Note: Part 1 of this installment #6 relies in part on an article Johnson wrote for History News Network that was published on August 7, 2022: A Writer Reflects on Four Enlightening and Challenging Lunches with the Father of Black Liberation Theology
For several months before Sheila Walker and I met for the first time in early 2014, I struggled with the outcome occasioned by a series of four, expansive, consequential private lunches I had during the summer of 2013 with Dr. James H. Cone, celebrated author of Black Theology & Black Power. Since its publication in 1969, this Cone book has carried the distinction of being the founding text for Black liberation theology. In turn, Dr. Cone became known as the father or founder of Black liberation theology. To Cone, long-time distinguished professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, the gospel of Christianity had been hijacked and distorted by white churches.
According to Cone,
“Although Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists did much to rescue the gospel from the heresy of white churches by demonstrating its life-giving power in the black freedom movement, they did not liberate Christianity from its cultural bondage to white, Euro-American values.” (from page vii of Black Theology & Black Power)
In certain respects, the approach and protocol I’ve discussed for Black-white relations in this series had a partial and truncated trial run in those four lunches with Professor Cone.
It seems a pertinent set of challenges and opportunities has stood before me at various times that brought me face-to-face with racism and the promise of racial healing and Black liberation. One point in time that cannot be omitted, which had a personal and inspirited effect upon my understanding, involves my unexpected link to Dr. Cone.
I have come to realize the conversations I experienced that summer with Cone – just the two of us, Black and white, one-to-one – constituted an essential segment of my “white reckoning”, a moment in time when my racial past, impressions, conjectures, and perceptions came under examination by a newfound and sophisticated friend, whose distant background and my own for the subjects explored were similar, although we viewed them from historically obverse realities. After all, the two of us spent our youths – I was the younger – in small towns in south Arkansas around the same time with only six years in age and a relatively short distance of fifty miles separating us.
The thoughts rushed unbridled and unmeasured into consciousness as my wife, Freda, and I sat at the funeral for Dr. Cone on Monday, May 7, 2018, nearly five years following the intense discussions he and I shared over the 2013 summer. Seating capacity at Riverside Church on the upper westside of Manhattan in New York City where the funeral was held is just a little over 2,000. From the vantage point of the pew we occupied that day, Riverside Church overflowed with a scattering of whites amid an ocean of Blacks. Listening to nearby conversations, I realized many attendees had traveled long distances to arrive at the ceremony honoring this controversial, but seminal figure of philosophical and theological importance. As the funeral progressed, I felt a thrill about the degree of respect and acceptance his Black liberation theology had obviously gained across the country.
Thrilled. I cannot think of a better word to assert my response to the impressive reaction for Cone’s views of Black life in the United States by both the celebrated speakers and the large crowd, present for the occasion. Eulogies were plentiful that day from prominent Black leaders of America’s Black churches and theological, liberation circles, such as Cone’s friend, Dr. Cornel West; the senior minister at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Raphael Warnock, one of Cone’s former students who would later, in 2021, be elected Georgia’s first Black United States Senator; and Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, Cone protégé, prominent author in her own right, and, at that time, Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary.
At least for this white author, my own writings on racial healing cried out for the voice of James Cone. While I had the advantage of a first-hand racial reckoning with him in a two-way Q and A dialectic, Cone’s books called whites to task in their beliefs and behavior toward Blacks and Black liberation. In many ways like Malcolm X, Cone’s voice would be unheard at the nation’s peril.
My extensive 2013 article on the Elaine Race Massacre had been published in a national literary periodical, a copy of which I provided to Cone. He and I inherited common knowledge about the region where the Massacre happened and the associated racial rituals, histories, practices, murders, and oppression that occurred there. We each recognized that so much about the Massacre was not unique for south Arkansas; only a matter of degree separated in 1919 a mass murder of Blacks from a single lynching – both were of the same flame.
A geographic mutuality brought us together, as he had shown considerable interest to learn much more about the Elaine Race Massacre with his curiosity about the subject ushering our first luncheon in mid-June. The lunches were spread over the summer, ending in late August. I was familiar with Cone’s work, having read some of his theological writings. He probably knew little of me but for my authorship of the Massacre article and biographical highlights that accompanied it.
James Hal Cone had been born in 1938 at Fordyce, Arkansas, a town of about 3,400 persons, both in 1940 and 2020, located a little over forty miles northwest from my hometown of Monticello via a two-lane road with much of it unpaved eighty years ago. Situated in the timberlands of rural, south Arkansas, Fordyce’s only claim to fame during the 20th century rested on the fact that it was the hometown of Paul “Bear” Bryant, the legendary, college football coach. Actually, Cone spent his youth in the smaller community of Bearden, some fourteen miles southwest of Fordyce and hosting a population of less than a 1,000 in both 1940 and 2020.
During the course of the 2013 summer, Cone recited for me a variety of stories about growing up in aggressively segregated south Arkansas and, more particularly, in Bearden. One such story dealt with watching a Black man being pistol-whipped in town at a four-way crossing by a local white, law enforcement officer; apparently, the policeman believed this older Black man had been too slow in accelerating his vehicle. Such gratuitous and arbitrary acts of violence, affront, and unfairness perpetrated by whites in and around Bearden wore on Cone for the rest of his life. He often invoked his parents’ relevance and influence, sometimes summoning his father’s name, “Charlie”, seemingly to give Cone supplementary insights and additional fortitude to confront a moment of dilemma, uncertainty, or spiritual, psychological pain.
From the outset, Cone brought to each of our lunches, as a gift, a different, personally inscribed book he had written, and from the very beginning of our conversations, I was struck by the eagerness and transparency of this man in his mid-70s at the time. Throughout the summer, stories of Cone’s life in Arkansas, including the years he spent in Little Rock studying at Shorter College and Philander Smith College before moving on to receive his doctorate from Northwestern University, would stream from him unencumbered. While a college student in Arkansas, he held a job as chauffeur for a prominent Little Rock businessman with the “n” word freely employed by his employer’s associates, friends, and colleagues from the backseat of the automobile. Recounting these stories of being a chauffeur, Cone still remained incensed at the ignominy of having to don the obligatory driver’s cap as part of his job.
Cone showed insistence at learning as much as possible about me: What was it like being white and teaching in the all-Black public school in Monticello before integration and what was the response then to my efforts by both the Black and white, local communities? How did my family react to my views and actions? How did I come to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer? How did my views about race develop to differ so tellingly from whites in south Arkansas, particularly from my own family? What did I think of James Baldwin and Malcolm X? Did The Episcopal Church make any reparations in connection with its apology and National Day of Repentance for the Church’s role in transatlantic slavery, using a litany for the service that I wrote at the Church’s request? How and why did I become so committed to the first permanent, physical memorial to the Elaine Race Massacre? Conducting a deluge of personally weighty and sometimes, quite probing questions, he was continuously and implacably inquisitive, this renown professor at prestigious Union Theological Seminary, where he had taught since 1969, this man of profound humility, who, notwithstanding his very enviable oeuvre of remarkably written compositions, complained about the difficulty he faced putting word after word on paper.
He freely described and discussed the myriad of crucial subjects that occupied his focus and ruminations, including the steps and circumstances that brought him to Black liberation theology; his criticism of Reinhold Niebuhr’s neglect of Black plight in Detroit and New York City, two cities where Niebuhr had been quite active; our mutual attention to the Detroit riots, the City of Detroit, and surrounding Wayne County, Michigan, two large, local governments where I served as an advisor earlier in my life and career; his belief that Blacks habitually hid their more visceral comments about white people; the Million Man March; his view that white subjugation of Blacks thrusts a higher burden of original sin on white folks; and his and my mutual recall of the integration of Little Rock Central High School, which happened in 1957 as I became a teenager and Cone, a nineteen year old.
Our final lunch in late August, 2013 proved to be the least satisfying – for us both, I believe. The conversation started very uncharacteristically with personal incriminations by Cone. He accused me, citing verbally an identical shortcoming of all whites for not paying enough attention to Malcolm X. He additionally upbraided me, referencing and castigating whites as a group generally, for not understanding Black circumstances and attitudes. Shortly into this unexpected jeremiad, I received a telephone call notifying me that my wife unpredictably needed to go to the hospital, and I should meet her there as soon as possible. Cone’s demeanor shifted instantly and dramatically, demonstrating much concern and sympathy, but I needed to dash. So, our relationship ended quite abruptly and unsatisfactorily. He exhibited irritation with me for reasons that are still baffling, and I, in turn, felt offended at his aggression. We never reached out to each other again.
As a result of these summertime lunches with Dr. James H. Cone, I have often pondered and attempted to unwrap the enigma I have not yet fully grasped: why did he desire to continue many lengthy discussions with me? We never had a real agenda for any one of our talks. Until the very end, each of our meetings carried the redolent purpose of friends meeting for no reason other than to share notable experiences and personal propositions. After thinking about this question for years, I have resolved that I possibly represented an opportunity for Cone to enter into a previously unrealized conversation he had envisioned with an actual or imaginary white person from his past who would willingly acknowledge and comprehend the life in Bearden and south Arkansas that Cone endured and overcame from the 1940s and 1950s. Is it wrong of me to surmise that four summer lunches in 2013 created a retrospective for James Cone that brought his own history and views into clearer focus against a backdrop of passage with a white man?
And yet, there is a much larger story and continuing relevance to explore than this one issue of why these lunches mattered to Cone. Rather, the reason and potency for the disconnection between us during our fourth and final luncheon together will be examined in the next installment of “For Racial Healing”.
Next Time: For Racial Healing: #6 ‘Four, Long, One-To-One Lunches With The Father of Black Liberation Theology – Part 2’