Composing a Further Life

their blood, got day labor jobs, just roamed the streets. And then at the end of the three days we would meet at the bar behind the Y where they all were staying, and in the context of a Eucharist in the back of the bar we had supper and everyone preached a sort of sermon together, which consisted of the revelations they had experienced in their three days on the streets. All the staff did it. The openness was remarkable.
    “Every person had a fieldwork assignment after the lectures, often in church agencies or community organizations. These were action assignments. Action-reflection as a mode of understanding was a sort of new cliché of that time,” Jim explained. “Each one of the trainees—that’s what we called them, not students, trainees—had to be part of an action-reflection group of fellow trainees, which would meet regularly and in which they would each in turn go through what they were doing in their action thing and then as theologians reflect on what that meant.
    “Chicago was very, very hot in terms of action, and we brought the leaders in to be guest lecturers and on panels and whatnot. The stuff that you read about in the papers, and some stuff that you didn’t read about in the papers, those were the actions on which people reflected, and those were what made the thing so exciting. It was—it had a very sharp sort of intellectual cast to it. Some of the best thinkers around came and spoke there, and it was also a sort of a base for the people in all of the agencies and community organizations who were working with the poorest people and involved in the sort of nitty-gritty revolutionary tenor of that time. So it was a very, very stimulating and exciting place.”
    Individual clergy and laypeople had been involved from the beginning of the civil rights movement, but institutional responses were slower. The Urban Training Center was created a decade after the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. Rosa Parks had triggered the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 by refusing to accept bus segregation, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in 1957, the same year that Little Rock public schools were desegregated under the eye of the National Guard. By 1960 the focus had shifted to voter registration and a push for legislative change, with the March on Washington in August 1963, when Dr. King made his “I have a dream” speech. Resistance to voter registration and desegregation was increasing and came to a head in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.
    “The staff and trainees of the Urban Training Center were there, staying in people’s houses and joining in demonstrations. Then, later that year, there was a huge protest in Chicago about the racial segregation of the schools, and Dr. King of course was there, and our entire student body was with the Chicago protesters—we all got arrested, we all went to jail for about two hours; we got police records.”
    Jim was in Chicago for eight years. I commented on the hopefulness of that time. “I mean, there was a belief that it was really going to be possible to fix the things that were wrong.”
    “Absolutely!” Jim said. “That was before cynicism.”
    “We really believed things were going to be fixed.”
    “And then everybody got killed. There was a loss of courage and a loss of hope that things could change. The War on Poverty—that was a big sign of hope, hope, hope, and then the tremendous amount of internal graft and sloppy stuff—very few of those projects really did much good.”
    After the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a series of events began that gradually changed the atmosphere. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Stokely Carmichael reframed the struggle in terms of Black Power in 1967. Lyndon Johnson did push through the Civil Rights Act in 1968, but that success was followed in April by the assassination of Martin Luther King, with nationwide rioting and whole neighborhoods burned in black communities, and then by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in the same year. The black leadership became less welcoming of white participation, there was a backlash in the churches against activism by clerical “troublemakers,” and at the same time the social conscience of the nation was increasingly focused on the war in Vietnam rather than on domestic social justice issues. Ironically, since then social activism has waned in the liberal churches, along with membership, and the lesson of