Mennonite Central Committee News Service
October 23, 1962
II - The Experiment in Peace
by Vincent and Rosemarie Harding
Near the middle of September we attended
a two-day meeting of representatives of more than a score of
organizations working in the field of human relations and civil
rights. It was held in Atlanta.
In the midst of one session, a lawyer
who had just returned from Mississippi predicted that desegregation
and voter registration in the South would become more difficult
as they moved away from the large cities and reached into the
essentially rural-minded areas of the Deep South. There would
be an increase in violence, he said. His Prophecy was echoed
by several other persons of long experience.
Seventeen days later two men lay dead
in the streets of Oxford, Miss. (significantly enough, they were
white persons killed by other whites), and many others were injured
as a result of rioting on the occasion of James Meredith's arrival
at the University of Mississippi. The prediction had not failed.
When such news reaches into our homes
and, perhaps, into our consciences, it is somewhat easier to
answer a question that is often asked within our churches. The
question is this: Why do we have Peace Section workers in the
South? What does race relations have to do with our "peace
witness?" Then the news begins to roll in. Five churches
are burned in two months, simply because individuals gathered
there (There is no other large gathering place for Negroes in
the Deep South) to learn how to, register and vote. Houses are
blasted by shotgun pellets and one Negro occupant in Mississippi
is dangerously wounded. An armed white intruder is killed as
he tries to force his way into a house to intimidate Negro persons
who registered to vote. Twelve hundred arrests come in Albany,
Ga., as a result of anti-segregation protests. The mutilated
body of a Negro is dredged up from a river less than 50 miles
away from a voter registration campaign spot in Mississippi.
Some students and many drifters riot on the "Ole Miss"
campus when one man seeks to enroll in his state university.
Such signs as these are clearly the
sounds of fearful strife. Their violence and intensity startle
us into the realization that peacemakers may well be needed here.
They force us to wonder if we can call ourselves a "peace
church" and yet stand back from such warfare, offering no
witness of love. They offer a simple answer to the question:
Why Peace Workers?
However, these are only the more obvious
signs of conflict. These are the outward manifestations of violence.
Rampant in the Deep South today is another kind of vlolence,
a deeper level of destruction. Each day that segregation lasts
(both in the South and in the North) it exacts a deadly toll
upon the human spirit. On the one hand it robs men of their dignity,
convinces them that they are less than fully human. It slashes
deep wounds into the spirit and leaves thousands of great minds
undiscovered, forced into the limbo of second-class existence.
Worst of all it causes men to hate themselves because of their
color and their parent- hood, eventually tempting them to curse
God and die.
On the other hand, it deceives generations
of persons into believing that their color makes them superior,
that their color is a sign of God's favor to them--a brutal blasphemy.
It creates a great abyss of fear and pride, prejudice and ignorance,
over which so many have never found the courage to leap. Then
when there comes any threat to the breaking down of this sinful
destructive system, the fears and anxieties are increased a hundredfold,
for men have lived this way for centuries, and they cannot bear
to think of what a new way might be like. Their very being is
threatened. They stand in dread. White kills white in the streets
of Oxford. Fear begets fear and it is met in a hundred ways.
Perhaps we saw it most poignantly
in the face of a filling station owner in southern Georgia who
told us not long ago that men had called him late at night and
threatened to blow up his station if he served our racially integrated
MCC family. So he asked us not to stop there again. Fear had
conquered his own regard for us.
This is the violence to the human
spirit that is not caught in the newspaper. It can only be seen
in a man's face by the gas pump, in a woman's eyes as she turns
her back on her own son. This is the destructive power of segregation;
and it is in response to this brutal toll on the hearts of both
black and white that we have joined the South's strange but hopeful
agony at this hour.
It is at the side of such suffering
men that our Master calls us to stand. It is in the midst of
such warfare that our Lord calls us to be peacemakers. And, paradoxically
enough, this peace cannot come without hard, prayerful struggle.
It must be fought for, perhaps died for, always remembering that
"our fight is not against human foes," but "against
the devices of the devil." (Ephesians 6, NEB). And segregation
is surely one of his favorite devices. Thus the Book of Common
Prayer calls the church to this petition: "... Grant us
grace fearlessly to contend against evil, and to make no peace
with oppression..."
Clearly, then, the peace we seek is
not one of conformity to injustice, but a molding of men's hearts
and institutions to the will of God. Only then can we find the
peace which brings down the dividing walls of hostility. MCC
has sent its workers here because of these things and because
we know that the church will wither' and die of prosperity if
it fails to involve itself in the real, burning issues of life,
suffering poverty and persecution for the cause of truth.
What does this all mean in the daily
living of our own ministry of reconciliation here? How do we
minister to a parish as wide as the South? It is impossible to
do, and hard to say in so limited a compass, but something can
be told. For instance, Mennonite House itself, with its door
always open, is a symbol of our search for Peace. Those who came
in may hopefully find some intimation of peace in the welcome
of the house and in the llfe of its occupants. In a sense, we
are saying to them, "Here, imperfectly lived, is a suggestion
of what a true community of brothers might be like; it is for
this that we are working, that all might sham our joy."
It is from the house, also, that the members of our own "peace
corps" venture forth to their daily tasks of reconciling
service throughout the city.
As a couple, our own ministry is less
easily defined. Much of our time is spent working with those
who are leading the struggle against segregation, whether it
be in Albany or Atlanta. We seek to learn from them and to share
with them our concern for reconciliation. They have taught us
that reconciliation can never come at the cost of the honesty
and dignity of any man. They have accepted our ministry of peace
and they seek to be responsive to our concerns. Perhaps Martin
Luther King had this in mind when he spoke to Vincent just before
King's jailing in July. He said, "You must come down to
Albany and help keep this a Christian movement."
We work, too, with those who oppose
the breaking down of walls. Police chief and mayor, segregationists
of many varieties are included on our list of visits. In a sense,
we believe they need our ministry most of all. A subsequent article
will describe this kind of ministry in some detail, using Albany
as an example. Much of this work is simply the long, patience-rending
task of sitting and talking with men, listening to their questions,
prejudices and fears, then seeking to 'interpret a new way to
them. It does not come easily, but we are convinced that this
is the church's task. For while we have allowed the political
and judicial forces to shame us in forwarding the cause of justice
and equality, the church still has one last chance to show men
the way beyond desegregation to a new community of brothers.
This is why so much of our time has been spent with church
leaders in the South, especially those who are white. Often the
encounters have found us acting as sympathetic confessors. Many
of these men have suffered untold inner agonies and many have
run so far from their consciences that they find it hard to return.
At times they have unburdened themselves to us. We have sought
to understand them and yet to encourage them to respond to Christ's
call, a call that ever involves the crass. This is not a call
that one answers with- out trembling. We who have avoided the
call in the North cannot too easily scoff at those who seek to
escape it in a place where it can cost their livelihood or their
life. So we search and pray together with such men and women,
our brothers in Christ.
These more personal approaches to
our ministry are often interspersed with attendance at conferences
of various kinds. They have included such meetings as a week-long
institute on Non-violence in Montgomery, Alabama; a three-day
conference on "Race and Politics" in North Carolina,
and the recent annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference in Birmingham, Alabama. It was at this latter meeting
that Vincent was called upon to minister to a young member of
the American Nazi Party who had leaped to the stage and assaulted
Martin Luther King.
It is likely, though, that few aspects
of our task are more meaningful, frustrating and rewarding than
the encounters with our Mennonite churches of North and South.
So often we have been so isolated as a church, intentionally
and accidentally. So often we have thought of race as a problem
confined to the South, while it was spilling all over our doorstep.
We have asked who our neighbor was while stepping over his broken
body and maimed spirit. So the task of interpreting the church's
response to human need has been filled with joyful pain, and
because we deeply love the church--in all of its manifestations--we
have no choice but to go on.
Finally, it should be said that our assignment
here has not neglected the more traditional concerns of our peace
witness, though our approach has been somewhat heteradox.
On Easter morning, in the heart of downtown
Atlanta, we stood silently for an hour at sunrise with a company
of concerned persons, holding our prayer vigil in a public search
"for peace and life" in a warring, dying world. We
led and participated in two seminars with theological students
and others on the questions of "The Christian and War,"
and. "Moral Suasion in Violent Times."
It was in February that the essential
unity of these various approaches to peace really struck us,
as we joined the national student pilgrimage for peace to Washington,
D.C. On this journey by bus from Atlanta we were accompanying
the first interracial group from the South to participate in
such peace action. (We shared in this outward demonstration for
two basic reasons. One was that we were convinced that Christians
were meant to let the light of the Gospel of peace shine from
the mountain top, and it appears that Washington, D.C. is one
of the best peaks in the world. We went, too, because we wanted
the youth who yearn for peace to know that the church shares
their concern and is willing to walk through the snow in front
of the White House with them. For it is only as we trudge the
barricades of peace with them that we will have an opportunity
to share with them our commitment to the Prince of Peace.)
It was on our return from Washington
that we stopped at a Greyhound terminal in Athens, Georgia for
breakfast early on Sunday morning. The waitress would not serve
us at first and the students who had marched miles for world
peace now faced again the realities of racial hostility across
a lunch counter. Vincent was called upon to speak to the waitress,
manager and finally to the students whose faces were beginning
to show deep resentment and anger. Peace in Washington had to
be joined with peace in Athens. Before long everyone was served.
Finally, just before leaving, a drunken
white man threatened to start a fight with the group, and the
search for peace was finally narrowed down to the lives of two
men, as Vincent sat with him on a bench in a tense waiting room
and sought to calm his fears. With our minds still seeing the
picture of two solitary men facing each other, we left Athens
realizing that the search for peace is indivisible, beginning
and ending with the human heart, as that heart responds to the
spirit of the Prince.
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