On June 6, James Meredith was shot in the back while marching along Highway 51 in the State of Mississippi. The first words he said as he hit that asphalt and tried to crawl to safety were: “Oh My God, My God.”
That response was automatic. A reflex! It reflected at a time of crisis. Meredith’s instinctive and life-long identification with the household of faith -- a religious, non-violent orientation to life!
One day later, on June 7, James Meredith was convalescing in a hospital in Memphis. And the first public statement he made was:
“What did I think while that man was shooting me? I was thinking that I had made a mistake not to carry a gun.”
That is the voice of violence, of despair and frustration and distrust pushed past the breaking point. It echoes the voice of the black nationalists who have elevated their hatred of white men into a religious creed!
It echoes the conviction of many that there is no way left except violence.
Between those two statements of Meredith -- the one on the point of death, the other on the road to recovery -- lie the alternatives facing the civil rights movement and our entire society -- not just this summer but for many summers to come.
On the one hand, we can stand by two basic principles: personal protest and personal moral responsibility.
On the other hand, we can turn our backs on our entire moral tradition, throw the baby out with the bath, and try quicker violent remedies that appear to work, but which destroy rather than increase personal freedom, justice, and respect for individual persons.
Many feel that the “way of violence” is the only way left. They are fed up and they are tired of empty promises.
A life magazine reporter summed it up this way:
“The way these kids see it, equality is like Whitey holds you by the belt at the starting line until everyone else is half way around the track, then gives you a big slap ... and says, ‘Go baby, you’re equal:' Takes an unusual man to win a race like that, It’s easier to shoot the starter.”
I am not in favor of shooting the starter.
But the starter must be changed. The old attitudes and “successes” are not enough. One person here and one person there who rose out of humble circumstances to positions of influence is not enough: - Percy Julian here, C.C. Spaulding there, Martin Luther King here, Robert Weaver there, Thurgood Marshall here, James Nabrit there. These exceptions prove that the rule -- the iron rule of poverty and discrimination -- that keeps most Negroes and most poor whites stuck in hopeless schools, hopeless homes, and hopeless jobs still holds.
The advocates of violence and hatred cry out:
“We can wait no longer. We want freedom now.”
But those of us who are the champions of personal moral protest and moral responsibility should not be content with the cry “freedom now.” That is too limited. Our cry - must be “education now,” “food now,” “health now,""jobs now,” “justice now,” as well as “freedom now.”
Sermons on the virtue of piety, of obedience, or self-restraint and patience are no answer.
Non violence is not enough. Non violence is only a prohibition. It is negative. What we need is an affirmation. A way of acting that makes sense. That can capture the spirits and the allegiances of men.
In the War on Poverty, I believe we have begun to find the elements of that new faith. We start -- where the civil rights movement did – with a respect for individuals as individuals -- with a respect for differences that carry no taint of inferiority or superiority.
In the Peace Corps, that’s what we are working for -
The right of self-determination -- of peoples and cultures. We are not engaged in some new kind of American imperialism. Peace Corps volunteers are not salesmen for the American culture.
When a Peace Corps volunteer goes abroad, we strip him of all the paraphernalia, all the badges of special privilege which have earmarked Americans as foreigners and strangers. When we send him abroad, he is on his own. No PX privileges. No car. No special diplomatic status. No dollar bills.
And perhaps the true secret of the volunteer is that he isn’t there to get something for himself or to sell something; he goes only to serve. He is not there to manipulate, to negotiate, to maneuver people, to force them to live American policies, to sell them on some new program.
Last month, a Sioux Indian, named Clyde Warrior was in our office. We were discussing Upward Bound. And he asked:
“Are you trying to wash students in white paint?”
We replied “No.”
Upward Bound is not white paint. Upward Bound has taken 20,000 promising youngsters from poor families and given them special preparation to enter America’s top schools.
We’re not trying to cast all poor people into some idealized middle class mold.
What we are trying to do is to help 35,000 Americans who have been spectators to become participants and share more of the good things of life. We do not crusade to make everybody middle class. We do crusade to make dignity, and opportunity and first class citizenship, available to all as a matter of justice. Here’s an example.
We don’t say to the Job Corps boys: Give up the way you speak. We don’t say: You should be ashamed because you talk like a hillbilly or a hood, or a country boy.
Instead we say: We’re teaching you a foreign language -- just like French or Spanish. We say that when you enter a different world from the one where you were raised -- you will need a different language. Not a better language. Just a different one.
And when those youngsters get through, they say to us:
We’re in better shape than you are. They’ say: You’re square. You only know one language. You can only get along downtown. But we can get along both downtown and in our home community. Because we know two languages. They’re right.
We begin with a respect for differences, for individuality -- but that’s just the beginning. Beyond differences are similarities and the most basic similarity, the common denominator of us all is our humanity.
Commitment to humanity can overcome all kinds of differences. One of the most dramatic examples occurred a little over a year ago in the Dominican Republic at the time of the Civil War.
In Santo Domingo - a city that was carved up into zones by barricades - the words, “Cuerpo de Paz” would open any barrier at the height of hostilities. It would gain immediate entry for any Peace Corps volunteer.
Why? One volunteer found out when he was in rebel territory and heard one of them say: “El maliditos Americanas (those very bad Americans). “So he asked them, “what are you talking about? I am an American.”
And the answer he got was: “We don’t mean you. You’re different. You live with us. When we’re hungry--you’re hungry. When we walk through the mud--you walk through the mud.”
In the Peace Corps we have seen that same commitment to humanity provethe experts wrong time and time again.
Jews in Arab countries.
Protestants in Catholic countries.
Whites in the bush country of Africa.
We are watching the same commitment to humanity work at home in the War on Poverty. John Gissander -- a VISTA Volunteer from Michigan -- sums up the experience of VISTA Volunteers working in the domestic Peace Corps:
“VISTA does not work magic. It does not hold time suspended. The only thing that I can see that VISTA does is try to make one of the oldest equations inexistence work: One person plus another equals two friends.”
John is making that equation work -- by simple acts, like raising chickens and starting a vegetable garden to bring fresh produce to his community for the first time. The miracle is that he is being allowed to do it at all -- because John is a Negro working on the Navajo Indian Reservation. And when we first began this program, all the experts told us that the Indians would never let a Negro on the Reservation – the Navajos are a sovereign nation under United States Law. They had the power to exclude John from the reservation altogether. But John is there -- showing the experts that they were wrong about Indians and Negroes.
Finally, there is a third dimension to this new mode of action, this alternative to violence that we are discovering in the War on Poverty - the Peace Corps -- and in the civil rights movement. We call it participation. Not participation by proxy -- not participation through some representative or spokesman. This kind of participation is not limited just to giving money or casting a vote once a year on Election Day - those kinds of participation are important but they are no substitute for personal involvement, personal service, and total commitment. There was a time when only - the elite - the wealthy - the privileged the white - the powerful - the highly educated - could participate. That day is over. It has to be over if we are to find an alternative to violence.
The civil rights movement proved that to everybody.
It’s a mighty good thing that Negroes didn’t wait until they had all written Master’s theses on race relations before they started demanding full citizenship.
You don’t have to be an accredited teacher to teach!
You don’t have to be a licensed social worker to give advice!
You don’t have to be a lawyer to fight injustice!
You don’t have to be an expert on economics, or sociology, or race relations to see that discrimination is wrong, poverty is wrong, injustice is wrong, ignorance is wrong.
You don’t need a college certificate to speak out as an accredited human being.
And to this audience, I would add, you don’t have to be an ordained minister to pray!
There are hundreds upon hundreds of men walking right now in Mississippi who are praying -- praying with their feet! ‘They are giving a new meaning to Meredith’s words “Oh My God, My God.”
And that poses a new question? If a new breed of the laity is going to lead us through the parting waters of the sea into Canaan, what is left for the clergy?
I say you have the crucial role. You are the long term continuing leadership of your community. You’re not here today and gone tomorrow. When the demonstrations have come and gone, when the glamour, the TV cameras and newspapers have all disappeared, that’s when the long hard job begins. You are the ones who have to thrash out the terms of the agreement -- to bring generalities down to brass tacks, to consolidate the gains. You are the ones who have to see that the moral awakening achieved by dramatic action does not evaporate into empty promises because nobody was there to follow up.
That’s why you are so essential. The very fact that you do have the continuing responsibility for organized leadership means that -
You -- must know this anti-poverty program in detail. You -- must keep your local community action leadership on its toes. You -- must participate in the shaping of programs. You -- must see that the views of the poor are expressed and heard.
We need you more, not less.
This program like the Peace Corps and the Civil Rights Movement, represents the fruition of spiritual values planted by the Church rather than a substitute for them. And just as these programs are the fruit of great religious leadership, the roots must stay firmly embedded.
We need you more, not less.
Reverend Malcolm Boyd sums it all up:
“What are we to say, Lord, about this family that lives in a wooden shack here on a winding dirt road in Mississippi? The father, a Negro laborer, earns less than a thousand dollars a year under the modern slavery of “the plantation system.” The mother is now bearing their seventh child. The family is hungry. As I see it, these persons have no opportunity to break out of the grinding desperate life in which they have been prisoners since birth.”
“Lot of well-fed, comfortable, middle-class people everywhere are praying for ‘situations’ like this all the time. But they don’t seem to do enough about changing such situations by altering political and economic facts of life, or helping specific men, women and children who are victims.”
“Isn’t prayer expressed in action, Jesus, and isn’t real action a form of prayer? Then maybe people in Chicago ought to pray for ‘situations’ like this by getting involved in Chicago community organization efforts and in the lives of Chicago victims; perhaps people in Boston, London, Sao Paola, and Johannesburg ought to pray in this way too. And people in Mississippi.”
“Otherwise wouldn’t it be more honest not to go through the mere motions of praying, Lord, if we do not intend to offer ourselves sand cooperate with you in fighting evil?”
To that, I can only add Amen.
