Grateful for the Letter from the Birmingham City Jail
Grateful for the Letter from the Birmingham City Jail
As I break the bread of my struggle as one old white man in
Birmingham, Alabama, may God continue to open our eyes that we may behold all
of the reconciling work of Christ. For
God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self not counting our trespasses
against us and giving us a ministry of reconciliation.
My journey in Birmingham began three years after King wrote
his “Letter from the Birmingham City
Jail,” and the four little girls and two boys were killed. I moved to Birmingham with my wife Nancy and
our two sons, Lawton, Jr. and Kevin in 1966 to begin work as a power
distribution engineer with Alabama Power Company. I had just graduated from the University of
Alabama with a degree in Electrical Engineering that spring. We rented a red brick house on the southwest
corner of Woodland Ave and 12th Street in West End. We joined the West End Methodist Church.
A white southern male working for Alabama Power Company and
a member and soon to be leader in the Methodist Church I was swimming in a
system created for my success and power.
A system defended by unbelievable violence; supported by the suffering
of untold numbers of people of color. I
was blind and deaf to their cries.
Unconsciously thinking that this was the way God designed the world to
be. I was comfortably asleep in a satiny
coffin of death. Viet Nam and the Civil
Rights Movement were not even on my radar.
Birmingham’s West End was Bull Connor’s political support
base. He like me was a Methodist Sunday
School teacher, he at Walker Memorial and Woodlawn Methodist Churches and I at
West End Methodist Church.
Each Sunday at West End Methodist had an amazing liturgical
pattern, attend Sunday School, then discuss the Negro problem, and then worship
God. The high passion on Sunday was the
Negro problem. The passion was not about
trying to achieve racial justice, but for the struggle to maintain racial
injustice. How are we going to keep
these “niggers” in their place, out of our church and schools? There were always plenty of stories to denigrate
and discount Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC.
It may seem surprising to you and it does now to me in
retrospect, from where I stand now, that there was no feeling that supporting the
fact that racial injustice was inconsistent with what we taught in Sunday
School and our worship experience at Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning. It was an unspoken but well communicated and
understood rule that only white heterosexual males with financial means were
the only possible candidates for first-class Christian status. This is still the creed of most white
churches in the south today. I want to
be clear here. I was not silent about
all this then out of fear, while secretly wanting to speak up for racial
justice. I fully affirmed this unspoken
but dominate part of our white male supremacist creed at West End Methodist
Church.
I remember one Sunday that demonstrated our non-Christian
creed. A black man came to worship with
us. The tension was so great that I can
remember the pew he sat in today. He was
not asked to leave nor were police officers hired to keep blacks out in the
future. Our pastor did a creative thing
in support of the white male supremacists creed by not giving an invitation to
church membership that day. It had been
standard practice every other Sunday to open the doors of the church. After worship we congratulated the pastor for
his creativity. And it became an
unwritten policy in the future if blacks showed up no invitation to church
membership. It was not surprising, but I
don’t remember any other black visitors.
They were conscious, I am sure of the lack of hospitality for black
people at West End Methodist Church.
Then came the assignment while attending Candler School of
Theology at Emory University in preparation for ordained ministry in the United
Methodist Church to read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from the Birmingham City
Jail. I heard these words of his
with my heart.
“I guess it is easy for those who have never suffered the
stinging darts of segregation to say, “wait.”
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at
will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate
filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and
sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million
negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an
affluent society; when you find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering
as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter why she can’t go to the
public amusement park that has just been advertised on television and see tears
welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Fun Town is closed to
colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in
her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by
unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to
concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos; “Daddy why
do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country
drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable
corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by
nagging signs reading, “White” and “Colored”; when your first name becomes
“Nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last
name becomes “John” and your wife and mother are never given the respected
title ”Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that
you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to
expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating
sense of “nobodiness”, then you will understand why we find it difficult to
wait. There comes a time when the cup of
endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss
of injustice when they experience the blackness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our
legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” (The Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings of Martin Luther King Jr.; p292-293.)
As I read these words, a required reading in a seminary
course, I came face to face with the answer to King’s questions.
“ I have traveled the length and breath of Alabama and
Mississippi and all the other southern states.
On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings. I have looked at her beautiful churches with
their lofty spires pointing heavenward.
I have beheld the impressive outlay of her massive religious education
buildings. Over and over again I have
found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor
Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they
when Governor Wallace gave the clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when
tired, bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark
dungeons of compliancy to the bright hills of creative protest?” (The Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings of Martin Luther King Jr.; p299.)
I knew where the voices of those churches were; I am one of
those voices! We were standing with
George Wallace and George Wallace’s white washed Jesus. A false Jesus we had created so our bishops
could own slaves and so we could get rich and stay rich off of the backs of
Blacks in bondage under Jim Crow. We had
killed John Wesley, who fought slavery until his dying breath, and buried his
works in the ground and kept the historical Jesus in the tomb so that we could
worship our white washed Jesus enthroned on a white lie we taught in Sunday
School, celebrated between Sunday School and worship and used as an excuse to
deny any Black participation in our worship services. All this is evidence of our white
righteousness, a building on the sand, a fabrication of our own creation in
opposition to God. I saw the lie! I wept and wept and wept! Bitter tears of one who discovered I was
living a lie, not just any lie, but a lie opposed to God with “defiance and
hatred.”