Three Massachusetts women are happy about their non-paying teaching jobs in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They are donating their services for one year at St. Ann’s parochial school. Two are recent graduates of Regis College, in Weston, Massachusetts – Miss Marie Lynch and Miss Maureen Burgin. The third is a retired Boston teacher, Miss Mary Magner. Miss Lynch, from Newton Center, explains that 17 members of her graduating class volunteered to donate one year to some Roman Catholic school that could not afford to pay teachers. Others went to such places as Texas, Virginia, New Mexico, and Jamaica. Miss Lynch explains the Catholic lay apostolate teaching program began among Catholic students about seven years ago. Miss Burgin, who is from Somerville, Massachusetts, says four other girls in her education class offered their services for one year. The retired teacher, Miss Magner, stated she still could have taught in Boston. But, she says, she wanted to give this year while she still has time.
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The Champlin, Minnesota, Methodist Church, a white congregation, has called a Negro minister as its pastor. Church authorities believe that the Rev. Dr. Charles Sexton is the first of his race to hold such a position in the upper Midwest. Dr. Sexton was pastor of the Minneapolis Negro Methodist Church that merged by invitation with a white congregation, also in Minneapolis, last December.
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A world Baptist leader has told Southern Baptist men that Christ should be an active partner in the business life of Christians. The statement is from the Rev. Dr. Theodore Adams, president of the Baptist World Alliance and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia. The 6,000 delegates to the Oklahoma City meeting represent Southern Baptist men’s groups in 40 states.
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A Methodist clergyman from Charleston, South Carolina, has been elected national chaplain of the American Legion. The Rev. Feltham James was chosen unanimously at the Legion’s Atlantic City, New Jersey, convention this week.
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Youthful rabbis are being sent out from New York’s Yeshiva University to suburban areas and they usually have to build their congregations from scratch. A prime example of the new program is Rabbi Jack Sable, 29 years old, and a former Air Force chaplain. In Riverdale, a New York City suburb, he began three years ago with a slip of paper with some names. Soon he had the Riverdale Jewish Center operating – a post office box at first, but quickly an 18-family group and a Hebrew school in an apartment. Then a basement was converted into a sanctuary for Sabbath services. Rabbi Sable became fundraiser as well as chief organizer and holder of other titles. And today, the Riverdale Jewish Community will hold its first services in its new $500,000 synagogue and social center. Rabbi Sable and director Victor Geller of the Yeshiva University Community Services Division say such experiences point to an Orthodox resurgence in American Judaism.
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And while on the subject of Judaism it is pertinent to observe that next Wednesday the High Holy Days of the Jewish faith will begin at sunset. These days have been called the most holy in the Jewish calendar and a time for spiritual inventory. The 10-day period that follows extends from Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. At both services rabbis will stress the theme of penitence and the possibilities of moral regeneration. Typical of the prayers that will be offered is the following, taken from the Union Prayer Book: “O Lord, hasten the day when all evil shall be destroyed and wickedness shall be no more. Quicken us to work with the righteous of all nations and creeds, to bring about thy kingdom upon earth, so that hatred among men shall cease, that the walls of prejudice and pride, separating peoples, shall crumble and fall, and war be destroyed forever.” It would be difficult to find a prayer, in Christendom or elsewhere that surpasses this in merit.
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It was reported this week that archaeologists have uncovered the biblical Pool of Gibeon and that the spring of ancient Israel is flowing again after 25 centuries. This was announced by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. This discovery confirms the biblical tradition that the men of Gibeon, now called el-Job, were literally “drawers of water.” The archaeologists also uncovered a mass of evidence indicating that wine-making was a flourishing industry before Gibeon and its environs were laid waste by King Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC. The Bible refers to Gibeon as the place where the sun stood still and stones rained down from the sky as Joshua routed the invading Amorites.
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For some time recently considerable discussion pro and con has developed regarding the deletion of certain racial and ethnic materials from songs, especially those of Stephen Foster. Those supporting such deletion say that such words as “darkies,” “Massa,” and the like, are resented by colored people because they remind the world that we, the whites, once held them in slavery. Last Monday the issue was focused locally by editorial in the Johnson City Daily Informer, under the title “Pious New York Has Started Burning Books.” Particular attention was given in the editorial to removal of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the public school book list because in that book the author has his characters use such words as “nigger.”
Today, the same newspaper runs, on the editorial page, a lengthy letter from a reader who resents this deletion, apparently mostly because, according to her, it is done at the instigation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It is a well-written letter. You are urged to read it.
Now this reporter takes second place to no one in his desire to protect, scrupulously, the rights of all people, regardless of their race, color, or other artificial insignificant differences. However, he too has shared the concern over the emasculation of literature in the name of minority rights. The Jews have complained about Shylock and parts of the “Merchant of Venice” have been changed. They objected to Fagin in Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” and parts of that great novel were deleted or changed. Catholics objected to the moving picture “Martin Luther,” and in some cities censors moved in and prevented it showing. Now it is the songs of Stephen Collins Foster and the novels of Mark Twain that are to be distorted in the name of civil liberties. Where is it all to end? These novels, songs, plays, are now a part of history. If there was or is any derogatory aspects about slavery (and there was) the onus rests upon the white man, not the Negro. So why should any thinking Negro object? If what Martin Luther said and did is objectionable to the Catholics, it is equally true that what a number of popes and other high-ranking Catholic officials have done down through the ages is equally offensive to us Protestants. If the Jew thinks that Shylock is bad from the Jewish point of view, let him read the process by which the author is supposed to have settled upon Shylock as one of his main characters, and he will find it was not with any necessary intent to disparage Jews as such, but to create a major character in the plot.
Members of minority groups would do well to stick to essentials in their commendable fight for equal rights, and forget about the happenstances of the past that make up much of our cultural history. It is true that ignorant, unthinking, unscrupulous people use Foster’s songs, Shakespeare’s play, and Twain’s and Dickens’ novels and other literature as vehicles to vent their prejudice towards others different from them. But if we are to embark upon a course that deletes from the press, radio, television, movies, etc., everything that might possibly offend someone, we are not only becoming a nation of sissies, but we are letting our concern for the incidental cause us to destroy the fundamental. Ours is a colorful culture and history, and all races, creeds, colors, nationalities have contributed to it: all should be proud of the contribution of each and every one of these. It should not be subjected to pernicious anemia because of the thin skins of the NAACP or any other minority group organization, and this reporter has great respect for the objectives and most of the accomplishments of the NAACP. Simple respect for the facts of history should cause us to have more sense.
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Probably most people who reflect on the subject would agree that religion, like many other areas of living, consists largely of a scale or pattern of values with respect to themselves, other people, and life in general. Someone has said, with considerable pertinence, that a person’s life can be evaluated by looking at his checkbook stubs, for they reflect the things that person considered most importance in life. Be that as it may, one who has a social consciousness cannot help but speculate occasionally about the pattern of values that causes people to bestow so much so frequently upon animals when such beneficence is totally unneeded. And this at a time when human beings in every community are in dire need of material comforts. Take the case of the Reading, Pennsylvania, woman who willed her dog a three-room apartment with air-conditioned bedroom, living room chair, a practical nurse, and $50,000. Or the Murray Hill, New Jersey, man who paid a carpenter $3,000 to finish the house with a glass-bricked roof, cedar and knotty pine walls, fluorescent lighting, and an electric blowing system. Then turned the whole thing over to his four Doberman Pinschers. Or the New York Life Insurance Company, recently chartered; its only policy holders: dogs. This reporter is fond of dogs and assorted varieties of other animals, but how many of these people for providing so lavishly for their pets will contribute 50% as much to a milk fund for undernourished children? Not only is the country going to the dogs in such cases, but, to put it biblically, it would seem that such persons are casting their pearls before swine.
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One of the virtues in any philosophy of religion framework is that of honesty; that is, being honest with oneself, as well as with others. Those of us who have studied and tried to understand the Russian system have long since given up the hope of finding honesty intentionally displayed by those who espouse the Moscow line. However, the recent hullabaloo in a few places in the United States over segregation, and the heyday the Russians are making of it has impelled one nationally-syndicated writer this week to point out that while in most places in this country, segregation under law is not practice, in Russia, segregation of the races for educational purposes is the order of the day, and that under not only statutory but under constitutional law. David Lawrence, the arch-conservative of the columnists, observes that Russia defends her segregation policies on the ground that she wants to preserve the literary tradition of the groups. Five of the so-called Soviet republics are in Central Asia, and there, according to evidence presented by Mr. Lawrence, “The Russians maintain one set of schools for their children and one set for the children of local people. It is a segregated system.”
Officials insisted, as do some of our southern Dixiecrat segregationists, that the “People like their own schools,” part of which may be true in both cases. It should be observed in passing that the Russian are European and white, while the Asians are Mongolian and dark. But what does all this mean for the argument put up by some segregationists here that integration is a Russian scheme? Well, it may be, for the communists will promote any idea, however inconsistent with their Marxian dogma, if they think it will cause confusion and trouble in the free world. Communists care nothing really about the civil rights of Negroes or anyone else but their own ilk.
And, what does it do to the Russian propaganda line that they invectively hurl at their own people and the world via their newspapers, radio, and other communication media?
There is a rule very old in the idea of Anglo-Saxon equity, namely, that’ he who comes into court should do so with clean hands. Or, to put it another way, he that would seek justice must be just himself. Obviously, two wrongs don’t make a right. If segregation in schools is wrong in this country, then it must also be wrong in Russia and vice versa. Christ put it much more succinctly when he said, “He that is without blame, let him cast the first stone.” But of course the Russians probably do not read the Christian Bible.