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The Chicago Memoirs:
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, 1967-1972
Chicago, South Side, 1968 (Part Three)
“Black rage was now unleashed by Dr. King’s death, but the damage in Englewood was slight compared to other places in the city. In Englewood there was already too much apathy and internalized anger.”
— Joel Nickel, The Chicago Memoirs
The last week in March Parker High School was in turmoil. The principal had suspended more than 20 students for protesting the deplorable condition of the school which was dilapidated physically and academically. The student leaders led by Sylvester Philips, happened to be members of the banned Afro-American History Club, and so when the school walked out, they all came to the most natural place where they had been accustomed to meet: Our Redeemer Lutheran Church. Their walkout came without warning, and I wasn’t about to bar the doors of the church to 600 black students. It was our policy to open the doors of the church to the community, and it was good to see the church so full!
One afternoon the students quietly took me on a tour inside Parker High School and showed me the home economics classroom in which none of the sewing machines worked, the chemistry classroom in which none of the gas jets or water faucets worked, the rest room where all the doors were off their hinges, and the exposed electrical panels in the hallways. The ceilings leaked. Their walkout was successful without any violence or disorder, and the school had to be temporarily closed for lack of students. Now the student leaders were in a position to bargain for repairs to the walls and electrical system and for equipment in the science classrooms. Since public schools receive state funds based on the number of students in school every day, the boycott would get results because economics were involved. A hit in the pocketbook moves the most intransigent establishment.
I explained the “freedom school” in detail to the Our Redeemer congregation in the next Sunday bulletin and editorialized: “In an age when many young people are turning their back on the church, we should feel honored that these students turned to Our Redeemer for help.” Their protests sought to improve their woeful academic setting.
Looking north on the 6400 block of South Harvard
The parsonage is the first house north of the church, with the VW van parked in the driveway.
But there were plenty of upset congregation members, resenting the fact that their sacred space had been used for purposes other than worship. I was sympathetic to their concerns, but housing the walkout was also part of ministry in the Englewood community. An usher even found a crushed cigarette butt under a pew in the back of the church and used it as “evidence.” The student leaders had been careful in their cleanup at day’s end, but had missed a solitary butt. The boycott continued into the next week. Barbara O’Banion was involved with the student leaders in their negotiations with the district school superintendent.
Thursday came and the Our Redeemer Ladies Aid was scheduled to hold their luncheon meeting in the parish hall. Sue and I invited and begged them to use the parsonage for their meeting instead, since there were only a dozen ladies and more than 700 black students, but they tenaciously hung onto “their church” and set up and decorated their tables in the parish hall. Next I went to the student leaders and asked if they could find another church in which to hold their freedom school for one day. They tried to accommodate my request, but the only church that would consent was over 10 blocks away from the school and the students were afraid that the police would arrest too many of the students if they had to walk that far.
So the inevitable happened. Picture it: 700 militant black teenagers met the all-white (in hair and skin) Our Redeemer Ladies Aid. The Ladies Aid never fully recovered. Tom Gieschen, knowing what the confrontation would be like, took time off from his own college classroom to come down to see what mediating he might accomplish. He was a great help in keeping the ladies calm, especially when a black police officer threatened to arrest me for aiding and abetting juvenile delinquency and truancy. Now, how would that look in the papers? “Pastor of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, the Cathedral of Gospel Art, arrested for aiding and abetting juvenile delinquency, sinning against Romans 13:1-5, and obviously guilty because he was arrested.” The crisis passed when two alert community relations officers from the same police precinct calmed down the black detective and explained that such a move would only further inflame the situation. We were much relieved to make it through the tension of the day — no one was arrested, no physical damage was done to the church, and all the students and ladies went home safely. But Sue from this day onward, in her role as pastor’s wife, never could bring herself to join a Ladies Aid group (even later when it was “expected” in Stayton).
Around suppertime as the students and I were still cleaning up, word came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis. We stopped work and sat in the parish hall office stunned in disbelief, listening to the radio reports. Then word came that Dr. King had died ... and there were shrieks and unrelenting sobs. Finally, as it was getting dark, I drove the student leaders home, making sure that nothing more devastating would happen that day. I made it back to the parsonage to hug my wife and son. We talked things over, trying to anticipate what might happen the next day. That same night the fires started burning on the west side of Chicago.
Early on Friday morning the Parker student leaders came to Our Redeemer again. But this time they immediately got on the phone and called all the South-Side radio stations and high schools to announce to black students that there would be a memorial rally this day at 6430 South Harvard. We estimated that well over 3,000 black teens were at Our Redeemer that day, singing, speaking out, establishing their solidarity with one another and venting their anger and frustration. There was much coming and going, but the church was filled to capacity all day long. I kept a low profile, shuffling between church and parsonage all day, keeping tabs on the gathering but letting Barbara do most of the directing of the use of our church facility. The leaders of the Black History Club who engineered a successful boycott of Parker High had suddenly grown into even more effective leaders of south-side teens.
Even the police kept their surveillance from a distance, watching us from a helicopter which circled overhead all day. It seemed to me that indeed “chickens had come home to roost” — that the Vietnam war had come home and America was waking up to its violent nature. As columnist, Mike Royko put it, “White America pulled the trigger.” But while the riots reached a crescendo on the West Side, there wasn’t any fire bombing or looting on the South Side, at least until Saturday. As I carefully explained to a lawyer from Mayor Daley’s “committee to investigate the riot,” who paid me a visit me at the parsonage months later, the fact that thousands of black youth had a place to go on the South Side that Friday was a significant factor in keeping things cool. When the circumstances were difficult, over 3,000 black teens went to church, and Our Redeemer opened its doors to take them in.
However, the action on the street was heating up, and some fires were indiscriminately set along 63rd Street. The tragedy was that the the fires burned black-owned businesses, small store-front shops along with white owned businesses that didn’t have the resources to rebuild. Englewood would never adequately recover from the damage.
By Saturday afternoon Sue and I were getting nervous. There is a difference between caution and paranoia, but we weren’t sure just where the dividing line was. It was difficult to get precise information about what actually was happening as police and fire sirens were a constant factor and the rumor mill was out of control. Radio stations unwittingly passed on rumor as fact and fear was like a net covering the neighborhood. Sue was six months pregnant and the circumstances strongly suggested that we should leave the parsonage. The Morkerts lived in an apartment in Hyde Park and offered us shelter. They shared their space with us ... and their good humor.
Larry was the pastor of a black Lutheran Church adjacent to the Robert Taylor Homes, the notorious high-rise public housing buildings along the Dan Ryan infected by crime and violence. He had been recently arrested and jailed by Chicago police for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” when high school students abandoned their dysfunctional school and came to his church to read, study, and do homework. The cops raided the church, planted a liquor bottle on the premises as evidence, and also confiscated bottles of communion wine. Pastor Dean Lueking from Grace, River Forest, went to the jail that night to bail him out. Unfortunately for Larry, his story and picture ended up on the front pages of the Lutheran Witness magazine, after which no Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod congregation would ever have the guts to issue him a call.
Anger is a tricky emotion. Turned inward it is self-destructive; turned outward it can result in burning and looting. I think it was Frederick Buechner who wrote something to the effect that “of the seven deadly sins, anger is the most delicious ... until one wakes up the the fact that what is being devoured is one’s self.” Black rage was now unleashed by Dr. King’s death, but the damage in Englewood was slight compared to other places in the city. In Englewood there was already too much apathy and internalized anger. But in the white enclave of Hyde Park there was just too much paranoia for us, as some apartment residents were filling their bathtubs with water in case the burning came close to home. Sue and I decided that it was better to return home Sunday morning and hold a worship service. It was Palm Sunday after all, and the few brave folks who ventured out gathered in the parish hall around the moveable altar/pulpit for mutual support from both human and divine sources. This was the place we wanted to be.
We talked about Jesus going to Jerusalem and how that trip entailed fear of what awaited him and the disciples. We spent time in the Garden of Gethsemane praying with Jesus, having been pressed and oppressed like those olives on Gethsemane’s mount — the name “Gethsemane” offering a fitting image of what was happening to Jesus. Jesus had courage to do his Father’s will, and the remnant of Our Redeemer’s disciples knew that following Jesus would no longer be comfortable. We were now “Ghetto Lutheran Church” and people would continue to come to our location at some personal cost. Outsiders would view this as a hostile place, in part because it marked the beginning of what I came to call “a period of rhetoric” among blacks — the hard rap, “soul on ice,” black is beautiful, and the devil is the white man. The irony was that in the fallout from his murder, Martin Luther King, the man of peace and non-violence, was replaced in the black mind by Malcolm X, the Black Muslim of forceful, violent resistance.
Next: The Chicago Memoirs of 1968 (Part Four)
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