We’ve been thinking, during this pre-Lenten season, of some of the gaps that exist between us - gaps of generations, or sex, between neighbors, and so on. It has been our contention that God has a word for the gaps, and in Jesus Christ has provided a means to bridge them - from the little ones to the big ones. Today - Race Relations Sunday - we stop to look at the racial gap, and as we do we find ourselves enmeshed in confusion!
There once was a time when I knew what to say on Race Relations Sunday, when things seemed - at least to me - to be absolutely clear-cut. Our aim was for an unsegregated church in an unsegregated society, and our words were accept and integrate. The word may still be "accept" but I’m not sure "integrate" is in the black lexicon any more. Five years ago, on the Synod’s Commission on Religion and Race, we fought with one of our U.P. Colleges, at the request of black students, to get students assigned to rooms without regard to race, breaking the pattern of automatically assigning black students to live with other black students. We fought discrimination in off-campus housing and the dialogue got hot and heavy for a time, but we won. Today what is the cry on that same campus? It is a demand for separate housing for blacks, for black studies as an academic division, for separate facilities for blacks in the student unions.
Five years ago when someone said, "Of course all Negroes have rhythm," or "They are all great musicians," we simply hooted them down until the whole thing became a cliche and a great put-on, to be used by Godfrey Cambridge and Bill Cosby to get a laugh, and yet today, what do we hear from the black community? Statements that "Black is beautiful, baby, and we’re decended from an African culture where we were lean and lithe - and you don’t need to teach us how to sing your songs, man, because we have soul - we have our own sense of rhythm and beat!"
Well, this is not to say that either position is unjustified - and maybe the clue was my statement about the fight with the colleges where I said "we" won, "we" being a synod commission largely composed of white clergy. Too long we’ve said, "we," when we should have been listening to "them."
That, too, is a change. Five years ago to say "them" was to show prejudice. The cry was to see the Negro as a person, as an individual with wants and hopes and dreams just like you and me, not as a part of a race. Today the cry is "Black Power" which means something very different to Eldridge Cleaver or Stokeley Carmichael than it does to Roy Wilkins or Edward Brooke - but it is a cry for separate identity - a demand on the part of the Negro to be seen as a group.
So what I’m saying is that I’m just not at all sure what I should be saying! Once I knew what to do; I picketed slum lords, I marched in a memorial for Martin Luther King, I denounced barbers who wouldn’t cut black hair. Today, like that white liberal in the movie Uptight, I find I’m not really wanted in the black community, but uncertain of what to do in the white one. Yet, if we are truly the children of God we must believe that He has a word for the gaps. We may well be confused and uncertain, but we are not alone, and there is a word.
I
What is it? Perhaps some of the things that Paul wrote to the church at Rome speak to us, even in such a different Scene. For example, he wrote, "LET LOVE BE GENUINE." That means, I suppose, many things - but certainly one thing is, "Let love be honest." For a long time, even among the so-called liberals, our love was not honest. It was patronizing. As I look back at my old sermons on the subject, I am appalled at the number of times I suggested that "They didn’t want this or that." How presumptuous on my part to assume that I could or should speak on someone else’s wants and needs! Our love dare not be patronizing; it must be honest. Which means that we have to try to understand the black community as well as any white can understand it (which might be "not much!")
Let’s admit that no one speaks for the Negro any more than anyone speaks for the whites. For all of the variety I think one need not be particularly astute to discover there is a discernable change in form and mood in the black community - a movement to what has been called "BLACK POWER."
This expression means many things but primarily, I think, it is a seeking of an identity by the black man that may make real dialogue, and ultimately real love, possible. White society has long said that we really ought to be color-blind, and judge each person as an individual on his own merits. The only problem was that the whole structure of our society dictated that our ideals of individual rights were expressions of ideals based on the security of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as a group. To "make it" in white society the black man had to be better than the comparable white, and he had to make it on white terms. As a result, he didn’t develop a real sense of his own identity.
Remember in Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN, how the son, after Willie Loman’s suicide, says "He never knew who he was." It’s a tragic play on a number of counts, but surely one of the most poignant realizations is the fact that Willie couldn’t communicate with his sons because he wasn’t sure of his own identity. Willie was white, but "not knowing who he was" may be the epitaph of the black community.
Black literature has made a wide swing - from James Baldwin’s NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, to John Williams’ THE MAN WHO CRIED, "I AM." I would recommend the latter. It’s not a nice book and I don’t buy the author’s thesis that there is an international conspiracy against the Negro with concentration camps now in readiness (although a number of blacks claim to believe just that). If you read it you get a feeling for the black search for identity. The black man wants to be himself on his own terms. Hence "Black Power" and the search for heritage. The black man wants to say, "I am!" Only when he can find his own identity and reconstruct his own past is he psychologically ready for meaningful dialogue and meaningful love.
He says, "Black and beautiful," and we don’t believe him or we completely miss his point because our mind set is tied to beauty as being white. Now, before you object to that I, too, can point with pride. My own alma mater elected a black homecoming queen this year - but she looked white! That is, her features were Caucasian and her skin just happened to be black. I’ve not seen Julia on television, but I was completely entranced with Diahnn Carroll when I saw her in NO STRINGS on Broadway a few years back - she too, has white features rather than black. Notice the dark mannequins that are beginning to appear in store windows. You have to look at them a long time to try and figure out if they are meant to be white or black and even then you’re not sure. The same is true with dark models in clothing ads. There are some who might be Negroes, but you’re never quite sure so theoretically everyone is happy. You don’t see many Afro hair styles on television or in store windows.
"Black is Beautiful" is the suggestion in the black community that you don’t have to look white to be somebody - that thick lips, flat noses, and kinky hair have their own style of beauty. It is the suggestion that heroism isn’t limited to the white race and when you see yourself as beautiful, when you see your own heritage as dignity, then you can relate to others with dignity and love.
This, it seems to me, is the basic reason for the current black separateness - a retrenching on the part of the black community to discover itself. Our call is to understand it. If love would be genuine, it must be honest - and understanding.
Adam Clayton Powell isn’t my ideal for a congressman (although there are some white elected officials who fall short of my particular admiration also), but the point is he happens to be Harlem’s choice. Not every black citizen likes him but to a large number he is a symbol of a "cat that made it big and thumbed his nose at whitey!" We don’t have to be Powell fans but by the same token we have no right to choose someone else’s heros. I gather that one of the really annoying things to the black community is white talk about someone not being a "credit to his race." We’ll choose our own heroes, the black community tells us, be they Malcom X or Stokeley Carmichael, and gratuitous remarks about how so-and-so should do more for his people can be done without!
This, it seems, is the situation. A move toward separateness in order that the black community can discover itself. Our call is to try to understand in order that honesty may mark the relationship between us.
II
Paul’s suggestion to the Romans goes on: "HATE THAT WHICH IS EVIL." I suppose that this has been the race relations theme for years and it’s still valid. Hate that which is evil. Evil is anything that degrades a man - little things and big things. A few weeks ago I heard a waitress say to a group of burly white truckers, "What will you boys have?" I wondered if that was how she would speak to a group of black customers. Probably. Just her way of being friendly, but "boy" to a black man is one of the ultimate insults connoting years of being a "boy" no matter what his age - of doing menial labor no matter what his education. A little thing but an evil thing because it degrades, and all the more dangerous because we may never realize what triggers the resentment in the black face when we’re just trying to be friendly. We’ve got to be sensitive to evil.
Or evil can appear in school textbooks - textbooks that fail to mention that Crispus Attucks, a Negro and runaway slave, was the first to fall under British fire in the Boston Massacre, or that James Otis, a Negro, gave an important speech in 1761 on behalf of the American Revolution that aroused such fervor that Daniel Webster said, "From that moment we date the severance of the British Empire." Little things, again, and I’m sure quite unconscious. Yet, over the years, there was a constant underplaying of the black man’s role in American history, or a complete misunderstanding of it. Booker T. Washington, for example, is always hailed in textbooks as the prime example of a black man who made it with sweat and hard work and served as an inspiration to his people. In point of fact, his docility infuriated militant Negroes, and his views did not represent completely those of the Negro community, and there was considerable bitterness engendered by his career.
My point is only that we haven’t been fair or accurate in our reporting of history, and we have consequently kept the black man from understanding his identity.
Evil can be big things, too, It can be the perpetuation of slum housing in the ghetto. It can be the stifling of opportunity to advance. It can be a wide variety of injustice from overpricing to shoddy merchandising, which - from all accounts is the norm, rather than the exception, in poverty areas.
III
We know all this, don’t we? We’re a bit weary of having it rammed down our throats. So we should understand that which is evil. Perhaps we’re moving in that direction with all deliberate speed - to use the cliche of the still unimplemented 1954 Court Decision. What is our role really supposed to be? How do we close the gap that, in fact, appears to be widening rather than closing. How do we communicate across a wall that seems bigger than ever? Paul says, "HOLD FAST TO WHAT IS GOOD." So, what does that mean? Stokeley Carmichael has an answer when whites ask "What can we do?" He says, "That’s your problem, baby!" In a real sense, it is, and it’s frustrating. We want to bridge the gap but we don’t know how. We want to help, but we seem to be rebuffed, and there aren’t many clues.
"That which is good" is LOVE, and love is concern - honest concern. So perhaps we show love by trying to understand. Maybe we begin by subscribing to magazines like EBONY so that we can understand feelings and emotions in the black community that we don’t get by reading the newspaper accounts about trouble at Olive High School.
Then, maybe, you do your thing - whatever it happens to be. As a result of a confrontation with some black families one family in this congregation began a scholarship fund - ultimately known as the Hiland-Bidwell Fund - in which $4,000 was raised in a short time to go to the black community, with no strings, to be used in education as they saw fit. Another member of this congregation is active in community organization in a white area fringing the ghetto - working with others to cool it, and seeking to develop understanding. Some of us have demonstrated against slum lords because it seemed to be the only effective way of speaking to an issue at hand. Others have tutored in the black community. A couple of our officers are studying the possibility of helping redesign a building in the North Side for a black community organization that is willing to pay for the service, but can’t get a reasonable bid. In quiet ways there are probably dozens of things being done
It is our problem, because we haven’t done enough and because we haven’t changed enough. Ultimately the black community needs our cash so that it can build up a power base - a base of economic black power that will enable it to stand tall. Ultimately we need to change attitudes and feelings. "White racism" may seem to be an unfair tag but the Kerner Commission that coined it was hardly composed of bleeding heart liberals. We all are racists to some degree and certainly we have an innate distrust for people who are different. (If you don’t believe that just wear a beard some time! It’s quite an experience to see the reactions from people who know you but who now sees you as strange, and not quite as trustworthy and normal as before, and also to see the hate stares from strangers.)
We do distrust those who look, act, and talk differently, but this can be overcome. Paul suggests that our real call is to be "AGLOW WITH THE SPIRIT." That’s our final clue!
I’m interested in the number of times one sees the word "soul" these days. There is soul music, soul food, and far be it for me as a white man to try to define it. I gather that at its heart "soul" denotes some kind of special warmth black men have for each other. It has something to do with relationships and depth of concern.
Perhaps being "aglow with the spirit" is something akin to that. The Spirit of the living God is nothing less than the ability to feel God’s presence and forgiveness and love, and to relate to Him and to our fellow men with an intensity of love. We are to so commit our lives to Him that His Spirit glows within us and we develop a kind of "soul" or concern for all men, across every gap of color, race, and creed.
In Damn Yankees a hit song was, "You’ve Got to Have Heart." Maybe our song should be "You’ve Got to Have Soul," that is, you’ve got to commit your life to Christ in such a way that His Spirit lives within you and you understand your neighbor, be he white or black - you fight anything that degrades him - and you reach across the chasm among us! Accept it ... and love one another!
