It is fitting for The Presbyterian Outlook to salute the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday by remembering what tireless advocates Dr. E. T. Thompson and Rev. Aubrey Brown were for racial integration and justice. (Thompson was the Outlook’s first editor and professor of church history at Union Seminary in Virginia; Brown was editor from the 1940’s to the 1970’s.) This paper stood tall on these matters when such beliefs were dangerous to espouse.
When Thompson was tried for heresy in Mecklenburg (now Charlotte) Presbytery, everyone understood that the sub-texts of that trial, ostensibly about the faithful interpretation of Scripture, were his positions on integration and ethics. Because of the malign interweaving of biblical inerrancy with segregation in the South, people who agreed with Thompson and Brown were labeled communists by fundamentalist Presbyterians. My parents were warned about possible communist influence when it was discovered in my home congregation (North Avenue Presbyterian in Atlanta) that I was to attend Union Seminary in Virginia. My childhood Sunday school teacher, who issued the warning, prayed for my spiritual safety. Her pastor, Dr. Vernon S. Broyles, Jr, was a Union graduate and had encouraged me to attend.
I recall this now as a tribute to those who preceded us in faith, women and men who suffered for their convictions in quiet, unacknowledged ways. They were willing, within the order of the church and the law of the land, to herald a new day, foreseen not only in the Declaration of Independence, but also in new understandings of the biblical witness. For them holy Scripture led to a repudiation of the theology and practice that had justified slavery, and continued to sustain segregation into the 1960’s.
A further memory of Thompson is appropriate. In an early Confirmation Class I led at Second Church, we took young people to meet several venerable “saints.” Thompson, long retired, was one of them. We learned that he had written 40 years worth of Bible studies (based on Uniform Lessons) for the Outlook. I asked him about the time he hosted King (and Adam Clayton Powell from Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem) when King spoke in Richmond in 1963. At the time I was an awestruck seminarian, delighted to see my professor on stage with Powell and King.
Thompson asked me if I remembered the title of King’s sermon. I did not. He said, “A Balm in Gilead, Ben.” Then he said that after years of massive resistance to Brown, and repeated racial slurs by press and politicians, Richmond was at boiling point. Justice was denied; people were angry. Dr. Thompson continued, “Dr. King could have set Richmond on fire, inflamed the crowd, and wreaked havoc. But he chose another path to freedom and justice for his people. That night there was a balm in Gilead.”
It was not to be safe everywhere. The speech was given before the deaths of Jonathan Daniels and Viola Luizzo, almost a decade before Governor Linwood Holton, obeying the law, walked his children into integrated schools, and six months before the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four children the age of those confirmands.
As painful and fraught with danger as those times were, they remind us that respect for law may often require suffering if unjust laws are to be changed, and that liberty and justice for all requires the power of government to be on the side of the weak and defenseless, and not just cheerlead for those who purchase legal privilege and political access. Those are bright memories indeed in a time when untruth is promoted, even celebrated, as fact, and citizens are despairingly cynical. As the nation marks the King holiday, let us give thanks for those who did not grow weary in well doing, even when it cost. And let us listen to Ken Woodley’s invitation to continue desegregating our hearts. May we also decalcify our minds and speak with courage and respect for the sake of the gospel.
