July 20, 2020
Last week was a tough one for surviving giants of the civil rights movement, as well as everyone who cherishes racial justice in America, especially during these dark days. The great John Lewis’s passing justifiably garnered most of the attention, but we also lost the Rev. C.T. Vivian, one of Martin Luther King’s close advisers and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
When I heard the news about Rev. Vivian, I was transported back to my childhood in Youngstown, Ohio. I recall vividly the day he sat in the den of our upper middle class suburban home sharing drinks with my parents. A rare scene in 1969 Ohio – an iconic Black preacher socializing with white country club types – perhaps still rare today. I was fifteen and awed to silence by the conversation with this elegant, precise man; his every word seemed weighted with importance. He’d been at Dr. King’s side, he’d been beaten and jailed countless times, he was once nearly killed by police in St. Augustine, Florida. A life so very different from my own brief, sheltered existence. Yet here he was in my house talking to my parents about things that mattered. I was proud and amazed.
Rev. Vivian wouldn’t be the last prominent civil rights figure to pass through our home. Writer Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones), Rev. Malcom Boyd (the “Espresso Priest”), Ron Daniels (activist and one-time presidential candidate) and many others made appearances during the late sixties and seventies. The odd thing is that my parents had been staunch Republicans as recently as 1964, when our Chevy Impala station wagon sported a bumper sticker reading OH AU H2O 64 – Ohioans for Goldwater 64. I thought this was very clever.
But soon after the LBJ landslide my parents joined Youngstown’s St John’s Episcopal Church, and they began to change. The Vietnam War was raging, protests were growing. The Bloody Sunday march from Selma to Montgomery, the Birmingham Church bombing, the Mississippi murders of civil rights workers – they all happened in 1965 and my parents couldn’t look away. A young white priest at St John’s preached every Sunday of social justice and community engagement, which was all it took. My parents were in, and they brought my siblings and me along.
My dad became a founding member of the Episcopal Society for Racial and Cultural Unity (ESCRU). They organized, lobbied, held conferences and sponsored lectures – hence the parade of notables through our home. But the famous visitors were not the most important.
In those days St. John’s was an all-white parish. St. Augustine Episcopal Church, a few blocks away, was all-Black. Members of St. John’s reached out to St. Augustine’s, proposing joint worship, community projects and social events. It became a years-long endeavor with mixed success. What I remember most are the barbecues, many of them at our house.
I recently came upon home movies of the first one, shot by my dad. It must have been 1966. I remember standing beside him at the front door as he greeted guests by pointing the camera and its powerful lights in their faces, inducing temporary blindness in some, I’m sure. Probably not an ideal welcome. But he was determined to capture the moment because it felt momentous. And it was. I was only 12 and felt the same sense of pride and amazement I’d feel years later looking across the room at C.T. Vivian.
The film is silent but revealing. Most folks seem excited but a little nervous. A lot of the white men mug for camera and their wives beam movie star smiles. Most of the Black guests are more reserved – smiling and friendly to be sure, but their posture more upright, their demeanor projecting dignity and a hint of wariness. The arrival footage is all that exists now – I don’t know if more was shot, but I do remember a party that became increasingly loud and joyous, like the many that followed. I will never tire of looking at that film.
One may cast this tale as one of naïve, do-gooding white liberals assuaging their guilt with gestures that ultimately did little to extinguish racism – society’s or their own. And that would be partly true. Many of the white guests at that party remained members of an all-white country club, including my parents – a contradiction I have struggled with to this day.
But I think there’s also something real and good in who my parents became, however imperfectly. The events of 1965 opened their eyes to racism and they decided to do something about it. Their example is forever stamped in the consciousness of their children and grandchildren and beyond. It’s driven me throughout my career in broadcast journalism to seek out stories related to social justice and racial inequality. It’s also made me hyper-aware of my advantages as a white person, every day of my life.
Which brings us to this moment, with its sudden explosion of white awareness of Black lives, racism and white advantage. I am hopeful that our collective outrage in this moment will be a lasting catalyst, similar to the way the events of 1965 impelled my parents and so many like them to metamorphize and agitate for change. An outcome John Lewis and C.T. Vivian would surely cheer.
Dan Morris is an Emmy-winning producer who spent fifteen years at ABC’s Nightline and has more recently been a contributor to the PBS NewsHour.