Anniston, Alabama Civil Rights Observance 17Th Street Baptist Church June 24, 2016

Anniston, Alabama Civil Rights Observance 17th Street Baptist Church June 24, 2016

HOW FAR THE PROMISED LAND?

William B. McClain Mary Elizabeth Joyce Professor of Preaching and Worship, Emeritus Wesley Theological Seminary Washington, D.C.

On the warm early fall Sunday afternoon, September 15, 1963, the Reverend Nimrod Quintus Reynolds, my clergy colleague and one of my dearest friends, and I left our respective parsonages. His parsonage of 17th Street Baptist Church was at 1700 Cooper Avenue.

He arrived to pick me up in his relatively new Bonneville Pontiac at the parsonage of Haven Chapel Methodist Church at 1504 Brown

Avenue. We were on our way to carry out the agreed-upon arrangement to literally begin the first step in the process of the desegregation of Anniston, Alabama.

As members of the Anniston Human Relations Council appointed by Mayor Claude Dear and chaired by the Rev. J. Philips

Noble, who is here today, and who also became and remains a very

1 dear trusted friend and treasured colleague, Rev. Reynolds and I agreed on the plan that we would quietly and secretly enter the library that day, receive a library card, check out a book, and the so-called

"integration" of the library would be a fait accompli. We told no one about the plan -- not even those closest to us!

Yes, we had heard about and been shocked and saddened by the news of what had happened that morning in Birmingham. We knew that a bomb shattering 16th Street Baptist Church had killed

Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins and Carole

Robinson, four little Black girls as they changed into their choir robes in the basement, preparing to participate in the Youth Sunday Service upstairs. One of the members said that those 15 sticks of dynamite that had been laid near the steps of the basement with a time delay of three minutes hurled those little girls into the air "like rag dolls." Yes, we knew!

In fact, before we left the parsonage at Haven Chapel I used my keys to re-open the church so that Nimrod and I could go into the sanctuary and kneel at the altar and pray for the souls of those little girls, the grief and bereavement of their families, friends, church

2 members, and the sad duty of their pastor, our good friend and colleague, the Rev. John Cross, Jr.

And then we moved ahead to carry out the "Anniston Plan. " We thought: "No, this was Anniston in Calhoun County, and not

'Bombingham.' We've had no fire hoses and dogs and Bull Connors here. This was Anniston near Fort McClellan where soldiers and their families had lived all over the world in multi-ethnic and racially diverse communities and the home of the Anniston Army Depot, a major federal weapons storage and maintenance site. This was

Anniston! situated at the foot of Blue Mountain that the great newspaperman of Atlanta , Henry W. Grady, had named "the Model

City... " Isn't that something like calling it "the Promised Land?"

Maybe we had so easily forgotten that this was also a seed-bed of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens' Council, the place of national attention because of the burning of the Greyhound bus station assault and the beatings of the Freedom Riders on Alabama

Highway 202 just outside the City of Anniston [I believe about five miles away!] on Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, just two years earlier.

Phil Noble's book, Beyonbd the Burning Bus, for which I wrote an essay Foreword, details all of this.

And then it happened. And it happened just like the racists hoodlums and vigilantes had planned it; just like a history of hate, white supremacy had expected to carry it out. It was no secret to them that two Black preachers were coming to "integrate the library."

Two black preachers -- men who had earned Master's degrees from accredited and reputable theological seminaries -- not worthless bought mail-order degrees or certificates from some "fly by night" unaccredited, fundamentalist Bible college -- Not a certificate from the shadow fake Trump University! And here we were unable to go to the Anniston Public Library, own a library card, check out a book, let alone sit down and read and ponder what we read, and carry out our research. Just think, in a public library built from the money from

Andrew Carnegie Foundation on the corner of downtown 10th Street and Wilmer Avenue, we could not use that public library. The old

Negro spiritual says: "Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble..."

But there we were as sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered, prey to a racist mob of some in the Anniston Star Newspaper said there were

100 who assaulted us and beat us with sticks, fists, and a length of chain. Nimrod was stabbed several times and bleeding more

4 profusely than I, and we tried to get back to the car -- I managed to get him into the passenger side seat, and I into the driver's seat -- but they had blocked the car in -- and I couldn't get the cart out. Just then

I heard the bang or the pop of a shot and the devastating sound of shattering glass -- and the bullet that had been fired from the side of the car where I was seated lodged just beyond the nape of my neck into the headrest of the driver's seat. It was just then that I was able to get Nimrod out and into the streets and amazingly along came a woman named "Miss Dollie" and I have forgotten her last name -- somebody here may help me remember -- and she was kind enough to stop and let us into her car and take us to a segregated Anniston

Memorial Hospital. Yes, it was more than a "library event," as the

Anniston Star Newspaper continues to call it. It was a racist mob attack on two innocent Christian preachers seeking to start the process of justice to carry out the "Anniston Non-violent Plan" that

President had called the Mayor to commend our peaceful non-violent plan. But for us it was two preacher-prophets still wondering: "How

Far Is the Promised Land?"

And that is why, when my dear friend, the Rev. George

Smitherman, then the pastor of Mt. Calvary Baptist Church and I were

5 escorted into the library the next day, accompanied by the Rev. J.

Philips Noble, Carleton Lentz, Miller Sprouill, and Attorney Charlie

Doster, I had one book in mind that I wanted to check out after receiving the first Anniston Public Library card issued to a Black person. That book was by Walter Francis White, a graduate of my

Alma Mater, Clark Atlanta University, and at the time the leading civil rights advocate as the Executive Secretary of the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It was a book about race and lynchings, and race riots, and the ceaseless and valiant efforts of Black people to obtain justice, dignity, and freedom in an American democratic nation that called itself the

"land of the free and the home of the brave;" "the land where the pilgrims trod," "the sweet land of liberty."

Walter Francis White persuaded President Truman, with the help of his friend, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, to appoint a civil rights commission to lead to the desegregation of the armed forces and he created a legal division of the NAACP which brought Thurgood

Marshall on to the national stage that led to the history-changing decision by the Supreme Court to desegregate public schools. He died almost a year after that monumental decision was handed down

6 by the Supreme Court and months into 1955 before Rosa Parks sat down and refused to get up from her seat on the bus in Montgomery, and she and Martin Luther King and others led the Montgomery Bus

Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He had just finished the book before he died with the question on his heart: when will the race- baiting and brutality stop? When will Black people in Mississippi,

Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida and the rest of the

South and the nation end the necessity to speak of themselves as

"voteless people" and therefore "hopeless people?" When will segregation and discrimination end? When will Black people in

America receive the freedom promised?

The book is entitled: HOW FAR THE PROMISED LAND? And that was the book I carried out of that library to be read by me in the next few days in my study at Haven Chapel Methodist Church!

On that sweltering August day of the summer of our discontent, 18 days before the tragic event at 16th Street Baptist

Church in Birmingham, and our brutal attack at the Public Library in

Anniston, Martin Luther King addressed us and our nation with a speech that is probably the most quoted speech in recent memory.

Under the symbolic shadow of the signer of the Emancipation

Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King reminded us of the promissory note of the Constitution which promised all American would be heirs to: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." And in his unforgettably eloquent and sonorous voice, he reminded us of his dream, the American Dream where "each person would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin."

That was not just Martin Luther King's dream. That had been the dream of generations of African American as long as they had been on the shores of America. It was the dream of the Black slaves as they sang "Oh Freedom, oh freedom over me, and before I I'd be a slave I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free."

It was the dream of the Black slaves as they sang "Go down Moses, way down in Egypt's land, tell old Pharaoh to let my people go." It was to keep on dreaming and marching to the Promised Land that they sang: "There's a Bright Side Somewhere! Don't you rest until you find it! It was the dream of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Richard Allen and W.E.B. Dubois, and it was in the souls of

Black folks as they took that British apocalyptic poem: "On Jordan stormy banks I stand and cast a wishful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land," and Frederick Douglass said they made it their avowed

8 and earthly goal as they sang and shouted: "I am bound for the

Promised Land, Promised Land , I am bound for the Promised Land,

Oh who will come and go with me? I am bound for the Promised

Land."

But for so many and for so long the dream had become deferred, and lingering between dream and deferral as an ungrammatical but an unanswered question: "Lord, how come we here?"

The great Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes, captured the very soul and spirit of this paralyzing anguish in these words:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- Like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

In Memphis, in 1968 in the mountains of Tennessee while protesting with the garbage workers for better working conditions and better salaries, Martin Luther King said the dream to reach the

Promised Land was still alive. He said he, himself did not really expect to get there with us, but in his words: "... I've seen the

Promised Land... we as a people will get to the promise land... Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Well, in 2008, 20 years later when America elected Barack

Hussein Obama as the first African American President in the history of our great country, we thought that maybe the Promised Land is not so far away. President Obama had saved the nation from a disastrous recession and avoided a sure depression as crippling as

"Hoover days" of the late 20s and 30s; he rescued the automobile industry from sure collapse and disaster; his health care program has provided 23 million people with health insurance who would not have been insured; he ended the Iraq War and rid the world of an evil maniac named Osama ben Laden; he reduced the unemployment rate from 7.6% to 5.0 %; he raised the stock market from 7,949 to 17,723 and reduced our deficit by $543 billion to below one trillion dollars.

And this he has done with opposition from the very first day he stepped foot and moved into the White House -- much of it simply because of the color of his skin. And thus, we still have to ask "How

Far Is the Promised Land?

Racism is still alive and well; the violence of Sandy Hook, San

Bernadino, the recent heinous killings of 49 people in Orlando, the

10 hate crime and brutal killing of nine people in prayer meeting at

Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina a week and a year ago last Friday all suggest that we have a ways to go to get to the Promised Land. The Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the Pastor of Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church was my doctoral student at Wesley

Theological Seminary. He was also my Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity brother and my Friend. I had recruited him to come to Wesley. And two of the women who were killed with him in the basement of that church had prepared lunches for my wife, Jo Ann, and my students just a year before when I brought 25 theological seminary students on a Gullah intercultural immersion to Charleston, South Carolina. Yes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble...

So, what can we do as people of faith, as people who seek the

Promised Land? Well, we can first admit that AK .15 and Sig Sauer

MCX automatic assault rifles are not sold to hunt deer, rabbits, pheasants and wild turkey, but are built, sold, and bought to kill other human beings, and ought to be made unlawful to be sold and placed on the streets. There is no human and moral defense for such wanton lack of gun control. My Friend, Anniston's Attorney, Charlie Doster, shared with me yesterday at lunch a copy of his research of the

11 comparative statistics of people killed from gun violence from around the world -- per capita population. The largest number outside of the

United States was Israel -- and that number was 58 per 7.7 million people. But the staggering statistic was the United States: 10, 728 people per almost 300 million people killed with guns. THIS IS 5 TO 1

DEATHS PER PERSON OVER THE NEXT WORST, ISRAEL -- AND

THEY ARE AT WAR!

Second, we can exercise our civic duty to vote -- for a voteless people are a hopeless people. A democratic government depends on the voice and the rule of the people. Every effort to suppress voting and to restrict the people of this nation must be fought and defeated.

So many people have bled and died to secure that basic right -- and some of them right here in Anniston and Calhoun County.

Third, the road to the Promise Land in race relations and human relations must be paved with honesty and every vestige of white privilege must be removed from our society. The beginning of that honesty will begin when we learn to say to each other in each others' presence what we say about each other in each other's absence. That ought to change the topic of our cell phone calls, texting, e-mails, our

12 facebook topics and all of the other ways modern technology and social media have made it possible for us to communicate.

And fourth, we can believe and practice our faith -- not right wing evangelical fundamentalism that requires us to check our minds when we enter the doors of the church. The Beatitude of Jesus was not "Blessed are the IGNORANT for they shall see God." Not the faith of marketplace theology that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But the "... faith that will not shrink though pressed by every foes; that will not tremble on the brink of any earthly woe." It was that kind of faith of our foreparents who kept the faith when "hope unborn had died,"

I am greatly honored and humbled that you have placed my name on an historic marker or plaque in Alabama -- so many of you, and especially Mrs. Georgia Calhoun and Attorney Charlie Doster -- to make it so, and I thank you. But what really finally matters to me as

William Bobby McClain is whether my life and ministry have made a difference for love, justice and service. Have I helped somebody as I have traveled along? Can my Aunt Minnie and Cousin Cathaleen and

Rev. L.G. Fields, my teacher and mentor, C. Eric Lincoln, and my old

Friends Nimrod Reynolds and George Smitherman look down from

13 their place in glory and be able to say: "He did a good job! Well done; you were a good and faithful servant!" And when the roll is called... I want to be there!