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 12^th 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.”