Safe House Podcast Ep. 63 - Chapter 2 (Part II)

Episode 63

Chapter 2 (Part II)

Micah 6:6-8

With what shall I come before the LORD,

and bow myself before God on high?

Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,

with calves a year old?

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,

with ten thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

He has told you, O man, what is good;

and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?

Discussion

1. The Stress of Inner Conflict (Niebuhr has a complex perspective on race—at once honest and ambivalent, radical and moderate. On the one hand, he says that “in the matter of race we are only a little better than the Nazis”; and, on the other, he is urging “sympathy for anxious [white] parents who are opposed to unsegregated schools.” In terms almost as severe as those of Malcolm X, Niebuhr speaks about “God’s judgment on America.” He calls “racial hatred, the most vicious of all human vices,” “the dark and terrible abyss of evil in the soul of man,” a “form of original sin,” “the most persistent of all collective evils,” “more stubborn than class prejudices,” and “the gravest social evil in our nation.” “If,” he concluded, “the white man were to expiate his sins committed against the darker races, few white men would have a right to live.”[24] But, unlike Malcolm, Niebuhr also says that the founding fathers, despite being slaveholders, “were virtuous and honorable men, and certainly no villains.” “They merely bowed to the need for establishing national unity” based on “a common race and common language.” He even says that the 1896 Supreme Court doctrine of “separate but equal,” which made Jim Crow segregation legal in the South, “was a very good doctrine for its day,” since it allowed “the gifted members” among ex-slaves, a “culturally backward” people, to show, as a few had done in sports and the arts, “irrefutable proof that these deficiencies were not due to ‘innate’ inferiorities.” In my view these latter views amount to a moral justification of slavery and Jim Crow.)
2. Compromise vs. Justice (Niebuhr praised the 1954 Supreme Court decision ending segregation in public schools, which he claimed “initiated the first step in the Negro revolt.” Yet he was also pleased by the Court’s added phrase, “with all deliberate speed,” which “wisely” gave the white South “time to adjust” (while also opening a loophole to delay integration). “The Negroes,” Niebuhr said, “will have to exercise patience and be sustained by a robust faith that history will gradually fulfill the logic of justice.” Niebuhr’s call for gradualism, patience, and prudence during the decade when Willie McGee (1951), Emmett Till (1955), M. C. “Mack” Parker (1959), and other blacks were lynched sounds like that of a southern moderate more concerned about not challenging the cultural traditions of the white South than achieving justice for black people. He cited the distinguished novelist William Faulkner and Hodding Carter, a Mississippi journalist “with a long record of fairness on the race issue,” in defense of gradualism, patience, and prudence, so as not to push the southern white people “off balance,” even though he realized that blacks were understandably smarting under such a long history of injustice: “We can hardly blame Negroes for being impatient with the counsel for patience, in view of their age-long suffering under the white man’s arrogance.”)
3. Environmental Immersion (German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, during his year of study at Union (1930-1931), showed an existential interest in blacks, befriending a black student named Franklin Fisher, attending and teaching Bible study and Sunday School, and even preaching at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Bonhoeffer also read widely in African American history and literature, including Walter White’s Rope and Faggot on the history of lynching, read about the burning of Raymond Gunn in Maryville, Missouri (January 12, 1931), in the Literary Digest, “the first lynching in 1931,” and expressed his outrage over the “infamous Scottsboro trial.” He also wrote about the “Negro Church,” the “black Christ” and “white Christ” in the writings of the black poet Countee Cullen, read Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, and regarded the “spirituals” as the “most influential contribution made by the negro to American Christianity.” Some of Bonhoeffer’s white friends wondered whether he was becoming too involved in the Negro community.[30] Niebuhr, in contrast, showed little or no interest in engaging in dialogue with blacks about racial justice, even though he lived in Detroit during the great migration of blacks from the South and in New York near Harlem, the largest concentration of blacks in America. He attended socialist and leftist meetings when W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph were present and included such writers and artists as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen of the Harlem Renaissance in his course Ethical Viewpoints in Modern Literature (a course that Bonhoeffer attended). But Niebuhr cites no black intellectuals in his writings. He repeatedly writes about “our Negro minority” (not “our brothers,” as he referred to Jews), a phrase that suggests white paternalism. Although Niebuhr allowed his name to be used for the support committee of the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP (1943), he did not join the organization or attend any of its conferences dealing with racial justice. He often used the word “negro” in the lower case, at a time when the NAACP fought hard to establish its capitalization. He seemed only marginally concerned about justice for black people, even though he firmly opposed racial prejudice in any form.)