Blood Done Sign My Name (14 page)
He went back to the well in 1967 and once again invited a black preacher into his pulpit, thinking that things had probably eased up a little since the Dr. Proctor episode in Sanford. He had survived that one and, after the waves of race riots in the intervening years, Daddy probably figured that a black man in the pulpit would not seem so revolutionary. In any case, when Daddy told Eli Regan, his powerful lay leader, that he was planning to invite Reverend Gil Gillespie, a noted black Methodist preacher, to deliver a sermon at our church, Regan asked why Daddy wanted to do a thing like that. Racism was an important moral issue, Daddy replied, an issue that the church needed to confront. Putting a black man in a position of honor and authority in front of a white congregation was a good thing, and if there was controversy over it, that was not a bad thing, either. People needed to work through these things, and not just in the abstract.
The wizened old conservative responded that he didn't think racism was a problem in our church at all, that he'd never heard anything that suggested any antipathy toward “our nigrah brothers and sisters.” Had
Vernon asked anyone on the administrative board whether they thought this was a good idea? No, Daddy told him, the Methodist
Book of Discipline
stated clearly that the minister shall determine the number and nature of services. And he didn't need to take a poll to know how people felt about these things. Nor did he think that a minister was bound by the principle of majority rule in all cases. Did the preacher mind, Regan wanted to know, if he asked around a little bit? Daddy told his lay leader that he didn't mind him asking around, as long as Regan understood that as a preacher he had to do what the Lord called him to do.
Regan dropped by the office the following day. “Vernon, you've only been here a year and you know us better than we know ourselves,” he said. “I asked almost everyone on the administrative board, and you don't have one bit of support for bringing in that nigrah preacher. I don't think you have one vote, if it came to that,” Regan said. For a moment, it seemed as though the conservative elder was preparing to warn Daddy not to invite Reverend Gillespie to speak. “We need him a lot worse than I thought we did,” Regan went on. “You bring him on. And don't you back down on it, either. I'm not going to say a damn word about it unless you get in trouble,” he said. “I might even oppose you a little bit. But if they come after you, they'll have to come through me first.” And then the red-faced old man winked at him and ambled out the door and back down to the orphanage.
When the news of Reverend Gillespie's coming filtered out to the congregation, there was a fair amount of low grumbling, but nothing approaching the protests in Sanford before Dr. Proctor came. And while Reverend Gillespie never became a nationally known orator and intellectual like Dr. Proctor, he was steeped in a black Southern homiletic tradition and was one hell of a preacher. Reverend Gillespie had all the traditional strengths and the polish of a good education, too, and a smile that would melt glass. His personality was so forceful, as folks back home say, that if he'd drowned in the river, folks would have looked for the body upstream. He was the genuine article, a first-class, grade A “pulpit peacock,” as my father and his five preacher brothers would put it.
WOXF routinely broadcast my father's sermons locally, so that shut-ins, the elderly, and those members whose Sunday morning could not transcend their Saturday night could hear the Word nonetheless. That morning, Daddy hadn't notified WOXF that he would not be preaching. And so when Reverend Gillespie climbed into the pulpit, he was unfurling his words not merely for the white congregation in front of him, but for all of Granville County. Otto von Bismarck had a point when he warned the Reichstag that conquering armies were not halted by the power of eloquence, but he had never heard Gil Gillespie. That morning, my father's controversial guest was like the minister who, as the poet Richard Baxter once wrote, “preached as never to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” Gillespie simply mesmerized everyone in the congregation and, for all we knew, everyone in the county who had a radio.
Daddy's most implacable adversary on the question of inviting Reverend Gillespie had come to Sunday school earlier that morning. But the fellow made a point of letting my father know that, as “a matter of principle,” he was not staying for the eleven o'clock worship service. The next week, however, the man dropped by the church office with a confession. “Vernon,” he laughed, “I started on home, but I reckon I have more curiosity than I do principles, because I could not keep myself from turning on the radio in my car just to see what the man was going to say.” As he drove along, the fellow told Daddy, he became more and more intrigued by the sermon and almost forgot who was giving it. “When I got to the house,” he said, “I couldn't get out of the car because he was still going at it. My wife just brought me out a sandwich and laughed at me.” The man threw back his head and squealed at his own silliness. “I'll tell you,
Vernon,” he said, “the longer that feller preached, the whiter he got.”
Even though Reverend Gillespie's 1967 visit caused less trouble for my father than Dr. Proctor's had in 1964, it would be a mistake to assume that the racial chasm in American life had narrowed. In fact, few white people, North or South, were comfortable with the notion of racial equality in the early 1960s, and the victories that black Southerners finally wonâthe Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the voting Rights Act of 1965, principallyârecruited legions of opponents. As the Democrats increasingly became identified with the black freedom movement, white Southerners poured out of the party. Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina had predicted this thirty years earlier as he'd filibustered against a 1938 anti-lynching bill: if national Democrats “come down to North Carolina and try to impose your will upon us about the Negro, so help me God, you are going to learn a lesson which no political party will ever again forget.”
Bailey's prophecy came true. In the presidential election of 1964, five states from “the Solid South” went to the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Republican organizers in Dixie traded almost exclusively in racial fear and white resentment. Political developments in the North reflected the same racial impetus; in the Democratic primaries of 1964, a third of the Democrats in Wisconsin and Indiana voted for Alabama's Governor George Wallace, the bellowing, slick-haired icon of Southern white supremacy. That summer when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he is said to have handed a souvenir pen to aide Bill Moyers, remarking, “Bill, I think we just gave the South to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine.” Johnson turned out to be an optimist. Two traditional Democratic constituencies, white Southerners in Dixie and “white ethnics” in the northern suburbs, now stampeded out of the Democratic Party, launching an enduring and racially driven realignment in American politics that would eventually put determined opponents of the early 1960s freedom movement into the highest offices in the land.
It is important to note that the “white backlash” that fueled this realignment, fed Richard Nixon's “Southern strategy,” and created the Republican Party of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, and Newt Gingrich began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not the riots of the late 1960s. The reaction against the African American freedom movement began much earlier, and rejected not only black militancy but also simple justice. National opinion polls taken in 1963, only weeks after Dr. King told America about his dream “that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” documented that “anti-Negro prejudice is widespread and deeply rooted in the U.S., extending to the vast majority of ordinary, well-meaning Americans” in all parts of the country. In truth, Dr. King had many admirers, but he was also one of the most widely and deeply hated men in the United States.
The sugar-coated confections that pass for the popular history of the civil rights movement offer outright lies about most white Americans' responses to the freedom movement instead of reminding us how profoundly it challenged American practices of justice and democracy. No one, in the rosy glow of our hindsight, was opposed to this movement except potbellied, tobacco-chewing racist rednecks in Mississippi. And thank God for the federal government, who in these fantasies rode over the hill like the cavalry to iron out these little difficulties on the frontier of American society. Polling data revealed that the majority of white Americans
in 1963
, prior to the Civil Rights and voting Rights Acts, believed that the movement for racial equality had already proceeded “too far and too fast.” North and south, whites avoided social contact with black people and strongly objected to integrated housing and schools. Agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hearing Dr. King's dream of racial reconciliation and equal citizenship, launched a calculated effort to destroy King's personal life and tried to blackmail the eloquent young preacher into committing suicide.
While most Americans would not have approved of the FBI's secret campaign to bring about King's suicide, we should not forget that comparatively few of them applauded Dr. King while he lived. In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus, genial and vacant, a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates. Politicians who oppose everything King worked for now jostle their way onto podiums to honor his memory. Many of them quote Dr. King out of context as they denounce “affirmative action,” despite the fact that King repeatedly, publicly, and passionately supported that principle. In his 1964 book,
Why We Can't Wait,
King called for “compensatory consideration for the handicaps [American Negroes] have inherited from the past. It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special
against
the Negro for hundreds of years.” But our memories about what actually happened in the civil rights era are so faulty that Dr. King's enemies can safely use his words to thwart his goals.
There remains no place in American memory for the economic vision of King, who said in 1957, “I never intend to accommodate myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the many in order to give luxuries to the few.” Not many people today recall the King who died in an attempt to organize the downtrodden of America into a nonviolent revolution to take political and economic power from the rich. “We are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society,” King declared just before his assassination. “We must recognize that we can't solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” The radicalism of Dr. King's thought, the militancy of his methods, and the rebuke that he offered to American capitalism have given way to depictions of a man who never existed, caricatures invented after his death. The real Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis in 1968 calling for “the dispossessed of our nation” to “organize a revolution.” There he told the nation that “the whole structure of American life must be changed”âjust before somebody killed him.
The assassination of Dr. King set off a racial crisis across the nation that spread into our church. “You can't have it here,” the man snapped at my father as we walked toward his study at the church on Sunday morning. “This is
our
church, and you cannot have it here. This ain't your church,
Vernon, this is our church. And I am telling you right now, you ain't having no Martin Luther King service in our church.” As the door to the small room swung open, I could see that Daddy's office was literally full of angry men. The pastor's study couldn't have been much more than fifteen feet square, and there were about twenty-five men packed in there. We could hardly get in the door for all the red-faced men in their Sunday suits. And I had never heard anyone address my father in that tone of voice.
“Little Buck,” my father said, turning the broad barrel of his body to face me, “you run on up to Sunday school now. Your mother will be along to get you before church.” I turned and scampered down the hall into the education building and then upstairs to my class. I don't remember being worried in the least about the men in Daddy's study. I knew that something odd was going on, but I figured it had to be some kind of misunderstanding among grown-ups. Everybody loved my father, for one thing, besides which nobody in their right mind would attack
my
daddy in a small room with only two dozen men.
Daddy hadn't been expecting anyone to find out about the memorial service until he announced it at church that morning. Dr. King had been killed on Thursday in Memphis. More than a hundred cities had exploded overnight into the flames King had worked so hard to forestall. Rioters and revolutionaries set more than seven hundred fires in the nation's capital alone. Army units in full combat gear took battle positions around the White House and ringed the Capitol building with machine-gun nests. Into the weekend, violent clashes occurred in cities and towns across the country, including rock throwing and street fights in our own little town. Saturday, as the smoke from the riots lingered from sea to shining sea, black and white ministers from Oxford convened an emergency meeting in my father's small study.
The preachers quickly agreed that there should be an interracial memorial service for Dr. King the following day, Sunday afternoon, at five o'clock. White people weren't going to attend a black church, it seemed pretty clear, and it appeared pointless to have an all-black service, given that their purpose was to nurture some sense of community across racial lines. But any white preacher who sponsored a memorial service for Dr. King was putting his job on the line. “The Baptist minister said, âWell, we sure can't have it at my place. I have a Board of Deacons, and they'd have to approve it, and I don't think I'd get a single vote,' ” Daddy recalled.