Phil Rice

Cobblestones for Civil Rights

I had been over at my friend George's house, and my pockets were stuffed full of various "Creepy Crawlers," those spiders and bugs kids made with heated plastic goop and some molds. My parents would never have bought such a thing for me, not so much because they recognized it as a silly and potentially dangerous toy, but because it enjoyed the price tag of being a popular fad. George's parents were always more inclined to throw the trendy toys at him to keep him occupied, and I enjoyed the peripheral benefits. As I walked through the living room on this day my attention was caught by a man sitting on the sofa. My dad introduced him simply as Father Woodruff. He was wearing a black suit with a black shirt and white collar. This was very familiar attire for me, as was the salutation "Father," since Dad was an Episcopal priest and often entertained other clergymen at our house. But Father Woodruff had a distinguishing quality that I had not yet encountered up close in my six years. He was a black man.

My memory of this occasion is very brief but still clear on certain points. This exotic visitor was very friendly and enjoyed my innocent curiosity, and when he expressed interest in the Creepy Crawlers, I made a gift of a handful, which seemed to cause considerable delight. I can still remember his smile as he stuffed them into the pocket of his suit coat. Apart from his appearance, I remember that he spoke with a distinct accent, but this was not a racial distinction; it was geographical. He was born in Trinidad, a considerable distance in miles and culture from our home in Johnson City, Tennessee. I would learn later that he had been educated in Chicago and Philadelphia—places just as alien to me then as Trinidad.

The society of my first years was officially segregated. By 1966 the signs saying "Colored" and "Whites Only" were coming down, but the actual segregation remained firmly in place. Still, from my personal perspective as a six-year-old, race was a non-issue in my life. I had never heard my parents using racial slurs or expressing any animosity or fear concerning people of other ethnicities at all, though their language did occasionally draw distinctions. In reference to Father Woodruff, the polite and acceptable term at that time would have been "negro."  The adjective "colored" was still generally considered acceptable, and may have been used by my parents, but it was quickly becoming publicly recognized for its irrefutably condescending tone. Both terms would soon be replaced by "black," and later by "African American," though the latter is still somewhat unwieldy because it makes geographic as well as geopolitical assumptions that don't necessarily apply.

Occasionally I would hear harsh racial slurs—and there are many from which to choose—around the neighborhood, but it was certainly no obsession among my young friends. In fact, for the people in our immediate community, any sense of racial superiority was entirely theoretical as most of us had never had so much as a conversation with anyone of a different race, and the television shows that taught us about life in other parts of the country, like New York and Los Angeles, were also entirely white. When it came to race, we were simply ignorant. We had, at that moment and in our neatly segregated little world, no reason to contemplate the subject. Until Father Woodruff came to visit.

The story of James Woodruff, beyond my childhood memory, remains one of great thought provocation. My dad was the Episcopal chaplain at East Tennessee State University, and in that capacity he had invited his friend Jim Woodruff to be a campus speaker. They had known each other in Nashville from 1960 until 1964, when Dad was the rector of St. Philip's Church in Donelson and Father Woodruff was a chaplain at Fisk, a university that is now known as a "historically African American" institution. Nashville, unlike Johnson City, was then an emerging urban center and was an active hub for the Civil Rights Movement, not only because of its sizable African-American population but also because it was home to a relatively strong contingent of white liberals (in 1950s and 60s, anyone supporting desegregation was considered a "liberal" regardless of political party affiliation.)

There was plenty of racism and bigotry dominating the city, and resistance to the concept of civil rights was often blatant and harsh. When the integration of the Nashville public school system was initiated in 1957, as described by author and human rights activist Will Campbell in Forty Acres and a Goat,

Rioters gathered each day at the schools where the nine black children were enrolled. Hundreds of screaming, irrational, sometimes armed men and women, on one occasion pulling cobblestones from the sidewalk and hurling them at the building. One school was destroyed by a dynamite blast in a nocturnal act of defiance.

Nonetheless, Nashville would prove to be fertile ground for acceptance amid the peaceful demonstrations as well as the violent reactions that would mark the decade, and it would ultimately embrace integration with far less violence than many US cities, north and south. But that was Nashville, not Johnson City, the town in East Tennessee where my family had moved in 1964, the town which in 1966 was not yet prepared to extend an official welcome to an ordained priest, not because of his religion or theology but because of his skin.

The official group clergy photo for the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, 1965, with
closeups of the Rev. Charles E. Rice (left) and the Rev. James Woodruff (right).

The invitation to Father Woodruff was approved through the proper channels, but no mention of race was indicated in the process and apparently the administration at ETSU failed to take note of the speaker's association with Fisk—or maybe that detail was omitted by a prescient Episcopal chaplain. When, just a couple of days prior to his arrival, it was discovered that the speaker was a black man, there was vehement opposition. The biggest outrage pointed to the fact that the guest apartment for visiting dignitaries was located on the ground floor of a building that also served as a dormitory for female students, all of whom were of course white. No way could the university allow a black man in such proximity to female students. How could he, so the popular reasoning went, be expected to resist such temptations?

Dad was adamant—the invitation had been approved by the university and accepted by the speaker, and he was not going to cancel the plans, nor would he search for a "colored" boarding house across town. Instead, he offered our home for lodging. This caused an even greater uproar. Not only was our house within sight of the original dormitory, it was also home to my 13-year old sister, who, according to the deluge of threatening phone calls, was soon to become easy sexual prey for the visiting priest. Dad received graphic threats on his physical well-being, and the Ku Klux Klan—creepy crawlers of a different sort— promised that if he went through with his plans there would be a cross burning on our front lawn. Having grown up in an environment where such threats of violence were to be taken seriously, Dad could have justifiably been swayed, but, after reporting the threats to the local constabulary (who, as he knew, may well have been in the Klan), he took the phone off the hook and held firm. It was, in context of the times, a remarkably bold and courageous stance.

Perhaps because the Klan realized that publicly confronting a prominent white minister would likely cause dissention within their ranks, there were no burning crosses in our yard or anywhere else. The official event subsequently went off without violent incident, though my father had firmly established himself as a local liberal agitator in the minds of many within the community. In The View from My Ridge, his collection of mostly autobiographical essays, Dad underplays the racism of the moment:

While a chaplain at East Tennessee State, we invited a black priest, Jim Woodruff, as a campus speaker. Even then he could not occupy a university guest quarters. He stayed the week with our family. Moderate then, he would a year or so later leave our Tennessee ranks and become a militant black power leader in the urban East.

In that same essay he mentions some formal encounters with racism during his time as a seminarian at Emory University in Atlanta. The paragraph demonstrates the awkwardness with which the subject was addressed by well-meaning but naive members of the inherently racist society of the time:

We took a course called "The American Negro." And we had service projects that touched the Atlanta ghetto. We got acquainted with some of the people at the black colleges across town. And in the latter part of 1952 we had a seminary referendum on the question of admitting blacks to the seminary. The response was 406 for, 13 against. The Augusta Courier carried red-inked headlines: "Emory Students Vote for Christian Communism!"

But in 1960 some of Dad's innocence began to diminish through his association with Will Campbell, the self-styled bootleg Baptist preacher who took the Civil Rights Movement personally.

(Will Campbell) called and told me he had some friends at his house who needed a pastor. I went over and found Malcolm Boyd and his entourage who had just fled Sewanee Mountain after trying to integrate Clara’s Restaurant. They were wrestling with a decision whether to return or not the next day. I first listened as they debated.

Among the five were three whites and two blacks, all priests. A younger black from Chicago was more heated up than the rest and vented his verbal anger at the mountain whites who had turned them away. Finally, I stopped him and asked, “Who the hell are you to make those people responsible for your decision? You are dealing with more than a cause up there—you are dealing with flesh and blood.”

Next morning they asked me to join them for breakfast and they set out again for Sewanee. Again they were turned away. Driving down the mountain they were tailed and harassed by a white mountain cook. On a curve he passed them and rammed into a granite bank. While he lay dying, one of these priests said last rites over him. More powerfully than any words could tell them, they saw flesh and blood.

The incident on the mountain road leading from Sewanee occurred two or three years before Father Woodruff's visit to Johnson City. It would not be the only brush with racial violence that my father would witness as a priest, but he never marched or participated directly in public demonstrations. He simply lived his life in an inclusive manner that disavowed racism and bigotry, and in that way he influenced all who came into contact with his life and ministry, including his family. Perhaps he could have been more assertive in the Civil Rights Movement rather than staying on the passive fringes, but he always picked his battles carefully. When viewed in context of the society, his actions—and non-actions—represent necessary strides toward the radical changes then being given nourishment across the nation.

As mentioned in Dad's little book, James Woodruff did indeed devote several years of his life actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and his militant persona took shape in the Diocese of Philadelphia rather than Tennessee. He was particularly active in the years immediately following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a time when the non-violent philosophies and actions of Dr. King were often superseded by activists bent more on civil retribution than civil disobedience. Woodruff was publicly associated with Stokley Carmichael and Malcolm Boyd, and also linked with such celebrated activists as Julian Bond, Amiri Baraka, and Ossie Davis. In an article from the February 1, 1970 edition of the New York Times detailing "a referendum to poll American blacks on the Vietnam war," he is quoted as saying "This is not a question of influencing the Establishment. There is no Establishment—this is a government of the people."

 
Muhammad Kenyatta and James Woodruff, c1970

As a clergyman Woodruff was likely struggling to reconcile his need to participate in the social and political movements that he encountered on a daily basis with his own canonical vows—not an uncommon dilemma for people of the cloth. He authored articles such as "Race War in America," "Black Power vis-a-vis the Kingdom of God," and "Black Power in the Church." He was Executive Director of the Union of Black Episcopalians (1969-1972), Professor of History for the Institute of Black Ministers in Philadelphia, and taught political theology at Episcopal Theological School, General Theological Seminary, and Philadelphia Divinity School. He clearly did his time in service to a cause, and by all accounts he served that cause well.

For me, there will always be a shining pinhole of a memory of the man with the dark skin and the exotic accent, a memory that can be activated by any number of connections, even something as seemingly unrelated as Creepy Crawlers. James Woodruff's role in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, like tens of thousands of other veterans of the movement, now blends together as a single event existing within a receding national memory where only a few deserving icons remain to receive credit for the actions of many. The individual actions of folks such as James Woodruff and Charlie Rice, ordinary but profound, fade even further in the wake of their own passing. But the progress remains, with or without the attachment of names. And I'm grateful.

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A native of Tennessee, Phil Rice currently lives and writes in the shadows of the Alleghenies of Western Pennsylvania. He co-founded Canopic Jar as a print journal in 1986.