©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

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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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