wfn.org | Amistad's Christian justice legacy lives on

["Barb Powell"<powellb@ucc.org>]

Dec. 15, 1997
United Church of Christ
Office of Communication
Laurie Bartels, (216) 736-2213
e-mail: bartelsl@ucc.org
Hans Holznagel, (216) 736-2214
e-mail: holznagh@ucc.org
On the Web:  www.ucc.org
              
Amistad's Christian social justice legacy lives on
in Cleveland-based church agency
                                               
     CLEVELAND -- As viewers of Steven Spielberg's
latest film learn of an important event in American
history, few will probably connect the story with the
risky stands for racial and social justice still being
taken today by the spiritual heirs of the Christians
who helped free the slaves from the ship "Amistad."
     Oil paintings of events in the Amistad story, and 
of Cinque and Lewis Tappan, two characters also
featured prominently in Spielberg's film, grace the
conference room on the sixth floor of the United Church
of Christ's national office building in downtown
Cleveland.  That floor is home to the United Church
Board for Homeland Ministries, which carries on the
work of the 19th-century American Missionary
Association, founded as a result of anti-slavery
momentum created by the Amistad event. 
     Not surprisingly, the Homeland Board -- which
still has a division named the American Missionary
Association -- is involved in late-20th-century
social-justice work that is sometimes as controversial
as that of its 19th-century predecessors:
     * One of its staffers recently was arrested and 
     thrown in a Jacobs Field holding cell for
     protesting against Cleveland's major-league
     baseball team's name and logo, which many American
     Indians consider racist and demeaning.
                    
     * It was a leader among religious bodies in
     responding to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s,
     founding the AIDS National Interfaith Network.
              
     * Its years of support of farmworkers reached high
     drama in 1973. Ninety-five UCC members chartered a
     plane from a national meeting in St. Louis to a
     field in Coachella, Calif., to picket in support
     of the United Farm Workers -- and in the face of
     threats from muscular Teamsters guards who opposed
     the UFW's presence.
              
     * It quietly played a key role in placing the Rev.
     Andrew Young in Birmingham, Ala., and other
     Southern hot-spots to work with the Rev. Martin
     Luther King Jr. to register voters and train
     people in nonviolence. 
              
     The Rev. Thomas E. Dipko, executive vice president
of today's United Church Board for Homeland Ministries,
hopes that kind of work would be a source of pride to
Tappan and the other Christian abolitionists who helped
free the Mendi captives who rebelled on the slave ship
Amistad in 1839.  He heads a staff of some 100 people
who work not only in social justice but in such areas
as evangelism, local church development, volunteer
ministries and the publishing of hymnals, books and
Christian education materials.
     "The American Missionary Association established
over 500 schools for African and Native Americans and
more than 200 local churches," Dipko says.  "It
published anti-slavery literature, founded Ryder
Memorial Hospital in Puerto Rico and opposed
'unrequited labor' as an economic cancer in the body of
the nation.
     Dipko continues:  "Commitment to justice for all
persons was inflammatory in 1839 and remains
controversial today.  Those who came to the support of
the Amistad captives were accused of heresy for
questioning Biblical references to slavery, going
against nature for insisting that all persons of all
races are fully and equally human, and being
'unpatriotic' for daring to question the place of
slavery in the fragile economy of the United States. 
In hindsight, we wonder how anyone or any age could be
so deluded.  We judge too quickly.
     "Although the issues today extend beyond race and
range from the equality of women with men to the place
of gay or lesbian persons in church and society, and
the right of laborers to organize, the old charges
continue to be made.  The bottom line remains
ironically the same.  The Amistad story is a parable of
justice seeking a midwife in our own time. 
     "If we say we love God and do not love our
neighbors as ourselves, as equals, all of them, then
injustice triumphs, there is no real peace and our talk
about love for God offends God's own heart.  If
addressing this discrepancy is controversial, then
faithfulness requires that we embrace controversy
itself as a sign of living by standards that come from
beyond this world."
     The United Church of Christ has more than 1.5
million members and 6,100 congregations in the United
States and Puerto Rico.  It was formed by the 1957
union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the
Evangelical and Reformed Church.
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[EDITORS: Dr. Dipko viewed "Amistad" in Cleveland on
Dec 12.  To interview him, please phone him at (216)
736-3801 or one of the people listed on Page 1 above.]
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