Many estimate that a fifth of the 250,000 or so participants in the 1963 March on Washington were white.  I was one of them, a San Francisco Bay Area college student who was attending Concordia Senior College in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, a liberal arts pre-theological school for students aspiring to be Lutheran ministers.

I had spent the summer in a Lutheran World Federation youth exchange in Europe.  I returned stateside a few days before the march, spending several days in Brooklyn with relatives who didn’t understand my desire to participate.  They were sure there would be violence on a day which proved to be one of the most peaceful—and joyous—in the capitol’s history.

The New York chapter of the Lutheran Human Relations Association had arranged for several busloads of its members to attend the march.  I joined them at the church where the Rev. Arthur Simon was pastor.  He later created Bread for the World. 

American Lutherans were not known for their passion for civil rights, but a few brave pastors and lay people got together to fight racism in many ways, forming the LHRA.  For many years it was based at Valparaiso University in Indiana. As this article will partly illustrate, northern Indiana, well above the Mason/Dixon Line, had much ugly racism in its history. It was courageous of VU, then under the leadership of O.P. Kretzmann, to welcome this organization because the Ku Klux Klan were not strangers to the area. 

The LHRAA founder and executive director, the Rev. Andrew Schulze, physically frail, was arrested for civil disobedience in his mid-sixties in Albany, GA in one of the most charged conflicts of the civil rights era.  He was a saintly leader.  He embodied Dag Hammarskjold’s insight that “in our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.” He and associate director, the Rev. Karl Lutze were at the march along with the Rev. Elmer Witt, the national youth director who was an important mentor to me and a remarkable number of others.  The youth organization, the Walther League, was an important part of the lives of generations of young Lutherans.  Under his leadership it helped many to relate their faith to issues of hunger,  justice, racism and peace. 

When we arrived we were all delighted by the upbeat excitement of the crowd.  We got to hear Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Odetta, the Freedom Singers and Marian Anderson performing. If that wasn’t uplifting enough there were speeches to come which articulated the hopes and, yes, dreams of my generation. 

The whites there came primarily from three sources:  progressive unions, such as the United Auto Workers, teachers, government workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union; the growing student movement supporting civil rights; and members from the religious community, primarily Christian and Jewish.

Although the March is often thought of in terms of Martin Luther King’s concluding “I have a dream” speech, there were many fine speeches that day. 

As a young Christian who was trying to apply biblical teachings about justice and respect to the burgeoning racial crisis America was facing, I was especially moved by the address of a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, who represented the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches.  

He got right to a point which still haunts people of faith combating racism:  “If all the members and all the ministers of the constituency I represent here today were indeed ready to stand and march with you for jobs and freedom for the Negro people, together with all the Roman Catholic Church and all the synagogues in America, the battle for full civil rights and dignity would already be won.”

Walter Reuther, President of the UAW, also gave a very eloquent speech, while one of the most poignant was that of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who had left Nazi Germany in 1937 after facing much persecution.  He said,  “Under the Hitler regime I learned many things.  The most important thing that I learned under those most tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem.  The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and most tragic problem is silence.”

My own involvement in the civil rights struggle started as a young person growing up in Berkeley.  While attending California Concordia College and High School in Oakland I participated locally in the civil rights movement and walked many a precinct fighting an anti-fair housing measure on the state ballot, but I never fully experienced the ugliness of racism until my ministry aspirations took me to Concordia Senior College in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

It was a strange place to be—especially for a left-handed half-Irish kid from Berkeley.  The Fort Wayne metropolitan area was later rated by USA Today as the least desirable large one in the country.  They would get little arguments from CSC students, many of which had come from feeder “prep schools” (combination junior colleges and high schools), that were located in more sophisticated urban environments. The college was all male, something very unusual for about half of the students, and reflected the largely German heritage of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.  I had classmates with names like Scherschligt, Schliepsiek, Tubesing and Buschkemper, not-to-mention many variations of Meyer, Myer, Mayer, Mehr, Meier and more.

When Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett was gaining notoriety in the Spring of 1963 for excluding blacks from the University of Mississippi, he chose to seek Northern support by speaking at the Ft. Wayne Rotary Club.  I was one of the main organizers of  would-be ministers showing up, along with the local NAACP,  to demonstrate against his policies.

It hit the national news.  It was news that even young Lutherans, generally a quiescent lot, were joining the growing student protests against injustice and racism.

That evening several of us protest participants wound up going for drinks at a local watering hole we had often frequented.  Lutherans and beer were not strangers to each other. It was a beer saloon in a city of many breweries, featuring free cheese and crackers, with sawdust on its floors. Lots of big mirrors behind the bar were about to help us see the drama which would ensue.

Our protest was the first item on the local TV newscast.  People in the bar recognized me as the spokesperson interviewed.  Soon there was confusing signaling going on and the bartender reached for something beneath the cash register. 

We feared it might be a weapon, but it turned out to be a glossy photograph.  It got passed around the tavern, with people saying things like “no more trouble there!”, “those students should learn from this!” or “the only thing worse than a n… is a n… lover!”

When the photo came to me I was asked for my reaction.  The photo was of a relatively recent lynching in nearby Marion, Indiana.  The smirks on whites partying below a Northern tree with  “strange fruit” still symbolize for me the demonic evil that often bedevils our world.

I said it was the most obscene thing I had ever seen.  

There was long silence. The tension was palpable. Eventually somebody said something which got the crowd commenting and laughing.  We got moving.  My friends and I got out of there as quickly as we could.

A high official of my school, an embarrassed Rotarian (I was told that he said we had set back the school’s public relations ten years—most impressive since it had only existed for seven!), sought to get me expelled or disciplined (for what?  We were careful to say we were not officially representing the school, but we were students from there exercising First Amendment rights.)  Sources at the time told me that the tone of an intense faculty meeting changed when the Dean of Students, Herman Etzoldt, indicated how proud he was of what we did and how we conducted ourselves.  Soon, I was having occasional private luncheons with the school’s president who discovered around the same time that I, somewhat different from most others, was also the editor of the school newspaper/magazine.

The big surprise was that the Federal Bureau of Investigation started investigating me. It had someone “borrow” my address book for a day so they could copy it.  Soon I was hearing that agents were interviewing many contacts they found there, all because I and others exercised First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and peaceable assembly to protest racist policies.

It is one thing to be exposed to the racism of several individuals as happened at that bar;  it is quite another to learn personally how the most powerful law enforcement agency in the nation was engaged in suppressing and harassing the Civil Rights Movement.
 
After all, what probable cause was there that I had committed or was about to commit a crime? What happened to 4th amendment protections from unreasonable searches and seizures?   Wasn’t the FBI supposed to be fighting organized crime rather than violating the rights of law-abiding and justice-loving citizens?

It was strange.  A couple of young women that I met sight-seeing in Copenhagen –and many others— were being sought out to learn more about my background and beliefs, influenced by such notorious rebels as Moses, Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus, Luther, Lincoln, Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Ironically, agents must have learned a lot about my contacts with the Walther League, the international youth organization of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in which I had been quite active.  Back in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties, the organization—like many denominational equivalents and campus ministries—was sensitizing youth to issues of hunger, race and injustices.   Subversive activity, wouldn’t you say?

At the time I assumed this investigation happened because of some overzealous local agent in a very conservative city not liking what we did.  But history clearly tells us–thanks in part to a break-in to an FBI office in Medea, PA, to persistent reporting by NBC journalist Carl Stern and  to the later investigation of Sen. Frank Church’s committee–that the agency, without constitutional or statutory grounds or congressional oversight, was actively involved in trying to suppress the civil rights movement as well as harass and discredit its leaders.
 
From its top leadership the FBI actively pursued the suppression of dissent (whether civil rights, anti-war, feminist or gay) by infiltrating campuses and groups in all sorts of ways: informers (administrators, faculty, clerks and students), monitoring mail, phone calls and spying on people to, in words known only because some frustrated patriots broke in to a FBI office: “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”  See The Burglary: the Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, by Betty Medsger, a former Washington Post reporter, published in 2014 by Knopf.   Curiously, two of the burglars were college professors, one a professor of religion.  A movie has been made about this burglary titled “1971”.

History clearly tells that what happened to me happened to many others, often in much more severe forms. FBI harassment of Martin Luther King, actress Jean Seberg and many others are shameful blots of official misconduct of the most egregious type, not to forget complicity in the murder of Fred Hampton. Agents suggested suicide to King and spread vicious rumors about Seberg which drove her to suicide.

In 1976, Clarence M. Kelley, FBI Director said, “During most of my tenure as director of the FBI, I have been compelled to devote much of my time attempting to reconstruct and then to explain activities that occurred years ago.  Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite a few indefensible.  We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated.”

It is a sad commentary on freedom in this country that gross governmental abuse of power often can only come to light through the courage of “criminal whistleblowers” such as the Medea burglars, Daniel Ellsburg, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Isn’t it obscene that the Twentieth Century’s most powerful and dangerous scofflaw racist in this country still has his name on the FBI headquarters?  That fact reminds us that the lawless racism of that agency was just as ugly, and far more dangerous, as that of a northern Indiana lynch mob.

Curiously, years later when Life magazine did a special issue commemorating the Civil Rights era that same photo I saw in the bar was published.   The first photo inside, it jarred me seriously.  It confirmed that it was from Marion, Indiana, eight miles from Ft. Wayne, in the 1930’s.  I never expected to see it again. 

But it was part of what brought me to join the marchers in Washington 54 years ago.

The following year, 135 CSC students joined in a protest when Alabama Governor George Wallace came to town, running a racist campaign for President in the primary, using language which would later be Trumped. This time we were joined by several faculty members and a large group of Roman Catholic priests-in-training from the Crozier House of Studies.

Three years ago many classmates gathered for a fifty year reunion. It was reassuring to hear many of them tell how this civil rights involvement shaped their later careers, where in different forms and contexts they became involved in many efforts to fight the results of bigotry, injustice, poverty and ignorance. Over a dozen went to Selma in ’65. One, as a rookie pastor, founded the first integrated day care in Louisiana, shortly after finishing seminary in ’68. Many are involved these days in welcoming immigrants, fighting for health, housing and nutrition and opposing injustice and discrimination in many forms.
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The summer of ’64 for me included some unusual results.. I returned to the Bay Area, as I awaited a visa for a radio broadcasting job I had accepted in Nigeria. Committed to non-violence, I engaged in sit-ins which could have led to arrests in San Francisco hotels and at the Republican National Convention which nominated Barry Goldwater. We were left sitting. At the RNC, all front entrances at the Cow Palace were blocked, but delegates were let out other exits. It was a strange feeling to be willing to accept the consequences of non-violent direct action only to be ignored by the powers-that-were.
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By a coincidence, my Pan Am flight to West Africa that fall included a large number of the leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement. After they experienced a difficult summer in Mississippi and elsewhere, they were rewarded with a vacation in the newly independent nation of Guinea, thanks to the generosity of entertainer/activist Harry Belafonte. The recent book, Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights by Steven Levingson, tells how crucially important the folk singer/actor was in facilitating communication between civil rights leaders and the reluctant Kennedy administration. He also donated and raised large amounts of money for bail and legal fees during the Birmingham and other struggles. He truly used his popularity and wealth to foster winning the struggle.

On the flight I had a long conversation with Julian Bond, with whom I would have later contact over the years, especially when we were both involved in the Congressman Morris Udall for President campaign. That was the progressive alternative to Jimmie Carter in ’76, but Mo kept coming in second in primaries. I sometimes think how different our future might have been under a Udall/Bond administration rather than a centrist Carter/Mondale one. Throughout his life Bond proved to be a brave and sophisticated leader who was a SNCC communications chief, Vietnam-war-opposing Georgia state legislator, teacher, actor, journalist, “Eyes on the Prize” narrator, NAACP head and, as he like to think of himself, a Race Man.

~ Robert O’Sullivan at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Selma March.