In 1914 World War I came, and the black man put on an American uniform and went off to defend America as "the land of the free and the home of the Boston Braves." As a result, he became stationed in the armed services in the northern metropolitan cities - Chicago, New York, Philadelphia - and word began to trickle back to the South (where 90% of the black population then lived) that if black people would migrate north they would find greater economic opportunity and social justice.
So between the years of 1920 and 1950, there was a mass movement of black people to northern cities. Songs like "So Long, Dixie" developed. The North became the Promised Land. By the thousands, blacks made their way to the northern cities in hope that there would be liberation.
But when they arrived in the North, they discovered that the patterns of segregation were no different than in the South: They were forced to live in certain communities; they could buy, sell or rent only in certain neighborhoods. They soon discovered that integration in the North was defined as that period between the time when the first black family moves into a neighborhood and the last white family moves out.
You must keep in mind that, during this period of time, in general (there were some notable exceptions, but in general) the evangelical, Bible-believing, fundamental, orthodox, conservative church in this country was strangely silent. In fact, there were those people who during slavery argued, "It's not our business to become involved in slavery. That is a social issue. We have been called to preach the gospel. We must deliver the Word. We must save people's souls. We must not get involved in the issues of liberating people from the chains of slavery. If they accept Jesus Christ as their Savior, by and by they will be free - over there."
To a great extent the evangelical church in America supported the status quo. It supported slavery; it supported segregation; it preached against any attempt of the black man to stand on his own two feet. And where there were those who sought to communicate the gospel to black people, it was always done in a way to make sure that they stayed cool. "We will preach the gospel to those folks so they won't riot; we will preach the gospel to them so that we can keep the lid on the garbage pail."
And so they were careful to point out such scriptures as: "Obey your masters," "Love your enemy," "Do good to them that hurt you." But no one ever talked about a message, which would also speak to the oppressor.
It was during this period that my own parents found their way from Greenville, South Carolina, to the city of New York, where I was born and raised. I was born in a little community called Harlem, which is typical of most black communities throughout America. Harlem is a small, two-and-one-half square mile area with a population of almost one million people. The social scientists tell us that if you took the entire population of the United States of America- all two hundred million Americans - and you forced every American citizen to live somewhere in New York, New York still would not get as congested as Harlem is right now.
It was in that community that I was born and raised in a fairly religious home, religious to the extent that my old man is a preacher, and that makes me a preacher's kid. But don't feel too bad about it - I got through it. I went through the motions because it was expected of me. But I never bought any of it basically because, like a great number of black people, I could not reconcile Christianity with the kind of community that Harlem was. Harlem was more than 40% slums. Thousands of people lived in rat-infested, rundown, dilapidated apartments where landlords never came around to provide services.
It was not uncommon for some mother to wake up in the middle of the night and send a piercing scream through the community as she discovered that her two-week-old baby had been gnawed to death by a vicious rat. You could set your watches by the police who drove into the neighborhood to collect their bribes to keep the racketeering going.
Now, during this great upsurge in revolution and rebellion that has been going on, there have been great numbers of evangelical Christians who have joined the hoot and cry for "law and order".
But how do you explain "law and order" to a mother who stands at the foot of her bed watching her baby lie in a blood bath, when she knows that that baby would never have been bitten by the rat in the first place, and the rat would never have been in the building, if the landlord to whom she had been paying high rent had been providing the kind of service she deserved for the kind of rent she was paying? How do you explain law and order to her when she knows the building code inspector, who represents the city administration, who is supposed to check out violations in buildings, came by that building the day before but was met at the front door by the landlord who palmed a hundred dollars in his hand, and the building code inspector kept going?
Now that is lawlessness.
But the point is, we never arrest the landlord. We never lock up the building code inspector. But I tell you who we do lock up: We lock up the frustrated, bitter, sixteen-year-old brother of that two-week-old sister who in his bitterness takes to the street and throws a brick at that building code inspector. We lock him up and say, "We gotta have law and order!"
And make no bones about it: the difficulty in coming to grips with the evangelical message of Jesus Christ in the black community is the fact that most evangelicals in this country who say that Christ is the answer also go back to their suburban communities and vote for law-and-order candidates who will keep the system the way it is.
So, if you are black and you live in the black community, you soon begin to learn that what they mean by law and order is, "all the order for us and all the law for them." You soon learn that the police in the black community are nothing more than the occupational force present in the black community for the purpose of maintaining the interests of white society.
Now, you may not be able to understand that. But allow me to break it down for you. If you go to the city of Chicago, you will run into a community there called the South Side of Chicago where there are several hundreds of thousands of black people. Black people make up 30% of the population of Chicago. To illustrate it in the words of Jesse Jackson: In Chicago these 30% live on 10% of the land. There are thirty thousand black people per square mile in the black community and in the white community there are only three thousand people per square mile. What they are seeking to do is the same thing that would happen if you took a quarter and tried to fit it into the area of a dime. Over one-fourth of the city's population is asked to fit into 10% of the land and is expected to maintain order. No way.
That is the reason why the emphasis is placed in the black community on property values, and in the white community the emphasis is in human life, a reason why Chicago's Mayor Daley can say, "Shoot the looters." He means, "We must protect property at any cost. We don't care about human life here. In the black community we will shoot people to maintain property." But in the white community, because there are fewer people in proportion to property, the emphasis can be on human life and not on property values.
Dick Gregory says that when Mayor Daley said, "Shoot the looters," he agreed with him. In fact, he sent him a telegram to say, "I agree. We ought to make that retroactive 250 years and put the guns in the hands of the Indians."
In this context, the question then becomes: How in the world do you communicate the gospel - whatever that is? How do you go in and communicate the message of Jesus Christ to a society that has been cut off and oppressed by the rest of society, especially when those people who wish to proclaim Christ have participated in their oppression?
I could not put all this together, so I rebelled against the concept of Jesus Christ having any relevance. At that time I put people in two basic extremes. (I think I still do.) On one extreme was what I called the pseudo-existentialist. Don't get excited by that word - the person in this position is better known as the beatnik or the hippie. He is the cat who looks at life and says, "Life is too mixed up to get involved." He withdraws, sits on a mountainside, creates his own world, establishes his own values and, in fact, becomes his own god.
But on the opposite extreme was another coward. He was what I called the hyper-Christian. He called himself, and I quote, "a Bible-believing, fundamental, orthodox, conservative, evangelical Christian," whatever that meant. He had half a dozen Bible verses for every social problem that existed. But, if you asked him to get involved, he couldn't do it. If you went to him and told him about the problems of Harlem, he would come back with a typical cliché: "What those people up there need is a good dose of salvation." And while that might have been true, I never saw that cat in Harlem administering that dose.
If you went to him and told him about the problems of Harlem, "Christ is the answer," he would say. To be sure, Christ is the answer, but Christ has always been the answer through somebody. It has always been the will of God to saturate the common clay of a man's humanity and then to send that man in open display into a hostile world as a living testimony that it is possible for the invisible God to make himself visible in a man. One must then come to grips with the fact that God is the great manager of all time: He gets his job done through people.
But, you see, it is unfortunate that God had to raise up other witnesses. This may be difficult again for us to understand. But allow me again to break it down for you. Throughout the world it has unfortunately not been the message of the evangelist which has liberated people - unfortunately. What I mean by that is this: Almost a hundred years ago today, a position paper was written entitled "The Social Gospel." It said that Christians must become involved in the issues of the day and make Christ relevant in those issues.
Immediately, that position paper produced a dichotomy. On one hand some said, "No, we are not called to be involved in social issues; we are called to preach the gospel." On the other hand, another group said, "No, our position is to feed hungry people, feed empty bellies, put clothes on people's backs." And the more the fundamentalists said, "Preach the gospel," the more the liberals said, "Feed people." And the more the liberals said, "Feed people," the more the fundamentalists said, "Preach the gospel."
The problem was that both positions were wrong. Both were extremes. Both compartmentalized me. One said, "Just give him a passport out of hell to heaven, get him saved, give him eternal life and never mind about his oppression. Never mind about the fact that he has to live with rats and roaches. Never mind that he's a fourth-class citizen. Never mind that he will be shot on sight. Never mind that there are places that he can't go."
On the other hand the liberal compartmentalized me because he wanted only to feed my belly. He did not see me as a total spiritual being. Throughout the world we have developed the same problem. Well you see, God will not be without a witness, which is precisely why, when the evangelical church began to become silent on the issue of preaching the worth and the dignity of all men, God had to allow communism to sweep the world in the last fifty years with its emphasis that the state is more important than the individual. And because it emphasized the state, there finally rose up people who began to reconsider the dignity and the worth of the individual.
Because the evangelical church was silent on the issue of humility, and we evangelicals went out and supported the industrial complex, we, too, began to preach technological efficiency. We lost all sense of spiritual life, humility and spiritual being. But God will not be without a witness. And this time he has raised up a great upsurge in the consideration of Eastern religions. Why do you think young people are caught up with mysticism, Buddha and Hinduism? Simply because they want something that teaches humility, some- thing that teaches spiritualism. In the midst of all the technology and super-scientism that has engulfed our society, God will not be without a witness.
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