Keeping the story of a martyred Presbyterian pastor alive
Synod of the Covenant webinar explores the important work of the Rev. Bruce Klunder
LOUISVILLE — Michele Minter, who’s the vice provost for institutional equity and diversity at Princeton University, grew up in Cleveland. On Tuesday, Minter offered up a webinar for the Synod of the Covenant called “The Choice Goes on Forever: Cleveland and the Martyrdom of the Rev. Bruce Klunder.” Watch the webinar here.
Klunder, a Presbyterian pastor one of 41 people who’s honored at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, died at age 26 on April 7, 1964, protesting the construction of a segregated school in Cleveland. Klunder was crushed by a bulldozer. He left behind his wife, Joanne, and their two small children. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, the Stated Clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, eulogized Klunder three days later at a memorial service at the Church of the Covenant attended by 1,500 people.
Minter opened her talk by signing the first verse of “Once to Every Man and Nation,” a hymn her mother taught her decades ago after being introduced to the hymn “at the funeral of a minister killed in Cleveland.”
According to Minter, the first Black families moved into Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood in the 1940s. White flight meant Glenville became a Black neighborhood during the 1950s. A white Presbyterian pastor wanted to invite Black neighbors to worship at the church he served, but members of the then all-white congregation turned visitors away at the door. The presbytery tried to intervene, and the pastor left, Minter said. Minter was later baptized at the Glenville United Presbyterian Church.
In Cleveland, the struggle for civil rights during the 1960s focused on desegregating the public schools, Minter noted. As the city became majority Black, its Black schools were overcrowded and its white schools were far from filled. Rev. Klunder was among the founders of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, which was best known for the Freedom Rides. The executive secretary was Ruth Turner, “a strong-willed and completely fearless former teacher,” Minter said.
Protests and violence rocked Cleveland’s Murray Hill neighborhood in January 1964. Two Black people were beaten by members of the crowd, who also roughed up priests from their own parish who were trying to intervene. Police responded by arresting two teenagers and releasing them an hour later.
In early April, the Cleveland City School District announced plans to build a segregated school in Glenville. Minter turned to “A Death and Life Matter,” a sermon Klunder had preached to an all-white congregation, to explain why overcoming inequity was so important to the young pastor.
“Why is it,” Klunder asked in his sermon, that Black people “crowd themselves into overcrowded, run-down flats and apartments in areas where trees and grass are all but unknown? … It is primarily because of certain structures which have grown up for which few people take any personal responsibility. … It is because integrated neighborhoods have appeared to be poor financial risks, and therefore, the policy of all the major banks in Cleveland probits the making of loans to Negroes, regardless of collateral, if they wish to buy or build in a predominantly white neighborhood.”
“The fact that we have Negro ghettos in our inner-city neighborhoods has meant necessarily that we have had segregated schools — schools where close to 100% of the pupils were Negro,” Klunder preached. “What kind of schools are they? They are in areas cut off from the tax revenue of the prosperous suburbs.”
“It is a life and death matter for all who exist as oppressed people,” he said. “It is a life and death matter for all of us, for our times are explosive. None can claim the luxury of not having to decide. The structures are being radically attacked, and each of us must respond even if it is only a personal response to the reading of a newspaper account of some action somewhere. It is an American dilemma.”
“To understand suffering and to make it your own will not dictate a particular strategy of action,” Klunder said, “but it will throw you into the battle to make your own decisions as a follower of him who suffered all that we might be one. Our Lord is risen! In him we have peace and life. Amen.”
On the day that her husband was killed at the protest, Joanne Klunder was at the zoo with her children. The operator of the bulldozer, Minter said, didn’t realize Klunder was there.
A small riot broke out. Rocks and bottles were thrown, and police protected the safety of the operator of the bulldozer. Police ended up making dozens of arrests.
Klunder’s death was Page 1 news for The New York Times. Malcolm X had spoken days before in Cleveland, delivering his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech.
CORE soon “moved away from civil disobedience to Malcom X’s tactic of seeking political power,” Minter said. On Nov. 7, 1967, Cleveland voters elected Carl Stokes the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city.
Minter said she’s concluded the opening lines to “Once to Every Man and Nation” — “Once to every man and nation, Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, For the good or evil side” — are incorrect.
“There is no one great moment to decide,” she said. “We work with the imperfect information we have at the time.” She’s drawn to the last two lines of the first verse: “And the choice goes by forever, ‘Twixt that darkness and that light.”
Minter said she offered the talk earlier at Church of the Covenant. People there shared what Glenville was like during the 1960s. “They had powerful experiences that no one had ever asked them about,” Minter said. “They were kids who were managing in these situations, kids whose families were struggling.”
The Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, executive of the Synod of the Covenant, asked Minter what she thought Klunder might have been up to if he hadn’t died so young. She thinks Klunder would have pursued working on the economic inequity that plagues the nation even today.
“Those of us who are relatively privileged live very different lives from those who are not,” she said. “We need to keep looking for ways to step into the work we can do where we are. The risk is to say, ‘we know what other people need’ rather than asking them what they need.”
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