The secular context and its turmoil were very much a part of the curriculum at some mainline Protestant seminaries in the mid-1960s. It simply was not sufficient to sit in a classroom studying Christian Ethics when a movement to put Jim Crow to flight was exploding all over the South. Four of the professors from The Methodist Theological School in Ohio had gone to Jackson, Mississippi to join a handful of blacks who tried to integrate the Sunday morning worship of the largest Methodist Church there. A convocation to celebrate their return to campus, after a brief jail term from their having been arrested on the church steps, served as a kind of “call to crusade” for many of the students. A handful of the students got together to decide how to translate this call into action.
So, there we were, driving into Alabama on our way to Selma in the early spring. A small integrated caravan of seminary students, “outsaade agitatas, come down he’a ta stir up owa Nigras” is what they looked like to most white southern citizenry. But if you looked real close inside those cars you would have seen someone else. Inside each of those cars were five passengers, four students, three young white students and one young black student, and a while professor, the students all wearing beaming bright clerical collars. If you could have looked further inside, inside each of those five, you would have seen elevated pulse rates, sighs of anxiety and tremors of fear nearly strong enough to register on a seismometer. We were excited to be “in the trenches” but we were as frightened as anyone could be in an automobile that felt like a “foxhole” with the possibility of enemy combatants in the vehicle whose head-lights shown through the rear window. After all, that was an equipped gun-rack, not an empty one, that we could see against the rear window in the pick-up truck where our headlights were shining. That gun-rack was a sober reminder of the Klan-killings of three college student voting-rights volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, whose bodies had be found the previous August buried in an earthen dam on Old Jolly Farm in rural Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Out of both dashboards, the radios crooned country music and crackled intermittently with the interruptions of news about Police Chief “Bull” Connor, dogs and fire-hoses of “Bloody Sunday”, and more news about the beating death of one of the protest marchers, The Rev. James Reeb, for whom a memorial service was to be held the day we arrived. If we had not been scared we would not have been sane. But it wasn’t sanity we were pursuing, rather it was our understanding of sanctity. We really believed what Graham Greene’s “whiskey priest” had said in The Power and the Glory.
That novel is set in 1920s Mexico and its persecution of the Church. About to be executed after being arrested for going to give Last Rites to a dying criminal, this priest is a drunk and has failed miserably to be either a priest or a decent human being. His last night before his firing-squad death, the “whiskey priest” tearfully laments, feeling terrible disappointment at the possibility of going to God empty-handed, “with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint.”
My seminary classmates and I had heard that image referred to in any number of chapel sermons and we did not want our lives to go a week further, lest we miss happiness at some appointed place. If we did, it would not be for lack of intention or lack of effort. So, that small self-denial in making this trip and our small courage, which donned masks of boisterous joking in the cars, was meant to give some sense that our lives had holy purpose.
The unpainted wood-frame house of our host family was typical of its neighbors on the unpaved, dirt street. The water at the kitchen sink flowed from a single porcelain-handled spigot because there was no hot water on-tap. It was not that cold in Alabama in March so the trip outside to the “facilities” wasn’t all that uncomfortable. Neither was the bare pine plank floor of the nearly-unfurnished living room uncomfortable as I pulled the top edge of my sleeping bag up under my chin the night before our participation in the march. I thought of the German proverb I had learned in the language class at OSU: Ein gutes Gewissen ist ein sanftes Ruhekissen – a good conscience is a soft pillow. The platter of home-made biscuits with apple-butter, the fried eggs and the hillock of grits with the pond of melted butter, surrounded by a shoreline of thick but crispy bacon the next morning meant that a satisfied appetite would complement the good conscience.
While the march the next day electrified with emotional charge, it was uneventful with regard to violence; unless someone really can “stare daggers” at you. Alabama citizens, by their looks as they lined the streets, were not there to cheer these “nigga lovas.” The marchers walked together in a line that stretched for miles, three-, four-, six-abreast, black-white, male-female, young-old with signs and that song that promised, “We’ll Walk Hand In Hand, We Shall Overcome, Someday.” None of us would ever forget that day and would someday realize that we helped force-march the country into a new era.
On the way back to Ohio, there was little boisterousness and no jokes. Instead, more than once one voice and then another would punctuate the silent drive with the words, “That could have been one of us,” as we heard the radios report the death of our fellow-marcher, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo.
Back home the next week, “saint” is not what I was being called. Although the middle-aged farm wife continued to attend Sunday School and Sunday worship regularly at the church where I was student-pastor, her husband sat, Sunday after Sunday during those same two hours, for more than a year in the church’s parking lot. Had you asked him, through the truck window, as he sat there in his freshly laundered bib overalls and plaid shirt, reading the Sunday paper, he would not have hesitated to inform you that he “had no intention of darkening the door of that Church, so long as that damned Communist is still the pastor.”
It was 1965 and I was in one world and those I served in another, per secula seculorum. Amen. A line I had read in one of novelist Frederick Buechner’s stories came to mind as I pondered whether my apparent alienation from those I was to serve was to go on this way “world without end.” Buechner recalls speaking of his own announcement of his intention to “enter the ministry,” to which a member of his family had said, “Was this your own idea or were you poorly advised?”
Through the Rear-View Window
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Sanchismos 
Ron, wow, this was such a superbly written post. What a great writer you are, and I moved by your courage and strong sense of ethics. I was eight years old in 1965, and hadn’t yet moved to the South. That would be two years later. My dad was in the Air Force, so that’s how we got transferred from California to Mississippi. Because my dad was in the military, I had always been exposed to diversity, so when we moved to Mississippi, it was quite a culture shock. I remember seeing “Whites Only” in store windows, water fountains and laundry mats. That was well up into my late teen years.
My parents ended up getting a divorce not long after we transferred to MS, so that’s how we (my siblings, my mother and I) ended up being “stuck” in Mississippi. My dad moved back to California. After I graduated from school, I took a job with the government in Washington, DC. That’s where I met my late husband a couple of years later, also working for the government. He was from Alabama; from a town where the KKK had their headquarters. I was in love, and didn’t have a clue what I was getting myself into when I agreed to move back with him to Alabama. While he found DC intellectually stimulating, he didn’t like living in a big city, and didn’t think DC would be a good place to raise a family.
He was open-minded, well educated, a natural-born leader, and a humanitarian. Unlike his whole family on both sides, he wasn’t a racist. I’ll never forget the day we drove into the town limits. There was a sign on the side of the road that said “Niggers, don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.” Decades later, while doing human rights research, I learned that sundown signs were common there.
I was taken aback by that sign, and wondering why my soon-to-be-husband would want to move us to such a hostile place. But I was young, naive and trusted his judgement. He found a job in a small city about 35 or 40 minutes north of his hometown, but got tired of the drive after 6 months, so we decided to moved there. On the first day we moved in, there was a KKK parade on the street that intersected with the street that our apartment was on. They were fully robbed and hooded, holding shotguns in the back of pickup trucks. It was intended to intimidate.
My partner really thought that he (we) could make a positive difference there. He was sorely wrong, and wouldn’t live to see his 30th birthday.
If you don’t mind, I would like to share your post with a blogging buddy who also marched in Selma in ’65. We call him Arch, which is a shorten version of his moniker. If he pops in, maybe he’ll show you a picture of the day he was there, and share his experience.
Thank you for bringing this post to my attention. It really is a pleasure getting to know you better. I’m glad our paths crossed. 🙂
Sorry about the typos and word omissions. Get used to it. I suck at catching my errors before I hit send. 😀
*robed
It’s true – she has Lysdexia —
Since we all want to get what we have to say out there, I suspect ‘lysdexia’ is a common form of eagerness. In fact, I think the word should be inserted in all our lexicons.
It’s not?
Hi Ron – Victoria is right, I was in Selma. If you’d like to discuss that in more detail, I can be reached at archaeopteryx@in-His-own-image.com. I would post the image that Neuro mentioned, but I have it stored on Photobucket, which it would seem is “down for maintenance“.
Arch, thanks for popping in.
@Ron, I saw this in my reader this morning. Thought I’d share.
http://kindnessblog.com/2016/01/29/silence-when-a-neighbor-uses-the-n-word-and-a-living-room-epiphany-by-carmelene-melanie-siani/
Victoria,
That’s a great post from ‘kindness…’ Thanks too for connecting me with the feathered dinosaur!
LOL — Ron, you may want to hold off on the thanks (at least for now) about me connecting you with Arch. My heart was in the right place. I had a weak moment. LOL
I’ll just put it this way — he’s an acquired taste. Unique. But, then again, I guess he’d most likely say that about me. 😀
Et tu, Brute! This was the most unkindest cut of all, for when great Caesar saw him stab, ingratitude, more strong than traitor’s arms, quite burst his mighty heart and vanquished him —
LOL — would you like some cheese and crackers with that whine? 😛
More of your Limburger? I don’t think so —
That’s proto-bird if you please, Sir —
Excuse me, Proto, I’ll have another bite of humble. I’m a birdwatcher, so I’ll add you to my life-list, at least having heard, if not seen your field marks.
“Excuse me, Proto, I’ll have another bite of humble.”
Just glad you didn’t say ‘crow’ – relatives, you know, even if they ARE the blackbirds of the family —
Very inspiring!
Pingback: Jeffster Awards #39 | Deconstructing Myths
Among the things writers do for readers are these: 1) they teach us things we never knew, 2) they remind us of what we have forgotten, and 3) they interrupt our paltry routines with the reconstruction of images that have been folded into the creases of other times and places. In other words, they teach us, once again, what we have long held dear and been on the verge of forgetting (or, as an old friend was want to say, of “disremembering.”
This is, for me, such a reconstruction, Ron.
I thank you for the disturbance. Walter
Remaining ‘disturbing’ is a worthwhile satisfaction!
We’re so proud to call you our friend. Thank you for all you’ve done. R & K
We’re so proud to call you our friend.
I wondered when I’d hear the story of your participation in one of the Selma marches. My own enlightenment took longer (having been raised in the South) but I have great respect and awe for those who participated in the fight for civil rights. Especially on the heels of “Bloody Sunday.” Did you see “Selma” the movie? There was a lot of back story that needed elaboration for those unfamiliar with the players and the background, but it found its stride when we saw the marchers and King’s eloquence. Thanks for your courage.
Haven’t seen the movie; want to see it. Many thanks for your encouragement in my keeping up my writing.
I’m proud to know you had the courage to go to Selma. I remember those days. Scary times but well worth the effort. Too bad not enough has changed.
Indeed, Pam, not enough is different! But now we can be distracted from justice here by focusing on the threats from ‘terrorists.’
The Desert Abba nailed the feelings, resolve and latent hopes of those of us who together took a baby step for justice all those many years ago. And, I am grateful for his words.
C. Joseph Sprague
_____
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
Alas, that hope’s latency has been stretched to filmy-thin!
Ron –
Good stuff! Very good stuff! Somewhere Bogie and Everett are smiling. They mentored us into a new understanding of what it really means to “Preach the Word.”
TOM
Not too long from now, Tom, those they mentored will be no more and their mentoring will fade from memory.
Did you send this to Jeff?