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Thirdly, although it brought some positive gains, integration
has tended to weaken the bond between African Americans and
the cultural and religious heritage that previously helped them
not only to survive, but to be self-esteeming and self-reliant
despite the walls that White people threw up to keep them "in
their place."
For these reasons and others many African Americans, while
advocating a racial integration that goes two ways, nevertheless
choose to retain their ethnic identity and cultural particularity,
believing that they still have something important to contribute
to the rest of America out of their ancestral heritage. They
propose, in other words, friendly fences rather than wrathful
walls. What do I mean by "wrathful walls"?
A Family Story
Early in the 1930s my parents moved to a predominantly White
block of Jefferson Street in North Philadelphia. Next door lived
a White policeman and his young wife who had a tiny baby boy.
A few days after my parents moved in, the White neighbor, whose
front door opened on the same stoop as ours, marched out angrily
and extended to about eight feet high the low fence that separated
the adjoining back yards. Apparently he did not want his wife
to look upon Black faces when she hung out her washing on their
clothesline. He wanted, it seems, to blot our blackness out
of his sight and his life. So what was meant to be a neighborly
fence suddenly became a hostile wall.
Some weeks later my mother heard a knock on our front door.
Standing there was the young wife--in panic. The child in her
arms had turned blue and was obviously choking to death. My
mother, a strong and experienced country girl from Gloucester
County, Virginia, calmly took over. She did a couple of skillful
maneuvers with the baby's upper torso while with her fingers
she pulled the obstruction out of its throat. The child breathed
again and started bawling at the top of its lungs. The young
mother grabbed him back with a barely audible murmur of thanks
and fled into her house.
Late that night, after her husband returned home, we heard
him out in the back yard with his tools, pulling down the six-foot
extension he had built on top of the original fence.
This story does not have the ending most of us might prefer.
The two families did not become fast friends after that. The
most we gave each other was an occasional nod when accidentally
meeting on the street, but the hostility between us vanished.
The climate changed for the better until they finally moved
away as the neighborhood became all-Black--as it is to this
day.
Everyone knows Robert Frost's famous line about good fences
making good neighbors. The Apostle Paul wasn't thinking about
fences when he wrote Ephesians 2:14. Fences can be positive.
They can help to demarcate the intimately personal from the
impersonally public, the particular from the general, the church
from the world. Not fences, but most walls need to be torn down.
Of course, no one should confuse our White policeman neighbor
with Jesus Christ who, without waiting to receive our service,
breaks down dividing walls that separate us from each other,
and without destroying our uniqueness as persons and cultural
groups, makes us one in himself. But we give thanks to God that
the policeman was at least human enough to be ashamed of what
his wall signified and humble enough to tear it down as a gesture
of gratitude.
Walls suggest permanence, isolation, impenetrability, and alienation.
The wall of ceremonial law and ritual meant hostile separation
of Jew from Gentile in the Apostle Paul's time--in ours, of
Black from White Americans. Two groups of people who are the
same in so many ways, and yet are different, with different
histories and experiences. The lingering question of the late
twentieth century is: How can we preserve healthy cultural identities
and contributive differences and yet be one people in Christ?
A Black Christian Perspective
Most of the old and new walls that separate us, like the one
between my family's property and the policeman's, have to begin
to be torn down from the White side rather than from the Black.
It was, after all, White people who erected them in the first
place. This does not mean that we Blacks have no responsibility
from our side. It is a gross misunderstanding of Black liberation
theology to suppose that all it does is encapsulate African-American
Christians behind their own self-made walls and rob them of
any incentive to reach out to others. In For My People: Black
Theology and the Black Church, James H. Cone of Union Seminary
in New York, the most prominent of African-American theologians,
writes about ministering to the poor of our own ethnic communities,
but he has no intention, nonetheless, of forcing any of us into
a narrow ethnocentrism:
In our efforts to accent our particularities, we must be careful
not to limit God to them or to remain enclosed in them ourselves
... We must, then, bear witness to our neighbors for the building
of community defined by love, justice, and peace ...
We may say that Christ, in the most profound sense, has already
guaranteed this "love, justice, and peace" by demolishing
the dividing walls between us, but we know that some Supreme
Court justices and lower court judges, some politicians and
government bureaucrats, and some just ordinary citizens--not
all of them White!--are busily erecting walls as fast as some
of us try to tear them down. That's one of the reasons why race
relations, despite integration, have been at such a low ebb
in our country since the 1960s.
Over the years most African Americans, like my mother in the
incident described above, have not permitted the walls to keep
them from treating Whites like human beings. That is one of
the remarkable influences that the Christian faith has had on
generations of Black people. Historically we have had a peculiar
aversion to any kind of wall. We know, almost instinctively,
that the refusal to heed the cries of the needy and underprivileged,
the mean-spirited resistance to affirmative action, the booming
business in prison construction and the reluctance to reform
the criminal justice system, the coldness many feel toward people
in Africa, Asia and Latin America and toward people in our own
midst whose sexual orientation may differ from ours, are all
examples of how even Christians "wall in" some people
and "wall out" others. These are not fences that can
contribute to an appropriate neighborliness, but impenetrable
walls that deny others the rights, responsibilities and opportunities
that most of the rest of us enjoy as a matter of course.
When it comes to public service as a ministry of the church,
not just Christian faith, but also Reformed theology has had
an undeniable impact on African-American Christians. The traditional
emphases of Black faith accord well with a comment by John Calvin
in his sermon on I Timothy 6:17-19:
We must recognize that God has wanted to make us like members
of a body. When we regard each other in this way, each will
then conclude: I see my neighbor who has need of me and if I
were in such extremity, I would wish to be helped; I must therefore
do just that. ... God has joined us together and united us in
one body, because he wants each to employ himself for his neighbors,
so that no one is addicted to his own person, but that we serve
all in common (cited in W.F. Graham, The Constructive Revolutionary,
p. 70).
Presbyterians in the Struggle
That understanding of neighborliness is deeply etched in most
Reformed churches. It certainly characterized the segment of
American Presbyterians I knew best during the civil rights era.
The Board of National Missions of the UPCUSA collaborated with
the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, with the Industrial Areas
Foundation, and with the Interreligious Foundation for Community
Organization to inaugurate a period of grassroots community
organizing in the inner cities of the nation, unprecedented
in our time.
The Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations brought
missionaries home from foreign fields to walk picket lines and
teach in Freedom Schools in the South at the height of the civil
rights movement. The Board of Christian Education helped to
launch the Commission on Religion and Race under the co-chairmanship
of Marshall Scott, a White professor at McCormick Seminary,
and Edler Hawkins, a Black pastor n the Bronx, thus guiding
the denomination into the vortex of the movement as the first
predominantly White church to respond to the call of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Eugene Carson Blake, the Stated Clerk of the
General Assembly, was arrested for protesting segregation at
a Baltimore amusement park, and at the March on Washington in
1963 he reminded the political establishment that the Christian
churches of this nation were on the side of the poor and oppressed.
Nostalgia is charming, but mainly an exercise in futility.
Those days are gone, but they will go down in history as the
most impressive demonstration of this church's union with its
disenfranchised and victimized neighbors. It was a time when
Presbyterians, as Calvin counseled, refused to be "addicted
to [their] own person ... [so as to] serve all in common."
A time when Black and White Presbyterians, without disavowing
each other's integrity and special gifts for humanization and
societal transformation, came together to prove the secular
relevance of the gospel to the struggle for liberty and justice
for all.
Unity in Diversity
Today other strategies and tactics may be required, but we
need to discover once more that form of Christian unity-in-diversity
that allows neighborly fences, but breaks down hostile walls.
Such a commitment always calls for sacrifice--sometimes even
to dissolution and death. But that is what God demands--sacrifices
that permit Christians to dismantle structures of power that
impoverish, deal unjustly, and alienate--even as we acknowledge
our different histories, perceptions, strategies, and styles
of life.
Because Jesus Christ has broken down the wall of religion and
made us members of one new humanity in himself, let us again
become wall-breakers in the church, and in the society to find
the secular equivalent of what the Lord did for us when he made
peace between two estranged peoples by the blood of his cross.
References:
James H. Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black
Church. Orbis Books, 1984.
W.F. Graham, The Constructive Revolutionary. John Knox Press,
1971.
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