Bill Faw
June 14, 2020
On March 8, I was the last in-person speaker at this church. Sorry: I did not mean to shut you down!
In the ‘lemonade out of lemons’ category: the shutdown has given me a chance to watch most of the HUU services on Zoom with Martha, and then watch my Bridgewater Church of the Brethren services later via YouTube. This has allowed me to see some excellent sermons from both inspiring churches!
I ended my March 8 talk with the possibility that humans may have evolved the capacity of wonder and awe, meditation and worship, as the fittest way to communicate with God or some divine dimension of reality.
Indeed, these last 3 months have tilted my balanced prayer & meditation sessions toward more earnest prayers – to a partially known and partially unknown God, seen through a glass dimly.
My talk today will be much more autobiographical and much less abstract than my last talk – or my two earlier talks.
I had prepared a decent draft of my talk for today, about a month ago. I continued to refine that talk up to a week and ½ ago, when the racial events of the day caught up with me, and steered me in a different direction.
I had pursued my Peace Studies BA, studied a year in Japan, and had two of my three years at Harvard Divinity School – long after Theodore Parker, but just before Elaine Pagels. But I had no vocational focus, until becoming involved in the early-1960’s civil right movement in Boston and North Carolina, during my third year at Harvard. While both Martha and I were raised in the church, this involvement allowed us to see the church as being relevant in a new way.
My ‘calling’ to become a Church of the Brethren pastor was specifically a call to inter-racial and inter-cultural involvements – not, at first, a general call to ministry.
Martha and I also became involved in the anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear arms race movements of the late ‘60s and ‘70s and beyond – for a number of years risking imprisonment by refusing to pay a portion of our income tax.
I served as a Church of the Brethren pastor for 24 years: first in an inner-city-Chicago church where we had both English and Spanish services, worked with an Hispanic street gang and younger children, had race riots come within 4 blocks of our house, and had involvements with Martin Luther King.
Second, I pastored a Black and White integrated church close to Watts.
Fourth we were part of an Evanston Illinois communal church, where we lived together and pooled money and property.
If that wasn’t exciting enough, four different times over a dozen years, my religious left activities brought me into scary contact with the KKK waving confederate battle flags, and/or neo-Nazis wearing swastikas – the actual “deplorables” that Hillary tried to warn us about.
I also pastored (third & fifth) more traditional churches in Roanoke and Richmond Virginia.
Then, after securing a PhD in Experimental Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, I served as a psychology professor for 24 more-prosaic years: in Ashland VA, North Carolina, and Georgia.
When I decided to change this sermon’s focus, I looked over my sermon file labeled Race. I landed on a short sermon to our white Chicago congregation on the 1965 Chicago race riot which had just started three days before – the day after the Watts riot began. I will update my reading of that sermon by saying “black” instead of “negro”, and give it a slight trimming. It speaks to today’s discussion on issues and the use of violence.
Listen in:
“Sermon on the Chicago ‘Riots’: August 15, 1965 (5 days < 25 yr old)
There seem to be two major underlying causes for race riots: 1) When there are few creative channels through which blacks can better their lives, tension mounts until it bursts; and 2) when violence, hate, and black racism are preached by black leaders – then tensions are created and burst.
This means that with NO civi rights leadership, tensions would mount; and with VIOLENT civil rights leadership, tensions are created. No change or violent change – both lead to riot.
In a riot situation the non-violent civil rights leaders plead for peace. Dick Gregory proved himself a man of courage and dedication! Al Raby (prominent Chicago civil rights leader with close ties with MLK) put himself on the line pleading for the rioting to stop. Only the Black-Muslim-affiliated ACT and Sparticists actively incited and supported the riot. Other civil rights leaders and black policemen, ministers, and community workers are all against that typeof expression of protest.
Now, the fact that the riot occurred can lead us to either of two conclusions: 1) either civic rights leaders were wrong to have stirred up protest in the recent past, trying to change the patterns of life they see about them – wrong because protest went wild in these riots – and most of you here today probably feel that way; or 2) the civil rights leaders were right in trying to channel tensions in terms of non-violent creative protest and self-improvement, but the city – and the whole community – were wrong in not seriously trying to bring about change.
But recall, that the absence of change creates violent change! A non-violent, creative civil rights movement, coupled with extensive social change and improvement, might be the best (and only) way to eventually eliminate all desire for riot.
It seems to be a lesson from history that contented people do not riot. And, it is almost impossible to see how blacks could be contented in our city and our country!
These may sound like harsh words, and perhaps they are. But I am convinced that the worst way to deal with riots of this nature is to increase our prejudice and harden our hearts – such reactions on our parts could only increase tension and despair, and thus riots.
This does not mean that riots are to be applauded – God forbid! They are disgraceful and regrettable! I ask only that we see that the main underlying cause seems to be despair and frustration with the life that blacks have to live. And that the more change that can come about or be brought about in the conditions of the lives of blacks in our city, the fewer riots in the future.
Now, not all of the plight of the Chicago blacks can be blamed on Chicago. Conditions for blacks in the South are most humiliating and de-humanizing. Many blacks who flee from the South have almost ruined lives. But our city has not only not attempted to restore life but has decided, through the actions of its citizens, to cage-in battered lives, containing them within very crowded neighborhoods with very few doors open to move into better neighborhoods, and with very little concern, on the part of most whites, for them.
That is, I would ask that instead of snarling back, we dedicate ourselves as a city and as a nation to restoring life where it has been broken.
There are many people in our community – youth and adults — who have actively increased racial tensions: a white youth shouts into the park (across the street from our church) an insulting name to a black returning home from school; a band of youths chase blacks through the park; adults call them filthy names or stir up their kids to do the same; a policeman incites white youth against blacks.
All of these I have witnessed, myself, in this very neighborhood, and some have involved parishioners of this church!
These things cause tension and riot as much as violent black leaders and youth.
If responsible white leaders cannot prevent or stop such things among white people, how can we blame responsible black leaders for not being able to control the riots?
Our society erupts occasionally. Let us dedicate ourselves to improve the lives of all people! Amen (and so ends the sermon within the sermon)
A FEW COMMENTS
That was clearly my strongest and most direct sermon – just 1 year into our 5 years at that church; 1 year into the 24 of my pastoring.
Perhaps the most relevant line for today, was my mentioning that I had witnessed a policemaninciting white youth against blacks. At some time before this sermon, some of our gang kids had come to our parsonage (above the church), to tell me that some black kids had jumped some of our Hispanic kids in the park, but that some policemen had broken it up.
I had our gang kids take me to the spot where that had happened. Two white policemen were still there. Our kids complained to the police that they had been jumped by those “blankety-blank N-words”. One of the policemen responded: “If this happens again, you can take care of those “blankety-blank N-words”, and ditch your knives and clubs. We won’t hold that against you.”
Because of our gang work, I was on the Community Relations Boardfor the 10th Police District. After the commander and I talked with the policeman involved – and saw that he trivialized the occasion (“It’s nothing! It’s just cop talk!”) – that policeman was transferred to an area far from racial tensions.
Five months after the events mentioned in my 1965 sermon, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and dozens of others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference moved to Chicago for a year of northern civil rights activity. The West Side Federation of Chicago, on whose executive committee I sat, was one of the inviting organizations; along with Al Raby’s group.
The reason that I know that MLK and his organization opposed the violence in riots comes from two “non-violence” training sessions I underwent in those early years.
The first was in North Carolina in 1964. We were being trained one evening in non-violent responses, in a black church in Williamston, when a lookout near a church window called our attention to a pickup truck which had been slowly circling the church – with several men in the truck bed in full KKK attire. The KKK man sitting on the tailgate with a shot gun, was identified to us as the Deputy Sherriff. We continued our training in non-violent responses — with a new urgency!
The second non-violence training was in Chicago, after the start of the July 1966 Chicago race riot. Mayor Daley had just called in the National Guard to line the major streets where there had been rioting the night before. Martin Luther King’s group was still in Chicago. King put out a call through our organization for black and white clergy to come that afternoon for training and an assignment.
King trained us in non-violent responses and assigned each of us to wear clerical collars and be responsible for one mile of one major riot-torn street — to walk on the sidewalk on one side, between the National Guard in the street and potential rioters in homes and on porches. Then we were to cross the street and walk the mile back on the other sidewalk, until about midnight. King was equally concerned about provocations from rioters and from the National Guard. There was no rioting that evening or afterwards – not until 21 months later when King was killed. King could not try to stop THAT riot!
Thankfully things have changed in many good ways since 1968 with African Americans – in self-image, education, housing, voting, and economics. But some things remain the same. Almost all of the riots and demonstrations of the past 50 years in America have involved the police – causing or at least implicated in the triggering events.
The riots of the 1960s, and the 1992 riots regarding Rodney King, were deeply-eruptive riots, of which some people took advantage to loot and burn. Today’s events are deeply and widely-inspired demonstrations – not riots – in which some people have taken advantage to loot and burn. The wide-spread world-wide involvement in these demonstrations and issues – and changes already occurring — are encouraging!
BENEDICTION
I end with Unitarian pastor, Theodore Parker’s, 1853 sermon statement, predicting the inevitable success of the abolitionist cause to eliminate slavery: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice”.
This was a statement of ‘faith’ by Parker: he “divined it by conscience”, not by the “experience of sight”. Our call is to work with “the moral universe” for justice and peace and love! May it be so!