re all familiar with Rosa Parks, the seamstress who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus
to a white man, and was duly arrested, tried, and fined for breaking this prototypical Jim Crow law. What
we’re less familiar with, however, are the politics and the NARRATIVE of the civil rights protest that
followed in the wake of Parks’ arrest.
First, it wasn’t just Rosa Parks
who refused to give up her
seat, and several of those
arrested were children. Look
at the charges filed against
this 15-year-old girl – assault
and battery for refusing to
give up a bus seat. Look at the
sentence here – the girl is
declared a ward of the state,
legally and permanently
separated from her parents.
This happened nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested.
Like the Childrens Crusade of 1963, it was no accident that a 15-year-old was on the front lines of a civil
rights battle. The girl in this case – Claudette Colvin – was a member of the NAACP Youth Council, and her
mentor – Rosa Parks – was the secretary of the NAACP Montgomery Chapter. Like the Birmingham
children eight years later, Colvin was intentionally placed in harm’s way with the explicit goal of becoming
a cause celebre that would be sympathetic to a national audience.
And it worked. National media coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott was highly critical of the arrests,
particularly Colvin’s. In fact, the Colvin case – much more so than Rosa Parks’ own case – was the backbone
of the Supreme Court decision in Browder v. Gayle, which struck down the Montogomery bus segregation
laws as unconstitutional.
But Alabama media coverage – the media coverage that my father would have seen – focused entirely
on the agency of the NAACP in breaking the law. There was zero assessment or discussion of the law
itself. There was enormous assessment of the de facto illegality of the acts and the intentional use of
children to perform illegal acts. In fact, E.D. Nixon, the head of the NAACP in Alabama during this span,
decided not to proceed with a boycott of the Montgomery bus system after Colvin’s arrest precisely
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 6
because – as effective as the Colvin Narrative might be on the national stage – he thought the child-used-
by-NAACP Narrative would undermine the boycott’s effectiveness on the ground in the Montgomery area.
Instead, he wanted an adult to be the face of the event, and that’s why Rosa Parks, arrested nine months
later, is on a postage stamp but Claudette Colvin is not.
This War of Narratives, one acting nationally and one acting locally, escalated dramatically as the Rosa
Parks arrest catalyzed a full-scale boycott of the Montgomery bus system in December 1955. Just as he
had chosen Rosa Parks as the public face of the arrest, Nixon chose Martin Luther King, Jr., then a 26-year-
old minister new to the Montgomery area, as the public face of this largescale protest action, MLK’s first.
As with the choice of Parks, Nixon’s choice of MLK was brilliant from a Narrative construction and delivery
perspective. E.D. Nixon played one hell of a metagame!
The white Narrative response was pretty effective, too, though. Rather than fight the boycott on the
“merits” of segregation and Jim Crow laws, the status quo Narrative effort focused almost entirely on the
illegality of the boycott. Yes, I know this sounds bizarre to the modern ear, but calling for a boycott of a
commercial service used to be illegal. I’m not making this up.
Let me say this again, with emphasis: only a few
decades ago, you would be arrested if you said out
loud that people should stop going to Starbucks or
Walmart or Amazon or SeaWorld or Chick-fil-A or
Exxon or Red Hen or whatever.
This wasn’t just an Alabama thing and it wasn’t just a
segregationist South thing. It was an anti-Labor thing
across the country. It was a status quo political thing.
The Montgomery bus boycott was defined as
illegal, which allowed the construction of a VERY
effective Narrative that the organizers were, by
definition, criminals. That MLK mug shot at the
start of this note … that’s not from his
Birmingham arrest, where he wrote his
masterpiece “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”,
but from his Montgomery arrest, where a grand
jury indicted him and close to 100 others on
felony charges of “conspiracy” against a business
enterprise. MLK was sentenced to a $500 fine or
a YEAR in the state penitentiary. No joke. More
than a year, actually. He spent two weeks in jail
before the fine was paid. For his words. For the
criminal harm done by his “hate speech”, as it
was defined then.
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 7
THAT’S the Narrative that my father heard. THAT’S the Narrative that moderate whites all over the South
heard. It didn’t turn my father into a segregationist or a racist. But that was never the intent. The intent
was to take my father off the political board. By constructing a dominant and immersive Narrative where
opposing the status quo was defined as criminal, status quo institutions made it impossible for my father
to actively support the civil rights movement. Why? Because to act in that way would mean self-identifying
as a criminal, and that’s something my father would never do. It’s not that my father was oh-so concerned
about the State seeing him as a criminal, although yeah, there’s that. My father’s pack was his family, and
he wasn’t about to do anything that might draw the gaze of the State, which he distrusted immensely,
onto his family. The bigger issue, though, was that my father could not abide seeing HIMSELF as a criminal,
and that was the meaning of civil rights activism in the Narrative ocean in which 1960s Alabama white
people swam: civil rights activism = criminality.
This is the awesome power of effective Narratives and the Common Knowledge Game. They don’t
control us directly, like high-pressure fire hoses and billy clubs. No, they’re much more effective than that.
Narratives and the Common Knowledge Game drive us to control OURSELVES.
The goal of Narrative creation by status quo Missionaries like politicians and oligarchs is rarely to change
your mind. It’s rarely to try and switch you from one side to the other side. It’s rarely to get you to vote
FOR them or to buy FROM them. Because you already do.
The goal of most Narrative creation is to take you off the board.
The goal of most Narrative creation is to convince you to sit down and shut up.
In our investment lives, we are told to sit down and shut up when it comes to industrially necessary eggs,
investment products like ETFs and passive index funds. We are told by trillion dollar asset managers, who
just happen to dominate the market in ETFs and passive index funds, that our fiduciary fitness is defined
by our opposition to “high fees”. We are told that we are acting against our client’s best interests – i.e.
we must self-identify as bad guys if not outright criminals – if we don’t focus on investment fees as our
be-all-and-end-all consideration. None of this will turn independent-thinking financial advisors into
outright Vanguard-indexing pod people. But it will absolutely make independent-thinking financial
advisors doubt themselves and their own virtue if they start to question the party line. You’re not one of
those bad guys trying to screw over your clients by putting them into actively managed funds, are you?
No, of course you’re not.
In our political lives, we are told to sit down and shut up when it comes to law-breaking Others, like child-
using MS-13 gangbangers or Muslim-country-originating ISIS terrorists or … on the other side … statue-
protecting Charlottesville Nazis or Putin-loving White House traitors. We are told by trillion dollar
political/media machines that our patriotic fitness is defined by our opposition to these cartoon foes.
None of this will convince independent-thinking Republicans to vote Democrat or independent-thinking
Democrats to vote Republican. But it will absolutely make both independent-thinking Republicans and
independent-thinking Democrats doubt themselves and their own virtue if they start to question the
(literally) party line. You’re not one of those bad guys trying to screw over America by supporting the
criminals/terrorists/Nazis/traitors, are you? No, of course you’re not.
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 8
Last summer I wrote a note – Always Go To
the Funeral – to introduce the social and
game theory dynamics in play with all of this.
At the time I didn’t see how our Narrative
shock collars could possibly get any stronger.
And yet here we are. The shock collars are
zapping us harder and harder. Our respective
yards encompassed by our respective
invisible fences are getting smaller and
smaller.
Red Hen … ZAP! Child prisons … ZAP! Supreme Court … ZAP! MS-13 … ZAP! Russia … ZAP!
I’m not saying that you should fight the Man, whatever that means to you.
I’m saying that the Man is very, very active in these Narrative efforts to take you off the board, to convince
you to sit down and shut up as an investor or as a voter. I’m saying that once you start looking for these
efforts, you will see them everywhere.
I’m saying that the Man is very, very skilled at defining your choices in ways that don’t seem at all like
they’ve been defined for you. In ways that seem like common sense. In ways that seem like common
decency. In ways that make you believe that YOU are the bad guy if you question the Narrative.
I’m saying that’s not true. I’m saying that you’re not a bad person for questioning the party line. I’m saying
that you may still make the choice to take yourself off the board, but make it a choice. I’m saying that the
sense of shame you may feel when you wrestle with these issues isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of
strength. I’m saying that you may feel alone and besieged and full of self-doubt as you wrestle with these
issues, but only because that’s the way that your social animal brain is hard-wired. Not because you are
truly alone.
If I could go back in time and tell my father, gone more than 20 years now, ONE thing it would be that.
You are not alone. Because I suspect he felt pretty darn lonely as he wrestled with all this. I think it would
have meant the world to him to talk this through with a member of his pack, to try and figure it out
together.
And that’s why I write Epsilon Theory. This is the blessing it has given me. To connect me with other free-
thinking and truth-seeking human beings, from all over the world and from every walk of life, who are
wrestling with this most basic question: how do we make our way in a fallen world without losing
ourselves in the process?
I never had a chance to talk with my father about that. Not directly, anyway. But I can talk with you.
We are not alone.
©2018 W. Ben Hunt
All rights reserved. 9
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