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“Brothers and sisters, FBI agents. People within the church structure who helped to support us. Racist white Christians” began James Forman, leader of the Black Economic Development Conference, author of the Black Manifesto, speaking to the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches in December 1969, taking stock of his friends and his opponents on either hand.
The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC) gathered that winter in Detroit in a climate of crisis – called upon to denounce the ongoing American war in Vietnam, to redress American racism through economic reparations, to reform itself so as to represent the power of women, youth, and racialized and minoritized people. Its proceedings were originally captured on 7-inch open-reel audio tapes, transferred to audio cassette a few years later, probably around the 1972 Assembly. The original tapes aren’t extant, and the audiocassettes in places are failing. Portions of the proceedings, lending full voice to the people who undertook to discern what Christian life demanded of them, can now be heard.
Forman’s addresses earlier that year – at Riverside Church in New York City, at the UPCUSA General Assembly in San Antonio – have been widely remarked on, but the radicalism of his position is worth restating. During that summer, former SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) workers affiliated with Forman occupied the offices of the Board of National Missions, COEMAR (Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations), and the National Council of Churches in the Interchurch Center at 475 Riverside Drive. Staff of the Interchurch Center sought a court order to ban the Forman group from the premises. Forman burned a copy of the court order on the steps of the God Box. On Wednesday December 3, he came to denounce the Council’s tactics, and to re-present the Manifesto’s demands.
Forman was introduced by Calvin Marshall, pastor of Varick Memorial AME Zion Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Marshall made clear that the Manifesto was a set of demands, not requests.
“It is up to not the white middle class church structures, the Negro middle class church structures or any other church structures to determine the legitimacy of the Black Manifesto and the Black Economic Development Conference. It is up to those Black people who issued the manifesto to determine whether it is legitimate or not. And because they deem it to be legitimate, you therefore have to accept it as a fact.”
Marshall went on to call out the costs of consultation – “You have already spent a good portion of the money that we originally asked for in airplane fare, in hotel bills, in dinner conferences. We understand that you are trying to talk us to death” – and belittled the Black caucuses of majority-white denominations, calling them “Negro” churches to emphasize their un-liberated character, saying they were “pimping off of the demands of the Black Manifesto” and serving as “native colonizers of the Black people.”
Forman begins by saying that the demands of the Manifesto weren’t presented in theological terms – “sin and restitution” – but emerged out of the experience of African American slavery. Monetary reparations were metered to exploited labor; Christian churches come in as addressees of the Manifesto not because the Church is a place where people corporately seek forgiveness of sin, but because the Church exploited Black labor, and Christians defended that exploitation: “You brought us from Africa, our native continent, enslaved us, exploited our labor, worked us as slaves, churches owned slaves, all the slave owners were white Christians.”
Forman adds that in the BEDC’s (Black Economic Development Conference) barnstorming, the economic conditions of historically Black colleges, many of them operated by Protestant denominations, were proof of lingering American racism. Forman holds the denominations to account for divide-and-conquer tactics, calling the denominational workers who watered down or palliated the BEDC’s demands, pejoratively “Negroes,” “houseboys,” and worse. He notes the contradiction present in a band of ecumenical workers who had earlier that decade spent time marching against the use of legal processes to inhibit protest, now turning around and seeking “injunctions” against the BEDC: “All the racist rhetoric of the sheriffs in Mississippi began to spew forth from the same people who are the leaders of the National Council of Churches and the various denominations.”
In closing Forman laid out actions the NCC could take to acknowledge the Black Manifesto, “which we know will not be followed”: to dissolve the organization and put its budget into reparations; and to recall all mission workers from abroad and have them “deal with white racism” at home, an echo of the 1963 recall of foreign mission workers to Birmingham, Alabama, in the wake of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, or the NCC’s own 1964 Mississippi Project.
After Forman laid out the Black Manifesto, Baxton Bryant presented a resolution committing the NCC to “never again resort to civil authority and police power in settling ecclesiastical disputes involving the wealth, resources, and business operations of the church.” Calvin Marshall, chair of the BEDC steering committee, who had introduced Forman, found his own representatives to tally the votes. Pages or staff of the NCC, presumably some of whom had been under occupation by the BEDC that summer, were apparently unwilling to do so. Background chatter on the dais was recorded: “It certainly shows how much strength they have. This is probably the most ill-calculated tactic I've ever seen.”
After the motion was defeated, Marshall returned to the microphone to call out the vote count: 24 in favor, 9 against, and “a great silent majority” abstaining – there were slightly more than 480 commissioners attending. The assembly drove right into the agenda item which had been interrupted – a statement on the Vietnam moratorium. One commissioner took a microphone, aghast: “How can we do that? Move from that to Vietnam. Mr. President, do I understand we are returning to the order of the day? What day is this? That's unconscionable!”
Cynthia Clark Wedel, elected president of the NCC after the first contested election in the body’s history, becoming the first woman to hold the role, was immediately asked in her first press conference whether she felt the body should have chosen a Black leader before her. Presbyterian minister and UFO enthusiast Carl McIntire, acting as a press officer, asked Wedel whether the NCC would endorse his own “Christian Manifesto.” She said she’d be happy to talk to him in a sidebar conversation.
The Delano grape strike was then in its fourth year, and the Council heard from a four-man panel representing grape growers and migrant farm workers. Among them was the then-23-year-old Eliseo Medina, who, quoting Emiliano Zapata, told the assembly “Es mejor morir parado que vivir de rodillas. It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. If we must die I say to you that I'd rather die fighting so that my children will not inherit the same life that I've had.”
Young people called for the death of the NCC and held a mock funeral procession. Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement addressed the assembly, calling for $750 million in reparations for indigenous people. Hope College student James Rubins offered his draft card to the trust of the Council as a protest against the American War in Vietnam. In a separate incident, another protester poured red paint on the dais.
Amid all of this, on Tuesday 2 December, Duke Ellington and massed choirs of greater Detroit performed his Second Sacred Concert, which debuted at St. John the Divine in New York the year prior. The 15-member orchestra worked through songs indebted to Black gospel and spiritual music, with portions expanding into free jazz. Of his own work, the Duke said “I think of myself as a messenger-boy.”
The 1969 NCC General Assembly spent much of its time receiving messages. According to the New York Times, the chief message was that active constituencies in the Council – Black and Hispanic, women and youth – posed a threat from the political left, whereas the Council and its mainline Protestant denominational members had grown accustomed to attacks from the right.
The Council, and the Church at large, would long afterward reckon with 1969’s appeals to transform power, to sacrifice comfort for that transformation, and to answer through their works the voices of the crowd.
Learn more:
A Call For Reparations (2020)
RG 301.9. United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Council on Church and Race records, 1963-1971.
NCC RG 4. National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America General Secretary records, 1950-1973.
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