CHAPTER 2
BY THE TIME I graduated from seminary in 1989, my grandmamma and my father were dead. But their faith was like a seed planted inside me. The Reverend Dr. William C. Turner, who had become a spiritual father after I lost my two best friends during my studies at Duke Divinity School, preached my installation service when I received a call to pastor Fayette Street Christian Church, across North Carolina’s northern border, in Martinsville, Virginia. People my grandmamma’s age started calling me Reverend Barber when I was twenty-six.
I’ll never forget my initial sermon at Fayette Street. As a young preacher in a new setting, I had prepared carefully, rehearsing my message and perfecting its delivery. Before I left home to drive to the church, I packed my ministerial robes and a new pair of dress shoes I’d purchased for this occasion. Like a groom on his wedding day, I wanted to look my best. But when unloading the car at the church, I realized that my shoes were missing. I had no choice but to don my robe and walk into the pulpit in the tennis shoes I was wearing. When the service was over, one of the mothers of the church pulled me aside and said, “Son, if you can preach like that in tennis shoes, you keep on wearin’ ’em.” The next week, she brought me a little key chain with tennis shoes on it.
So I set about doing the work of a pastor. I visited my people in their homes and prepared sermons in my study. I worked on the craft of preaching even as I tried to pay attention to what was happening in people’s lives and in the life of that small town. Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Martinsville could have appeared to a nostalgic observer as a Mayberry where everyone knew one another and took care of their own. But it did not take long to discover the fault lines that ran deep beneath the picturesque veneer of this small Southern town.
My first New Year’s Day in Martinsville, the black churches in town invited me to preach the annual Emancipation Day service. A celebration of President Lincoln’s executive action to free slaves, in 1863, Emancipation Day services are a century-and-a-half-old tradition in the black freedom movement. It was a heady time for a young freedom preacher. Nelson Mandela had been released from Robben Island in South Africa just months earlier, and Doug Wilder had just been elected the first African American governor of Virginia—indeed, the first black governor of any US state since Reconstruction. My wife and I were living in the church parsonage, where, we learned, the first savings and loan for African Americans in Martinsville had been started in the attic, just after the Civil War. Across the street from the church was the site of the old school that had afforded African Americans an education since the great jubilee of 1863.
It was easy to be hopeful in my Emancipation Day sermon in southern Virginia that first day of January, 1990. My enthusiasm about the power of God to break chains and set captives free stirred the spirits of some workers who had been trying to organize a union at the local textile factory. They came to me and told me that, for each year of service to the company, a factory worker only earned three dollars toward retirement. So, folks who had given their lives to that company for thirty years were being sent home with ninety dollars and a company watch. What’s more, they had begun to realize that the chemicals they had worked with for decades had drastically increased their chances of developing cancer. A woman in my congregation retired only to discover that her cancer was already advanced to a degree that it could not be treated. I sat with her family and watched her die in poverty from a disease she had contracted while working for the factory.
Now, after hearing my Emancipation Day message, workers from that same factory were asking me to help them start a union. I was not a very experienced pastor, but I knew that I could not pretend to love a family I had grieved with if I was not willing to take a stand against the systemic injustice that had taken their mother from them. In essence, I had no choice. If I were going to do this work of pastoring, I had to join the fight.
No sooner than I had begun to support the union effort in Martinsville, I started receiving calls and visits from movement people—many of them old friends of my father. All of them were elders whom I respected and whose analysis I considered carefully. But they were not of one mind. Some supported the union, insisting that civil rights and worker’s rights must go hand in hand because racism and poverty have always been inextricably bound together in the South. Others insisted that I should not support the union because good factory jobs were fading away quickly with no clear replacement to follow them in small Southern towns. Corporate bosses who were pressured too hard by unions would close up shop and move elsewhere, leaving their former workers unemployed and impoverishing towns like Martinsville. Sure, wages weren’t all we might hope for, they said. But they were better than nothing.
Listening to the analysis of both sides, my mind had to acknowledge the legitimate concerns and at least partial truths of each party. Martinsville had indeed suffered from the divide-and-conquer strategy of post–civil rights deconstruction. The pro-union activists were right to insist in the wake of Doug Wilder’s fusion coalition victory that we must pursue a pro-labor, white-and-black-together strategy. But, at the same time, ongoing viable businesses in the community were essential to everyone’s well-being. The factory owners could not simply be our enemy. The community needed them as much as they needed us.
As I studied and listened, I learned how essential an economic and political analysis is to moral leadership. Not only must we know the arguments on all sides of any debate, we must also seriously consider the questions that are not being asked and their implications for everyone involved. My very first fight in Martinsville, Virginia, etched this principle of moral leadership deep in my soul: Before you get loud, be sure you’re not wrong.
But I was also learning how the essential work of careful reasoning on any social issue can lead to a “paralysis of analysis.” People who mean well in both the church and community often hear arguments on each side of an issue, throw up their hands, and say, “It’s complicated. There are good people on both sides.”
They are right, of course. But I could not forget the family of that woman who had died of cancer, seemingly helpless in the face of overwhelming powers. An economic and political analysis helped me to see more clearly the multiple factors that contributed to her suffering. But only a moral analysis offered the clarity that would compel us to do something. We weren’t trying to start a union simply because it was the smartest or most politically advantageous thing to do. We were going to start a union because it was the right thing to do.
As a preacher, I assumed that my greatest allies in moral leadership would be fellow clergy in town. So I was encouraged when we heard that the president of the textile factory was willing to host a clergy breakfast at his corporate office. When I arrived I was impressed by the number of ministers present, many of them already enjoying the good food that had been spread out on nicely decorated tables. I joined them, eager to talk about our strategy before the president arrived. But shortly after I took my seat, the president stepped in, shaking hands and calling each minister by name. “Good to see you, Reverend Johnson. How’s that parking lot we paved for you working out? Hello, Reverend Smith. How was your anniversary service? Sorry I couldn’t make it.”
He made his way around the room, shaking hands and reminding all the ministers of the ways he’d been a benefactor to them and their congregations. Without ever taking a seat, he finished his round of greetings, then stood at the head of the table, thanking us for our good work in the community. As he was telling us what else he had to do that morning and starting to say his goodbyes, I raised my hand and said, “Mr. President, I thought we were meeting this morning to talk about the union.” With a smile, he looked at me and said, “We just did.” A couple of days later, I read a letter in the newspaper, signed by most of the ministers who had attended that breakfast. In the most thoughtful and compassionate language possible, it explained why, as a group, they could not support the union.
With that, our union movement was finished. The Bible says Judas betrayed Jesus for forty pieces of silver. But the moral leadership of Martinsville sold out for much less. A nice breakfast and a few friendly reminders of who was in charge were enough to squelch the moral dissent of our group. Disappointed, I sat in my study, trying to understand how this had happened and where our efforts had gone wrong. I found myself praying with the psalmist, “O LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?”
Though I knew we had lost the fight, I couldn’t shake the moral analysis that remained so clear. There it was in the prayer book I had been given by generations of Jews and Christians before me as a guide for leading God’s people in worship.
They crush thy people, O LORD,
and afflict thy heritage.
They slay the widow and the sojourner,
and murder the fatherless;
and they say, “The LORD does not see;
the God of Jacob does not perceive.”1
I had studied political science in college and had, at the invitation of a friend, worked on a lieutenant governor’s campaign during graduate school. I knew enough about realpolitik to understand that we didn’t have a power base to move a union campaign forward in Martinsville. I had also read in seminary the work of the great twentieth-century social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, whose concept of Christian realism suggested that faith-based notions of justice and mercy could motivate “moral man” to engage political issues. But Niebuhr had cautioned that “immoral society” would always require those seeking justice in this world to compromise and calculate their political effectiveness. Yes, a moral analysis might get preachers engaged in a campaign for a union, Christian realism said. But effective work for justice in the real world would require real political power. It wasn’t enough to stand up for what was right. Before you stand, you also need to know who has your back.2
Niebuhr’s critique of a simplistic moral analysis forced me to think practically about strategy. I had to admit that I had been naïve going into my first fight. I was pastoring some of the workers who were directly affected, and I knew why I was compelled to support them. I had listened to arguments for and against a union by people I respected. But that was all. I had falsely assumed that the moral authority of preachers would be enough to sway a corporate boss in a small Southern town. I had not thought to ask who would stand with us in the fight.
But even as I was learning from the analysis of Christian realism, I also knew that I could not trust its basic assumption that faithful action is determined by political effectiveness. I could admit that we had lost, and I wanted to learn from my mistakes. But I also knew that standing for the union had been the right thing to do.
I needed something more than Christian realism to guide me in the task of leading people who had lost a fight but still knew that the Lord was on their side. Thankfully, I had the time-tested prayer book of the Hebrew children that had been written down in exile, centuries after God had brought Israel up out of Egypt. The words of Psalm 94 kept resounding in my ears: “Who rises up for me against the wicked? Who stands up for me against evildoers?”3
Psalm 94 insisted that moral dissent is still necessary even when there is no reasonable expectation of political success. When we stand for right, even if we feel that we are standing by ourselves, we are in good company. When we raise a voice of moral dissent, we don’t only stand with Moses against Pharaoh. We also stand with William Lloyd Garrison, the nineteenth-century abolitionist who denounced slavery when its abolition was a political impossibility. When the mayor of Boston had him jailed, supposedly for his own safety, Garrison wrote these words on the wall of his cell: “William Lloyd Garrison was put into this cell on Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 21, 1835, to save him from the violence of a ‘respectable’ and influential mob, who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that ‘all men are created equal’ and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God.”4
The nineteenth-century abolitionists didn’t stand up against slavery because they knew they had the numbers to defeat it. They stood up and raised their voices in moral dissent because they knew that slavery was wrong. Likewise, in 1846, when Mexican forces fired upon US troops who had been sent across a disputed border to provoke just such an incident, President James K. Polk asked Congress for a declaration of war because “American blood had been shed on American soil.” But a freshman Congressman from Illinois who did not know that it wasn’t his place to raise a moral dissent introduced the “Spot Resolution,” which would have required President Polk to identify the exact spot on US soil where the attack had occurred. The resolution was defeated, and many seriously questioned Congressman Abraham Lincoln’s patriotism for introducing it. But nearly two decades before his second inaugural address, Lincoln had stood up in Congress to raise a moral dissent.
Henry David Thoreau, too, stood against the Mexican-American War in the mid-nineteenth century, refusing to pay a poll tax that would support imperialism and the expansion of race-based slavery into Mexican territory. Though he was arrested, Thoreau wrote in his classic work “Civil Disobedience” that it is the duty of everyone to disobey any law they find morally objectionable. This had been, he argued, the very basis of the American Revolution. But when Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him in jail, Emerson was taken aback at his friend’s moral dissent.
“Henry,” Emerson reportedly asked through the jail cell’s bars, “What are you doing in there?”
To which Thoreau replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”
In the American struggle for justice and freedom, moral dissent has always seemed impractical when it began. Yet people of conviction have responded to the psalmist’s basic question by answering, “Here I am. Send me.” In 1896, when the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky stood alone to write a dissenting opinion. By any political calculation at that moment, his words were simply a waste of time. But looking back, we can see that every legal challenge to segregation in the twentieth century was based upon the careful reasoning of Justice Harlan, whom history would name the Great Dissenter. Without his words, NAACP attorneys could not have successfully argued for the desegregation of public schools nearly six decades later in Brown v. Board of Education. Justice Harlan lost by a landslide in 1896. But he won history.
As I contemplated the necessity of moral dissent with Psalm 94 open before me, I looked up the street from the church parsonage at the little school where the black children of Martinsville had been educated through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the elders in my congregation had attended that school. Whether they knew Justice Harlan’s words or not, their existence was a living sign that the Great Dissenter had not stood alone when he insisted that separate could not be equal. Teachers had sacrificed to ensure a quality education for black children. The community had organized to construct and maintain a building when public funds were severely limited. People of faith had gathered on Sunday mornings and at midweek prayer services for decades to cry out to God and to teach their children, “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in God’s sight.”
The psalmist was right: “If the LORD had not been my help, my soul would soon have dwelt in the land of silence.”5 Where political realism would have silenced dissent, faith had made it possible for a moral voice to cry aloud and spare not. But the faith that inspired moral dissent was not blind faith. It was, rather, conviction that took the long view. Even when they could not see now how justice would prevail, generations of dissenters knew that it would. Even when they felt alone in the moment, they knew they were part of a “great cloud of witnesses” in the long movement toward justice.
I thought I had come to Martinsville to practice preaching—to get some on-the-job experience as a pastor. But it turned out that the lived experience of a community of moral dissent converted me to the faith that my grandmamma and my father had shown me. It had been one of the great privileges of my life to have those two saints always praying over me and speaking into my life. But now I was in a new place, and they were not there to speak directly to me. I did, however, have the same prayer book that had guided them. In the wake of my first real experience of defeat, the Psalter was teaching me to pray. In words that had sustained generations of moral dissent, I came to know the liberating God of history for myself.
As I wrestled intellectually with the fundamental shortcoming of Christian realism, I recalled that Reinhold Niebuhr’s social concern had also grown out of his experience pastoring in early-twentieth-century Detroit. Niebuhr had witnessed the great northern migration of a generation of Southern sharecroppers who left the confines of Jim Crow racism for the hope of opportunity in Henry Ford’s automobile factories. Observing the imbalance of power between corporate bosses and factory workers, Niebuhr had also sided with the unions. But as a German American whose whiteness afforded him access to the dominant religious culture, Niebuhr did not stay with the black and poor white workers of Detroit to develop his concept of Christian realism. Instead, he moved to Union Theological Seminary in New York City and tried to apply the principles of established religion to the struggles of oppressed people through the teaching of “practical theology.” Even though Niebuhr had sought to develop Christian realism in the service of people like the factory workers of Martinsville, it seemed to me that he had missed their essential theological contribution to any theory of Christian social engagement. “If God be for you,” the saints at Fayette Street asked, “who can be against you?” A faith that had been born under and sustained over and against injustice knew implicitly the absolute necessity of moral dissent.
We lost that first fight in Martinsville, but it was an invaluable experience for me. The language of faith was not simply, as I had seen in seminary, a medium that had to be reclaimed from the reactionary extremists of the Moral Majority and the so-called religious right. Nor was it merely a catalyst to compel individuals to engage with immoral society within the framework of Christian realism. No, the liberating faith of the Psalter gave me an agenda for moral dissent. Preaching the prophets reminded me that moral dissent is nothing new; we have a goodly heritage. And teaching Jesus as a practitioner of moral dissent helped me to identify strategies and tactics to sustain people in their struggle, both in and beyond the church. Though I had not found a name for it yet, my first fight in Martinsville was forcing me to develop a new imagination for social engagement that was built upon a fundamental commitment to the necessity of moral dissent.
The New Testament Letter to the Hebrews offered an apt summary statement for the posture required by the faith I was learning: “But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.”6 In a movement based upon moral dissent, defeat does not cause us to doubt our purpose or question the ends toward which we strive. We do not belong to those who shrink back, for we know the tragic truth of history. When oppressed people shrink back, they will always be forgotten and destroyed. Faith-rooted moral dissent requires that we always look forward toward the vision of what we know we were made to be. But defeat can and must invite us to question our means. While realism cannot determine the goals of our faith, it must shape our strategy in movements of moral dissent.
Right there in Martinsville, I began to look long and hard at the mistakes of our efforts rooted in moral dissent. One of the first things I realized was that we had not applied the insight of civil rights veterans who had affirmed our support for the union. Their historical analysis suggested that a black preacher ought to support the union because powerful white people would always strive to “divide and conquer” poor folks. If white workers could be persuaded not to trust black workers, then they would vote against their own economic interests. Although I had found the argument persuasive, I had not gotten to know any of the white workers in the union movement. I recalled the minister’s breakfast with the factory president. It had seemed normal at the time, but looking back, I realized that only black pastors had been there. The company president must have met separately with the white pastors, and we had no idea what he had said to them. It was now clear to me that we had been vulnerable to defeat because we allowed ourselves to be divided.
I had found Niebuhr’s Christian realism insufficient because of the blind spot his white privilege created. But when I turned the search light of truth onto my own soul, I had to acknowledge my own assumptions and fears. I remembered an evening in 1975, when I was twelve years old, visiting the home of my uncle who had married a white woman in eastern North Carolina. In the darkness of that night, we looked out the window of their home to see a fiery cross illuminating a small crowd of men. With an almost eerie sense of calm, my uncle took a shotgun off its rack, handed it to me, and said, “Stand by the back door and shoot anything that moves.”
My family knew that we had the blood of black, white, and Native American ancestors flowing in our veins. I was never opposed to integration on principle. But I learned firsthand to fear white anger and the violence of white mobs. For me, a twelve-year-old boy, it had been a matter of life and death.
Fifteen years later, those patterns of mistrust and suspicion that had been written upon my young soul were being used by people in power to subvert my work for human freedom. I naturally trusted the black workers and their pastors. But I was suspicious of white workers and their allies. I had good personal reasons for these inclinations, just as others had reason to trust their own gut. But Martinsville showed me that Jesus’s insistence that we love our enemies is more than an ethical ideal. In the struggle for human freedom, it is also a practical necessity. If love does not drive out the fears that so easily divide us, we will never gather together in coalitions strong enough to challenge those who benefit from injustice.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass said during the nineteenth-century abolition struggle, articulating a reality that no black person in America has ever been able to ignore. But Douglass also experienced the ability of a movement that builds wide and deep to sustain a moral fight until it is won. Douglass gained his personal freedom on his own, but he knew he would have to work with others to free the enslaved black people of America. He worked with Garrison and with the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, abolitionists from South Carolina. He worked with Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. He worked with Quakers and evangelicals, with British sympathizers and with radicals like John Brown. Douglass knew what I was now learning: in the struggle for justice, we always need all the friends we can get.
I was grateful for my friendship with Chevis Horne, a white pastor in Martinsville who stood with us in our struggle for justice even when many of the black pastors were willing to sign the statement against the union. Horne knew the importance of friendships across the color line. The foreword to one of his books was written by Gardner C. Taylor, a friend and confidant of Dr. King’s who founded the National Progressive Baptist Convention.
Not long after we lost the union fight in Martinsville, a young white woman named Michelle came to see me. She introduced herself as a daughter of the family that owned one of the big furniture companies there in town. I didn’t know what she wanted to talk about, but I was immediately suspicious. Why does she want to talk to me?
It turned out that she had heard about the union fight and our moral concern had resonated with her. She wanted to talk because she, too, had a moral concern. Michelle had grown up listening to local businessmen talk at her family’s dinner table. She knew how things worked in Martinsville. But she had recently learned that toxic chemicals were being stored in a black neighborhood without any neighbors’ knowledge. She knew it was wrong, and she wanted me to help her stop it.
I agreed to help Michelle investigate the situation. We did our homework, staking out the place at night and photographing the warning labels on the trucks that were unloaded. It turned out she was right: not only were extremely toxic materials being stored there but also leaky barrels were being left to drain into the ground. Michelle and I worked together to form a little organization that we called Sensible Concerns About Toxins (SCAT). We were careful to make sure the leadership of this group included black and white, poor and well-to-do citizens of Martinsville. We moved from our research to an education phase, using public meetings, press conferences, and marches to get the word out. When someone would tell us, “We’re with you, but we can’t march,” we’d say, “That’s OK. You know people. Tell them what’s going on.”
The owners of the property argued that they were doing nothing wrong. It was their land, they said; they could do what they wanted with it. But by the time they started fighting back, we had a coalition broad enough that no single business interest could beat it. Our spokesperson, Ms. Gloria Hilton, was a woman from the neighborhood who had taught public school in the community for over thirty years. When she spoke, people listened. And her moral authority was backed up by people who looked like her and people who didn’t. We were a force that the old guard of Martinsville had not imagined having to reckon with, but we were a force more powerful than even we could fully see.
Before SCAT’s work was completed, my wife’s mother got sick and our family decided to help care for her. I wasn’t there to celebrate the final victory with our allies, but I stayed in touch and saw for myself the single-family homes that were built on that property for low-income families after the storage area had been removed and the soil cleaned up. More than twenty years later, Ms. Hilton still lives in that neighborhood. She says the coalition that came together there in the early nineties not only reclaimed a piece of land that was being abused, it also gave the neighborhood a focal point of pride.
For me, my three years in Martinsville were the crash course in moral leadership that I didn’t know I needed. Our defeat in the union struggle sent me to my prayer closet and taught me how moral dissent is central to my vocation as pastor. But it also helped me imagine the kind of coalition politics that we were able to practice in a local campaign against environmental racism. I came back to North Carolina knowing both the fights I couldn’t run away from and something about what it would take to win them. Only a fusion coalition representing all the people in any place could push a moral agenda over and against the interests of the powerful. But such coalitions are never possible without radical patience and stubborn persistence. I was about to learn both in a struggle I would never have chosen.