I grew up in the South, so that I was aware of the difficulty, the
distance between the races, and I can tell you a whole lot more than you
want to know about what it means. Did you grow up in the South? Well, it
was fascinating. In fact, I shared with a group of North Carolinians up
near Asheboro just on Tuesday of this week my whole
pilgrimage in terms of racial attitudes. It's fascinating to reflect
back on how I was unconsciously conditioned toward a kind of cultured
racism. I wasn't a race-baiter and I never saw a lynching. The brutality
of the relationships was to me a subject that I came on in academic
studies of the history of the South. But I experienced the distance
between the races and never quite understood why it was and was told it
was a matter of education and so forth. But it was not really until I
got into Washington, which was then a predominantly black community
under the control of Congress at that time without any right to vote;
the citizens of the District had no right to vote. It was ruled by
committees of the House of Representatives, which were ruled by those
who had seniority, and the seniority people in the House of
Representatives were Congressmen from the South. I remember the key
figure was a Congressman from South Carolina named McMillan. We all
called him "Judge McMillan." He really was. He was judge and everything
else. It was a fascinating thing. He stayed in office in part by being
able to report to his constituency in South Carolina that things were
terrible in Washington because of the predominantly black population
when, in fact, he was in charge. He was the effective one who
accomplished whatever was done administratively in Washington, so he had
a perfect cyclical system of security. He could see that things were bad
in Washington and then would go down to South Carolina and report that
they were bad. In other words, I really came to terms with the whole
matter of structural racism on the streets of Washington, D.C. and
became influenced by black citizens with whom I worked on a number of
different councils and committees. Most notable was a man with whom my church, the Church of the Pilgrims, established a
community relationship with the Church of the Redeemer, a predominantly
black church. Both of these were Southern Presbyterian churches in the
District of Columbia, and the man who was called as their pastor was a
man named Jefferson Rogers. Jeff Rogers and I were about the same age,
and his wife and my wife both grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it
was one of those fascinating things where we sat down and we began to
develop a relationship of complete candor. It took a little while to get
absolutely honest with each other, but we began that kind of frank
exchange of where we'd come from and what we saw as the situation. For
instance, Mary Grace Rogers and Arline, as we sat at their table one
night, discovered that they were both from Shreveport, and we talked
about what that meant and so forth. It was perfectly amazing. Here were
these two women about the same age, both interested in the same thing,
both active in educational work, both active in the social life of the
city, both active in the church and in youth conferences and all that
sort of thing. When they sat down and talked together, all they really
had in common was the weather. In other words, it was that distinct.
There was a black community; there was a white community. And we wept
over that. We began to realize the tragedy of that. I remember such
helpful moments as when Jeff was talking about the predicament that
blacks faced in terms of the structural racism. I remember saying to
him, "Well, all I feel as a result of that is just pure guilt." And he
said, "Guilt is not an adequate response. The trouble with guilt is that
it paralyzes." That has stuck in my mind, and I think in some ways in
part has been one of those moments of breakthrough for me, where I felt,
"If you can do something about this, you really must
do something about it." As a result of that friendship with him, which
continues, we helped to form together the Washington chapter of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther King, Jr. came
to Washington for the chartering of that chapter, and I met him and was
with him on that occasion. I was with him on one or two other occasions
that involved primarily meetings related to the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference.
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.