We went to Nashville and I was the assistant minister at the First Baptist Church (now Capitol Hill).
The minister was Kelly Miller Smith. Kelly was also head of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference. I spent the summer working at the church and picketing H.G. Hill with folk like John Lewis, Diane Nash and others who became luminaries of the civil rights movement. Joe Carter from Brooklyn and I integrated the Holiday Inn after sitting in the restaurant for an hour or so.
Our best friend besides Kelly and Alice and Will Campbell and his family. was C. T. Vivian who used to come around and we would talk deep into the night. Jim Lawson would come in from Memphis to teach us nonviolence.
I mention this only to express my own surprise -- the term racist never emerged all this time.
Back in Chicago, I worked and got to know folk like Dick Gregory and Jim Flagg. With Renewal Magazine, which I founded and edited, I did what I could to support the civil rights movement.
In 1966 I spent the better part of a year in Geneva at the World Council of Churches where I did work on international development and what people now call liberation theology. Down the hall was my friend Beth Kipligat who has played a major role in church and government in Kenya.
I suppose my shell of naivete -- I would prefer to call it something else but I have no word for it (Beth's word when she wrote her note was "color blind") -- was broken when Oscar McCloud, a Black colleague from seminary and later the Presbyterian Church, suggested that we call a session at a Consultation on Church Union meeting in Atlanta in 1968.
At ou rump meeting, I proposed reparations as a means of inducing Pritestant denominations to get rid of their assets and unite and also to support Black development. I was summarily told by the next speaker, Mance Jackson, that I should not be stating an agenda for Blacks. I have a holographic mind and that was all it took to show me the future.
We had entered a time of ideological hardening in which the notion of beloved community that had been at least considered in Nashville was replaced by Black Power and a ton of posturing all around. When I asked Oscar what had happened, he brushed it off.
Well, I had my agenda and I followed it, even as -- a week later -- Jim Forman announced and championed the Black Manifesto which turned the reparations issue to a direct confrontation with churches. Ironically the only major contribution to the Black Economic Development Conference came from the Massachusetts UCC under the direction of Avery Post. I was asked to help him facilitate the gift.
Incredible, when I look back. Incredible too that Union Theological Seminary managed to hold a recent meeting on reparations with nothing on the program to suggest this chapter in American church history had ever occurred.
After 1969, we were deep into an era of posturing and rhetoric and balkanization. I watched people like Michael Novak and Richard Neuhaus sidle ever more to the right. I watched the Democratic Party learn to feed at a common trough with the Republicans.
The friendships I made with Blacks were with artists like Ron Fair, a novelist, and -- for a brief and significant time -- with science fiction author Samuel R. (Chip) Delany -- and singer Bev Rolher. A few islands of normality in the balkanized wasteland of our common broken dreams. I became a house husband and wrote more books.
Yes, I had cried before my family when Martin was shot. And after corresponding with Bob Kennedy to urge him to run in 1966, and discussing it with him by mail from Geneva, the only communication I got in 1968 was a telegram inviting me to his funeral. I did not go.
I did not go to the March on Washington. Or Woodstock for that matter. I have never been into such "history".
I need not continue. Suffice to say that now the gates have reopened.
The problem Barack addressed on Tuesday is still with us.
The minister was Kelly Miller Smith. Kelly was also head of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference. I spent the summer working at the church and picketing H.G. Hill with folk like John Lewis, Diane Nash and others who became luminaries of the civil rights movement. Joe Carter from Brooklyn and I integrated the Holiday Inn after sitting in the restaurant for an hour or so.
Our best friend besides Kelly and Alice and Will Campbell and his family. was C. T. Vivian who used to come around and we would talk deep into the night. Jim Lawson would come in from Memphis to teach us nonviolence.
I mention this only to express my own surprise -- the term racist never emerged all this time.
In 1966 I spent the better part of a year in Geneva at the World Council of Churches where I did work on international development and what people now call liberation theology. Down the hall was my friend Beth Kipligat who has played a major role in church and government in Kenya.
I suppose my shell of naivete -- I would prefer to call it something else but I have no word for it (Beth's word when she wrote her note was "color blind") -- was broken when Oscar McCloud, a Black colleague from seminary and later the Presbyterian Church, suggested that we call a session at a Consultation on Church Union meeting in Atlanta in 1968.
At ou rump meeting, I proposed reparations as a means of inducing Pritestant denominations to get rid of their assets and unite and also to support Black development. I was summarily told by the next speaker, Mance Jackson, that I should not be stating an agenda for Blacks. I have a holographic mind and that was all it took to show me the future.
We had entered a time of ideological hardening in which the notion of beloved community that had been at least considered in Nashville was replaced by Black Power and a ton of posturing all around. When I asked Oscar what had happened, he brushed it off.
Well, I had my agenda and I followed it, even as -- a week later -- Jim Forman announced and championed the Black Manifesto which turned the reparations issue to a direct confrontation with churches. Ironically the only major contribution to the Black Economic Development Conference came from the Massachusetts UCC under the direction of Avery Post. I was asked to help him facilitate the gift.
Incredible, when I look back. Incredible too that Union Theological Seminary managed to hold a recent meeting on reparations with nothing on the program to suggest this chapter in American church history had ever occurred.
After 1969, we were deep into an era of posturing and rhetoric and balkanization. I watched people like Michael Novak and Richard Neuhaus sidle ever more to the right. I watched the Democratic Party learn to feed at a common trough with the Republicans.
The friendships I made with Blacks were with artists like Ron Fair, a novelist, and -- for a brief and significant time -- with science fiction author Samuel R. (Chip) Delany -- and singer Bev Rolher. A few islands of normality in the balkanized wasteland of our common broken dreams. I became a house husband and wrote more books.
Yes, I had cried before my family when Martin was shot. And after corresponding with Bob Kennedy to urge him to run in 1966, and discussing it with him by mail from Geneva, the only communication I got in 1968 was a telegram inviting me to his funeral. I did not go.
I did not go to the March on Washington. Or Woodstock for that matter. I have never been into such "history".
I need not continue. Suffice to say that now the gates have reopened.
The problem Barack addressed on Tuesday is still with us.
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