Interracial alliances and social change
Taylor uses his connections to various civil rights leaders and groups to illustrate the importance of interracial alliances when seeking social change.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with J. Randolph Taylor, May 23, 1985. Interview C-0021. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Since by then, you see,
I was a white southerner who was involved in what basically was a
predominantly black civil rights movement I at least had the contacts
which such a group needed to be able to establish relationships across
town and throughout the South. When we moved to Atlanta to Central
Presbyterian Church, one of the tangential things ... It
wasn't central to the whole decision, because we went as a
call to Central Presbyterian Church, a splendid church thoroughly
involved in the life of the city of Atlanta. But one of the
serendipitous effects was the fact that Ebeneezer Baptist Church, of
which Dr. King and his father were co-pastors, was about a quarter of a
mile from Central Church, and so we contacted them and they were very
hospitable to us. As we arrived in Atlanta, the Kings greeted us, and in
retrospect that was very significant. That opened doors that we just
simply would never have had opened to us, particularly in the black
community but also somewhat in the white community. I moved to Atlanta
in December of 1967, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in
Memphis in April of 1968, just really four months later. The result was
that what I think would have come to have been a very close association
was aborted. Since Mrs. King had been so gracious when we came, Arlene
and I went immediately over to her house and visited
with her and with Daddy King and with Mrs. King, Sr., and that began a
very close friendship, so that I have stayed in touch with the King
family. I shared in Mama King's funeral. I went back to
Atlanta to share in Daddy King's memorial service just this
past year. And the two churches began to program together, a
predominantly black church and a predominantly white church, and now do
a great many things jointly. That relationship continues, and
it's a very exciting one. Through the process of all that, I
got to know the other civil rights leaders in Atlanta and was heavily
involved with Andy Young. Andy was Chairman of the Community Relations
Commission of the city of Atlanta, and I was his Vice-Chair. Then when
he was elected to Congress, I became Chair of the Community Relations
Commission, and Joe Lowry, who's now President of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, became my Vice-Chair. Then
when I came to Charlotte, he took over the Chairmanship of the CRC
there. The result of this is that I've always been really
involved in interracial discussions about the issues that affect the
community and the society and have come a long time ago to see that
it's very important that we talk together, that you cannot
deal with any of these issues from a one-race point of view. I think
that's the trap most people don't realize. They
figure, "Well, we can figure out this problem, and we can solve
it." But the "we" has got to include blacks
as well as whites, and that's true for the black community as
well as the white community. Each community can fool itself that it can
do this alone, but it can't. Together we can really move in
terms of the structures and systems of a metropolitan area like
Charlotte, or a state like North Carolina, or this region, or the
nation, but it's got to be both black
and white, and that's, I guess, maybe the chief learning from
all that pilgrimage.