Civil Rights Month

Rev. Michael Phillips’ Comments

Betty Olson’s Story

February 9, 2003

Rev. Phillips’ Comments:

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to offer the opening prayer at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast in Poughkeepsie, coordinated each year by the Catharine Street Center. It is one of the truly great city-wide events of the entire year. It was an honor to be asked. Given the theme of the day, I composed a prayer that I felt would be appropriate; however, I soon realized that it would need an introduction if it was going to make any sense to the almost seven hundred people who attended.

As we begin three weeks of liturgies for the healing of memories associated with racism, I would like to begin with the same opening prayer. Here then, is the same introduction. I was introduced at the podium by Cora Mallory-Davis, community activist.

Good morning. As Rector of Christ Church it’s nice to be back on Market Street leading prayers. For those of you who don’t know, for the first 122 years of its existence, Christ Church was located on Market Street, down where the Armory is now. The corner there at Church Street was named, I suspect, for “The Church” the Church of England, which was Christ Church at the time, founded ten years before the Revolution.

I know I’m not one of the speakers on the program this morning, but I ask your indulgence for a minute or two to put the opening prayer in context so that when we pray we will have a better sense of its focus and its meaning.

The annals of Christ Church refer to an issue that catapulted the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight: racism, and its antecedent: slavery. The official history of Christ Church tells us that in 1780 (four years into the Revolution) Colonel Andrew Bostwick, Deputy Foragemaster-General of the Continental Army, rented the glebe house and property from Christ Church. Glebe property allowed the clergyman a means to make a living while serving in a missionary and colonial position. The glebe house still stands on Main Street. When Colonel Bostwick vacated the house three years later, he owed quite a bit of money to the church vestry. Money was in short supply during the Revolution and the army was often not paid in a timely fashion by Congress. Without the funds to pay his debt, the Colonel arranged for the Vestry, the governing board to “…take his Negro, Jack, in part payment of his debt,” to quote the history book exactly. As if that fact is not shameful enough in itself, I am sorry to tell you that the Vestry of Christ Church accepted Jack as a legitimate form of payment. The history book does not even mention the man’s last name. He is known simply as “Jack.”

This is my church. This is my history, my shameful history. It is also our history, the history of the City of Poughkeepsie. Our history is made up of the combined histories of all the individuals and all the institutions that have ever lived or operated in our City. I am not proud to share this part of Christ Church’s history with you, but I believe it is important we never forget what our ancestors did in their time, for good and for ill. None of us can change what has occurred in the past; however, events like this annual breakfast are helping us re-shape the City of Poughkeepsie, to bind up the wounds of the past, and to chart a path forward together. We thank the Catharine Street Community Center and its Planning Committee for calling us together year after year. Their diligence and commitment to our community is an enormous gift to all of us.

I hope that everyone here this morning has come not only to remember and honor the man, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., but also to remember and honor what the man said. “I have a dream,” he told us. Our dreams are informed by the honest and uncensored memories we hold of our past, and the effect those memories have on our present, as we imagine our shared future.

With that, I’m ready to pray. I invite you to join me in prayer.

Good and gracious God, you have bound together all the people on earth into a common life, we remember, honor, and give thanks for those who devote themselves and give their lives to reconciliation and peace; encouraged and strengthened this morning by their witness, and by your Spirit, we pray that you instill in us the wisdom and the will to create a compassionate, just, and holy present, so that generations to come will be proud to claim it as their past. Amen.

I don’t have a master plan for all of this, these liturgies. I don’t have an idea of what it’s supposed to look like when it’s all done. All I know is that we need to keep moving forward. We need to take another step. The Civil Rights movement was about getting the law right. It was an important and necessary step. But one step, even an important step, does not bring us to the end of our journey. We have to keep walking.

I have asked three from among us to move us along on our continuing journey. I have asked them to remember and to assess where they have come. I have asked them to speak, not to end our conversation, but to begin it. This morning we will hear from Betty Olson, next Sunday, Barry Menuez, and finally John Quis.

Betty Olson’s Story

Racism and the Civil Rights Movement:

Personal Recollections and Reflections

The first day of kindergarten is a pretty momentous and terrifying occasion for most of us - we are introduced to all sorts of new things, new people, and new experiences, and are called upon, perhaps for the first time, to decide how we as individuals will respond. Two things stand out in my memory of that first day. First, I was told to stick my hand in some really gloppy stuff and to make a picture with it. I couldn’t believe that they would actually want me to do that – wouldn’t my hand get dirty? But I was a very obedient child, so I overcame my misgivings and did what I was told. The other memory of the day was a circle game, during which I was told to hold the hands of the children on either side of me. The hand extended to my left was a dark hand, and I had never touched a person of color before. The same hesitation came over me – wouldn’t my hand get dirty? But I was a very obedient child, so I took his hand in mine. I got through the day, and I learned something - I was right about the fingerpaint - it really does get you dirty - but I was wrong about the hand.

Not long after this, during one of the frequent family trips into New York City to visit my grandparents, I caught my first glimpse of an ad campaign that ran in the subways for many years. It was a picture of a beautiful little black girl, about my age, with one big tear running down her cheek. The caption read “Hate hurts. Speak out against prejudice.” I don’t remember what organization was behind that ad, but I do remember in perfect detail exactly what that little girl looked like and the exact feel of the huge lump that arose in my throat every time I saw the picture. From then on, every subway trip occasioned a struggle for me - part of me wanted to avoid looking at the picture, because I knew that it would be hard to hold back my own tears, and I was afraid someone would see. But the other part always won - I just couldn’t turn away.

I grew up in Plainfield, NJ, a city of about 45,000 people with a sizable black minority. At first, we lived in an apartment, just on the fringe of the “good” part of town, while my parents saved up for a house. When the time came, I participated by searching in the classifieds for possible homes. I was aware of our price range, which was quite low, and I remember triumphantly announcing that I had found a good one - three bedrooms and a front porch for only $12,500. My father’s response was, “What does it say at the top?” I acknowledged that the heading in big capital letters said “COLORED OR WHITE”. “Well, that’s okay, it says ‘colored or white’, and we’re white,” I said. My father replied, “Do you want to go to Washington School, or Emerson School, or Bryant School?” By his tone, I knew the answer was no. My parents prided themselves on being open-minded, but their liberalism ended where their children’s education began. Not that they would object to our contact with minority children, but they were well aware that the quality of education was not the same. Eventually we were lucky enough to find a house on the fringe of the “good” school district where I was already enrolled, and where there were one or two black students in most grades. And there I learned about the horrible people in the South, who were fighting to keep the black kids out of the white schools. We, of course, would never do that.

I was, however, well aware of the boundaries in my home town. Not only was there a black ghetto, but there was also a section called Sleepy Hollow, where the really beautiful houses were, and where I felt unworthy to so much as walk down the street. This was the domain of the country-club set, the movers and shakers of the city. But money was not the only prerequisite to join the elite. I recall an ongoing story about one Salvatore P. Diana, Jr., who aspired to join the Plainfield Country Club. Mr. Diana was a federal judge, but his name ended in a vowel; he was an Italian-American, and a Catholic. I still remember the banner headline in the Plainfield Courier-News that announced, “Judge Diana Admitted to Country Club; Third of Membership Resigns”. Needless to say, a person of color or a Jew wouldn’t even dare apply.

It was a great escape to go away to college, and it was not until then that I found my voice to speak out, as that ad campaign had exhorted. Not that I was particularly brave. I recall with amusement my very proper submission of a request to the Warden (as the Dean of Residence at Vassar College was known) for permission to picket the Woolworth’s in downtown Poughkeepsie. Although the local branch was integrated, the Woolworth’s stores in the South still refused to allow blacks to sit at the lunch counters - they would sell them the food, but they had to eat it standing up. Some college students in Greensboro, NC had started to picket down there, and soon the idea spread to picket the whole chain. I would like to think that I would have picketed even if permission had not been granted, but I didn’t have to cross that bridge - it was, and I did.

Neither was my decision to join the Southern Teaching Program a particularly brave one. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I naively thought that things were getting better down there, although I admit that I certainly thought of white southerners as “the other” in a negative way. I was a graduate student at Yale and saw a notice on the bulletin board that told of a program started by Dean Munro of Harvard to recruit graduate students to help staff poor black southern colleges. It mentioned that there was an immediate need for a French instructor at Miles College, a Christian Methodist Episcopal related school in Fairfield, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham. French was my field, so I took the ad as a sign that I was called. Sure enough, when I contacted the program, no one else had responded for that particular position, and all they wanted to know was how soon I could get there. I submitted a request for a leave of absence from my studies, it was granted, and off I went.

This was certainly a learning experience, any angle you looked at it! I had not even been a teaching assistant at Yale, so had absolutely no teaching background, and arrived to discover that nobody had any textbooks! Since I had recently spent a year in France, I decided to wing my first day by inviting my students to ask me everything they always wanted to know about France. I was somewhat taken aback when the first question was, “Is it true that they don’t have grits there?” I hardly had the nerve to tell them that, let alone the French people, I had never personally swallowed a single grit in my entire life. There ensued a mutually educational cultural exchange, totally aside from the task at hand of learning about France and French.

There were no fancy copiers in those days, at least not at Miles College, just an ornery mimeograph machine leaking purple ink, with which I reproduced pages from my own college textbooks (probably illegally, as I think about it now, but it was for a good cause, as neither the students nor the college could afford books.) Most of the students at that time were commuters, and many did have jobs, but the money they earned was needed to help feed the family or pay the rent. Many students struggled to stay awake after spending long hours at a night job. As the recent beneficiary of a generous scholarship and later a full fellowship plus unearned stipend from wealthy schools, I was humbled to witness to what lengths my students were willing to go to pursue their educational goals.

There were other opportunities to observe poverty up close. My major off-campus activity was participating in voter registration drives in the Birmingham area, as the Voting Rights Act had just been passed the year before. We would go door to door in black neighborhoods, trying to persuade people to register and to vote, and offering them transportation to the polls. It was quite an eye-opener to me to see some of these homes - many still had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing, and quite a few lacked electricity, despite the fact that most were headed by working people. The typical house would be one floor and extremely narrow, as property value was measured by road frontage, so the rooms would just be one behind the other. Still, I remember thinking that these people were in some ways better off than those in the northern ghettoes, because most of them had a big vegetable garden and a few chickens running around.

But as far as the purpose of our visits, we did not meet with overwhelming success. I was quite frustrated by what I at first perceived to be apathy towards the newly-won enfranchisement. The fact is, people were afraid to exercise this right. I remember in particular one man, who met me at the door with several very young children clinging to his legs. He refused my invitation by pointing to the youngsters and saying, “I don’t want no trouble - they need me.” At the time, I saw this response as quite short-sighted, and tried to point out that if he wanted his children to have a better life, he needed to use the vote to change things for the better. I didn’t fully appreciate his position until I became a parent myself many years later. It is very easy to take risks when you are young and single and have no one depending on you; that changes once you are committed to the care of another life.

Of course, if truth be told, we also didn’t have the greatest of choices to offer the newly enfranchised. The contest of the moment in Alabama was the Democratic primary for governor, which was tantamount to the election, since the Republican Party in the sixties had not yet made inroads in the South. The incumbent, the infamous George Wallace, was prohibited by term limits from running again, so instead he thrust his wife Lurleen into the race, which was crowded by a total of seven candidates. Needless to say, not only were none of these candidates black, but none of them came anywhere near to espousing positions that we could really support with enthusiasm. It came down to rallying around the least offensive of the candidates, one Richmond Flowers, whose position was that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were here to stay, so people had better just accept it, like it or not. He came in last. Lurleen succeeded her husband.

Although I myself was earning next to nothing to teach at Miles, I was given free housing on campus. I didn’t have a car, so used to walk to the supermarket, which, of course, was located in the white section of town. The crossing of the border between the white and the black neighborhoods always had me holding my breath, as the sight of a white girl coming from or going to a black neighborhood enraged many of the whites in the area, who often seized the opportunity to threaten me, although I was never actually attacked physically. But the scariest experience occurred one time when I found myself in downtown Birmingham after the last bus for Fairfield had left. I hailed a cab, got in, and gave the address of my campus apartment. The driver turned to me and said, “You don’t want to go there, Miss.” I told him that I did, and he asked me if I knew where that was. I told him that I did indeed, that I lived there. I can still see his neck flushing bright red as he snarled, “If there’s one thing I hate more than a nigger, it’s a nigger lover.” He then grabbed his radio and said something into it that I couldn’t hear. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and jumped out at a red light, as I had a very strong feeling that I might not end up at my destination.

Those incidents were not the cause of my departure from Birmingham, though. It was the pink sky that I had seen as so lovely when I first arrived, but turned out to be too much for my lungs to handle, as it was caused by the combination of the polluting steel mills and the sultry weather. By this time, I knew that I had no desire to return to the ivory tower, but I did remember Poughkeepsie with more fondness than Plainfield, so it was here that I began my career in social work, as a means of continuing to address my concerns for the poor and powerless.

In the summer of 1967, I was in Poughkeepsie, but my home town was burning. Plainfield was one of the small cities hardest hit by the race riots, and had the distinction of making the national news when an angry crowd beat a white police officer to death with a shopping cart. That day also marked the death of my parents’ liberalism, not out of hatred, but out of fear. My father had always walked to work; now, at the age of fifty-four, he finally learned to drive because he did not feel safe on the streets. The house that never used to be locked at all received wave after wave of new locks and bolts. My parents held out longer than most, but after their third burglary, the last while they were in their bed, they too became part of the white flight and retired to Florida. No one that we had known was left.

Although the voices of violence were being heard more and more, Martin Luther King remained committed to non-violent protest, and at the end of 1967 he laid out his most ambitious vision yet. Legislative victories had already been won, but from an economic standpoint, many were still disenfranchised. So he shifted the focus from civil to “human rights” with a plan for a Poor People’s Campaign that would gather people from all ethnic groups to work for change. Among the goals were full employment at a living wage for all who sought it, a massive building and renovation program to provide decent and affordable housing, and a national health insurance program so that everyone would have access to medical care. The plan included the gathering of nine caravans of poor people, including African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Native-Americans, Puerto-Ricans and poor white Appalachians, to camp out in Washington; daily demonstrations at the Capitol; an economic boycott; and a Solidarity Day March in which people of all ethnicities and income levels would come together in Washington to support those in the encampment, which was dubbed Resurrection City.

After learning of an organizational meeting to coordinate the local response to this effort, I showed up at the Ebenezer Baptist Church to participate and was named a co-chairman of the Dutchess County Contingent of the Poor People’s March. As such, my name and phone number appeared in the Poughkeepsie Journal to call for more information and bus reservations. For many months, long after the march was over, I would be awakened in the middle of the night by callers threatening to kill the “nigger lover”. This was not coming from those “other” people, the red-necked southerners. This was Poughkeepsie. On the other hand, we were successful in raising a sizable amount of money from both white and black people to help support those in Resurrection City and to pay for bus seats for the poor from our area to attend Solidarity Day, which was to occur in May. It was a heady time, filled with hope. And then came April 4th.

It was a Saturday, and I had gone into New York to shop and later meet a friend for dinner. She worked in Bloomingdale’s, and had heard about Martin Luther King’s assassination on a radio in the break room, just minutes before I arrived. We were both stunned by the loss, but both also had somewhat self-centered reactions. Her first thought was, “Forget dinner, I’m going home as fast as I can, because the city is going to explode.” My selfish reaction was that I had been cheated - I was going to be there, in that great man’s presence, and now he was gone.

Despite the enormous loss, King’s family and cohorts agreed that the Poor People’s Campaign should go forward, and we all carried on as best we could, despite the chaos. Bayard Rustin was called upon to bring some order to the effort, and he did step in and took over for a short time, postponing Solidarity Day to June 19th to allow for more time to recover and get organized. But his tenure was short-lived, and in the end the leadership fell to Ralph Abernathy, with Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, James Bevel and Jesse Jackson. Some blamed the failure of the Poor People’s Campaign on the inability of anyone to fill Martin Luther King’s shoes. Others saw the campaign as doomed from the start because of its lofty goals. Still others felt that it was because it was becoming harder to maintain the support of the white middle-class liberals: it was easy for them to sympathize with the downtrodden and overtly mistreated blacks in the South of the fifties and early sixties; it was quite another thing to keep that sympathy when they finally stopped taking it any more.

Certainly, if we are to measure success by looking at the goals of full employment at a living wage, decent affordable housing, and universal medical care, the Poor People’s Campaign was a colossal failure. Indeed, thirty-five years later, we still haven’t achieved any of this, and have an even higher percentage of people living in poverty now than we had in 1968, as well as a greater disparity in income from the richest to the poorest. But by another measure, at least for those of us who were there, a part of Martin Luther King’s dream was achieved, if only temporarily.

I am referring to his statement, upon the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that its purpose was to bring about the “beloved community” in America. John Ansbro, King’s intellectual biographer, named as his central belief “the redemptive power of agape.” King himself had grown up in an agape community - both his father and grandfather were ministers in the tightly knit churches which had been the main source of comfort and support to blacks throughout their many years of oppression. Agape is characterized by unconditional caring and sharing, encouraging those emotions which move us to cooperation and socially constructive action. It is likely that this is the concept upon which King based his “beloved community.” In some sense, Resurrection City was a microcosm of that dream.

Certainly the photos of the beleaguered encampment gave no hint that anything good could have been happening there. It rained for twenty-eight days, and the entire fifteen acres of West Potomac Park, from the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial, were a sea of mud. Neither did the news accounts paint a positive picture - there were many stories of the disorganization, the dissension among the leaders, the inevitable arrests that naturally occur when a large number of people are gathered in close quarters under difficult conditions. But the rest of the story, in the words of Mike Clark, a white Appalachian participant, is that, “The poor people’s ghetto evolved a way of life and a way of thinking ... this experience of living together ... sow[ed] the seeds of change in the students of Resurrection City.” Clark represented a group of disenfranchised Americans who had hitherto been uninvolved in the movement, and their presence offered a counterpoint to the “white backlash” effect.

Resurrection City had a Poor People’s University, which held educational workshops on the problems of racism and poverty and how to overcome them through non-violence, integration and solidarity. And the cultural tent, called the Many Races Soul Center, presented a stage for cross-cultural exchange through music, dancing, art and literature. From black Gospel singers to Native American chanters, to Mexican folklorists, to Dutchess County’s own Pete Seeger, all raised their voices in harmony. On Solidarity Day, between 50,000 and 100,000 people of all races and social classes crossed their arms in front of themselves, grasped their neighbors’ hands, and sang “We Shall Overcome” in English and Spanish. In that small piece of time and space, we tasted the beloved community, and it was good. Resurrection City did indeed live up to its name.

The seeds were sown. Yes, indeed, hatred, inequality, injustice and poverty have not yet been eliminated. But don’t ever let the pessimists convince you that we haven’t come a long way. My twenty-one year old daughter can scarcely believe these stories, so foreign are they from her experience. Her best friend throughout grade school was a black girl, but it never occurred to her that she was being “liberal” or open-minded - Sarah was simply her friend. Nor was my daughter ever called “nigger lover”. As I’m typing this, my computer rejects the “N” word. And when Trent Lott forgot what century he was in, there was immediate recognition that he was history. HALLELUJAH!

Yet it is not enough to enact the laws, it is not enough to expound on principles. Ideas may change minds, but the essential is to touch hearts. That was the power of the subway ad of my childhood, and that was the power of Resurrection City. Love is an up-close phenomenon. For it to happen, our spiritual journey needs to lead us to the perception that, to paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the other, and he is us.” It happens in the beloved community. I do not use the past tense, because I am not ready to leave that concept on the pile of fond memories. I prefer to see the beloved community as a work still in progress. And everyone is invited.

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