Martin Luther King Jr. forced us white Southerners to contemplate our Christian claims. He had a dream that left us nowhere to hide in the Bible Belt.
I wasn’t the only reader of The Atlanta Constitution whose great granddaddy had died in Confederate uniform. But as Editor in the 1960’s, and working at the shoulder of Ralph McGill, I labored to help the white man change while the black man struggled to wait.
If God didn’t have a hand in certain events, I’m convinced he was looking over Southern shoulders with some interest. For instance:
“I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.” -Psalms 102:9
The Rev. Thomas J. Holmes was a big, rangy Southern Baptist preacher who was called in 1964 to the pulpit of Tattnall Square Baptist Church on the corner of the Mercer University campus in Macon. By 1966, a black from Ghana who had been recruited to Mercer by Baptist missionaries tried to attend services at Tattnall Square Church. The ushers threw him out. The deacons bluntly reminded the preacher this was a segregated church. Tom Holmes reminded them of God’s biblical command that “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” and said he could not consent to deny any person entrance to the altar of his church. The deacons told him he apparently did not understand the nature of his employment and suggested he repent. Tom and his wife came to see me at The Constitution in that period and told me what was going on. His doughty wife, Grace, told me the pastorium at Tattnall Square was the prettiest house she’d ever lived in and she did hate to leave it. But looking proudly at her husband, she said, “I know we can’t stay there.” He knew it too. He stayed and preached sermons of brotherhood until the deacons fired him. His book, “Ashes for Breakfast,” (The Judson Press, Valley Forge, 1969) tells the cruel story gently.
Job
The plain, hard-working cafeteria owner came to my Constitution office near tears in early 1963. “You have bankrupted me!” he said. Our editorials had urged owners of Atlanta eating places to integrate voluntarily and show the world they didn’t need to be forced to do the right thing by a federal public accommodations law, which Congress, of course, had to pass in 1964.
A few upscale restaurants had opened their doors to blacks. But this man’s cafeterias were for working-class folk. And the day he’d decided to admit blacks, segregationist pickets led by a future Georgia governor, Lester Maddox, put picket lines in front of all his cafeterias and the public would not cross them. I tried to comfort the distraught owner by telling him his children would be very proud of him some day for doing the right thing when it was hard to do. Since that seemed to offer him little solace in his immediate crisis, and since I knew him to be a deeply religious man, I suggested he go home and read, that night, the Book of Job. (He later told me, “You know, that Job really DID have problems.”) I did not wait for divine intervention, I’m afraid. Instead I telephoned the late Atlanta police chief, Herbert Jenkins, and told him the story. “Oh, I can fix that,” the chief said.
“It’s a very logical police guess that whoever blew up that church in Birmingham the other day and killed those little Negro Sunday school girls might be right here in Atlanta today. Whether they’re in these picket lines or not, I’m going to send uniformed officers with cameras to every one of those cafeterias tomorrow morning and snap close-up pictures of every man in those lines.”
Every picket vanished by nightfall. The cafeterias' patronage returned.
Ora et Labora
I’d not really expected to hear from the abbot of the Trappist monastery at Conyers, Georgia, who was a friend of mine, but there he was on the phone to my office at The Atlanta Constitution. “The lay brothers want to make the stained glass,” he said. I told him that was great.
White night riders in Terrell County, Georgia, had burned down three ramshackled black churches where civil rights workers were registering blacks to vote. I wrote a column suggesting my white kinsmen in the God-fearing state of Georgia might want to build those churches back. I named a prominent Baptist preacher in Atlanta as treasurer, and specified that no rich givers were wanted. Rather, I hoped small contributions from just us little people could give a greater testimony.
The nickels, dimes and quarters came in scotch-taped to tablet paper, many with penciled notes at the bottom. A typical one said: “I got no use for this integration thing. But no man’s got no call to burn down another man’s place of worship.”
The $10,000 that came in was ample. Atlanta architect Joe Amisano designed the three churches for free and found a contractor who put them up at cost. The monks' stained glass gave them light. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. dedicated them. I would guess the Lord was not displeased.
Suffer The Little Ones
Journalists I’ve known shy from piety. Yet we learned in covering the century’s greatest domestic story that the telling news didn’t happen far from a church house. That fact added thump, again and again, as we strove to write, for Southerners, accounts that could bring down home the brute history of the time. When The Atlanta Constitution desk phoned me at home one terrible September Sunday afternoon in 1963 I went to the office and banged out in 30 minutes a column from the heart of a father who had a nine-year-old daughter of his own. It was rough, uneven and overwrought, I can see now, a third of a century later. But Walter Cronkite got wind of it and gave over a huge chunk of his little evening television newscast to a film of me reading the whole thing nationwide on CBS. The hundreds of letters and telegrams that flooded in afterward humbled and educated me on television’s capacity to amplify the news, not to mention a church’s connection to the better angels of human nature.