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The Chicago Memoirs:
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, 1967-1972
Chicago, South Side, 1968 (Part One)
“I was invited to conduct a daily chapel service at Luther High School South where a couple of our teens attended classes. I spoke about our unity in Christ, that as baptized Christians we have an identity that transcends race. That was the last time I was ever invited out to the southwest-side school to speak at chapel.”
— Joel Nickel, The Chicago Memoirs
With the start of the new year we began a new adult seminar series with a discussion of the “doctrine of the church,” trying to put into practice the type of community Jesus started. We confirmed some adults that first Sunday in January — Perryman Adams and Camilla Hoy who would later be married, Mr. and Mrs. Tanas, a white couple on welfare living in an dilapidated apartment on 63rd Street, Mrs. Venetha Thomas, who would later take her family and flee to California to escape a gang death threat, and Mr. Harold Peters who had long been interested in joining Our Redeemer but was prevented from doing so because of his lodge membership (a typical Missouri Synod hang-up, even though he hadn’t been active in the lodge for 25 years; he merely had his insurance through the lodge). These people, each in their own way, indicated the new openness and diversity of the congregation.
Urban conservation, but no urban renewal
Looking north on the 6400 block of South Harvard. The parsonage is the first house north of the church. Englewood was a “conservation” area, not designated for urban renewal.
Joe Evans from the local bank came for the second seminar to talk about urban renewal. Our neighborhood is not designated as an urban renewal area, but as a “conservation area” even though there was precious little conservation going on. The thought was almost ludicrous. This designation prevented us from getting Department of Urban Renewal funds and our good intentions to renew the community were clearly not enough. When we investigated the possibility of starting a day care center, city inspectors told us we would first have to make a $15,000 investment in a sprinkler and fire alarm system, money we did not have. Now it also seemed like a housing renewal project was closed to us as well. That same week I was invited to conduct a daily chapel service at Luther High School South where a couple of our teens attended classes. I spoke about our unity in Christ, that as baptized Christians we have an identity that transcends race. That was the last time I was ever invited out to the southwest-side school to speak at chapel. There were times when I went out there uninvited to deal with the racial problems our students were having. Perhaps my sideburns were too long.
I was also summoned to the Our Redeemer Ladies Aid meeting at a private home. Some of the ladies were reluctant to come into the neighborhood except on Sunday morning, so the group usually met at a member’s home. The noon, weekday meetings meant that none of the black women of the congregation could attend even if they wanted to brave entrance into the all white neighborhood. Ashland Avenue was at that time the dividing line between the black and white communities, sort of like the DMZ in Vietnam, patrolled constantly by police. The meeting was painful because it was clear that I was invited not just to lead a devotion, but to answer questions. They didn’t approve my pastoral intentions, what I was doing “to our church.” “What will you do if all the white members leave?” they asked. “Who will support the church?”
I tried to be kind, remembering that they had invested a great deal in the building of Our Redeemer, a place where they were nurtured in the Christian faith. When they spoke of “our church” the “our” didn’t include black members. The Ladies Aid would become a casualty of change. “Blessed are you, white members of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, because you are fortunate to be in a position to serve others and together examine the spiritual problem of racism which most Americans go to great lengths to avoid.”
So I called upon friend and Pastor George Hrbek who led an experimental house church in Hyde Park to come to Our Redeemer for a “pride and prejudice” seminar topic. George took all the white participants upstairs in the parish hall and friend and Pastor Bill Griffen met with all the black participants downstairs. This was the first time there had been any intentional racial separation in the congregation, but our purpose was to put people in a place where they could honestly open up. They did. Bill Griffen was a catalyst who could draw out black feelings and George Hrbek was a sacrificial lamb to absorb white distrust, fear and anger.
After the separate session the two groups came back together and Bill opened the discussion with the question, “Why do you think the two groups were divided?” That drew white response which took offense at the move because “Our Redeemer is an integrated church, not a separatist church.” Ann Branch, a feisty articulate black member responded, and spoke passionately about what second-class citizenship and second-class church membership truly meant. “What ever got into that little lady?” some white members asked in hushed tones at the end of the seminar. “She always seemed so petite and gentle and has such perfectly behaved children.”
That was the beginning of Ann’s move in the direction of black militancy. She had spoken up and now was marked. There was a shift going on, a move from passive “civil rights” into black militancy. Stokely Carmichael suggested that the demarcation between the civil rights movement and the black power movement came already in 1964 when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was refused seating at the Democratic convention. He suggested that moral claims in themselves may lack power, and power is needed in the black agenda for social change.
Segregation in the North is more hidden and subtle than down South, but often there are unintended visible cracks in the façade that expose the racism underneath. A case in point was the permissive transfer policy that allowed students to transfer from one school to another. Both public and private schools were trying to achieve more racial balance, and busing students was fast becoming the number one issue in many communities. The Mount Greenwood area was one of those communities. During the first week in February, some four or five black elementary pupils started attending Mount Greenwood Elementary School. Thursday night there was a news item on TV which depicted those black children walking along the sidewalk to the school surrounded on both sides by white parents yelling obscenities and racial slurs at them. Three college students from Northwestern University were also on hand with placards urging integration. After the children passed into the school, the crowd turned on the college students, took away their signs and started beating them with the signs and with fists. The police stood by even in the presence of TV cameras and did nothing. After the uncivil whites vented their anger, the police moved in and arrested the students for disturbing the peace. Why are the police called “Chicago’s finest”?
The next morning there was a LAC clergy meeting (all four of us — me, Norm Theiss, Larry Morkert, and George Hrbek) and we thought we should visit Mount Greenwood, since LAC’s purpose was “to confront racism.” So we made some signs and, despite the 5 degrees above zero temperature, drove out to Mount Greenwood in my newly purchased white 1968 Volkswagen bus. I parked my “white god” two blocks away from the school for fear of vehicular damage, and we marched to a sidewalk across from the school. The police asked us which side we were on. We explained that we were not with the 150 white protesters and were summarily assigned 20 feet of sidewalk at the north end of the block. We had to walk through the white mob, and when they read our signs, we started catching their venom. One of their signs showed some imagination: “Put Redmond and Cody (school administrator and Roman Catholic bishop) on the bus and leave the driving to us!” One lone black cop was assigned to guard us while a detachment of 30 white cops stayed with the mob.
We marched in a circle for about two hours, and when 3:30 came and school was dismissed and the black students left safely, we figured we had served our purpose and started to leave. It was at that point that I didn’t think we were going to make it safely back to the bus or that the bus would leave unscathed. But the black cop walked with us. Larry Morkert had the ability to invest a bit of humor in tight situations. As we were ushered back to the bus, we had to pass the side entrance of a Missouri Synod church. The pastor of the church was standing behind the locked glass doors, but Larry called out his name, smiled broadly, and waved. The contrast was too much. Here we had a solitary police escort followed by a howling mob, and the pastor stood safely behind the glass doors of his comfortable sanctuary — and he was known by us. I have since had to repent of the moral superiority I felt at that moment, because that pastor had to deal with a deep spiritual problem in his community. We got into the white bus and headed back to the safety of the black ghetto. It was good to be home.
Next: The Chicago Memoirs of 1968 (Part Two)
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