Wade Burns, architect and mild-mannered civil rights activist, has a few gentle words for the person on the other end of the line.
He says, “I loved your [February] Civil Rights issue.” The issue shows a photo of a group of men inside the Oval Office at the White House, and Burns points out that there is a name missing for a person peeking from behind another person. He’s concerned about this name because he fears the history highlighted in the issue is slipping away, falling off the record as the people who participated in and experienced the events of the Civil Rights Movement die.
Photo courtesy of Susie and Wade Burns.
This history is why he and his wife, Sallie, have lent their personal collection of historical photos to Union Presbyterian Seminary. Visit the Charlotte campus and walk up the stairs in the Thomas W. Currie building. You’ll find the hall lined with photographs – some of which were in the news outlets of the day, others more personal, some black-and-white, others in color – of heroes and events of the Civil Rights Movement. Many revered names – Martin Luther King Jr, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, for example – were his personal friends. He and Lewis shared an especially close friendship lasting from the 1960s to Lewis’ death in 2021.
“To view the exhibit is to get lost in time,” writes Rodney Sadler on the seminary’s website.
The call to Burns on this day is an opportunity to ask about the exhibit at Union, his friendship with Lewis, who served 17 terms as the U.S. representative for Georgia’s 5th district, and the congressman’s practice of nonviolent direct action during the Civil Rights Movement.
Would Mr. Burns be willing to write about that?
Mr. Burns demurs. “I’m not a writer,” he says. “I’m an architect and storyteller.
“You got a minute?”
About 60 delightful and thoughtful minutes later …
The story isn’t what you think (is it ever?) and is more a lesson than a story. The kind voice on the other end of the line is attached to a vault of insights and memories from a person who witnessed the Civil Rights Movement, the personal lives of its major players and the years beyond with both macro and wide-angle lenses.
As a teenager, Burns spent several months in an integrated high school, which was just about the only interaction he’d had with anyone Black.
The story isn’t what you expect … and is more a lesson than a story.
“I was a White boy who had only been integrated in public school for a few months of my senior year, never met one of the Black students at Virginia Tech when I was there that went on in the College of Architecture, where I never knew any African American person other than a domestic worker. And then I’m living in the Black community, and I was educated in one heck of a hurry.”
He’s getting ahead of himself. After graduating, Burns worked at an architect’s office and was given the job of redesigning homes in the historic West End in Atlanta, Georgia. The West End was then a primarily Black neighborhood of modest but sturdy brick homes, houses with good bones that needed updating. The West End residents, concerned about gentrification, appealed the redesign plan to Atlanta officials.
Burns didn’t plan to gentrify the neighborhood, but he did move into West End himself. After Atlanta’s mayor, Maynard Jackson, allowed him to continue, he updated homes and worked to ensure that the original residents could remain in them. Some of those folks are famous today.
“By a wonderful piece of fate, all of the heroes were my neighbors,” he says. “The closest was Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who moved his church across the street from my house, and then [John] Lewis down the street and Mr. King eight blocks away.
“And I worked [in] that community, not understanding anything about race, but understanding what the Civil Rights Movement was about. It was about human dignity. It was about being (the other), being dismissed.”
“… I worked [in] that community, not understanding anything about race, but understanding what the Civil Rights Movement was about. It was about human dignity. It was about being (the other), being dismissed.” — Wade Burns
While working and living in this community, he also learned about the active nature of nonviolence, which James Lawson, a Fisk University professor, had introduced to his friend John Lewis.
“And he [also] introduced Lewis and others to the concept of ‘unearned suffering,’ and that unearned suffering was a path to grace,” Burns said.
King had embraced this idea. “As my sufferings mounted, I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force,” he wrote in his article “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.””
“I decided to follow the latter course,” he wrote. “I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive … ”
Lewis also embraced this, Burns said. His friend suffered a fractured skull on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” the walk from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, that was in protest to voting rights denied Black Americans. Lewis was also attacked while visiting Rock Hill, South Carolina, as he supported lunch counter sit-ins. He never fought back, never swung out, Burns said, still in awe and admiration after more than half a century.
Nonretaliation and nonreaction to violence can be difficult to grasp, Burns said, and he points the metaphorical finger back to himself.
“White folks don’t have the measuring sticks to know what it is because we didn’t experience it and don’t experience it and don’t know how powerful it is and how malignant it is.” “It” being all the things that Black people in America have experienced: violence, racism, hatred.
Nonviolent direct action
To remove injustices, nonviolent direct action strategy “absorbs hatred into a greater love, knowing the hater is more than their hatred and may even be converted to our side,” according to the Nonviolence Toolkit at the Center for Applied Nonviolence. “The cycle of hatred and violence ends with us.”
Burns points to the immediate forgiveness given to Dylann Roof, a White supremacist who murdered nine Black people in Charleston, South Carolina’s, “Mother” Emanuel AME Church in 2015. Roof had hoped to start a race war, he later said — which could have happened if family members of victims, and survivors, hadn’t called for peace.
In this month’s benedictory, Rodney Sadler writes that nonviolent direct action is often confused – mistakenly – with passivity. Still, it is one of the most potent responses a person can have when confronted with violence, he writes.
And Burns believes nonviolent direct action in the U.S. is directly borne out of the teachings of the Black church, and he compares the 5,000 lynchings in the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow South to Christ’s suffering on the cross.
“They were so parallel,” he says. “[There was] extraordinarily painful death sanctioned by the state, public humiliation of people considered so worthless they deserved to be tortured to death.
“All of that took place in Jim Crow. Jim Crow was, in many ways, just as bad [as slavery]. You weren’t enslaved, but your wife and your daughter could be taken from you. There’s no paperwork. You could be abused in any way. There was no prosecution.
“And the nonviolence movement was based on suffering and grace. You could be nonviolent, even though you had unrepentant offenders,” he says. “And all that ties into the last words of Jesus, ‘They know not what they do.’”
What those who were enslaved, and eventually, those living under Jim Crow rules but attending Southern Black churches, came to understand was Jesus gave us a gift of grace. “You could forgive the person who had done the worst, though they were not repentant. But you could forgive them … so you did not have to carry the burden of bitterness and hate toward them, but only the burden of healing from what they had done to you.
“That was an incredible message.”
“Jesus gave us a gift of grace that we could forgive the person who had done the worst, though they were not repentant. But you could forgive them …” — Wade Burns
Lewis, King, and other leaders in the Civil Rights Movement leaned into the message of uncompromising peace that had formed despite their bondage in the U.S.
“All the folks who had been in all these churches for a few hundred years understood: these [White] folks weren’t going to repent. But hate wasn’t going to get you anywhere, and you could only do that by forgiving them as best you could … and trusting it would be dealt with elsewhere by the Lord.”
‘Educated by the best’
The photos lining the walls at Union Seminary are a historian’s gold. There are glossy, black-and-white photos with hand-written notes, color pictures of Burns’ children and family sitting with Abernathy, Lewis, and Bond, and a shot of Lewis and Burns suited up in tuxedos; Lewis looks both serious and proud, the best man at Burns’ wedding. The collection also includes a quietly eloquent shot of Lewis standing beside still waters and remembering Julian Bond, snapped by photojournalist Steve Schapiro at the exact moment that Bond’s ashes were being scattered in the Gulf of Mexico and gifted by Schapiro to Wade and Susie.
The deep friendship that Lewis, Bond, Abernathy and Burns shared is apparent in the comments that accompany the pictures. You feel the joy of sitting on a porch with friends, the energy of children scampering through the house and past these civil rights giants, the pride the children – now grown – exude when photographed later at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Some photos are signed by the subjects; others, by the photographer who froze time.
The photo from the Oval Office is also in the collection. The man with the missing name? John Lewis.
In the intimacy of these friendships, Burns learned about the lack of nutrition for poor people and the demand for labels to be added to foods. Because of Dick Gregory’s
insistence for nutrition labels, when Burns’ oldest son was discovered to be sensitive to gluten, Burns was able to more easily modify his son’s diet.
“I felt like I was privileged,” Burns said. “I got mentored over the course of decades by Andy (Andrew) Young, the King family, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy … I was taken in by all of those folks, because I lived and slept in the community, which is a whole different thing than working in the community.”
He hopes that the message of nonviolence and the history behind the faces pictured in “I Am a Witness” will be the Union exhibit’s primary focus, and that the faith he witnessed in these men and women will be apparent.
“They demonstrated the difference between believing in Jesus – we won a prize, we get to go to heaven, and you don’t – versus believing Jesus, which is a lifetime of hard work until it isn’t; until your faith is strong enough that you do not respond with anger to horrific mistreatment.
He pauses.
“I wish I was a writer,” he says. He’s concerned about the story being lost. “The survivors, the witnesses — are almost all gone.”
Suggested readings and viewing:
The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Martin Luther King Jr.
