On the King call.
Yeah, okay.
Well I had gotten to know King fairly well.
Some people on the faculty, who were, we would
call them activists, in ethics and so on.
I was not on those front lines, but you hung
out with them.
So I met regularly with his group.
I had been an interim pastor at a church in
Lawndale, two blocks from where he was living
when he was here.
I’m not pretending intimacy or influence.
I’m not, what was the name of the guy who
just lost his job on television for putting
himself in the middle of stories?
I’m not in the middle of the story, is what
I’m getting at.
But the breakthrough for me was in the summer
of ’61, we had five little boys, oldest
was seven.
And the Hampton Institute of Virginia, we
know it well.
Well off, mainly episcopal churches in Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Washington, New York, every year
would subsidize a meeting, five-day meeting
of pastors of small black churches.
I don’t know if there is such a thing as
a small black church but I mean they weren’t
names I’d known.
All week long, it was their gift to them.
And that week, of ’61, I did five mornings
of lectures.
The stage was littered with tape recorders,
and notepads.
In the afternoon, King would preach.
And nobody stopped for a recording, they were
jumping and so on.
And we lived in the same guesthouse, and when
he would come back from his sessions, there
was a little hanging tree there, and he’d
put one of the little boys, our youngest Micah
was a year and a half.
He’d put him on the branch, and then it
would fall down on him.
That’s all beside the point except to say
that that autumn, October 31, we did what
Lutheran churches do, you have a reformation
festival.
And Mr. Jackson, a Tennessean teacher, came
to me after church, or after the service,
and said, “Pastor, you better talk to your
son John.”
Why?
“He lies.”
And I said, “John’s the most honest little
kid.
He wouldn’t ever lie!”
“Yes, he claims last summer he spent a week
at a hotel with Martin Luther.”
I said, “I think we’re going to have to
tell you there’s a difference between Martin
Luther and Martin Luther King.”
So I don’t want to feign intimacy but it
was true that the buildup to Selma was, you
could see it coming.
In Greek, and Biblical, and Tillochean terms
it was a kairos.
Ordinary time, chronus, and all of a sudden
you could sense it’s shaping up.
A couple years later you could see it with
the Vietnamese war.
Week in and week out, there are people working
for better race relations and so on, but everybody
could sense this was it, and that bloody Sunday
television brought it.
In those days, people had three or four channels
to watch, so the whole nation watches them.
And during the filming of a judgment at Nuremburg,
they interrupt to tell about the Bloody Sunday
images.
The next morning, we all got phone calls from
King’s people, not per se from him.
Your quota.
I was supposed to find fifteen in divinity
and Christian sentry.
Chicago, if you get a hundred, we’ll fly
you a flight down there.
I won’t go into more detail about that except
to say I made 15 calls and every one of came
through.
And divinity school in 2015, celebrating the
50th anniversary, asked what did we learn
from it.
Our ethicists were naturally at it.
We historians weren’t.
Cutting to the end of it, we were there, it
was called Turnaround Tuesday, which is a
nice way or humbling the venture, Turnaround
Tuesday.
We got up to where those guys in the blue
were and they turned us around.
King led us in prayer.
But, when I wrote a little article about it
for the divinity school later on, what did
we learn, I learned that in the crises, you’re
still wrestling with the things you always
wrestle with.
We were driven back to the Atlanta airport
the evening Jim Reeb was killed, Pastor James
Reeb, a Unitarian.
But we were heading back to Atlanta, I had
classes the next morning.
So we’re on our way, and Arlie Shardt, who
was covering it for Time, had rented a sizeable
car and we’re in it.
And after a long while he said, by the way,
we’re driving 35 miles an hour, because
they said if you go over that you’re going
to get arrested.
He said, “you guys can never get rid of
your theology.”
He said, “First there were two of you who
were millennial apocalyptic Baptists.
You could march for anything.
You don’t worry, you don’t have to report
to anybody.
If you feel it, you go, that’s it.
There’s no scripture, text about it.
You just do it.”
He said, “and then Marty and Brauer, you’re
both Lutheran, and you’re hung up, because
you thought you were violating Alabama law,
but it was a federal law.
And there’s Romans 13, which every Lutheran
has drummed into them that you don’t resist
higher authority.
So we’re sinning.”
Fortunately for us, King worked out that day
with a good federal judge that lifted the
injunction.
But you had that problem.
And then he said, “There’s Robert Grant.”
He was a professor of early Christianity,
in personal life a devout, undevout about
everything else except Anglicanism.
He was kind of the Charles Adams of theology,
funny sense of humor.
And was high church, and conservative in every
way, but the conscious was reached, so there
he was.
And he said, “Okay, Marty and Brauer, they
have trouble with Romans 13.
Professor Grant, he doesn’t even know if
King George III is dead yet.”
He was still in the empire.
Yes.
That’s the long way of going around and
saying that I really do believe that if you’re
devoted to your scholarship, it can lead into
other side, and you can’t, my third “-I-Z-E”
word of the day, you can’t artificialize
it.
One year we were all told to bend our courses
so that it would be relevant to it, and the
oriental institute with whom we worked a great
deal did that.
And Hans Guterbock, a great Sanskrit scholar,
was going to teach a course on the city and
stuff.
After about a week the students came and said,
“Mr. Guterbock, just be yourself.
You really were a good professor when you
just taught us the real stuff about that ancient
culture.
Now you’re trying to make it relevant to
Chicago in 1963?
Forget it.”
And I think that was it too, if you were in
that line as my colleague Al Pitcher, Dean
Parsons of Rockefeller Chapel, Gibson Winter,
they were all writing books about this subject.
It was a natural for them, and it grew out
of their thing and their students were studying
on it.
We were marginal.
We were also blessed, humanistic, invested,
and Harding, there was a surge of African
American students for the first time.
The first African-American student at Chicago
had been Benjamin Mays, in the 1920’s, and
a shaper of the field.
And in teaching we had the great John Hope
Franklin in history, and taught with us.
It was new, suddenly you have all these people
there who knew things we didn’t know.
One of my advisees was Jeremiah Wright, better
known a little later in the Obama campaign.
He’d been on Bill Moyer’s program, the
Friday before it became big news.
Moyer said, “How did you get into this stuff?”
“Well uh, my Professor Martin Marty taught
us all this.”
I didn’t teach him anything.
He said, “He was teaching us, you don’t
just serve your congregation, you serve the
city.
And he had us all bring a Sunday bulletin
from our churches, and had us count how many
events were just within the premises, and
how much reached out.
So we did it.”
Well, that’s how it was.
Well, Vincent Harding and I were fellow students.
He was a brilliant student.
But it shows how the changes came.
Sidney Mead, my advisor, and I yield in admiration
for him, said, “Mr. Harding, you are a negro,
and if I were you I would avoid a negro subject.
If you write about negroes you’re going
to get typed and that’s your specialty.”
So he had him write on Lyman Beecher, the
congregational New Englander, which Harding
did superbly but not with passion.
And in the middle of it all, the Martin Luther
King family called him to work with their
foundation.
Maybe head it, and so on.
And he put in a few years there, not pleasant
years, he didn’t like the way it was done.
But he came back to finish his doctorate,
so I was in on his dissertation but I can’t
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take credit except for being a campus buddy.
