[Dialogue] 10/14/10, Spong: How St. Luke's Church in Tarboro, N. C., Challenged My Racism

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Thursday October 14, 2010 

How St. Luke's Church in Tarboro, N. C., Challenged My Racism

As I stood in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapel at Morehouse College recently to witness the unveiling of my portrait to hang in the Hall of Honor, I could not help but look back on my life with wonder. I was raised uncritically in the racist prejudice of the South and yet I had somehow been able to escape its clinging power. How did such a dramatic transition occur? In my mind I began to recall the turning points. I am happy to recognize that two of these turning points occurred in church, which somehow helps me to accept this institution's constant failure to grapple with its own negative history. The others were personal experiences. Allow me if you will to share with you the key moments of transition on my journey out of racism.
First, in my early childhood during Lent every year, my church used something called a "Mite Box" for the children's Lenten offering. This box derived its name from the story of the Widow's Mite in the gospels. We were taught to place the coins that came from our Lenten sacrifices into these boxes. Some of us would give up candy for Lent; others ice cream; still others our Saturday trip to the movies. Whatever the "sacrifice," the money saved became our "mites," given to aid, we were told, the Christian mission around the world. The impressive thing to me, however, was that on the sides of this "mite box" were pictures of children from all of the nations of the world kneeling in prayer. These children were wearing native clothes and their faces revealed the pigmentation and the ethnic identities of their heritage. There was a Native American child dressed in buckskin; an Asian child with black hair and eyes slanted a little differently; a Dutch child with wooden shoes ; black children from the various nations of Africa that we called "The Dark Continent;" a child from the people of the North Pole then called Eskimos, and wearing a fur lined coat and hood. This was my earliest childhood knowledge that enabled me to embrace the fact that there were different kinds of people with different dress, different looks and different shades of color, but all of them were portrayed as praying to the same God. It was an indelible impression.
When I started the first grade, I was informed by my mother that I could no longer play baseball with what she called the "Negro" children, who lived on the other side of our woods. I did not understand and was angry, but the decision was final. Segregated fences were erected.
In January of 1942 when I was in the fifth grade, my grammar school accepted the invitation of another school in Charlotte, North Carolina, to send representatives to a patriotic assembly they were planning. The strong emotion of patriotism was in the air since this was about a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the United States into World War II. I was chosen to be one of my school's delegation. When we arrived it was obvious that this school was for black children. I had no idea at that time that there was such as thing as a "black school." It had frankly never occurred to me that there were no black children in my school. My consciousness was clearly underdeveloped.
In the assembly at that school on that day, however, I had three more indelible experiences. First, we all said the Lord's Prayer to the same God so I began to wonder why only white people came to my church. Second, we all said the same pledge of allegiance to our flag. This meant that they, like me, were full citizens of this country. Third, when we were asked to stand to sing the national anthem, much to my surprise and confusion that assembly sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing," which someone told me later was the "Black National Anthem." Its words spoke of bleeding feet on the march to freedom and the lash of the master on the backs of the slaves. At that time slavery had been presented to me by "good Christians" only as a benevolent act designed to offer the people in Africa "a better life, civilization and a chance to be baptized." Reality, which was quite different from yesterday's racist propaganda, was beginning to crack through my comfort zone. 
I had no classmates of color throughout my educational days in public school or even at the University of North Carolina. It was not until I entered the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1952, to begin my preparation for the priesthood, that I had my first black classmate. A native of Detroit, his name was John Walker and, prior to his death, he became not only the highly-respected Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., but also the vice-president of the Episcopal House of Bishops. While we were fellow students, however, John Walker could not go with me to have a cup of coffee at the local drugstore. For the first time I felt existentially the pain of racism, but it was so entrenched I had no idea how to confront it as I, newly ordained, headed back to my North Carolina home.
In 1957, with racial tensions rising, I became the rector of Calvary Church in Tarboro, a wonderful town of 7,500 people in eastern North Carolina. One block away from Calvary Church, which backed up to Panola Street, was St. Luke's Episcopal Church which faced Panola Street. Panola Street was the dividing line between Tarboro's white and black populations. St. Luke's was a black church. In this town in 1957, the gospel was clearly segregated.
St. Luke's had no priest. It has been served long and faithfully for many years by an elderly black priest named The Rev. Dr. Milton Moran Weston, but he was now in his eighties and had finally retired. No one else was available to serve St. Luke's. So the leaders of this small congregation came to me, the rector of the "white" church, and asked me if I could provide them with worship services, including the Eucharist on two Sundays a month. I agreed and thus began my association with that wonderful congregation. We gathered for worship on the second and fourth Sunday mornings at 9:30 a.m. I literally went one block away to preach a segregated gospel to this black congregation that never had as many as fifty members. The people of St. Luke's took me just as I was and they loved and stretched me into being something that I never imagined I could be. One does not lead worship without also becoming a pastor. So I married black couples, baptized black babies; counseled troubled black people; walked through sicknesses with black patients and conducted funerals for black people ranging from an infant who digested poison to the elderly who died of natural causes. Working with black teenagers I began to feel both their despair and their anger. They saw no job opportunities except as domestic workers or manual laborers, which made incentives to stay in school almost non-existent. I also crossed the social boundary that the white community thought was sacrosanct. I went to the rehearsal dinner parties when St. Luke's couples got married and to wakes at the funerals of the members of this congregation. I was frequently the only white face at these gatherings. In time two things happened. First, increasingly I was invited into the affection of the people of St. Luke's. They became not parishioners, but friends. I still remember so fondly people like Jesse and Sadie Wilson, Callie Hyman, Betty Forbes Gray, Shirley and John Freeman, Reg and Judy Moss, Helen Quiggless and the wonderful stately and strong Dr. Weston and his wife along with their grandson, Winnfield Crews, whom they were raising. There were many others for whom I became the first white person they had ever trusted. They shared with me family secrets. I knew who they were related to in the white community. I began to embrace the sexual component of racism, that is, the way black women had been used as sexual objects for white men over the decades since slavery. Miscegenation has always been an unadmitted fact of American life from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond, even in the pious Bible Belt of the South. The second thing that happened was that I quickly came to the attention of the Ku Klux Klan, who saw me breaching the walls of segregation and daring to "socialize with N---ers!" The result was that I and my family underwent hostility and threats from the Klan.
In that town and with the members of both of my churches I lived through the tension of the events, both locally and nationally, that engulfed our country in the fifties and sixties. That included sit-ins, public demonstrations, traffic tie ups, the Selma march, the use of fire hoses and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators and the bombing of black churches that killed little children in their Easter finery. In Tarboro I watched a black dentist whom I knew well dare to enter the political process as a candidate for the town council, something that had never happened before. He won and years later was elected mayor. I also knew and respected the sheriff, who was charged with protecting the first black children ordered to attend Tarboro's heretofore all white schools. He carried out his duties with integrity, even though he opposed that decision with all his being. In that struggle for civil rights, I was called by my priestly vocation to look at human oppression in all its forms: race, gender, sexual orientation and religion and I vowed to oppose any attitude that diminished the humanity of any child of God. It was through St. Luke's Church that this all became clear to me. I became committed from that time on to work to affirm the fullness of humanity for every person and to stand on the side of any victim of prejudice whatever its cause. In the living out of that vocation I became more deeply and fully human. That was the gift of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Tarboro, North Carolina, to me. More than any other experience that I can recall today that congregation made it possible for me to become the person who would someday be honored by having my portrait hung in the Hall of Honor at the King Chapel. Through this column I express my gratitude and continuing love to that small, but heroic congregation and I salute them with deep appreciation. 

– John Shelby Spong
 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


David Gaines, via the Internet, writes: 
Thank you for your columns. I have been reading them for seven years and have enjoyed every one. I use them for reference in many discussions with other Christians and non–Christians or, as you say, "Church Alumnae." Having just finished a column about New Testament books, a thought occurred to me. Do you or other biblical scholars use any of the writings that were not adopted or canonized as New Testament material to determine the authenticity of those books that were accepted as New Testament material in the 4th or 5th century? I am speaking of the material discovered at Nag Hammadi. When you say that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a reference, could those groups that wrote that material have used for example the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Mary? Thank you for your time with this question.
David Gaines, via the Internet, writes: 
Thank you for your columns. I have been reading them for seven years and have enjoyed every one. I use them for reference in many discussions with other Christians and non–Christians or, as you say, "Church Alumnae." Having just finished a column about New Testament books, a thought occurred to me. Do you or other biblical scholars use any of the writings that were not adopted or canonized as New Testament material to determine the authenticity of those books that were accepted as New Testament material in the 4th or 5th century? I am speaking of the material discovered at Nag Hammadi. When you say that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a reference, could those groups that wrote that material have used for example the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Mary? Thank you for your time with this question.



Dear David, 
Extensive studies have been made of non–canonical books by many scholars, including members of the Jesus Seminar who, for example, elevated the Gospel of Thomas into the Canon of the New Testament when they published their book, "The Five Gospels" — edited by Robert Funk and Roy Hoover. Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University has published a major study of Thomas entitled "Beyond Belief". Professor Karen King of Harvard has written a book on another of the non–canonical gospels, entitled: The Gospel of Mary Magdala. 
Most of the material discovered at Nag Hammadi is considered later than the New Testament period and is not used to authenticate events in the life of Jesus so much as to throw light on the early development of Christianity or, as Professor Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina would say, "early Christianities" because there was clearly more than one until what we now call "orthodoxy" finally won out. I think we need to remind ourselves constantly that "orthodoxy" does not necessarily mean it is right, but it does indicate that it won. 
Hope this helps. 

– John Shelby Spong






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