Reflections on “Ecclesial Repentance”

Carolyn Dupont

On Palm Sunday 1964, leaders at the prestigious and prosperous all-white Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee turned away a black worshiper. When more African Americans returned on subsequent Sundays, the church refused them as well. In a nation rapidly growing disgusted with blatant and apparently gratuitous expressions of white supremacy, Second Presbyterian’s closed doors sent tremors in multiple directions. Christians nationwide heaped shame upon the congregation, denominational authorities censured it, and conflict within ultimately split the church. The splinter communion, Independent Presbyterian, proudly consecrated itself to the most conservative expressions of Christianity, even as its constitution embraced an explicit whites-only policy.


In the fifty years since, Memphis Presbyterians have occasionally whispered about this unsavory history, but its exact lineaments remained murky. Recently, however, Rhodes College professor Stephen Haynes skillfully laid out the story in The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation. In large part as a result of this uncovering, Second Presbyterian and Independent Presbyterian—both having long since discarded their whites-only policies—invited black Memphians with ties to the historic ordeal to gather in commemoration and to participate in collective truth-telling, repentance, and forgiveness. Strong emotions marked the event, and many left with a sense of purging and relief.


While such rituals of confession, reckoning, and forgiveness no doubt strongly impact the participants, what effect will they have on contemporary race relations in Memphis and, if they are repeated elsewhere, on the racial hierarchy in America as a whole? Much depends, it seems, on how we tell the history of these episodes. The story usually becomes one in which a few segregationists acted out of temporary and unfortunate personal “blind spots,” errors easily corrected by a little enlightenment, sincere regret, and heartfelt apologies. While folks who willingly reckon with their past misdeeds deserve admiration, the history of American race relations and of white religion’s support for white supremacy runs far deeper than the actions of a few misguided racists who committed isolated racial slights.


Far more lies at stake here than individual hearts marred by racism; far more is needed than individual repentance. Really reckoning with our racial past requires presenting segregation for what it was: a system designed to artificially advantage whites by artificially disadvantaging blacks. This system did its most vicious work in institutions and social structures. More effectively than individual racial hatred, inferior education, exclusionary politics, and exploitative economics kept black Americans perpetually in the underclass. And underpinning it all, preventing any moral critique from challenging the system, lay an individualistic religion. Divinely suited to serve white supremacy, this version of Christianity denied even the existence of those structures; no indeed, it maintained, an individual bears responsibility for his/her own fate in this life and the next, thus black Americans must claim responsibility for their own travails. The answer to America’s race problems lay, claimed this faith, in individual conversions, not in dismantling segregation.


A profoundly individualistic religion, one that never examines the harms perpetuated by evil social systems, only asks its adherents to look for evil in their own hearts. Such a faith proscribes the understanding, crops the vision, and limits the tools for understanding the problem of race in America. And in failing to understand the problem, it certainly offers little in the way of efficacious answers. Our ongoing racial disparities have their causes—now, as they did in the Jim Crow Era—in systemic and institutionalized practices that continue to advantage whites and disadvantage blacks. Black Americans continue to suffer from unequal education, over incarceration, residential segregation, inadequate healthcare, and inferior economic opportunities. And very often, white Americans examine their own hearts, certify that they personally are free from racial prejudice, but continue to promote policies and to think about race in ways that help these systems thrive.

             

Further Reflections by Jim Bullock on his return to Second Presbyterian Church after fifty years:

The event at Second was very moving to me. It was strange being back in the sanctuary of Second. I had been inside before I came to the doors on March 23, 1964. As a college student I visited the church many times as well as Idlewild Presbyterian. I visited Idlewild more.

When I was asked to speak I had thought about what I was going to say a lot. I did have tears when they asked us back. It did give me an opportunity to talk about where I came to know reconciliation. It was truly in my home. I  had been brought up in a home like the home in the movie "Help."  But a home that was ever learning how to be open to all God's people. Reconciliation is a journey. We are ever being asked to break down the walls that separate us from others. 

When I looked at the web site of Second and Independent Church it really scared me at first. White male leadership everywhere. They have walls that need to be broken down beyond racism. We all have many walls. The journey of faith is getting in touch with the ground of our being that calls us to reach out beyond ourselves. Ourselves may be the greatest wall of our time.

Reconciliation has to do with ever being reformed by the grace of God. We all have our racism, our classism, etc.God leads us to go beyond the walls. Reconciliation has to with a calling, a calling to go beyond the walls. I was led to go beyond my walls, and the calling became a passion.

To be in a group looking at how people come to reconciliation in our time is pretty exciting to me. I hope to get new ideas, but also a push to do more reconciliation myself, more reconciliation in my community in St. Augustine. Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine is going to sit down on May 8th with St. Paul Methodist (a predominantly back congregation} to see what things we can do together. 

I have been working on being a volunteer mentor coordinator in St. Augustine, getting folks in faith communities to mentor kids  who are poor, black, "cracker," Hispanic, etc in school, in a group home, in a juvenile justice lock up facility, etc. as a way of getting us out of our white affluent ghettos, out of just taking care of ourselves and our own. It has been life changing for me. I think it can be life changing for all of us.

Jim Bullock, one of the students to be turned away from Second Presbyterian Church fifty years ago, and one of the speakers at the 50th anniversary commemoration service on March 22nd, has written this article about the event for the Presbyterian News Service:

http://www.pcusa.org/news/2014/3/27/repentance-and-reconciliation/

Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary Commemoration of the Memphis Kneel-Ins

March 22, 2014 is a day I shall not soon forget. When I woke up my stomach was already churning. The rainy weather seemed to bode ill. I made my customary stop at Starbuck's where I had my customary grande chai latte. But I could not get my stomach to settle down. Hope and fear were churning away in my gut and the words of a colleague --"you know, this thing could go really badly"--echoed in my ears.

I arrived half-an-hour early at the location where the day's events were to take place (typically, I'm at least five minutes late everywhere I go). I walked inside the church and looked around until I found the room where I was to meet several other men for a time of prayer. The prayer time had been my idea, and I was glad I had suggested it. Inside the room were representatives of three local churches--Idlewild, Second and Independent--which have little in common beyond the name "Presbyterian." In fact, the churches represent different denominations that define themselves largely in opposition to one another. But there we were, praying for reconciliation--among us, and among the people who would come to Second Presbyterian Church that morning to commemorate the traumatic events that had split the church fifty years earlier.

As the prayer time went on, I found myself crying tears of joy. A day we had hoped for, imagined, and dreamed of was finally here. The Spirit seemed to be honoring our vision of a service of truth-telling and reconciliation at the site of one of the South's most notorious acts of racial exclusion.

My role in the commemoration was one I had performed many times. Using slides I had prepared over the course of several years, I would document the Memphis "kneel-ins" that began at Second Presbyterian on March 22, 1964 and the repercussions these visits had for the excluded visitors, the church, and the city. But today I was making this presentation just a few dozen feet from the spot where the kneel-ins had taken place. As I  climbed the steps at the front of the sanctuary, I thought of those who had tried week after week to climb the steps of the church entrance half a century before, only to be blocked by church leaders.

Fifty years earlier to the day two young men--Joe Purdy and Jim Bullock--had visited Second Presbyterian together as part of a church visit campaign planned by members of the intercollegiate NAACP group and inspired by their mentors in non-violence, Maxine Smith and James Lawson. Before the young men could reach the entrance, a church representative asked Joe "are you African?" When he said "no, I'm American," he and his white friend were refused entrance. They returned the following Sunday (and the six Sundays after that) with a growing number of friends of both races who stood outside the church in silent protest of the church's refusal to welcome them. Though few knew it at the time, the men responsible for repelling the visitors were enforcing an explicit policy of segregation adopted by the church's session in 1957.

As I prepared to tell the story of the Memphis kneel-ins, I could not help but comment on the "awesomeness" (words completely failed me) of the moment. Being asked to give this presentation in this place, and to do so in the service of reconciliation was truly humbling. My audience included members and pastors of Second Presbyterian, members of pastors of Independent Presbyterian (which had been formed as a protest to Second's ultimate decision to integrate in 1965), students who had stood outside the church week after week in the spring of 1964 hoping for entrance, and the siblings, children and grandchildren of "protestors" who were now deceased.

Following my presentation--quite sobering in its portrayal of the extent to which white Christians were willing to go to prevent racially mixed groups of students from entering their sanctuary--I introduced Jim Bullock. Jim is now in his early 70s, but one could still see a strong resemblance to the young man in the college yearbook photo I had just shown. Now a retired Presbyterian pastor and a tireless advocate for at-risk children, Jim spoke humbly and powerfully about what had led him to bring his black friend to this white church fifty years earlier. He spoke of attending NAACP meetings at Lemoyne College (a historically black institution in Memphis); he spoke of participating in non-violence workshops in Jim Lawson's study; and he spoke of the example set by his father--a pastor in Jackson, Tennessee, who in the late 1950s had invited an integrated group to worship at his church. When the church's session voted to exclude black visitors, Rev. Bullock registered his dissent and then, as Jim put it, "spent the next seventeen years loving those people to a place of openness." It was a riveting testimony, and particularly salient for an audience that had just heard how this young man and his colleagues had been portrayed as atheists, communists, and NAACP dupes with no "spiritual motivation."

Jim was followed to the lectern by Carolyn Purdy McGhee, sister of Joe Purdy, who died before his time in 2001. When I had asked Carolyn to speak at the event, she was not sure she had anything of relevance to say. But when her time came, she confidently approached the lectern, leading us as she did in singing "We Shall Overcome," the song synonymous with the civil rights struggle. Realizing perhaps that most of us white folks did not know the words, she had them projected on the screen. I doubt if that song has ever been sung in that sanctuary; I am quite sure it has never been sung with such emotion. Carolyn then spoke about her brother--his activism, his career as the first black regional manager for Pepsi, his deep spirituality, and the legacy of which his family is so proud. She then taught us a new song, one she had composed using Joe's last words--"honor God." We sang "We Will Honor God Every Day," again to the tune of "We Shall Overcome." I don't believe there was a dry eye in the house. I know mine were not.

After presentations on the progress that Second and Independent churches have made in the area of race relations over the past fifty years, we repaired to the church's Fellowship Hall for lunch. As Second's senior pastor Sandy Willson put it, "let's have some family time." And we did. The "family" gathered for this meal included former protesting students Jim Bullock, Howard Romaine, Robert Morris, Ervin Bullock, Coby Smith, Vivian Dillihunt and Lillian Brown, as well as relatives of Joe Purdy and Earl Stanback. It included at least one man who had stood at the church door in 1964 to keep them out. It included church members far too young to remember the kneel-ins, but aware that this day was not to be missed. And it included a group of scholars and pastors--the Ecclesial Repentance working group--that had convened to witness this event and help plan others like it.

Others who were present will be posting their reflections on this event on this blog, which will be a place to document and discuss the ongoing work of those committed to truth-telling and reconciliation in the places where unresolved racial trauma continues to affect the Church of Jesus Christ.