2/11/68

Scripture: Read Jeremiah 9: 23, 24; Luke 10: 38-42;

Philippians 1: 27 through 2: 4.

There are many kinds of revolutionary changes in this world. Some of them move very swiftly. There is a lot of ferment in the churches, both Protestant and Catholic. We in Wisconsin Rapids may hear a little about a layman’s point view in this area from a couple of men who have consented to speak to our Union Lenten Sunday evening services next month.

There is a terrific amount of nationalism rife in the post-world-war II world. And it is a force to recognize and to be reckoned with. The worlds of communication and of travel would hardly be recognized by anyone who had been out of touch with progress (like some modern Rip Van Winkle) for the past 25 years. There are changes in the education pattern, and more are predicted. Despite the changes, I still think that there are highly valuable lessons to be learned from Grandpa and Grandma out of their spirit and experience. But there are changes occurring that make much of Grandpa’s and Grandma’s experience inadequate for the demands of our life in 1968, and we are forced to be pioneers, whether we like it or not, on the highways of modern demand. On those highways, we need both the spirit of venture and the lessons of history.

One of the areas of current revolution is in the matter of race relations. Since this is Race Relations Sunday, we may as well give some thought to it. Interestingly enough, the Sunday nearest Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Race Relations Sunday, is often Boy Scout Sunday. In a fair sense, this is quite an appropriate occurrence. For the Scouting movement is inclusive of all boys, of any race, in most nations of the western world and some of the Orient.

But race relations is fast moving from a kind of recognition that all of the races of mankind are of one humanity under God, to a more and more agitated concern over how we treat each other in the racial picture. For one thing, there is mounting tension all over the earth, between people of the white or Caucasian race, and those non-Caucasians of every racial color who are non-white. For a long period in history, Western white civilization has been materially advanced enough so that the white man has out-stripped the non-white man so far that there has been no sufficient kind of balance. In the process, the white man has not only been capable, but often arrogant. He has experienced, and expressed, his own kind of superiority to others whether they be the most primitive Australian aborigines, the Incas and other Indians of South America, the many tribesmen of Africa, or the people of ancient culture in the Orient and near East. That supposed superiority is now being challenged by all who want not only material well-being, but recognized self-respect. And the former arrogance of some of the white men will no longer be accepted. Indeed, there may be those who dream of a reversal!

Best hope for a revolution of peaceful progress would seem to be in more of person to person understanding and respect and cooperative endeavor. Race relations in our own nation are particularly acute as between black and white. Our country has some glorious history. But some of the nation’s history is not glorious. Not a little bit of the nation’s early kind of prosperity was built with the aid of human slavery. Black people, from many of the tribes of the African continent, were kidnapped by stronger black tribesmen, and delivered to the crews of ships in the slave trade to be taken, like farm live stock, to the plantations of the new world. It may not have bothered the consciences of those white seamen and plantation operators whose superiority placed the black slaves without question on a lesser level of life. But to those who regarded black, as well as white, as part of the human race under God, the institution of chattel slavery, and its maintenance, did become a matter of conscience grievous to endure.

After the nation had been nearly torn apart, and the union preserved only after disastrous civil strife between the states, chattel slavery was abolished, and black slaves were freed. But they were not, generally, given any land from which to wrest a living. And only the most menial kind of jobs were open to them. Schools helped some. And the Congregational Churches were among those that founded, and supported, some of the best schools for freedmen. But the schools, helpful as they have been, have not been enough. A century after the ending of chattel slavery, there still exists a kind of slavery to poverty and lack of adequate opportunity that chains the poor of every race, but particularly the black people, of our country.

The South has had its way of dealing with the problem, a way determined by the white man and acquiesced by the black man. But that way is breaking up. Great numbers of the Negro folk have gone to the North, especially to the large cities. Those in the South are demanding more recognition as people, and equal opportunities for equal ability. Those who have gone North find life no easier. Jobs are scarce, housing insufficient, crowded, and squalid for vast number of Negro folk. And so the whole matter of relations between the races has become explosive. Northern cities have seen riots that surprised both white and black. And these explosions seem to rise out of a kind of desperation that knows not where else to turn.

Our whole approach to race relations has had to change in this swift-moving, revolutionary time. Five or ten years ago, the focus of attention in race relations was in the non-violent struggle for civil rights in the South. Young people from the north --- some college students, some ministers, some seminarians, would volunteer to go south to help Negro people with their marches, sit-ins, voter registration efforts. They were usually given special training as to how to act even when faced with violence. For determined though they were, theirs was a non-violent movement.

Personally, I have always been glad that so much of that movement was in the hands of Christian people -- church ministers like Martin Luther King. I am fully aware that he is considered a controversial figure. But his determination is still expressed in terms of non-violence and I hope it will stay that way. One of the hard, cold facts of 1968, however, is that much of the initiative has passed from the hands of men like King to the hands of those who are willing to use violence, or who even advocate it. That attitude is going to be difficult to deal with. And the difficulty is much more than how possible violence can be met with what kind of force. We are faced with problems of social change, of class, of economics, that call for far more understanding than most of us have as yet.

Last summer, I was among those who went to Cincinnati as a delegate to the Sixth General Synod of the United Church of Christ. Cincinnati was just recovering from what some called a race riot, and what others preferred to call a rebellion. Representatives of the city government and of the Negro community were heard on the floor of the Synod. Negro ministers of our fellowship solidified in a few significant efforts. The Netherland Hilton Hotel, where the Synod was meeting, was challenged in that it appeared to have no Negroes employed except in menial tasks. Management flew a Vice President in from the West coast to assure the Synod that the local situation would be remedied. Negro delegates nominated a Negro minister as Secretary of the denomination, to succeed Dr. Fred Bushmeyer, retired. The Rev. Joseph Evans of Illinois, pastor of a Negro congregation in Chicago, was elected. He accepted the office “not as your Negro secretary” but as “your secretary” to be in the service of all the churches of the fellowship. There were significant strides taken there at General Synod. But, after all, that is a fairly sophisticated level of living and fellowship.

The most explosive areas, where people find it hardest to turn any way with any hope, are in the ghettos of the big cities. Housing is desperately crowded. One of our Synod speakers at Cincinnati was Bayard Rustin who addressed us delegates with great candor and frankness, and with persuasive hopefulness. But, without being dramatic, he gave us one illustration of what it can be like to live in a Negro ghetto. He began by saying that many people, of many sorts, are so well off that they can not even imagine what it means to live in, or walk into, a Negro ghetto. They’ve never been there. “Well,” said he, “I’ll tell you how awful it is. The woman I hated most in the dilapidated apartment house in which I lived for ten years in Harlem was the tenant who was always clean. I begged that she should be filthy, for every time that she sprayed to get rid of her roaches, they came down to my place. In a situation where roaches were inevitable, I was taught as a boy to wash out the tub when I left it. In Harlem I learned never to wash out the tub when you left it, because where 15 people from 5 families were using one bath tub, you always came back to find it dirty. I therefore adjusted to the ghetto and left it dirty; I washed it once -- before I got in.”

And the rats! I have heard rather cultured young Negro men talk of the way they had slept lightly, night after night, listening for rats, because people in their building had been bitten by rats while sleeping in the night. One of my own sons lived for 2 1/2 years in a modest apartment building listed by the University of Chicago housing office and occupied mostly by students of different races. But it is the last bit of integrated housing on a street that from that point on south is largely Negro ghetto. Not long after Arthur had moved in, a new manager took over operation of the building for the owner. The new manager, himself a family man of modest means, soon made a pleasant discovery about that building as compared to the previous place he had managed. And he summed it up in three surprised words: “Gee, no rats!”

You and I don’t know much about that. And we don’t want to --- or do we want to? Somebody --- or a lot of somebodies --- has to understand that kind of living conditions and lend some sort of influence for change. Somebody --- or a lot of somebodies --- have to understand what it’s like for any young person to find no work -- particularly any Negro young person, to feel himself unwanted for any job --- nothing to do except raise the devil or be a runner for the underworld, when he’d rather have a job. They hate the white-dominated world for the way they live and for the life they miss. They hate its police; they hate its doled-out charity; they hate its standards. And they hate other Negroes who have made out in the white man’s world.

This same Negro speaker whom I mentioned earlier, Bayard Rustin, went with Martin Luther King to Watts, California, to see what they could do to heal that sociological sore. And Rustin speaks of the difficulty of the Negro middle class person out of that experience. “Thus,” he says, “when Dr. King and I went to Watts, the young men there told us: ‘What are you two doing out here? You’ve made it --- we haven’t. You don’t understand us. In fact you are house Niggers. We’re as good as you, and we haven’t made it, but you have. Therefore we distrust you because you must be playing some dirty game with Whitey to make it.’”

And so they gang up in their own way, determined to make some kind of life in their own area. Two such gangs on the south side of Chicago are the Devils Disciples and the Kenwood Rangers. They make war on each other and they look after their own. Recently they have signed a truce in order to get behind a government training program for jobs and there has been for a time a sharp decrease in crimes of violence. Chicago police seem determined to break up the Kenwood Rangers. Some of the responsible citizens believe there is more hope in understanding them and working with them. Actually, when it appeared that rioting was about to erupt on Chicago’s south side last summer, it was the young Rangers who are credited with stepping in and persuading the hotheads to “cool it.”

But they make no promises for this year. And they don’t want any nosy whites telling them what to do! I know white seminarians who are trying to keep in touch and stay on understanding terms. In spite of the fact that they have done some suffering too, they more-than-half expect to be kicked out of the area at any time.

One of the churches on Chicago’s south side that has really tried to understand, and do something about the situation, is the First Presbyterian Church of Woodlawn. Its tough-minded young minister, John Fry, is one whom the police would like to see transferred out since they would rather try to break up the gangs than see anyone work with them. But Presbytery and the local church have backed up Fry so far in the church’s program with the Rangers. The church furnishes a room for a kind of headquarters or gathering place. One of the staff members spent full time with those young fellows, for he thinks there are real positive things that really interest them -- like organizing a restaurant, a theater group and a job-training program. He and Fry believe that there is such an affirmative potential that the Rangers ought to exist.

Fry is not himself a Ranger (He is a white minister) and he has been known to confront Rangers with a considerable capacity for rage. He and his staff challenged Ranger policies time and again. But they are putting forth a mighty effort to understand, at the very point where few of us can understand. The ability to understand, and the effort to keep open lines of communication, is a major challenge of our time. Without it, human relationships deteriorate to misunderstanding and a kind of jungle warfare.

As a matter of race relations and understanding, one needs to be reminded that not all rebellion is in the Negro ghettos, nor among jobless whites. The same kind of understanding and firmness is needed in New York’s Westchester County, or any other where the richest Caucasian youngsters go to debutante parties and find it amusing to tear up thousands of dollars worth of antiques and paintings. There is a poverty of plenty, too. And there is a violence of ignorance and of neglect, where most of us figure as participants.

Now race relations have not smoothed out in decades and centuries past. And we are not going to settle them this morning, nor in the very next decade. But any kind of thoughtfulness about human relations, any kind of compassion for those who live in spiritual desperation, any kind of belief that our faith should make a difference in our actions, drives us to the continued effort to improve our relations with the various races of mankind. We need to find what freedom is for -- for ourselves and for all others.

No one of us is going, alone, to bring about the revolutions for good. But we need to deal with life patiently, persistently, with generous understanding, with an effort to help create the conditions wherein others, as well as ourselves, can live in self-respect. It we are going to live in an era of “Black Power” -- and we are, for whatever that means in the thinking of Negro people -- we had better be concerned and restrained, over how we wield White Power. Here in our community we can be concerned with the kind of climate that understands and helps those on the front line of conflict and challenge. Our Wisconsin Conference, which we support with our gifts, has a couple of men on the front line who deserve our prayers, and support and backing.

We have the first conference minister for metropolitan mission in Rev. Dave Rohlfing. He is a capable, experienced young (white) minister working in the city of Milwaukee. He has a wide variety of interests. Necessarily, one of them is the racial situation in that city. I have not heard of his heading any marches. He may, or may not, approve them, but I don’t think he works that way. He is more concerned with those civic moves that may improve the plight of people who cannot help themselves unaided.

We also have, in Milwaukee, the first Negro minister to serve our fellowship in this state. A graduate of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and ordained a Baptist minister, Rev. Herman Haller is, nonetheless, performing a service in our behalf as head of Fellowship Community Church where a variety of approach and activity seeks to minister to the needs of Negro folk of that area. When we support our own church and its programs, we support these two representatives of our fellowship at their posts on the front lines of human contrast.

We can try to be understanding and to become continually informed about emerging Black Power where the main emphasis, so far, seems to be in the direction of sufficiency and self respect. We can continue to remind ourselves of the one-ness of human longings, aspirations, and aims. We can listen to the voices of those who have struggled with the racist problem. Here is one who has tried to grapple with Christian responsibility on the subject and concludes that:

1) to be Christian in our approach is to be sensitive to the powerlessness and the alienation of many in our society and to proclaim God’s power.

2) to “be there,” identifying with suffering rather than inflicting suffering. Churches and persons may need to risk life for the poor and the powerless (our Lord did!)

The main function of the church has often been to prepare society. Sometimes its function should be opposition to a society that has become a tyranny to those who have no hope. The church must be as sensitive to tyranny as it is to anarchy. It can identify itself with creative leadership in this area as well as in the other revolutions of our time. Some of the church’s energy should go into experimental task forces and experimental urban ministries as well as to its regular institutional programs.

Meanwhile the old virtues are not dead. Bayard Rustin concluded his address to General Synod with a homely story. He had gone to North Carolina to make a speech. He was rushing to the meeting when he noticed that his shoes were not well groomed. Up the street, he saw an old Negro man with a shoe shine kit, and he went over to him. He got the shine in a hurry; asked “how much;” got the answer, “ten cents” (this was North Carolina) and gave the man a quarter. “Have you got some change?” asked the old shoe shiner. So Rustin searched his pockets and found 2 dimes and a nickel. He watched while the old fellow put a dime in his pocket and 15 cents in an old cigar box marked “Gloria.” Even in his hurry, Rustin stayed long enough to say, “I don’t want to butt into your business, but I’ve never seen anyone divide his money that way -- some in his pocket and some in a box.” The old fellow looked at Rustin and said, “O, that’s Gloria’s money. You see I’ve got a daughter that’s 17 years old. Every time I get a tip I put it is Gloria’s box. If I don’t get a tip, I ask for two nickels, and I put one in my pocket to keep the family goin’ and the other in Gloria’s box. I’m decided that, if it kills me, I’m going to give my daughter a college education.”

Well, there’s that spirit among poor people. “And,” says Rustin, “it’s the spirit of America. And it’s the spirit of God.”

Amen.

-------------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 11, 1968.

Also at Kalahikiola Church, February 16, 1969.

Also at Waioli Hui’ia Church, February 11, 1973.