Gene M. Tucker - "In the American Tradition" (March 31, 1968)

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-	For thy people.	0:04
	Oh, almighty God,	0:10
	thou who art the one who acts in history	0:15
	to bring about thy father which art in heaven,	0:17
	hallowed would be thy name,	0:21
	thy kingdom come,	0:23
	thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.	0:25
	Give us this day our daily bread	0:30
	and forgive us our trespasses	0:33
	as we forgive them that trespass against us,	0:35
	and lead us not in temptation	0:39
	but deliver us from evil,	0:42
	for thine is the kingdom,	0:44
	the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.	0:46
-	The most serious and urgent moral problem	1:08
	within our country today	1:11
	is the question of justice and equality for the Negro.	1:13
	If we failed to recognize this earlier,	1:18
	surely we can see it now after Watts in 1965,	1:20
	and Newark and Detroit in 1967.	1:26
	The alternatives have been posed very clearly by Tom Wicker	1:30
	in his introduction	1:34
	to the Report of the President's Commission	1:35
	on Civil Disorders, he said,	1:37
	"Negros will not go away,	1:41
	they can only be repressed or conceded their humanity.	1:44
	And the choice is not theirs to make."	1:48
	The appearance of that report	1:52
	and expectations of new violence in the future,	1:53
	force us here in this chapel and this university	1:56
	to ask ourselves once again some serious questions	2:00
	and to deal with these questions	2:04
	in the light of the Christian gospel,	2:05
	the questions are,	2:08
	what are the causes of this senseless death and destruction	2:10
	and what can be done to prevent its recurrence?	2:14
	More specifically, what is the appropriate response	2:17
	of concerned Christians to this tragedy in our country?	2:21
	Everyone seems to have an answer to the question, why?	2:26
	Congress blame the Negro,	2:30
	and to punctuate that conclusion,	2:32
	pushed through an anti riot bill	2:34
	and in first refused to pass riot control bill	2:36
	for the American slums.	2:38
	Others blamed Congress and others the president.	2:41
	But all these are superficial and political answers.	2:44
	As I have listened to all of these explanations	2:50
	and the new ones which have come out in response	2:52
	to the appearance of the Riot Commission's Report,	2:54
	it didn't take long to realize	2:58
	that an explanation	3:00
	could be found in the biblical tradition,	3:01
	in particular, in the words of the Old Testament prophets.	3:03
	Some of these words spoken over 2,500 years ago	3:08
	are surprisingly appropriate,	3:11
	suggesting an answer to our first question, why?	3:14
	The text from Amos which was read earlier	3:18
	could be summarized,	3:20
	because you'll oppress the poor and crush the needy,	3:23
	the days are coming when you yourselves will suffer.	3:26
	Or again in Amos,	3:31
	because you sell the righteous for silver	3:33
	and the needy for a pair of shoes	3:35
	and trample the head of the poor dust of the earth,	3:37
	you yourselves will suffer.	3:40
	Examples could be multiplied many times	3:44
	but let this modern paraphrase	3:46
	of the text from Hosea be sufficient	3:47
	if we can bear to hear it.	3:50
	Listen America, pay attention citizens of the United States,	3:53
	you have planted inequity, you have reaped injustice,	3:58
	you are seeing the result of your lies.	4:02
	Because you have trusted in your missile systems	4:05
	and in the size of your armies,	4:08
	therefore the noise of fighting	4:10
	shall be heard among your own people,	4:12
	and all your cities shall experience destruction.	4:15
	Just as innocent people have died	4:19
	in all your past and present wars,	4:21
	even mothers and little children,	4:23
	thus, it shall happen to you and your people, America,	4:25
	because of your history of violence.	4:29
	These are harsh and brutal words	4:33
	and I don't like to listen to them anymore than you do,	4:35
	because they say to me, you, the wealthy are the criminals.	4:38
	You are the ones most responsible	4:44
	for injustice and suffering	4:46
	and therefore you are going to suffer.	4:48
	To their own people, the prophets announced,	4:52
	you have sinned against your neighbor and against God,	4:54
	therefore, God is bringing judgment upon you	4:57
	in the form of historical disaster.	5:00
	And so the classical prophets	5:03
	speak with almost monotonous consistency.	5:04
	Not only do these words sound harsh and brutal,	5:08
	their theological categories are difficult for us to	5:11
	comprehend and even more difficult to accept.	5:14
	History is explained in terms of sin and judgment.	5:18
	What does this mean in our language?	5:22
	We can I think put this same announcement	5:26
	into words which may make better sense to us.	5:27
	They say in the long run	5:30
	there is an inevitable relationship	5:34
	between injustice and suffering.	5:36
	If you sow the wind, you're going to reap the a whirlwind.	5:39
	Now, we don't have to believe that this is always true	5:45
	to agree that it applies to our racial tensions today.	5:48
	The same point I think is made in 20th century language	5:52
	by a contemporary novelist	5:56
	who has his characters reflecting on the responsibility	5:58
	for a particular national crisis.	6:02
	It's not the fault of a leader or two he said, sadly,	6:06
	Perhaps it's history's fault.	6:09
	I suppose it must be history	6:12
	which arranges to bill a civilization	6:14
	at the very instant it is least prepared to pay.	6:17
	Viewed this way, the prophetic announcement	6:21
	suggests an explanation for the riots.	6:24
	History is turning in its bill to the American civilization.	6:27
	The riots are the price we are now paying	6:32
	for a long history of violence	6:34
	and offenses against our brothers.	6:36
	Thus the explanation of the riots	6:40
	from the classical prophets.	6:41
	But we must test this suggestion against our history	6:44
	and our contemporary situation.	6:47
	Last summer two men made news	6:52
	when they spoke directly to this issue,	6:54
	the first was President Johnson,	6:56
	and grasping for a profound response	6:59
	to the recent violence in American cities,	7:01
	the president said, and he's been quoted often,	7:03
	violence is not in the best American tradition, indeed.	7:07
	The second man, H. Rap Brown, was far closer to the truth	7:12
	when he infuriated Americans by saying,	7:15
	violence is as American as cherry pie.	7:18
	Violence is sad to say	7:22
	a part of the great American tradition.	7:25
	One doesn't have to look far in the history of our country	7:28
	to demonstrate the truth of this assertion.	7:30
	From the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, to Vietnam,	7:33
	we have resorted a again and again and again	7:38
	to violence to settle our problems.	7:41
	And today our economy thrives on violence.	7:44
	One has only to look at our national budget	7:48
	to prove that point.	7:49
	Last summer, either Huntley or Brinkley	7:52
	said that he had discovered where the money	7:54
	from individual income taxes went.	7:55
	The Pentagon alone, he said,	7:58
	each year spends more than the total of receipts	8:01
	from individual income taxes.	8:04
	At that time, more than 70 billion a year.	8:06
	The rest of the federal budget is supported	8:10
	by corporate income taxes and other revenues.	8:12
	Now we may respond that these violent conflicts in the past	8:15
	and even the one we are presently engaged in	8:19
	were inevitable and necessary.	8:22
	Maybe they were.	8:25
	But when we have said that,	8:27
	we may be able to understand how black power spokesmen today	8:29
	are saying that the Negros freedom	8:33
	will not be achieved without violence.	8:35
	Rational men must respond, of course,	8:39
	that civil disorders are fruitless,	8:41
	that they will not achieve freedom.	8:44
	But some Negros are saying this is not the question.	8:46
	They would simply rather die than go on this way.	8:49
	Violence is as American as cherry pie.	8:55
	No one knows that better than the American Negro.	8:58
	The history of the Negro in America	9:01
	is a bloody chronicle of violence.	9:03
	Over 300 years ago,	9:06
	the first Negros were brought to these shores in chains.	9:07
	For two centuries they were bought and sold like animals.	9:11
	Children were separated from their parents.	9:14
	Can this be done without violence?	9:17
	And wives from their husbands.	9:20
	The first steps toward their freedom were taken in blood	9:22
	and the great American experiment	9:25
	almost floundered on this issue a century ago.	9:27
	And then for a century more than Negro	9:31
	has been subjected often to intimidation	9:33
	and not infrequently to mob violence.	9:36
	And a recent Congressional committee reported	9:40
	that even today, the Ku Klux Klan remains, quote,	9:42
	a vehicle of death, destruction, and fear.	9:46
	Listen to this advertisement	9:52
	which appeared in a newspaper in the early 1800s,	9:53
	$50 reward, ran away from the subscriber.	9:57
	A Negro girl named Maria,	10:01
	she's of a copper color between 13 and 14 years of age,	10:04
	bareheaded and barefooted,	10:07
	she is small for her age, very sprightly and very likely,	10:10
	she stated, and hear this,	10:13
	she stated she was going to see her mother at Maysville,	10:16
	or again, $50 reward, ran away from the subscriber,	10:21
	his Negro man, Pauladore, commonly called Paul,	10:26
	I understand General R.Y. Hayne	10:29
	has purchased his wife and children	10:32
	from H.L. Pinckney, Esquire,	10:35
	and has been him on his plantation at Goosecreek	10:37
	where no doubt, the fellow is frequently lurking.	10:40
	The Negro in America knows	10:45
	and remembers that he was a slave.	10:47
	This is a part of his history with which he has to live,	10:50
	violence and pain.	10:53
	But now for the first time the shoe is on the other foot,	10:55
	so we hear again the words of Hosea addressed to us.	10:58
	They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind.	11:02
	We have planted the seeds of this violence	11:07
	for 300 years and have no right to be surprised	11:09
	that they are now full grown.	11:13
	But when we chronicle the history of violence in America	11:16
	we have touched only one aspect of the cause for the riots.	11:18
	The other side of the story is the present plight	11:22
	of poverty stricken Negros in our society,	11:25
	whether they live in the slums of the large cities	11:28
	or in the shack towns	11:31
	of small community after small community.	11:32
	And I suppose Durham falls somewhere	11:35
	between these two extremes.	11:38
	It is almost impossible for those of us who are white	11:41
	to comprehend the agony of these men and women and children.	11:44
	Few writers have been able to put into words	11:50
	that pain and suffering	11:51
	better than the Negro novelist James Baldwin.	11:52
	In one of his short stories written a decade ago,	11:56
	one of his characters looks out the window	11:59
	of a tenement upon the mass of humanity	12:01
	and dirty buildings and garbage cans and says,	12:04
	all that hatred down there,	12:08
	all that hatred and misery and love,	12:10
	it's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.	12:14
	This in 1958.	12:17
	Or in another story a Negro tells	12:20
	of returning by boat to New York.	12:22
	A big sandy haired man held his daughter on his shoulders	12:25
	showing her the Statue of Liberty.	12:27
	I would never know what this statue meant to others.	12:30
	She had always been an ugly joke to me.	12:33
	Or again the same character gives his view of the small town	12:37
	in the south where he grew up.	12:41
	It's a terrible town anyway,	12:43
	the whole thing looks as though	12:45
	it's built around the jailhouse.	12:47
	There's a room in the courthouse,	12:49
	a room where they beat you up.	12:51
	This is the way America has looked to Negros	12:54
	for generations.	12:57
	This feeling is produced by the depth	12:59
	and breadth of white prejudice	13:02
	with which the Negro has to live.	13:03
	George Lincoln Rockwell the head of the American Nazi Party	13:07
	until his recent murder was asked last year,	13:09
	how many people in this country agreed with him?	13:13
	He admitted that his organization was small,	13:16
	but felt it had widespread support.	13:19
	He said when the time comes	13:22
	millions of Americans will fight with me	13:25
	under the sign of the swastika, as he put it,	13:27
	every Negro-hater is a Nazi at heart.	13:31
	How true?	13:34
	And the Negro has had to bear this hatred,	13:36
	this hatred and more subtle forms of discrimination	13:40
	have led to the conditions of American slums today,	13:43
	inferior education, unemployment, underemployment,	13:47
	squalled housing conditions,	13:51
	in short, this hatred and discrimination	13:54
	have cut off the Negro's hope.	13:57
	So the contemporary causes of the riots	14:01
	are the prejudice and injustice	14:03
	which the poverty stricken and Negro has experienced.	14:05
	As William Sloane Coffin Jr. repeated recently,	14:09
	there are no revolts without revolting conditions.	14:12
	No one who has walked through the slums of our cities	14:17
	can deny that these revolting conditions exist.	14:19
	To walk through these slums is to see as the prophets say	14:23
	the face of the poor trampled in the dust.	14:27
	What caused the riots?	14:32
	I am suggesting that the biblical tradition	14:34
	gives an which is born out by an examination of the facts,	14:36
	our history of violence, especially toward the Negro,	14:41
	and our failure to deal justly with the Negro	14:44
	have caught up with us.	14:47
	History is handing us its bill.	14:48
	To be sure, there are other factors to be mentioned,	14:51
	but the roots are deep in our history	14:55
	in our present situation.	14:57
	So there we have the problem	15:01
	and an explanation from the prophet	15:02
	supported by the facts of our history.	15:04
	Where do we go from there?	15:06
	Is there any way to stem the rising tide of violence?	15:09
	We have not seen the last of the riots	15:13
	as events of this very week have made it clear.	15:15
	Everything that we have said in no way condones violence,	15:19
	nor does it even excuse it.	15:22
	But it does imply	15:24
	that if we expect to prevent its recurrence,	15:25
	we must address ourselves urgently to the roots of it,	15:28
	the conditions of American cities produced by racism.	15:32
	And here is where our Christian duty	15:37
	and our national self-interest intersect.	15:40
	The only way we can preserve law and order	15:44
	indeed American society	15:46
	is to address ourselves to the question of justice,	15:49
	justice for all Americans.	15:52
	Will the prophets of doom have the last word?	15:56
	The issue is at least still in doubt.	15:59
	And the answer is up to us.	16:02
	Christians cannot ignore this problem.	16:04
	From the prophets who speak out against injustice	16:07
	to the sayings of Jesus	16:10
	that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves,	16:12
	the biblical tradition cries out	16:14
	that we are to be concerned about our neighbor	16:16
	especially the poor and oppressed.	16:19
	And here this paraphrase of one of the texts	16:23
	appointed for reading this Passion Sunday,	16:25
	The blood of Christ purifies your conscience	16:28
	from dead works to serve the living God.	16:31
	This says to me	16:36
	that those who have heard the gospel are free.	16:37
	The bonds of the old guilt and injustice can be broken.	16:40
	We can make a new beginning.	16:45
	While 300 years of injustice cannot be forgotten.	16:48
	It can be overcome.	16:52
	Now, assuming that we as free Christian citizens	16:55
	want to do something,	16:58
	here are some suggestions for our beginning.	17:00
	First, each one of us must develop	17:04
	some real awareness of the depth of the problem.	17:06
	One needs to become sensitive as far as possible	17:11
	to what it feels like to be poor and to be a Negro.	17:14
	This means contact with Negros	17:18
	and Negro communities is essential.	17:20
	A minister in Watts had a program	17:23
	to help sensitize people to the problems,	17:25
	groups of middle class, white church people	17:28
	came into that slum community	17:31
	and he sent them out to walk down the streets	17:33
	and into the stores to buy a few things.	17:36
	Then they knew firsthand what a slum smells like,	17:40
	and they knew that for themselves	17:45
	that the poor do pay for inferior goods.	17:47
	Second, the church must begin to be the church	17:52
	with reference to racial equality.	17:55
	11 o'clock Sunday morning	17:58
	is still the most segregated hour of the week.	17:59
	So many people are asking themselves,	18:03
	is the church	18:06
	the most culture bound institution in the country?	18:07
	Is the church a private club where we mix with our own kind?	18:10
	Or is it the institution charged	18:15
	with furthering the love of God and of neighbor?	18:17
	Martin Luther King has said	18:21
	in the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro	18:23
	I have watched white churchmen stand on the sidelines	18:27
	and mouth pious irrelevancies	18:31
	and sanctimonious trivialities.	18:33
	If he speaks harshly and strongly	18:37
	about the role of the church,	18:39
	remember that he speaks as a churchman,	18:40
	out of love and concern and out of a confidence	18:43
	that the church can take the leadership in this struggle.	18:46
	Third, we as individuals and as Christians	18:51
	can work in our own backyard,	18:54
	our community is where we live	18:57
	if even for a year or four years.	19:00
	The large problem of injustice in America	19:04
	boils down to the sum total of thousands	19:06
	of little injustices in every town and city of our country.	19:09
	We as citizens can speak out to those	19:14
	with political and economic power in our town	19:16
	for a fair hiring, freedom in housing,	19:20
	and non-discrimination in education.	19:23
	All these needs exist in the City of Durham.	19:26
	Fourth and finally,	19:30
	those who are aware of the seriousness of the problem	19:32
	must call for a radical redirection of national goals.	19:36
	We are spending our national wealth and energy	19:40
	on war and space.	19:44
	And when I speak of a redirection of national goals,	19:47
	I am not speaking of money alone,	19:50
	but of best use of all our resources.	19:53
	Solutions to the problems of the poor will not take shape	19:56
	until we apply massive amounts of creative energy	20:00
	to these problems.	20:03
	We can afford to do it.	20:05
	We cannot afford not to do it.	20:08
	The present crisis demands it,	20:11
	justice demand ends it,	20:13
	and the Christian gospel demands it and makes it possible.	20:15
	Amen, let us pray.	20:20
	Oh, Lord, forgive us our past and present guilt	20:25
	and violence against our neighbor.	20:30
	Give us the strength to live as Christian men and women	20:34
	through these difficult times.	20:38
	Guide our words and our actions	20:41
	that we may help to bring about reconciliation	20:44
	in our society.	20:48
	In the name of him who came to make reconciliation possible.	20:51
	Amen.	20:56
	(soft orchestral music begins)	21:00
	(soft orchestral music continues)	23:33

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Title:

Gene M. Tucker - "In the American Tradition" (March 31, 1968)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4dj5dh8r

Date:

March 31, 1968

Speaker:

Tucker, Gene M.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0424
ref6051_dfa
uachapelsermaud
duke:627937
dcrau002416
ark:/87924/r4dj5dh8r
5d7a3326-f3c0-4478-aedd-1720809a1122

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Gene M. Tucker - "In the American Tradition" (March 31, 1968)

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1. Gene M. Tucker - "In the American Tradition" (March 31, 1968)

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Gene M. Tucker - "In the American Tradition" (March 31, 1968)

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