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Author leads pastors in dialogue on race, civil rights

Dec. 5, 2005

NOTE: Photographs are available at http://umns.umc.org.

By Neill Caldwell*

HICKORY, N.C. (UMNS) - While reflecting on the often violent civil
rights struggles of the 1960s, author Tim Tyson challenged a group of
United Methodist pastors to continue to talk about America's struggle
with racism.

Since the 1960s, things have improved and worsened at the same time, he
said.

"We have an expanding black middle class but greater poverty than ever
before," he said. "We're more segregated than we were in the 1970s and
are rapidly moving toward a re-segregated public school system.

"Sunday mornings are still very segregated," he continued. "The United
Methodist Church is short on strong black congregations. If we're to
find a place for ourselves and survive as a church that's making a
strong witness in the world, we need to make some changes."

Those comments came during a question-and-answer session following
remarks that Tyson made to clergy members of the Western North Carolina
Annual (regional) Conference Nov. 15. The Elders' Day Apart, held Nov.
15 at Christ United Methodist Church, was sponsored by the Duke Divinity
School.

Tyson is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies
at Duke University and a visiting professor of American Christianity and
Southern Culture at the divinity school. Before that, he was a professor
of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The day included a panel discussion by four retired conference pastors
who were active during the civil rights era, and a time for small group
interchange on questions about race relations.

The son of a long-time minister in the North Carolina Conference, Tyson
is the author of Blood Done Sign My Name, a book about the May 12, 1970,
murder of a young black man in the central North Carolina tobacco town
of Oxford. Tyson was in grade school when the killing happened, and his
next-door neighbor - and playmate's father - was charged with the crime.
It became a life-changing event for Tyson. "Oxford has burned in my
memory for 30 years now," he said.

Henry Marrow was a 23-year-old Army veteran who was chased down by three
white men after allegedly using profanity in front of a white woman in a
convenience store. Marrow was shot in the back, and as he lay helpless
in the gravel road the men crushed his skull with the butts of their
weapons and then shot him in the head.

"The prosecutor said they killed him as you or I would kill a snake,"
Tyson said. The crime led to several nights of violence in the
community.

The story "is not just about Oxford," Tyson said, "but is not that
different from what was going on all across the country" in the early
1970s. "The story of Oxford is the story of America."

Tyson said his father, Rev. Vernon Tyson, was a white liberal preacher
who was not directly involved in the civil rights movement but who
strongly supported it.

"Once or twice a year he would give a sermon reminding his church that
God did not invent the racial caste system we were living under," Tyson
said. "He asked black preachers and black choirs to come and participate
in worship. And every couple of years there was a group of people who
wanted him out because of it. That was the church I grew up in, and it
made me mad.

"These days it seems the entire Bible is apparently all about
homosexuality," he added. "In those days it was apparently all about
race."

Tyson went back to Oxford while in college and began interviewing
residents about the crime as part of a history paper. He met people like
Eddie McCoy, a black Vietnam veteran who had organized black residents
of the community from the local pool hall. "Eddie had a very
'conservative' theory of politics: You have what you can take and you
keep what you can hold. Power speaks to power, and weakness gets
nothing."

Only when the town's economic base - the huge warehouses holding stores
of tobacco - began going up in flames did the whites holding power in
Oxford begin to make changes.

"We have this image of the civil rights movement being very spiritual,
very nonviolent," said Tyson, "which bears little resemblance to what
actually happened. We tell each other the stories we want to hear."

As an example, Tyson cited recent obituaries about civil rights pioneer
Rosa Parks that credited her "tired feet" as the reason she refused to
give up her seat on the bus to a white man, not that she was a trained
civil rights worker who also worked with the NAACP.

"We just want to hear about a tired old lady," Tyson said. "We want the
whole thing to be resolved in 22 minutes plus commercials ... a kind of
'just add water' redemption story."

Tyson said the book has given people in Oxford and elsewhere a "place to
start talking" about race relations. "I've been back regularly and
spoken at city hall and at the local high school, and we've had a pretty
good public conversation. There are still deep scars and hard feelings
on both sides. But there is a strong sense that the old way was wrong
and we need to find a new way."

Attendees at the clergy event were especially moved by the stories of
their four colleagues - the Revs. Belvin Jessup, Hubert Clinard, Jim
Ferree and Paul Starnes - who directly participated in the struggle for
civil rights. The pastors, two black and two white, each shared a few of
their experiences from the '60s.

Starnes related that many of the events described in Blood Done Sign My
Name were similar to what he encountered in his ministry. "It was a
difficult and dangerous time," he said. "I love to be loved and like to
be liked, and it was difficult to know that if you spoke those words you
would not be liked and even hated by some."

Starnes, who is white, told of difficulties at one church where several
church members also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Those difficulties led
to a cross burning on the front lawn of his parsonage.

Jessup said that reading Tyson's book brought back many memories. "It's
difficult for me to relive that history over and over, but I appreciate
the book. It's so prophetic and stark."

Clinard said he once asked his district superintendent if he should be
worried about future appointments if he continued to be active in
supporting civil rights. "His response was 'prophets always die in the
streets alone.' So that was it."

Ferree said black pastors were encouraged to "play it safe" and not make
waves. "It happens even now," he said, "where you see pastors who are
content to 'play it safe.'"

*Caldwell is a freelance writer based in High Point, N.C.

News media contact: Tim Tanton, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or
newsdesk@umcom.org.

********************

United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org

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