America Behind the Color Line (26 page)

What I’m proud of is that this city, which is led by African Americans, is financially sound. The state of Tennessee is having tough economic difficulties, Shelby County is having tough economic difficulties, but this great American Southern city, we’re strong financially. And the paradox of this is, in the old days there was this thought that blacks could never manage a multimillion-dollar governmental institution. Today this institution that I lead, the eighteenth largest city in America, has about $60 million in reserves and a double-A bond rating. We are a strong financial center, stronger than many cities that are headed by white municipal executives. And we’re proud of that.

I’ve always loved cities, the great cities of the world. Cities in America went through a decline, and now there’s a rebirth. For whatever reason, you were considered a success if you lived in suburban American. You had made it when you could move outside the city limits. That was milk and honey for white affluents. Then as blacks’ economic conditions improved, blacks fled the cities as well. Now we’re seeing people come back to the city. Memphis is among the top five cities whose majority white population lives downtown. That has occurred here within the last decade. Ironically, there are now more white citizens who live and work in downtown Memphis than blacks.

Some folks may question whether that’s good for black people or bad. I think it’s healthy. My perspective is that it’s healthy for cities to have a diverse population. It’s healthy for the economy of the cities; it’s healthy for the quality of life; it’s healthy for diversity. I don’t think that cities ought to be the exclusive domains of poor minorities. You lose your tax base. We’re building affordable housing here. The real challenge is to make cities a haven for all people—affluent, middle income, and those who are poor. We are revitalizing public housing in Memphis. In about another five years, all dilapidated public housing in the city will become mixed-use housing. You won’t even be able to identify the lower-income housing. We want to blend in low- to moderate-income people with middle- and higher-income people. We want people from all economic strata to live within proximate vicinities of one another. That’s what America ought to be about.

I’m not concerned about losing either black or white voters as a result of this approach to housing, and I’m not naïve about it. Memphis has grown to a level of maturity where people respect capable leadership irrespective of the race of the leader. Now, I’m not on an ego trip, but we have earned the respect of white Memphians. They didn’t give this to us. They fought me in the first election. But I’ve been in this job for twelve years, and we’re financially solvent, we’ve raised per capita income, and we’ve brought more jobs here than any other previous mayoral administration. So we have performed. The mark of excellence is not defined by the race of the officeholder. It’s about the quality of your work.

We have brought the white people along with us. We’ve earned that. They didn’t give it to us. I was on trial. The difference between then, when Dr. King was alive, and now is that they would have never let me even be on trial. They never gave me a chance then. You couldn’t get on the stage. So we’re onstage, we’re front and center. We win an Oscar, Grammys, for performance.

In a profound sense, though, in terms of our essence and ethos, we’ve lost a lot. In modern-day society, we’re much better off, by American standards. But in terms of who we are as a people, how we got here in our struggles, I think we’ve lost a sense of that. I think of Dr. King at Mason Hall on April 3, 1968. He said, “I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know, tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” Dr. King recognized that the spirit of African Americans has been deepened through all our troubles, and that it needs to be preserved— that the Promised Land is of the spiritual as well as the secular. I think the challenge today for our people is to build a future while preserving a sense of who we are.

THE REVEREND
DR. R. LAWTON HIGGS, SR.
Word of God

It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord,

Standing in the need of prayer.

Not my brother, not my sister, it’s me,

O Lord, Standing in the need of prayer.

—African-American spiritual

Birmingham is in need of prayer. A lot of prayer, for sure. We have too much poverty, and still too much hate hanging around. We’re still too segregated in too many ways. We’re segregated in public education. Birmingham city schools are now around 98 or 99 percent black. Many of the suburban school systems are 98 or 99 percent white. Some Jefferson County schools are integrated. But it’s not about the growing, energetic engagement of an inclusive, multicultural society looking forward to building those bridges. It’s more about how blacks and whites can be kept separate.

It’s a matter of both class and race. The notion of contamination is still current. Recently, my wife was talking to a lady out in the northeast section of Birmingham known as Centerpoint. She said, if they just wouldn’t stand in their yard, it would be all right. She meant it’s all right if blacks move in, if they just wouldn’t stand out in their yard.
Their own yard
. They just don’t understand they’re destroying our neighborhood by standing in their yard.

It’s better than it was in the days of Dr. King, because they won’t kill you.

That’s true. That’s the major change that’s taken place. The segregation is not enforced by active violence, and that active violence is no longer acceptable, and that is a glorious gift of God. Probably one of the greatest accomplishments in human history is that Birmingham is not Jerusalem. And the reason it’s not is the work of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King. I love those men. They have a lot to teach the world.

I entered ordained ministry from the West End United Methodist Church in Birmingham in 1974, six years after Dr. King was killed. That congregation was heavily racist and was all white, and people were leaving the community. I was convinced in those days that I was a racist. I was not a violent man, but I definitely concurred with the view that black people are less than human and that they needed to stay in their place. I had no relationships with any black people. None whatsoever.

I would not have wanted members of my family to have friendships with black people. I would not have even wanted to have a black person as a member of the church I was a member of. We did not have any black members. Let’s say a black Methodist family had shown up at our church on a Sunday to take communion. That would not have been good. Oh, no. They would have probably been served reluctantly, but the preacher would not have made an invitation to church membership the day they were there.

Well, I read Martin King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and it broke my heart. I cried for about three days. I discovered I was in opposition to God, and began to read a lot more of Martin King’s work. I found out he preached the same thing that John Wesley preached, exactly the same thing. I was caught in a real bind, a spiritual bind. So I decided I would stand against racism.

It was a slow decision. I didn’t become an overactivist. I didn’t join the NAACP the next day or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or any of the others. And I had no idea how deep all this was. The first thing I lost when I began to change was my dad. He threw me and my wife and our children out of his house because I said that black children can learn as well as white children. My own father. In a very violent rage. I mean I thought he was gonna physically attack me.

It was very painful, very difficult. Across the years, my dad and I developed a good relationship. He had grown a lot, as I had grown. My dad died two years ago, when he was ninety-three years old. He had changed a lot, but he still held a lot of his beliefs. He was a lot more reserved in his expression, at least while I was around. But I don’t know that he ever fundamentally changed his view.

Racism is a deep, sick thing. I guess the real turning point in my life came when I was appointed to the McCoy Church here in Birmingham in 1983, nineteen years ago. McCoy United Methodist Church was one of the larger historically white dominant churches in Birmingham. I was appointed pastor after it had lost its dominance because of racism. The day I moved into the parsonage, I had an amazing encounter with God. I was walking across the street, thinking about McCoy Church and the church growth business—the whole philosophy of building church membership, connecting with people in ways that make the church grow. And one of the axioms of the Church Growth Movement is if you see a moving van, invite the people to church, because they’re in transition. They’re moving into the community; they’re looking for a home. So you invite them to church.

I was in the middle of Eighth Avenue, north of Birmingham-Southern College, and I saw this moving van and God said, Lawton, invite those folks to church. They were black. I knew they were black. And I could not invite them to church. I thought I had grown a lot about this business, but I was paralyzed and could not invite that family to the church that I had just moved to. I knew the history of rejection in the Methodist Church, the history of the white church in Birmingham, and it just seemed more than I could do.

So I stood there in that turn lane on Eighth Avenue for what seemed like an eternity. I don’t know how long it was. Then finally God said as clear as me talking to someone next to me, he said, Lawton, you’ve got to go over there and invite those folks to church, or you go back across the street and pack your bags and leave, ’cause I can’t use you in this city.

Well, I was too ashamed to go pack my bags and leave, and God was not in a negotiating mood. So I reluctantly went across the street and invited those folks to church. They didn’t come, because they knew my reluctance, and they also knew the history of the church, I’m sure. What this did to me was, one, I discovered how sick I was. As a white male preacher, I’d invited thousands of people to church. Everybody—people who had stolen, killed—all whites. And I could not invite a black person to church. And two, I essentially became a recovering racist at that point.

This was a euphoric event for my ministry, a great victory for me personally. It was as though I had broken some of my chains. The next day, I went in to a meeting some folks were holding in the basement of the McCoy Church. The Greater Birmingham Ministries—Scott Douglas was there, a great man; now he’s their executive director—had been working with a group of folks who had been in a labor struggle with some of the food distribution people and were on strike. They had started the Greater Birmingham Unemployed Committee, and I went in and I invited them to come to church.

I was on a roll. And it scared them absolutely to death. Matter of fact, it terrified the black folks who were a part of the Greater Birmingham Unemployed Committee. They had just had to leave a Presbyterian church in town because the church was afraid they were going to start coming to worship. They thought this new white preacher coming into town was setting them up to get them out of the McCoy Church basement by inviting them to church to get them to show up so they’d get run off. They were terrified. But then we had a wonderful time together, and of course this turning point is really what saved my life. It was the beginning of the journey that changed my life.

Dr. Louise Branscomb, one of the great white leaders in civil rights and human rights, was a member of the McCoy Church. The Greater Birmingham Unemployment Committee went to her because she was on the board of the Greater Birmingham Ministries, and they said, what’s this crazy creature doing trying to get rid of us? She worked it out with them, and they came to church later on but never did have to leave. All this reveals the other side of the story: the black folks were afraid to come in. So I decided I would work on my racial attitude, and I began doing all I could with them.

For nine years, I worked on a doctor of ministry degree on urban congregational development at Drew Theological Seminary. The faculty there and my advisory committee would not let me go by without really dealing with the issue of racism. So I had to work on that in lots of ways. They worked me over pretty hard. Among the many texts I had to grapple with was George Kelsey’s
Racism and the Christian Understanding of Man
. Kelsey describes racism as “idolatrous faith,” because a racist is really saying that someone’s skin color is more important than divine creation in settling the worth of human beings. I had to come to grips with this misplaced faith in my own experience as a young person and as a man.

We did everything we could possibly do to build an interracial, missional congregation in the McCoy Church. But it kept declining. After nine years, we admitted failure, and the church died. The church I had first entered as an ordained minister died the same year. I had worked in our United Methodist structures here in Birmingham and in Anniston, trying to make some headway with racial inclusiveness. I was not successful. Churches die because of racism.

Eight churches closed in Birmingham the same year the McCoy Church closed, all over the issue of race. I have tried to work with the Alban Institute, which helps congregations across the country deal with human relations in their congregations and with all the things that affect the well-being of congregations. I’ve worked with the general board of the United Methodist Church and with an urban center that helps congregations grow in their capacity to relate to their neighborhoods. All of that was pulled out from under me. There wasn’t any interest in it in the white church. Only tokenism.

When we tried to lease the storefronts for the church, the people we were leasing them from told us—it was in the lease, and I’ve got a copy of it—that all you can do is have the church. You cannot feed anybody, you cannot distribute any clothing, you cannot house anybody. All you can do is have the church.

I have since read
But for Birmingham
, by Glenn Eskew. An area of Birmingham now called Smithfield used to be called Dynamite Hill, because segregationists blew up several explosives there. From the late 1940s to 1965, between forty and fifty bomb attacks in Birmingham targeted blacks to try to prevent their exodus from all-black areas into white areas of the city. Twenty or more of the bombings targeted ministers and churches. Eskew said that some of the meetings to plan the bombings on Dynamite Hill were carried out in the basement of the McCoy Church. That was before I got there, but the neighborhood knew that about that church. That was corrupt, evil, carried out right in the heart of God. For a church, which carries the revelation of a gospel, the highest standards of human history and experience, to be so corrupt at its core is the most powerful expression of evil that can be present in the world.

Since I’ve been in Birmingham, we’ve had the battle with the FBI, which assaulted Dr. Richard Arrington here. We had a march in the streets about that. They pursued him to try to destroy his political career here and essentially broke his spirit as a human being. He was the first black mayor of Birmingham and served for twenty years, till 1999. I’m on the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham. The Reverend Abraham Woods is president of SCLC here and was instrumental in getting the FBI to reopen the case of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed the four young girls and injured twenty-two others. Reverend Woods and I and many others, we had to organize and protest ’cause they were gonna reverse the name Richard Arrington Jr. Boulevard; they were gonna put it back to 21st Street. They wanted to put it back to 21st Street ’cause they said it was too long a name to put on the envelope. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Boulevard would have been all right.

What I’m doing today in integrating the Church of the Reconciler is not typical in Birmingham. We are a multicultural, multiracial United Methodist congregation. It’s radical. There’s nobody else doing this in Birmingham. Despite all the press about the New South, nobody else is doing it. Come let us make money together, and let’s don’t go to church together. Let’s don’t go to school together. You might live near me if you’re as rich as I am, but don’t stand in your front yard, please.

There’s one black minister in a white church here, and there are a few black members, but not many. They have additionally been serving another church that was totally white, so everything is on the back of that black minister. He has to be white; he has to carry all that burden as the pastor. There’s not any power sharing with the community or interest in sharing the power of building an inclusive experiment. I have two sons who are Methodist preachers, and they’re both with churches here in Birmingham that are completely white. My older son is married to a Methodist preacher who is one of the pastors of First Methodist, a predominantly white church. I think they may have some African-American members, but it’s not an interracial congregation. So as Dr. King said, eleven o’clock on Sunday remains the most segregated hour in America. And that’s still pretty much the case in Birmingham.

Yet integration has to come to Birmingham, because if we don’t integrate, we don’t know one another. If we don’t know one another, we’re afraid of one another. If we’re afraid of one another, we’re gonna hate one another. And if we hate one another, James Baldwin’s message in
The Fire Next Time
will cease to be prophecy; it will be realized. Integration is necessary for life, not just for Birmingham but for the world. If we can’t integrate in Birmingham, they’re not going to be able to integrate in Jerusalem, and we’ve got to learn how to love enough to do that. Not to change you or change me, but for me to be able to love you and you love me even though we’re different, and for us to have the strength that comes from that, so we can address the problems of the world.