“So That None Shall Be Afraid”:
Establishing and Building the Student Interracial Ministry, 1960-1961
“Only insofar as we lend our support and energies to a creative witness such as this will we ever realize the promise of the Holy Scripture: ‘…And every man will sit down under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.’”
– Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., March 29, 1961, offering to co-sponsor the Student Interracial Ministry131
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Martin Luther King, Jr. to The Student Interracial Ministry Committee, March 29, 1961.The letter is addressed c/o Mr. John Collins, National Student Christian Federation. SIM, UTS, 1A:2:f1.
“Free-lancing for the New South”: Seminarians Join the Student Revolution In the spring of 1960 the Union students returned from the conference in North Carolina to New York City motivated to keep alive the vision of a mighty wind of change that would blow through the country. They had some reason to be hopeful; not only had the gathering in Raleigh excited them with its emerging leaders and engaging religious rhetoric, but a civil rights bill, albeit a weak one, had survived a Senate filibuster and been signed into law on April 21, 1960. Energized by this chain of events, the returning Union students called an all-campus meeting and delivered a report on their trip to the South. They also proposed a resolution on the racial crisis for general discussion. It read, in part, “As Christians, we seek the realization of the Kingdom of God and the reconciliation of man to man and man to God. Segregation is incompatible with this, God’s plan for us by His love in Jesus Christ.
Therefore we cannot remain silent in the face of recent events. …We thereby commit ourselves to the struggle against segregation and for full human dignity in our own churches and communities, wherever they may be.”132 In this small way, the Union Theological Seminary committed itself to the civil rights movement.
Jane Stembridge regaled her friend John Collins, with whom she had been working the year before in a storefront church in Harlem, with tales from her trip to Raleigh. They had picketed Woolworth’s together and now she encouraged him to undertake an interracial ministry that summer. Collins had left behind an engagement and a relatively staid life as a lawyer in Chicago to come to seminary in New York City, where he was immediately entranced by both the city and the social engagement of many at the seminary. A number of
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“Text of Resolution to be Submitted to an Open Meeting of the Student Body, April 28, 1960,” the Grain of
Collins’ classmates were attending seminary courtesy of Rockfeller grants. Collins described them as “seekers” who were more experimental in their thinking and social engagement than were more typically religious pre-ministerial undergraduates who felt “called” to the church. They tended to be bright students from the top liberal undergraduate institutions, and Collins found the ideas and interests of these “Rockefeller types,” as he called them, inspiring and engaging.
Collins also found fellowship with the members of Union’s Social Action Committee, which had arranged for the incoming students in Collins’ class to take an orientation tour of the city and meet some of its progressive leaders. Their tour included a discussion with A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters at his Harlem headquarters and long visits with the pacifist activist Bayard Rustin and a leader of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. The day concluded with a meeting with Bill Webber at the East Harlem Protestant Parish. Collins remembers thinking, “Boy! This was where the action was, you know. This was on the very threshold of the Sixties – there was no civil rights movement yet, other than the Montgomery bus boycott, but there was a stirring. And all of a sudden, I felt exciting things were happening.”133
Collins was stirred again by Stembridge’s excitement about the events in North Carolina and their possible involvement in southern ministries. He in turn enticed two other Union students, Franklin “Chris” Gamwell, a “northern” Presbyterian from Bay Shore, New York, and Charles Helms, a “southern” Presbyterian from rural northern Florida and southern Georgia. Collins and Stembridge also sought the advice and assistance of their Christian ethics professor, Roger Shinn, and of J. Oscar Lee, the director of the National Council of
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Churches’ Department of Racial and Cultural Relations and one of the only African Americans in that organization. Lee helped out by contacting Gammon Seminary, a black theological seminary in Atlanta, which advertised on a bulletin board there that Union students were seeking seminarians with whom to collaborate in interracial ministries.134 The Union students began to receive calls from Gammon and soon they had formed three
interracial pastoral teams: Charlie Helms from Union would join Willis Goodwin at Wesley Chapel Methodist Church in Greenville, South Carolina, Chris Gamwell would work with Maurice King at Bethel Methodist Church in Morristown, Tennessee, and Union’s John Collins would pastor alongside Gammon’s John Watts on a rural church circuit near Mobile, Alabama.
Jane Stembridge took a different approach, one that led her into the frontlines of the civil rights movement. In 1960, female seminarians did not have the parish ministry as a career option, and most who sought church careers did so as music or education directors. Because joining a black seminarian in a team ministry was not an option for her, Stembridge contacted Ella Baker, hoping that the SCLC Executive Director could suggest another path of involvement. Baker was then in Atlanta, just getting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee off the ground. She invited Stembridge “to come on down” and join her working in the office.135 The two women became inseparable that summer, beginning a long
friendship and working relationship. When the summer of 1960 ended, Stembridge took a leave of absence from Union Seminary and stayed on in Atlanta as SNCC’s first white staff member.
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Charles Helms, oral history interview with author, October 30, 2009.
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First Steps for SIM, the Summer of 1960
In the first summer of the Student Interracial Ministry project, each of the seven students involved had a unique experience that presaged the variety and depth of lessons that would be learned by SIM students over the next eight years. Most changes, both at individual and community levels, were so modest and subtle that they were barely noticeable at the time. In other ways, the impact was so great that Reverend William Crewes, the director of an ecumenical seminary program, claimed that, “in particular communities the whole pattern of social mores was destroyed and witness to peaceful reconciliation evolved.”136 Though this may have been an enthusiastic overstatement, the students and their supporters hoped that by demonstrating alternative racial relationships within the church, especially by having a white assist a black pastor and, later, by having a black pastor lead a white congregation, their small steps would help to engender greater understanding and to begin to break down patterns of segregation and the mindsets that supported them. These small steps would be the beginning of a long and difficult journey, which over the years would encounter many setbacks as well as grand achievements. But it was in that summer of 1960 that SIM’s great adventure began.
Chris Gamwell and Maurice King: Before that summer of 1960, Chris Gamwell had already had a small taste of interracial exchange, having spent the previous year engaged in a fieldwork practicum at the La Guardia Housing Projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Gamwell was born on Long Island in 1937 and grew up in Peekskill, New York in a conservative white neighborhood, where his only exposure to diversity was the few Italian and Jewish kids in his high school. He attended Yale University and then, thinking about a
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career in the ministry but unsure, enrolled at Union to study theology. Reinhold Niebuhr was then at the end of his teaching career and had lost a lot of his dynamism following a stroke in 1952, but his neo-orthodox theology still held strong at Union and immediately captivated Gamwell. Though most first year students at Union were given fieldwork assignments in small parishes, Gamwell chose to work for the Henry Street Settlement House, which at that time did community organizing in the La Guardia public housing units, home to a diverse mix of southern whites, blacks, Jews, and Latinos. There, he recalled, “though I was kind of wet behind the ears, I got educated in the problems of poverty and race in this country, somewhat at least, through the work at the Henry Street Project. So when the opportunity came to work with the Student Interracial Ministry, I leapt at it. That sounded like a great way to spend the summer.”137
Gamwell was teamed with Maurice King to minister at Bethel Methodist Church in Morristown, Tennessee, from June 19 to September 4, 1960. Though also a young
seminarian King was already married and so spent most of his weekends back in Atlanta with his family. Gamwell’s closest association ended up being with Paul Edwards, the Dean of Students at Morristown College, a black institution that provided most of the members of the Bethel Methodist Church. Edwards served as Gamwell’s local contact and hosted him in his house for several weeks. Later Gamwell lived with several other members of the church, and felt that the experience of living in the black community “helped to erase very real racial feelings within me,” as well as contributing to the racial reconciliation of black community members to him.138 In addition to working with Morristown’s black community, Gamwell
137 Franklin “Chris” Gamwell, oral history interview with author, December 4, 2009.
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Chris Gamwell, “A Statement on the Interracial Student Ministry” 1960. SIM, UTS, 1H:1:f7. Also published as “A Bulldog Goes to Bethel” in the Grain of Salt, fall 1960, 5.
and King also attempted to reach across racial lines to whites in town. They hosted a gathering of prominent white citizens at their church one Sunday evening, likely the first time whites in Morristown set foot in a black church. Gamwell reported that the gathering “helped greatly to foster a certain, though far from complete, understanding of the attitudes of the white community and augmented my discussions with the Negroes in gaining
somewhat of a picture of the racial situation in Morristown.”139
Charles Helms and Willis Goodwin: In Greenville, South Carolina, Charles Helms, a white Union student from Decatur, Georgia, partnered with a black ministerial student, Willis Goodwin, to pastor at two churches, the Wesley Chapel and the Minus Chapel. Helms had been born in New Smyrna, Florida, and raised in northern Georgia in a family with many generations of roots in the South and a strong commitment to segregation. He recalled that race issues were not talked about in church or in his family. “There was no need to talk about it because there was nothing perceived wrong with the prevailing system. Questioning
segregation was unthinkable. I grew up not having any zeal about changing things but also not having any conviction about black people being bad or unequal or unsanitary or whatever.”
As an adolescent, he had a religious awakening while listening to a visiting missionary at his church, and decided then to join the ministry. He attended Davidson College beginning in 1954, with the goal of attending seminary afterwards. The Brown v. Board decision came down while he was at Davidson, which at least broached the subject of race. Helms was among a few students who urged Davidson to desegregate. Among the few other progressives at the school was his Philosophy professor, who was a graduate of Union
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Theological Seminary in New York City and urged Helms to go there as well, which he did in 1958.
The theology he encountered at Union Seminary, in which the social and political aspects of the Gospel were highly emphasized, was distinctly different from that with which he had been raised. Most of his classmates, too, had much more liberal backgrounds. He recalls, however, that he readily accepted his upbringing as abnormal and embraced the tenets of the Social Gospel approach. He also embraced the novel living arrangements he experienced in his dorm, Hastings Hall, where he lived on the same floor as both African and African American students.
During his first year at Union, Helms did his parish fieldwork in Hell’s Kitchen in a little church that had been a German Evangelical and Reformed Church, but was now
reaching out to the African Americans and Puerto Ricans who had more recently moved into the neighborhood. Although the system of inequality was not as rigid as in the South, Helms was taken by the high incidence of poverty and few opportunities the parishioners had for advancement. Having already been working in a kind of interracial ministry among the poor, he, like Gamwell, responded positively when their mutual friend John Collins proposed the summer program that would evolve into the Student Interracial Ministry.140
Helms and Willis Goodwin lived together in the black community of Greenville and spent most of their time working with church youth. About a month into the experience, however, their summer took a sharp turn when the two preachers spontaneously led a sit-in at the Kress Department Store lunch counter in Greenville. It was to be the first public
demonstration of its kind in South Carolina, and the first known attempt to desegregate a
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lunch counter in the Deep South. As Helms exited the restaurant, he was attacked by whites, who cursed him and called him a Bolshevik, Communist, and “mulatto” who had “incited the niggers to riot,” before proceeding to beat him up. Helms recalled that when “they started in, I remember I wasn’t so much scared as I was remorseful – about all those teeth I was going to lose.”141 Helms was vilified in the local press and spent the rest of his pastorate in
Greenville shifting from house to house within the black community, afraid to stay too long in any one place for fear of further reprisals.142
John Collins and John Watts: For John Collins, a white Methodist born and raised in Chicago, the fear of possible danger, of new experiences, even of the judgment of his fellow whites was at times overwhelming. Collins, who had never been south of Illinois before, teamed up with the Reverend John E. Watts, an African Methodist Episcopal minister who was reared in Mobile, Alabama, and had never been north of Raleigh. Collins and Watts served two churches, the Star of Zion A.M.E. Zion Church in Talladega, Alabama, and a rural parish known as Wesley Chapel #2, about six miles out of town. They took turns preaching at each church, so that in one month, they would have each given two sermons to each congregation.
Collins met with the pastor of the white Episcopal Church later that June and learned that he was not alone in fearing for the consequences of upsetting the racial order. Although a self-described liberal Alabaman in his mid-thirties, and a graduate of General Theological in New York City, the Reverend Franklin urged Collins not to introduce himself to whites as a pastor in a black church, and warned him that staying in the parsonage could make him the
141 Charles G. Helms, “”Statement on the Interracial Student Ministry,” 1960. SIM, UTS, 1H:1:f7.
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target of violence. Franklin confessed that he could not himself preach on the race issue in Talladega or he would be out of a job. “It’s too bad you can’t meet the whites and hear what they say,” he told Collins. “There’s plenty to learn and it’s all bad.”143
Collins also learned that middle class blacks too feared upsetting the racial peace, when a Talladega College faculty member implored him and Watts to conduct their activities only on the campus so as to avoid trouble in town. Collins confided to his journal that such an attitude impeded progress, because the campus was relatively safe and nothing would be accomplished by going the safe route. “But,” he wrote, “It’s not for me to push them – only to participate in whatever program is developed. Nor do I want to push them further that I am prepared to go.”144 However, pressure would soon come from above as well. A few days after Collins wrote these thoughts in his journal in June of 1960, the Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy held his first meeting with Martin Luther King to talk about civil rights. It was a first step toward the tougher federal civil rights legislation that would
overturn Jim Crow and guarantee black voting rights.
Collins found himself welcome in the black community and in the church, where almost everything was new to him. At first, the active call and response of the congregation surprised him and upset his Midwestern Methodist sensibilities. Soon, though he came to see it “as a real dialogue [that was] extremely helpful to the preacher” and he tried to get into the swing of delivering a real southern fire and brimstone sermon. After one early attempt, John Watts congratulated him by saying, “you almost preached!” and an elderly lady came up to
143 John Collins diary, entry for June 3, 1960. Possession of John Collins.
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him after the service to say, “if you stay here long enough we’re going to make a preacher out of you!”145
Jane Stembridge: Southern preaching was not new for Jane Stembridge, the fourth of