Interviewees

Shaun Illingworth: This begins the second interview session with Reverend Moses William Howard, Jr., on February 19, 2019, in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, with Shaun Illingworth. Thank you very much for having me here again.

M. William Howard: Pleasure.

SI: Last time, we got into talking about your time at Morehouse. One of the things you became involved in was doing research with Dr. Mays for his autobiography. Can you tell me a little bit about your dealings with Dr. Mays, your thoughts about him, how you came to know him? [Editor's Note: Morehouse College, founded in 1867, is a private, all-male, historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia.]

MWH: Well, now, let me just say, Mays is one of those icons in the black community who would not be so well-known in the contemporary time. He was an advisor, a mentor, to Dr. King. He had quite an impressive record of advocacy for Civil Rights long before it became, like, a thing in the modern period.

For example, he wrote a book of theology in the 1940s--I think 1941, it might've been, maybe even earlier--at Howard University, where he was on the faculty, characterizing the concept of God by black people. He called it The Negro's God. He was trying to show the different conception of who God is among black people, the descendants of the slaves.

So, Mays, by the time he got to Morehouse, I guess in 1947 or so, he was already a revered figure. So, he mentored a whole generation of budding young activist-scholars in the black community, especially men, because Morehouse was all men. Dr. Mays was one of them, but Lerone Bennett, and so many others, keeping in mind that Morehouse had this tradition from its founding in 1867, you had giants, like Howard Thurman, for example, another prolific author, probably not so well-known among people who don't study these subjects.

[Editor's Note: Dr. Benjamin E. Mays (1894-1984), a Baptist minister, became one of the intellectual leaders of the New Negro and Civil Rights Movements through his tenure as Dean of the School of Religion at Howard University from 1934 to 1940 and as President of Morehouse College from 1940 to 1967. As an educator, he imparted his belief in the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience to his students, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He published his book The Negro's God: As Reflected in His Literature in 1938. Historian and journalist Lerone Bennett, Jr. (1928-2018) served as executive editor of Ebony Magazine and published books on African-American History. Reverend Howard Thurman (1899-1981) served as the first Dean of Rankin Chapel and on the faculty of the School of Divinity at Howard University (1932-1944) and, later, Dean of Marsh Chapel and on the faculty of the School of Theology at Boston University (1953-1965). His book Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) and his work with the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, along with his academic career, helped spread a philosophy of nonviolent resistance.]

Dr. Mays--let me tell you one interesting story--he attended South Carolina State College. That was a state college for black people in South Carolina. He was from South Carolina. He thought his education had not been adequate, so he reenrolled in another baccalaureate program at Bates College in Maine and graduated from Bates College, right. [Editor's Note: Dr. Mays attended the High School Department at South Carolina State College for his secondary education, graduating as valedictorian in 1916. He began his undergraduate studies at Virginia Union University before he transferred to Bates College, graduating in 1920.]

He was a man driven by his hunger for knowledge. He knew that, somehow, knowledge and the transformation of black life in America were intertwined. So, he pursued knowledge and went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He must've earned--not earned, but was awarded--I don't know, fifty or sixty or seventy honorary doctoral degrees from universities and colleges all over the country, but he was a stoic, modest man.

He was a very handsome, tall, upright gentleman, who had a clarity about himself and about human life that was quite astonishing, especially to a kid like me, coming from Southwest Georgia. You thought of someone with such high achievement as being just a little arrogant and self-assured. Mays, really, he was self-assured, but he contradicted the arrogance part.

I remember being with a group of young men, who revered him, by the way, and this kid was from South Carolina. He was eager--you know, from South Carolina, Dr. Mays--to be associated with Dr. Mays. He said, "Dr. Mays, I'm from South Carolina and I understand you're from Ninety-Six, South Carolina." Now, Ninety-Six is actually the name of a little town in South Carolina. Dr. Mays said, "No, son, I'm not from Ninety-Six--I'm from Ninety-Five."

The kid, of course, was perplexed. He said, "No, the town is not Ninety-Five, Dr. Mays. It's Ninety-Six." He said, "Oh, yes, I know," he said, "but I was born about a mile south, out in the country, so, I call it 'Ninety-Five,'" you see. [laughter] So, even though Ninety-Six is just a little stop on the road, Mays wouldn't even claim that little town as his hometown. He was eager to let it be known that he was really from the rural area around that little settlement.

So, he was extremely modest but highly accomplished, and he set a tone for the college that still obtains. In fact, we've had difficulty perceiving presidents [apart from his image]. Even younger people who never met Dr. Mays, they have the aura of Mays in their minds, and they're always comparing our successive presidents to Dr. Mays. They talk to me and I say, "Number one, Mays is not coming back. Number two, these are presidents for a different time," but he cast that kind of spell.

He gave the eulogy, the public eulogy, which was massive--I mean, thousands of people on the quadrangle of Atlanta University--for Dr. King. To this day--I may have mentioned this in the prior interview--I can remember him speaking. The title of his eulogy was, "It's not how long you live, but how well." That's published. You can read that eulogy.

His point was, he went through history, starting with Joan of Arc. I remember it. I think she was eighteen. He went all the way through, talking about young people who hardly lived. Well, Dr. King died at thirty-nine--are you aware of that?--thirty-nine. His point was, "We still remember Jesus. He was thirty-three." He named all those young people who made a mark on history but who died quite young.

His point was, to this audience, overwhelmingly students, "Everybody, as Dr. King would say, would like to live a long life, but the question is, 'How well did you live?'" This "well" had nothing to do with, "How much wealth did you accumulate?" but, "What good did your life have for humanity?" That was Mays in a nutshell. [Editor's Note: Dr. Mays delivered his "No Man is Ahead of His Time" eulogy for Dr. King, on April 9, 1968.]

SI: You became involved in helping to do research for his autobiography.

MWH: Yes.

SI: How did that come about, and what did that entail?

MWH: I was approached one day by Wendell Whalum, who was the legendary music person at Morehouse, the person known for his association and leadership of the Morehouse Glee Club. Dr. Whalum approached me and said, "Howard, Dr. Mays has assigned me the responsibility of identifying a few students who can work with him on his autobiography. I think you should be one of those."

Well, to work with Dr. Mays was a great honor. I didn't know what it entailed, but we met with him, with Dr. Mays, in his home. We were supervised by Samuel DuBois Cook, another prominent scholar, African American sociologist, who Dr. Mays had chosen to sort of orchestrate these young people working on the project.

[Editor's Note: Dr. Wendell P. Whalum (1931-1987) served on the Morehouse faculty, eventually becoming the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Music, and as Director of the Morehouse College Glee Club from 1953 to 1987. Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook (1928-2017), a Morehouse Class of 1948 alumnus, taught at Atlanta University from 1956 to 1966, when he became the first African American to hold a tenure track position at Duke University. He later served as President of Dillard University for twenty-two years.]

I was assigned to interview, as I think others were, but I know that my assignment was to interview a certain number of people in Atlanta who were Dr. Mays' contemporaries age-wise. Keep in mind that Atlanta grew around the intersection of major railroad lines. Today, Atlanta sustains its growth because of the airport. So, transportation had always been a key to Atlanta's economy and growth.

In those days, the railroad brought black people from different parts of the South into the City of Atlanta. So, it was a great opportunity to meet elderly blacks who were from different parts of the South, but you didn't have to go to those places to meet them, because they had converged on Atlanta. They told you their childhood memories, what it was like growing up in the rural South under the most bitter versions of Jim Crow segregation.

To give you one example of this, I interviewed a woman who, as a girl, had seen a woman hung from the rafters of a church. The woman was pregnant, and the perpetrators had split open her stomach …

SI: Oh, wow.

MWH: And the unborn child spilled out, hanging from her innards. The thing that I remember most is these people remembered these stories--sometimes, they wept when they told them--but they were not bitter, right.

So, Mays, again, I talked about his modesty; if you read Born to Rebel, he chose not to write his life story just about him. He decided that he would write his life story in the context of other people in his generation, so, "My story is one of many." [Editor's Note: Dr. Mays published Born to Rebel: An Autobiography in 1971.]

So, you read, in Born to Rebel, the story of the black mother travelling in the colored car on the railroad going someplace, maybe North. Now, I think any student of the Jim Crow Era would know that black people were often relegated to the back seat of things, but, on the train, they were in the front car, because the trains were pulled by locomotives that were powered by coal. The coal dust would often settle in the first car, you see. So, he would tell you stories like that, to let you know that, "I grew up in this milieu. This is the setting of my life." So, oddly, we were collecting data for him to write his autobiography, but, as young kids, we were learning about a chapter of history that we probably couldn't have learned any other way.

SI: Even though you had grown up in Georgia under this.

MWH: That's right. Of course, I never witnessed a lynching. So, that era, in terms of massive numbers of lynchings, that had passed, you see, but it did inspire my own writing. I'm writing a piece called "Vignettes of the Old Black South." I think historians have done--that is, academic historians have done--a decent job of really telling us about the era, but these intimate tales, these intimate accounts of personal exposure, an academic scholar often won't have access to that.

So, I'm talking about what I experienced from around, I would say, 1948-'49, which is my earliest actual memory--my elders told me about things that happened before, but in terms of my actual memory--until about '63, when I left. That's the summer of the March on Washington and, that fall, I entered Morehouse. You're too young to know, but that was a heady period, 1963. That comes around the bombing of the church in Birmingham, the Selma stuff that went down.

[Editor's Note: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom occurred in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the march. On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by a white supremacist and four African-American girls were killed. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, African Americans (and their allies) in Dallas County, Alabama, and its county seat, Selma, Alabama, fought the state government, the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan in their efforts to register African American voters. In 1963, SNCC organizers joined the effort. After the bombing in Birmingham, SNCC and local activists staged sit-ins and other protests that met with violent opposition. The civil rights activities continued with the historic Selma-to-Montgomery March in the Spring of 1965 and voter registration efforts in counties such as Lowndes in the summer of 1965.]

I left to go off to Northern Illinois to work in the sheet metal works factory, to help pay my college expenses. So, that's when I became separated from the small-town South, because, once I left Illinois, I went to Atlanta. Atlanta was a far cry from the brutal segregated area where I had lived, although it was still a segregated town.

So, hearing the stories of these elders was life changing. Then, when we saw the way Mays treated them in the book, it was really an amazing tribute to a generation, not just his account, personal account, of growing up.

SI: Can you give me an example of how, even though it was the same system of segregation, things were different between the small-town experience and when you got to college in Atlanta?

MWH: Well, yes, let me think, because I'm really right in the middle of describing the colored or Negro community, right.

So, in my town, for example, no black person could hold a government job. Ironically, my family was acquainted with a family where the man had been a postman but years before I was born. By the time I came along, a black postman was unheard of. No black police officer, no black person hired by the government, local, state or federal, in my town, except, maybe, I guess in the post office, there was a black janitor, or maybe a black janitor in the local police department--but you would never think of a black police officer, right. When you got to Atlanta, that was different. You had black lawyers, judges, postmen, anything you can think of. I mean, they were there.

Now, you also had black entrepreneurs in Americus. They owned small businesses, like shoeshine parlors or cleaners, dry cleaners, or pool halls or small restaurants, or cafes, we called them, not restaurants. In fact, I make a point in my writing to say that I was nearly an adult before I saw someone order from a menu, because there was no place in my town where you could go with your family and sit and have a pleasant meal, ordering from a menu, because even those establishments owned by blacks [were] more like a sit-at-the-counter-type thing or a takeout-type of thing. To reflect on it, it's because they had to have a mixed, multilayered type of business. They had something where you could get food, but you had to have a place where you could dance and a place where you could--I don't know what else--but they weren't conventional restaurants. The chain restaurant was nowhere to be found.

So, when you got to Atlanta though, you had all of this. You had restaurants where you could order a nice meal, restaurants where you would take your family, the kids, everyone. You had black-owned clothing stores, the whole range. It was like a separate black economy--hotels, jazz clubs, you see. Literally, if you can appreciate this, you had two separate economies.

At some point, they must've intersected, but when we came to Atlanta in '63, you had the white economy and the black economy. As a result, you had a class structure. You had African Americans who lived in very palatial homes. You had the first African American insurance company, or certainly the largest, Atlanta Life Insurance. So, you had millionaires, you see, black millionaires, oh, boy. Now, you also had the professions. You had black dentists, you had black physicians, you had--you name it--you had a duplication.

Now, downtown, the white economy [was] much richer, but in Atlanta, you also didn't have that same sense of economic dependence on downtown. You also had the universities that provided a buffer, provided intellectual energy, and personalities that drove the politics and the culture. You had in Atlanta five accredited colleges and universities, five. They were all in the same side of town. So, you can see that provided a certain boost in Atlanta's identity.

Atlanta also had a different history. If you read the history of the NAACP, written by Langston Hughes, they will give you an account of the Atlanta Riots. So, as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, Atlanta's black community had a full-scale uprising in opposition to the oppressive rules and conduct of the white community. So, they'd sort of established themselves as a community that would not be docile in the face of certain kinds of restrictions, you might say. [Editor's Note: African American poet and scholar Langston Hughes wrote Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, published in 1962. During the Atlanta Riots, from September 22-24, 1906, white mobs killed over twenty-five African Americans.]

By the time I got there, it was like the emergence of the black elected official [was a] possibility. It hadn't happened yet, but Leroy Johnson, I believe, was elected as the first member of the Georgia Legislature since Reconstruction. Now, remember, in the time of Reconstruction--I'm not sure of the record of Georgia--but, throughout the South, black people were in state legislatures and so on. After Reconstruction, that had been knocked down.

So, Leroy Johnson became the first member of the Georgia Legislature, black. Then, shortly thereafter, we had a gentleman whose name I'm not recalling at the moment. I see his face. He was elected to the [Georgia State] Senate. That was the beginning. Then, eventually, in a year or so, you had the case of Julian Bond. Do you know that story? [Editor's Note: Leroy Johnson won a seat in the Georgia State Assembly in 1962 and then in the Georgia State Senate in 1963. An African American had not been elected to the State Assembly since 1907 and the State Senate since 1874, the end of Reconstruction.]

SI: I do not know that story. I know Julian Bond.

MWH: Julian Bond ran for, I think, the State Senate, and he was denied office because he had burned his draft card. He was opposed to the Vietnam War. He had been a very prominent activist in SNCC, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The whole community rallied around him. Julian Bond was being elected by some historic margin, right. To some extent, his election and re-election was driven by the opposition that he was getting. Eventually, he won his case. He was seated, and he served for quite an extended period. That was the breakthrough. [Editor’s Note: Julian Bond (1940-2015) helped found both SNCC and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He served in the Georgia House of Representatives (1967-1974) and the Georgia Senate (1975-1987) and then served as Chairman of the NAACP (1998-2010).]

Over time, more and more African Americans were being elected to office. Eventually, Maynard Jackson, who became the first black mayor of Atlanta, ran against Herman Talmadge for the US Senate. Now, voter suppression, in those days, was notorious. We have the '65 Voting Rights Act, but the Voting Rights Act's effect did not happen immediately, you see. It grew. It was evident that it was growing, but there were still ways of suppressing the black vote in the South.

Maynard Jackson ran against Herman Talmadge. Herman Talmadge and Richard Russell [Georgia Governor (1931-1933) and US Senator (1933-1971)], for whom a [US] Senate office building is named to this day, they were notorious segregationists. He got--I think you can research this--but seems to me that he got something like seventy thousand votes, right. Today, that's nothing, right. Wow, it was like he had become a Senator. I mean, that was like a breakthrough, like, "Wow, he won seventy thousand votes," whatever number it was. He lost, but it was considered huge and a big breakthrough, sort of like Stacey Abrams. She didn't become governor, but nobody disputes that she is a power to be reckoned with now. It was that same way when Maynard Jackson ran for Senate.

[Editor's Note: Maynard H. Jackson, Jr. challenged incumbent Senator Herman Talmadge in 1968 for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat representing Georgia. Despite losing the bid, Jackson’s strong showing of carrying 200,000 votes across the state and the City of Atlanta propelled his election as mayor of Atlanta in 1973. As the first African American mayor of the city, Jackson served from 1974 to 1982 and then from 1990 to 1994. Talmadge served as Governor of Georgia from 1948 to 1955 and then as US Senator from 1957 to 1981. Democrat Stacey Abrams gained national acclaim as the first African American woman to earn a major party nomination for a gubernatorial election in her 2018 campaign to become governor of Georgia. She lost to Republican Brian Kemp in a close and controversial election marked by allegations of racially-motivated voter suppression.]

Just after that, he was chosen to be deputy mayor by Ivan Allen [mayor from 1962 to 1970], a white businessman, moderate Georgian. Atlanta had been known for producing these moderate politicians, in part because they could see the black electorate growing--so, they were responsive. Now, the black electorate grew because it was the center of commerce, and many people from around the South migrated to Atlanta. So, it produced a sizable black population. Ivan Allen chose Maynard to be his deputy mayor. He gave Maynard significant responsibilities, and so forth. Then, when Ivan Allen wanted to move on, step down or whatever, he backed Maynard Jackson. The community backed Maynard.

Maynard became the mayor, right, served with great distinction, produced the Atlanta Airport and MARTA [Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority] and all of these things, which further enhanced the black population, because black people began to move to Atlanta from everywhere, not just the South now. They were coming from the industrial North. The place to be was Atlanta--but this white moderate attitude had begun in Atlanta for quite some time.

So, the other counties in Georgia--Georgia has 159 counties--but Fulton, especially Atlanta, the county seat of Fulton and the state capital, was almost like an island in Georgia. You had William B. Hartsfield [Mayor of Atlanta from 1937 to 1941 and then from 1942 to 1962]. William B. Hartsfield was the man who coined the phrase, "Atlanta is a city too busy to hate," and that set the tone, mainly, in Atlanta's social climate.

But, in '63, there were lots of businesses still segregated. You could go downtown to the counterpart of Macy's, you might say, which was called Rich's Department Store, or Davison's, another big department store, you could go there. You might even find a few black people employed in these stores, but you couldn't go to the poolrooms and the bars and the whatever.

In my freshman year, there was a time when most of us were in jail, in the freshman class, desegregating these facilities, but the city leadership knew the image they wanted to maintain for Atlanta couldn't tolerate this. So, the facilities were opened fairly quickly, with very little violence. So, that was a relatively short episode. I don't know if I'm on the subject here.

SI: Absolutely. Can you elaborate on, maybe, one of the experiences of desegregating a place …

MWH: Yes.

SI: … That you were involved with?

MWH: I mean, now, keep in mind that to simply desegregate a racially-segregated location was something that the college embraced philosophically. That was a part of its mission, almost. So, when we would go into a place and there was resistance and we would be arrested for a brief period of time, it wasn't as if the college would then think about expelling us, because it was a part of the mission. It was the alma mater of Howard Thurman and Martin King, and Mays was the president, you see.

Buses, city buses, I remember very well being ordered off a city bus for refusing to sit where we were told, but everybody was doing that. Eventually, the buses opened. Now, keep in mind that Atlanta's working class had had a kind of progressive outlook on social change for many years. They knew, for example, that the bus population, the customers, were overwhelmingly black. [Note from M. William Howard: The city bus system in Atlanta was desegregated in 1959, so it was not the focus of protests during my freshman year at Morehouse in 1963.]

It was a city-wide system--it went from one end of Atlanta to the other--but it was often transporting domestic workers and other black people. So, if they stopped riding the bus, it would shut the whole thing down. Working-class elders, who had no connection to the colleges, applauded us, you see, and that made it a bit easier, because you had a community that was applauding what you were about. It wasn't like an intergenerational clash.

That came a little later, when the young activists began to question--after having major experiences across the country, having travelled abroad--they began to question the United States more deeply. Then, the conservatism of the elders began to surface--but I would say that, well, I never spent more than three days out of class. I was never physically abused in an Atlanta jail.

I was arrested in Americus, questioned, but never held overnight. But, after '63, after the Summer of '63--actually, during the Summer of '63, when I had gone off to Illinois--even though we had had a number of high-profile developments in Americus, things really broke open. You can read about this if you don't know it, about the Leesburg Stockade. Have you ever read about that? This is when some young girls were taken to a stockade and made to sleep on the floor, and so forth, and so on. [Editor's Note: In July 1963, police arrested fifteen African American girls and young women who tried to desegregate the Martin Theater in Americus. They were imprisoned in the Leesburg Stockade under harsh conditions for forty-five days without any charges being filed.]

All of that transpired from '63 on, to maybe '65 or so, when open resistance of a kind that we had not seen began to evolve. Even a homicide by a black man against a white--I think a police officer or deputy, someone like that--transpired in that period. This guy actually went to trial. Now, that was unheard of, because, in an earlier time, if a black man committed an offense like that, he wouldn't see trial. There would be a vigilante group that would come and lynch him, you see, but, by then, the commercial establishment of that small town, like the commercial establishment in Atlanta, had recognized something was going on.

When I was a young child, when we began voter registration, we began innocently. We weren't mobilizing to take power. We were simply saying, "You're a citizen--you should be registered." We were radicalized by the reaction, and we didn't know why. Today, I look back on this--we were nearly half the population and the people who controlled the place knew that if we were to register in larger numbers, that would have implications for their position. Today, three of the five members of the City Council in Americus are black. They knew that day would come.

Now, I mean, in the City Council, you can hardly tell by the way they vote who's white and who's black, because they're all, basically, preserving the status quo, but, in those days, they assumed that when the blacks were elected, they would run them all out of town, I guess. I don't know what the thing was.

When I went away in '63, Americus became a really tight place there for a while. There was a national case on--they didn't call it insurrection, they called it something else--and I think an alumnus of Rutgers was a part of this case. Don Harris, do you know that name? [Editor's Note: In August 1963, Donald S. Harris, Rutgers College Class of 1963, was arrested in Americus, Georgia, while trying to register African American voters. Working for SNCC, Harris and two others were charged with sedition, a capital offense in Georgia at that time. The case stirred support on the Rutgers campus and across New Jersey in the Fall of 1963. Harris was released in November after a federal court declared the law under which he was charged to be unconstitutional.

SI: Yes.

MWH: I knew Don very well. In fact, in recent years, I've had some good chats with him down in Florida, where he's now living, but all of that happened after '63. I was, of course, in Rockford, Illinois, working to help cover my college. So, it sort of catapulted me into the Atlanta situation more so. In Atlanta, you had the national headquarters of SNCC. So, you could get a different experience of what was going on.

SI: These actions aimed at desegregating places around Atlanta, were they coordinated by a group like SNCC, or was it more the students coming together?

MWH: SNCC was involved.

SI: Yes.

MWH: But, this professor who had the debate with Stokely Carmichael, Samuel Williams, was head of something. I'm not sure what that was called, like, the Human Rights Commission or something, but it was, in effect, Atlanta's version of some kind of local activist opposition to segregation. They were more of the coordinators.

[Editor's Note: Samuel Woodrow Williams (1921-1970) served as Chair of the Morehouse Department of Philosophy and Religion from 1946 until his death in 1970. He also served as pastor at the Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta and helped found the SCLC. He co-founded the Atlanta Summit Leadership Council, which organized protest campaigns targeting segregated spaces and services in Atlanta in the 1960s. In 1966, Mayor Ivan Allen named Dr. Williams the Vice Chair of the Atlanta office of the Community Relations Commission, which focused on combating race discrimination in city government employment. Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) held leadership positions in SNCC and the Black Panther Party and helped found the Black Power Movement.]

SNCC people were in Atlanta, but not as involved in transforming the local setting, because, in some ways, Atlanta was already moving and didn't really need SNCC. SNCC was in Atlanta as a home office because it was a safe haven, you see. They knew that by being on Raymond Street--I think is where they were, 6 Raymond Street, I think--they wouldn't be threatened by law enforcement or any other powers-that-be. They were rooted in a black community that would be protecting [them].

So, they weren't as focused on, as I recall, changing things in Atlanta, because that was already rolling along. I would say that Dr. Williams' organization probably had more to do [with that]. In fact, Dr. Williams, who was a distinguished professor and a highly-regarded teacher of Martin King, was arrested himself. So, even our faculty people, a few of them, participated.

SI: The political campaigns you mentioned, did you participate in any of them, or did they draw on the college students?

MWH: Not really. Remember, when I went to college, I was seventeen, number one.

SI: Okay, yes.

MWH: I could register at eighteen in Georgia, by the way, in those days. That's one way Georgia was leading the nation--but, also, I was not a resident of Atlanta, per se. So, being involved in the electoral machinery of Atlanta, I could see what was going on. The students certainly applauded this, but they were not as much an integral part of it, because they were often from out of town--sort of like students coming to Rutgers being involved in Middlesex County elections.

It wasn't an organic thing, but we certainly observed it and we were very supportive, especially of Julian, because Julian was a "young Turk" and he was closer to our age. He was about something more than simply winning public office. The Vietnam issue was very much a part of our psyche and thinking. He was taking a really courageous position on Vietnam.

It was the forerunner of SNCC's internationalization of its own sense of purpose, which is something worthy of note as well, because, remember, in its beginning, it was focused on desegregating the South.

SI: You brought up the Vietnam issue. I would imagine that was on the minds of yourself and most men your age.

MWH: Yes.

SI: Are there any memories of either your own thoughts on what would happen if you got a draft notice or any kind of anti-war activity?

MWH: What is interesting about that is that I am the son of an Army retiree, right. I never lived the military life because my parents were divorced, but I was reared in the home of my father's mother. So, I was very conscious of the fact that, in some way, we had a military connection.

If you were at Morehouse College, being exposed to the kinds of readings in the curriculum, the kinds of extracurricular speakers who were coming to campus--and we had some really substantial human beings coming to talk to us about the world, about this society. Some of them were themselves on the line, in terms of their own lives, Dr. King being the most noteworthy, but many, many more.

So, by the time I reached graduation age or time, Vietnam was the big issue we were confronting. I actually applied and was accepted and enrolled in Naval Officer Candidate School. That was presented as an option. The Navy, at that time, especially [being] a naval officer, was considered a very high-level kind of thing, compared to Army infantry, and so on. So, I enrolled in the Naval Officer Candidate School. My heart was never in it, all right.

So, I think in the interim, before hearing that I was admitted to the Naval Officer Candidate School--I think this is the sequence--there was a period of time when you applied, and then you didn't hear. You were interviewed, and so on, but you didn't hear. I volunteered to go to the Peace Corps, and I was assigned to teach English in Libya in the Peace Corps.

I was to go to Clearfield, Utah, to study Arabic and, also, I guess, some introduction to Islam, but it was a big language training place, Clearfield, Utah. Clearfield, I understand, was also--I've never been there--a desert region and it approximated the landscape of Libya. All of this was in the papers of acceptance. Before I could enter the Peace Corps, there was a revolution in Libya. Muammar Qaddafi took over the country and banned the Peace Corps. [Editor's Note: Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi led a coup d'état against King Idris I in September 1969 and ruled Libya until he was ousted and killed in the 17 February Revolution of 2011.] [M. William Howard's Note: There must have been another reason for my deciding not to go to the Peace Corps, because the revolution in Libya occurred later, in the fall of 1969, after I had enrolled in Princeton Theological Seminary.]

Shortly thereafter, I received a letter informing me that I had been admitted to the Naval Officer Candidate School. I went to Newport, Rhode Island, and I entered the training program. I was dating a young woman at that time who was fiercely against the war, and she badgered me. [laughter] So, every other day, I was getting badgered, “I was joining to fight in Vietnam," and so on, but the truth is, I had my own internal doubts about this.

I visited the office of the commander of the training and explained to him that I was doing reasonably well, but [had reservations]. He said, "Stick it out, Howard. You might find this [appealing]." I performed miserably at OCS. I've been accused about being intentional about my poor performance, but I was just depressed and weary about--not so much about the war, about combat, that wasn't my thing--but it was the ethics of the war.

Now, I'm surrounded by my "giants" telling me [to oppose the war]. I don't know if you know--now, I graduated in '68--in 1967, Martin King gave his most prolific and stirring speech against the Vietnam War. Are you familiar with this?

SI: Is that the Riverside Church speech?

MWH: At the Riverside Church.

SI: Yes.

MWH: "Time to Break Silence." [Editor's Note: On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break Silence" speech at Riverside Church in New York City, condemning the Vietnam War.]

All of this was [in my mind]. So, eventually, I dis-enrolled from the OCS, understanding that I would be still a member of the Naval Reserve. In other words, I was not free to go--I was just leaving the OCS thing.

I wrote a letter to Dr. Mays and I asked for his good counsel. I told him my situation and I told him I had a high interest in the study of theology, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to be a minister. I was, at that point, struggling with my sense of purpose and identity, and so on. He said to me, "I want you to be in touch with," and he gave me the name of the president of the [Gammon?] Theological Seminary. I said there were five institutions [in Atlanta]; there were six. There was a theological school in that same center.

So, right away, the president there invited me to come enroll in the school, but this lady friend of mine, who is still my friend to this day, she had a college schoolmate who was dating a guy at Princeton Seminary. Somehow, she mentioned this to them, and he said, "Well, I think he should also put Princeton in the mix of schools. If he's thinking of doing this, he should think about Princeton." So, I think there were two or three other seminaries who invited me to come.

They had, in those days, something that had been popularized by the Fund for Theological Education--I think that thing still exists. It was based here, but it was a national program. Dr. Mays was a key part of the board, funded by the Rockefellers, the family. That provided a trial year for persons who may have been inclined toward the ministry, they were not certain, but, “We will give them a trial year, free of cost to them, to explore this.” So, that trial year was made available to me by Princeton without the Fund, because Princeton was sufficiently funded. They didn't really need that, so, they [self-funded it]. [Editor's Note: Founded in 1954, the American Association of Theological Schools Fund (or "the Fund," now the Forum for Theological Exploration) established the Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship Program to provide potential seminarians with a trial year of study.]

James Andrews was the vice president at Princeton at that time. James McCord was the president, but Andrews was sort of a right-hand man of McCord. He invited me to come at this student's recommendation. I sat down, and one of the first questions he asked me, one of them, I'm not sure if it was the first, who might commend me for, like, a recommendation, who would other than this student, who was a student? I said, "Well, I'm not sure," I said, "but I know that Dr. Mays, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, has a strong interest in me." I had no idea--would this guy know Benjamin Mays? That never occurred to me. I simply said, "Dr. Mays." He said, "You know Benjamin Mays?" [laughter] It's very emotional. [Editor’s Note: James I. McCord headed the Princeton Theological Seminary from 1959 to 1983. James E. Andrews went on to serve as the stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA.]

SI: Yes.

MWH: Because I'm mostly a scientist, but this is a time when you had a feeling that something other than science was intervening. This was a guy from Texas, from the Southern Presbyterian Church, and he loved Dr. Mays.

SI: Do you want to take a break?

MWH: I'm good, I'm good.

SI: Okay.

MWH: What I'm responding to is something I haven't mentioned. He didn't allow me to complete an application and he granted me, in that sitting, a full academic scholarship--this is sort of funny, something I had never heard of--pocket money, all my books, everything. So, I attended Princeton Seminary just like that. These other schools offered me admission; they couldn't afford to give me all of this. So, I had the full scholarship, my books were covered and a small stipend for some pocket money. It wasn't big money. It was just something, "You're a young man. You'll need a little pocket money. You need to get a haircut," something like that. So, that was an amazing gift.

I remember coming on Human Rights Day, totally coincidental. December the 10th, I came into Princeton on a bus from Newport, Rhode Island. It was snowing. When I went back to Newport, to begin the process of total separation with an honorable discharge from the Navy, I had the whole thing. It was all made possible for me.

I enrolled in February, February of '69. I was able to take off--I'm not sure the date--but I was able to leave Newport, completely separated from the Navy, in time to spend the Christmas holidays in Georgia. That was a great turning point in my life.

So, when I came to Princeton in February, it was a new world, studying. I had always been a man of the church, a person of the church. I had worked very closely with my local congregation in Georgia as a sextant, cleaning the church and ringing the bell for funerals, and so forth, but I never envisioned being a clergyman, though my interest had always been philosophy and religion. I had majored in philosophy and psychology at Morehouse.

So, it was an interesting experience, studying religion. In fact, when my family heard I was going to study religion, it was confusing, because the concept of religion in the black community was that of "a calling from God." They had never heard of a person who had done academic study of religion.

Once I got to Princeton, wow, I discovered all sorts of interesting personalities teaching courses in theology, Bible, ethics, church history, and subjects like that. I found myself, as one guy put it, "like a hog in slop." [laughter] It was very invigorating, and so on, but the idea of being a clergyman still hadn't hit me, right. By the way, it didn't hit me for quite some time. Then, my professors, upon reading my papers, after one year or so of this--I was going to be there for a trial year--I would be encouraged, "Howard, this is your thing. You should [study this]."

I had a professor at Morehouse, Lucius Tobin, who was a contemporary of Dr. Mays. Lucius Tobin was a professor of religion. He and I remained close until he passed away. At that time, he was considered an unusual man. He read things that were beyond what other people were reading, and he encouraged us to read. I remember, I came out of [high school] thinking I would be a mathematician. When I was bending toward philosophy at that time as a second major, and had decided maybe psychology and philosophy, I told him that I was struggling with this--and he laughed at me. He laughed at me, like, uncontrollably. He laughed at me. When he finally recovered, he said, "Howard, you're no mathematician. This is your field," philosophy and, actually, some history, liberal arts-type things, always interested in literature and the secrets of mankind, "What is the nature of the human being?" and all of that. [Editor's Note: Reverend Lucius M. Tobin (1898-1984) came to Morehouse as a Philosophy and Religion Department faculty member in 1944 and also served as Pastor of the Providence Baptist Church in Atlanta.]

That really stimulated my thinking. When I went to seminary, that professor came to some kind of conference in New York, and he journeyed to Princeton on the train to see me. So, I kept going because I had Dowey, Professor [Edward A.] Dowey, [Jr.] and others there at the Seminary who were encouraging me.

Before I knew it, I was near graduation--still never imagined myself as a clergyman--but, to connect that to Vietnam, when I went into the seminary, I received a notice saying I was now, I think, 4-D ["Ministers of Religion" in the Selective Service System classification system], or something like that. It was different from 1-A. That 1-A was, like, you were on your way. I was never classified 1-A, because I went immediately toward Naval OCS. After a while, before I could get that 1-A classification, I think I was 2-S, if I'm remembering all of this.

SI: That is a student deferment.

MWH: Yes, student deferment. When I went into the seminary, I got a notice, unsolicited, 4-D, I think it was.

In that senior year, Princeton Seminary, at that time, required you to sort of talk about, "What do you aspire to?" I remember writing--by then, I knew that was a gift of mine--I said, "I want to do something that involves arranging things." I didn't know exactly what that meant to them, but I had a [sense of that], because I was very good at organizing, administering and keeping things in an orderly [manner], sort of relating to people.

So, my first job offer was to go to Dartmouth College, right out of seminary, to become the assistant to the chaplain at Dartmouth College and to be an associate director of the Tucker Foundation. The Tucker Foundation was an entity within Dartmouth that founded and administered something called A Better Chance. You ever heard of that? [Editor's Note: Founded in 1951, the William Jewett Tucker Foundation sought "to serve as the spiritual and moral authority of the College." In 2014, the college split the foundation into the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact and the William Jewett Tucker Center. The foundation began the A Better Chance (ABC) program in the Summer of 1964.]

SI: No.

MWH: A Better Chance was an agency. By the way, Dartmouth created a national program, but it started there--it was New England exclusive--to take young people, often racial minorities, and place them in high-end New England preparatory schools. Now, you have a number of high-performing African Americans in this country, doing all kinds of jobs, who were brought into A Better Chance. Dartmouth was the leader of this. Now, Dartmouth has a unique connection to the American Indian community and American Indians were brought into A Better Chance.

SI: Oh.

MWH: African Americans, [through] A Better Chance, they went, often, from places like Exeter and Choate, and so forth, into Ivy League colleges. These are bright kids, but they were in substandard secondary schools out there in America.

So, my wife and I were brought to Dartmouth, given the red-carpet treatment. I think on two occasions, we went to Dartmouth. My wife had a job here and they offered her a position that was paying a lot less money, but we noticed early that Dartmouth considered it a special privilege that she would come to Dartmouth and so, “taking a few thousand dollars cut in your salary shouldn't bother you,” because you were coming to Dartmouth. [laughter] Then, they told my wife, "Of course, you will save money, because you'd only need a wardrobe of warm weather [clothes] about three months out of the year," [laughter] because it's snowing and it's cold. So, she said, "Well, tell me, where is the nearest black church?" They said, "Oh, you can find one there in Boston," which is, of course, not around the corner.

SI: Yes. [laughter]

MWH: And, of course, I'm interested in jazz and she's interested in the church, and so forth. So, she told me, she said, "Now, this is a great opportunity for you. I want you to go there, and I want you to come home on weekends. I'll stay here." Her mother lives very near where we are now. That didn't sound like much of a marriage to me.

I have a good wife--I didn't want to screw this up. So, I said, "No. If you don't mind, I'm going to turn this job down and stay and presume that I am of value to somebody and I'll get a job." We agree. I mean, Dartmouth was very, very high on me, and they were very disappointed--you could tell in the sort of interaction and the counteroffer and all of that. I felt very badly, because I liked the people and I think the job opportunity was great, but I didn't like the implications that it would have for my own life.

Now, during that period, the last year or two before graduating from Princeton, I had a part-time job. I was the campus representative to Livingston [College] of the United Campus Ministry, which I'm not sure still exists. That ministry was directed by a wonderful guy. I'm looking at his face and I can't think of his name--but it was down College Avenue, just across from the faculty club down there. Is that what that's called, the faculty club, at the bottom of …

SI: Down by the park, or at the other end?

MWH: No, down at the very end, away from the city, down College Avenue.

SI: Yes.

MWH: I think it's a faculty club.

SI: Yes, the Rutgers Club was there for a while.

MWH: Yes, the Rutgers Club.

SI: Yes.

MWH: Just across from there, up the hill, there's a house and that house housed United Campus Ministry. United Campus Ministry was a non-denominational Protestant service to the students. It was not University-sponsored, but University-approved. It was funded by the area churches in the Greater New Brunswick area and it served the student population on the Douglass Campus, and so forth, all around. I was appointed to be the guy at Livingston.

I got that job because there was a prior student at the seminary who did this work. When he was graduating, he recommended me--can't think of the guy's name. So, I did this for, I would say, a year-and-a-half. I was given the task of identifying a person, a successor who could follow me. At a luncheon for all the different denominational representatives, where I was going to introduce this new person, a woman sat next to me from the Reformed Church in America, one of the sponsors of the United Campus Ministry. She said, "So, Bill, what are you going to do next? We know you're graduating from the seminary and you are leaving the Campus Ministry, but what are you going to do next?" I said, "I have just turned down the one really significant job opportunity [I had], and so, I'm not entirely sure." Of course, I was built up as this great chaplain guy, and so forth. She said, "Really?" She said, "What are you doing after this lunch?" I said, "Well, I'm going back down to Princeton." She said, "Well, I'm in Trenton. I'm the head of the," she was, like, the education commissioner, or something like that, in this building, which is not an education building anymore, but she was a top person in this office. She said, "I'd like for you to come and visit me in the afternoon, if you're willing." So, sometime around four o'clock, I visited her office. She said, "I'm going to put a friend of mine on the phone. We'd like to tell you about an opportunity that might be of interest to you." She told me about the Black Council, it was called at that time, the Black Council of the Reformed Church in America. This was an organization of African American members of the Dutch Reformed Church. An office had been set aside in that church to organize the African American members of the Reformed Church as part of the mandate flowing from the Black Manifesto.

The General Synod of the Reformed Church had met that year, 1968 [1969], at Rutgers. They had their national meeting on the Rutgers Campus, and their meeting was interrupted by James Forman, whose organization had chained closed the headquarters in New York of this denomination, demanding reparations for slavery, and so forth, and so on. You may be familiar with this. He had confronted the Riverside Church in April that year. This was in June of '68 [1969]. One of the agreements was that the church would create this organization of members. [Note from M. William Howard: James Forman did not take over the meeting of the RCA General Synod at Rutgers in 1969, but he was invited to speak because his group occupied the headquarters of the church in New York.]

The person who initially occupied this job, after two or three months, became ill and passed away. They offered me this job based on what had been said about me and my performance at Livingston, and so on. So, rather than going to Dartmouth at a certain salary, I went to New York for more money. So, I was able to stay with my wife seven days a week--I mean, you couldn't beat that--and, also, to have a significant role in shaping this community.

So, I stayed with that organization for, I think, either a full twenty years or nineteen years and some months. That was when the Trustees of the seminary came and got me and said, "We want you to be president of the seminary." I declined that job, but they didn't [stop]; they persisted. I eventually went there. [Editor's Note: Reverend Howard served as the executive director of the African American Council of the Reformed Church in America from 1972 to 1992. He served as president of New York Theological Seminary from 1992 to 2000.]

During the time I was at the Reformed Church was also the great explosion of [anti-apartheid activism regarding] South Africa, for example. In fact, by 1976--remember, I started with the Reformed Church in '72--by '76, the church had come back to Rutgers for its annual meeting, because it goes around the country in different places, but it'd come back to Rutgers in '76. I had been with the organization for four years. [Editor's Note: The RCA General Synod in 1976 met at Fairleigh Dickinson, not at Rutgers.]

The organization, the Reformed Church, always met, like, in mid-June. So, like, on the--whatever, mid-June, like the 15th of June, something like that--it may have had its opening session. On June the 16th in 1976, you had the Great Soweto Rebellion. That had to do with the requirement that was objected to by black South African students that they study only in the Afrikaans language. They wanted to be able to study English, more universal languages. [Editor's Note: On June 16, 1976, in Soweto, the largest black community in Johannesburg, South Africa, approximately twenty thousand students protesting the exclusive use of Afrikaans language in their schools were met with violence from police, resulting in 176 deaths.]

Well, prior to that time, in the Fall of '75, Dr. Howard Hageman, the President of New Brunswick [Theological Seminary], had invited a distinguished leader of the black church in South Africa to study at New Brunswick. A student, a white female student, had suggested to the South African that, "You should really get acquainted with these black people who are organizing in the Dutch Reformed Church. They have an interest in South Africa and you're here--why don't you consider meeting them?" He was interested. [Editor's Note: Dr. Howard Hageman served as President of New Brunswick Theological Seminary from 1973 to 1985. Dr. Hageman met Reverend Elia Mashai Tema in South Africa in 1974 and invited him to study at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, where Tema earned a Masters in Theology degree in 1976. He later returned to South Africa to serve in a church in Soweto.]

She called me and said, "We have this Reverend Elia Tema and he'd like to meet." I said, "Well, this is quite opportune," because the national meeting of the black members was, like, two weeks or so from that call. I said, "Please, let him know that we've talked. Have him give me a call. I'd love to arrange for him to come and greet us--and, of course, too, at our expense--remain for the conference and get to know people," and so on.

So, Reverend Tema came to that meeting. On the day that he arrived, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, the room that he entered was dark and, on the screen, up front, we were showing a film called The Last Grave at Dimbaza. In a nutshell, this film was about how South Africans were under such stress under apartheid that they were digging graves before people died. When the lights came on, we saw this man. Then, he felt, of course, that he was home; people were concerned about his situation. [Editor's Note: The Last Grave at Dimbaza, a clandestinely-shot Anglo-South African 1974 documentary, revealed, for the first time to a global audience, the conditions of apartheid, the legal segregation, forced resettlement and oppression of black South Africans by the white Afrikaner minority in South Africa.]

During his stay at New Brunswick, he persuaded Dr. Hageman to invite Sam--I'll think of his last name--Sam Buti, Sam Buti, his friend, but the president of the church. He said, "Look, this would be a great time for you to hear from the leader of our church." So, Sam Buti was the special guest for the General Assembly of the Reformed Church. He was scheduled to speak at 10 AM, June 17, 1976. [Editor's Note: Reverend Sam Buti served as President of the South African Council of Churches from 1975 to 1981.]

On June the 16th, you had this tremendous explosion, and on the front page of The New York Times the following day are the pictures of the students being shot. There's a famous picture of a young male student carrying a girl who had been shot. He's running through the street trying to get aid. That's on the front page. [Editor's Note: During the Soweto Uprising, photographer Sam Nzima took a photo of then eighteen-year-old Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying the shot sixteen-year-old Hector Pietersen, who subsequently died.]

That's when Sam Buti was to speak, and it galvanized [the General Assembly]. See, now, the Dutch Reformed Church is the cousin of the sponsors of apartheid in South Africa. This galvanized the Reformed Church in America, because this Buti was very effective. A good bit of my portfolio following that was focused on South Africa.

SI: Do you mind if we take a quick break?

MWH: Yes.

[TAPE PAUSED]

SI: Thanks to you and your wife for your hospitality. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the experience at the Princeton Theological Seminary. First, you had obviously been up North before, for Navy Officer Candidate School and other visits, but was there any kind of culture shock, either coming to New Jersey or coming to the Princeton Theological Seminary?

MWH: Well, let me say, I had spent a fair amount of time in Northern Illinois.

SI: Okay.

MWH: Not Chicago, but Rockford, which is a different story. Rockford, maybe there was, like, five percent black population. So, I'd been exposed in factory settings where lots of white workers from the South, particularly Tennessee and Kentucky, had migrated for the opportunity to work, to be in unions. So, I had a lot of exposure to that.

It was very foreign, but Morehouse College, which was a college with an integrated faculty and some white students who elected to come to this black private college for men, so that exposure was very useful. OCS, of course, fit into that nicely, because Naval Officer Candidate School was almost exclusively white. It was where the Ivy Leaguers went for military service, if they went, because it was considered sort of an elite.

So, by the time I got to Princeton, I'd had this type of exposure, but I cannot discount the Morehouse soil as cultivating or producing this kind of openness to all kinds of people, and so on. Now, remember, when I came into Princeton, it had a handful of black students, maybe eight tops, eight, nine. The following year, there were over twenty--it doubled--but, when I came, it was small. Princeton was now committed to bringing in more African American students.

I would say the approach to theological learning or teaching at Princeton was not so foreign to me, because they believed in biblical criticism, which means they were not fundamentalists. They believed in the teaching of biblical languages, and so on. They had some great authorities there.

At seminary, I sort of took an interest in pastoral counseling, because it was close to my psychology interest, but I discovered along the way that the approach to pastoral counseling was profoundly culturally-limited. So, some of the things that were true in the black community would not have fit with the paradigm of, shall we say, religion-based therapy.

So, I then began to take an interest in the history of religions. That was my focus in the seminary, under the guidance of Edward Jurji, who was a Lebanese Christian, Ph.D. from the university, Princeton University. After two years of intense engagement with Jurji, who I liked a lot, I realized that I was being taught Christianity in relation to other faiths in the history of religion, and I didn't want that. I wanted to study, let's say Islam, or any other religion, on its own merits. That's why I went to study, while in seminary, with Ben Ray at the university, but I completed my time at the seminary with a focus on the history of religions. [Editor's Note: Dr. Edward Jurji (1907-1990) served on the Princeton Theological Seminary faculty from 1939 to 1977. Dr. Benjamin Ray taught at Princeton University and now serves as a Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.]

My paper was about the concept of a supreme being that existed in ancient African religions. Most people having a cursory knowledge of traditional African religions knew about the God of the Sun and the God of the Soil and the God of Fertility, and so forth, but all of these lesser gods answer to a higher power. So, I wrote about that and that was sort of my thing--still not thinking I would be in parish ministry.

I never went to parish ministry until I was fifty-four years old. In some ways, I went kicking and screaming. By then, I felt I had a call to ministry, but it was not necessarily to local ministry. I had had a fair amount of international experience. I think you know that.

SI: Yes, which we will talk about in another session.

MWH: But, some people would say to me, because I had been president of this seminary that trained people for ministry in very local situations and I was a bit critical of what local churches were or were not doing, people like that would say, "Well, you have such a strong opinion of what these churches should be doing--why don't you test your own capacity to do that?" That, and many other reasons, I wound up going to Newark, and that added another dimension to my knowledge of people and their worship experience and the role of the church. Prayerfully, I left a little bit of a mark on that. [Editor's Note: Reverend Howard served as pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, from 2000 to 2015.]

SI: Going back to Princeton, when you graduate from a theological seminary in that model, do you automatically become ordained or do you have to go through additional steps?

MWH: No seminary ordains; I think maybe Catholic seminaries.

SI: Yes, I was raised Catholic, so I am more familiar with that.

MWH: Right.

SI: I am just learning about this now.

MWH: So, the seminaries prepare you, but then your respective denomination submits you to another discipline, another procedure. So, I was interviewed and commended for ordination by the Great Rivers Region of Northern Illinois, American Baptist. They examine you, but they commend you to your local congregation and it's the local congregation that conducts the ceremony of ordination.

So, I was ordained [there] because, by that time, having worked in Northern Illinois and having family there, I'd become attached to a local church in that town, Rockford, Illinois. Reverend Gilbert licensed me; that's a part of the process. Then, when I completed the rigorous sort of oral and written exam, he organized and conducted the ordination service, back in 1974. So, that's the connection. [Editor's Note: Reverend Eldridge H. E. Gilbert (1912-1991), a Civil Rights activist, served as the pastor of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Rockford from 1944 to 1989.]

Princeton didn't--in fact, one of the going debates is, when the denominations are looking for qualities in pastors--not only qualities, but orientations--they wonder, "Are the seminaries providing this?" you see, because they don't have any operating influence on the seminaries, and the seminaries don't have any influence on them, per se.

Now, if you're at Princeton [and] you're Presbyterian, you may have a slightly closer connection to that process, but the big seminaries, like Princeton, usually have a pretty ecumenical student body. You have, especially Roman Catholic women--women could be found there--Lutherans, Presbyterians, Reformed, Baptists, Methodists, they all go to a place like that. So, naturally, the Methodists don't want to hear from the Presbyterian seminary too much, but they respect the academic preparation of the students.

SI: You also got married while you were at the seminary.

MWH: Oh, yes, I'm proud of that, more than my degree.

SI: Okay.

MWH: I met my wife about midway--and I should hurry to say it's the same wife I have now, right. [laughter] We met about midway. We were married in 1970. I came to the seminary in February of '69, so about midway; in fact, I think exactly midway. We married in July. My wife grew up around here, so I met a local girl. We got married. In July, it will be forty-nine years.

SI: Wow, congratulations. You had come from this college experience where activism was a big part. When you were in the theological seminary setting, were social activism discussions happening?

MWH: Oh, yes, Vietnam.

SI: Yes, okay.

MWH: Oh, boy, Vietnam was a huge issue at the seminary. Princeton Seminary was, is, a bit, I would say--and this is not meant to be pejorative--it's a kind of a middle-of-the-road seminary.

SI: Okay.

MWH: It's more, I would say, orthodox or classic--not Orthodox as in Orthodox churches--but a pretty classic seminary. I would say it was tolerant of activism, but it was a little bit cautious about activism. A lot of the students came to the seminary in those days preoccupied with the Vietnam War. So, various things were done to protest the war, not so much against the seminary, but at the seminary.

Some of us accused the seminary of taking stock of those years and then intentionally beginning to recruit students who were not likely to be of that ilk, but I always say, "The times produce the students; the students don't create the times." So, the students that we had in that period were generated by the environment, but, maybe later, as the environment waned, you got a different type of student.

There was some concern that Princeton wanted to intentionally recruit less socially-conscious students, not so much of the black students, but of students in general. You also had a very strong presence of international students at Princeton. I suspect you may still have some, but nothing like those days. So, they brought the international flavor into the conversation.

SI: I also want to ask about the ministry at Livingston College. Livingston College had just opened its doors in 1969, a couple years before you would have arrived? Do you have any memories of interactions with the students or with the faculty? Does anything stand out about that experience?

MWH: Livingston, I don't know, has anyone written a book on Livingston?

SI: I know Paul Clemens has written a lengthy article on it. It has been covered in a number of the recent books on Rutgers history, but I do not know if there is an independent volume on it.

[Editor's Note: Dr. Paul Clemens, a Rutgers University Professor of History since 1974, published Rutgers Since 1945: A History of the State University of New Jersey in 2015. He co-authored, with Dr. Carla Yanni, the article, "The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964-1973: Revisiting the "College of Good Intentions," published in The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries (Volume 6, Issue 2) in 2017.]

MWH: Well, maybe an article is sufficient, but you had some nationally-known poets, nationally-known musicians. It was almost like Livingston claimed certain free space to do things because the central administration didn't know what to do with it. That's my view; it's not bad. There was a cross-fertilization of cultural ideas, and so on, very heavily bent toward black and Latino.

I remember one of the things that happened. When I got there, I discovered there was a gospel choir at Livingston, directed by a musician who was not, as I recall, a big church person. It was also student-led, student-generated. In fact, when I preached a few times for [University Chaplain] Brad Abernathy at the chapel there, he loved the fact that this gospel choir would always come with me, because it would light the place up.

Livingston is coming after the Newark Rebellion and all of this. So, that sort of informed the environment. I think, in those days, Livingston was talked about as a possible center for the study of urban policy and stuff like that in New Jersey. I don't know the extent that it ever became that, but it was certainly a safe haven for very interesting people, politically very interesting, and they weren't supervised. They were free to think and do, and it thrived. I mean, as far as I could tell, in those days, it was a very robust place. [Editor's Note: The Newark riots lasted from July 12 to July 17, 1967. They began after the police arrested an African-American cab driver and rumors spread that he had been killed in custody. The riots resulted in over two dozen deaths, over seven hundred injuries, fifteen hundred arrests and property damage exceeding ten million dollars. In 1965, the Curriculum Planning Committee, under the guidance of founding dean Ernest A. Lynton, undertook the task of designing Livingston College as an innovative, experimental institution dedicated to the teaching of the social sciences. By 1969, after the Newark Rebellion and similar unrest across the nation and demonstrations by African-American students at Rutgers protesting racial inequalities, Livingston planners expanded the college's mission to emphasize diversity and began to recruit students from underserved communities in New Jersey.]

When we were involved in the unification of undergraduate colleges--fast-forwarding a bit--I remember a very prominent educator from Newark called me up and said, "Look," and this is someone with whom I had a great relationship, "what are you guys doing? You're going to make it more difficult for my students to come to Rutgers." So, by then, Livingston had evolved into a kind of gateway to Rutgers for students with lower performance records, academic performance records, because, before the unification, every college had its own admissions standards and its own graduation requirements. So, Livingston had become, as it were, a substandard unit of the Rutgers family. It was not that when I was there. I'm trying to think of some of the people who taught there, but they were prominent people.

[Editor's Note: In an effort to transform Rutgers into a leading public research institution, in 1981, the University merged the faculties of the independent colleges into a single centralized unit, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Despite the reorganization and the increasing power of the central administration, Rutgers College, Douglass College, University College, Livingston College and Cook College continued to exist until 2006, when the liberal arts colleges merged into the School of Arts and Sciences and Cook College became the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. From 2007 to 2010, Reverend Howard chaired the Board of Governors of Rutgers University; he served as a member of the Board of Governors from 2004 to 2014.]

SI: You are saying that when you were there with the Campus Ministry, Livingston had a good reputation.

MWH: Right, yes, I mean a reputation for innovation and cultural sort of fermentation.

SI: Nikki Giovanni was there. [Editor's Note: Nikki Giovanni, a world-renowned poet, writer and activist, began teaching at Livingston College in 1969. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech University.]

MWH: Nikki, yes, she could've been there.

SI: Yes.

MWH: You had Idris Muhammad, a great drummer, played with John Coltrane and people. You had people--I think, not [drummer] Mickey Roker--but you had internationally-acclaimed jazz artists teaching courses. You had the likes of Nikki Giovanni and others; I don't know if it was Sonia Sanchez or Toni Cade Bambara. These were published poets, but that was in its formative [era]. [Editor's Note: Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995), an acclaimed writer and social activist, taught at Livingston College from 1969 to 1974. Sonia Sanchez, a poet, playwright and activist, helped found the first Black Studies Department at San Francisco State College in 1967. She then taught at several universities and colleges, including Livingston College, before joining the faculty of Temple University in 1977, where she spent the remainder of her academic career.]

It was here sort of finding its way and germinating to be something, but we didn't know what it was going to become. As it got older, I think, it sort of devolved into this gateway I've been talking about, which is not to say that you didn't have [good] students at Livingston.

SI: Yes, we can pause.

[TAPE PAUSED]

MWH: So, yes, I think by the time we get around to the unification issue, it has evolved into something different from those formative years, yes.

SI: Right, let me pause just for a second.

[TAPE PAUSED]

MWH: Let me say, the Livingston Campus today, physically, it is radically different. It was a much smaller place. Now, you go there, and it's almost like a little city.

SI: Yes. On a daily basis, what would you do as a minister on campus?

MWH: I had a little cubbyhole there that was called an office, but I spent most of my time milling around in the student center, because that's where you would meet people. People were comfortable. You sit there and people'd come up, "Hey, Reverend." I developed a lot of good relationships with students over the years, during the time I was there.

One of the projects that I worked on--in some ways, people referred to [this sort of thing] as "town/gown," right--you had all these kids who had some church background. They were often the first in their families to go to college, and their relationship to their churches was strained because they were away. So, I spent time trying to connect students to area congregations. I would bring local pastors to roundtable sort of discussions, introduce the clergy to the students.

Then, we had quite an interesting encounter with the campus bus service. It's far [less] sophisticated than it is now, but it was there. It was a real thing. It went through the Livingston Campus and back around, back over to New Brunswick, and so on. Our thing was, could we have a schedule--because, on Sundays, the schedule was very light--could we have a schedule that would make it possible for the students to hop on the bus, go in to church, and come back? There was a fair amount of cooperation on that. We got around to that toward the latter days of my tenure. How it worked out after that, I don't know. We also, as I implied earlier, developed something of a relationship with--is it Kirkpatrick?

SI: Yes. [Editor's Note: Kirkpatrick Chapel, constructed in 1873, sits on Rutgers' Old Queens Campus on College Avenue.]

MWH: Brad [Abernathy] and I became very well-acquainted. We spent a lot of time together. He and I shared some interests. He was a remarkable guy. I think he was the last person …

SI: University Chaplain, yes.

MWH: But, he was excellent. He took a liking to me, and we spent a lot of time [together]. So, we tried to also connect the Livingston students, because they were way over there in the country. Now, your memory may not go back this far, but Livingston, it was, like, out in the country someplace. The roads that go over there now, it was nothing like that, going over the Lynch Bridge and all that highway and stuff. I remember students in those days fighting the extension of Route 18. That was a big issue.

The way we would go to Livingston is, you'd come out to--what is it?--Albany Street, the main street in New Brunswick, make a left turn and go over into Highland Park, and turn left just as you went across the river and drive along a little road there along the river. I don't know what that was called.

SI: To River Road?

MWH: Maybe River Road.

SI: Yes, yes.

MWH: That was the way you went to Livingston.

SI: Wow.

MWH: It was a pretty simple place back in those days. So, [we were] bringing the kids over, getting them at least--not trying to get them sort of, like, structurally linked--but giving them a little familiarity with a chapel that was a part of their school.

SI: Yes.

MWH: There were students who really appreciated that, because, to some extent, whether the University was responsible for that or not, they perceived that they were relegated to the boondocks. Kirkpatrick was--coming there was--a sort of affirmation that they were a part of the same university.

SI: Would students come to you with personal problems in general? I know drug abuse was starting to grow at this time. I do not know if the Vietnam War would still be an issue then, people asking about what they should do about the draft.

MWH: Not as much. You know what I remember more than anything else? Because, remember now, this was, say, between '70 and '72, and you're dealing with undergraduate students. In terms of their personal options, they weren't really, existentially, confronted with Vietnam, just as I wasn't until 1968, because I'm on my way out. When you were in your sophomore year, and so on, now, you might've been concerned about Vietnam, but it wasn't personal, unless you had relatives or something. What I remember more than anything else was students dealing with family problems, home problems, in the sense that these were very often young people who came from homes with limited economic options and neighborhood issues, and so on. Those issues came with them to college.

This is an interesting one. There was also the whole issue of life direction, because, in that period, you had the sort of militant questioning, very fertile sort of environment--created by people like Nikki Giovanni, right--questioning, among other things, Christianity, the role of the church. These were very charismatic, attractive personalities presenting this message. You had kids who had grown up in the church--and, here I am, representing the church. So, I got a lot of questions about, "Which way do you think we should go?" I did a lot of work helping students see that they perceived a tension and contradiction that may not have been as strong, as rigid, as they perceived. Now, what you'd find, and this would really be evident when we would bring the reverends to meet them, the philosophical bent of a pastor, or the culture of that pastor's church, may have been far more conservative and unreceptive to that environment they were experiencing with the artistic leaders around the campus, but it didn't necessarily contradict the good reverend's understanding of Christianity.

I was very eager to help them see that the Gospel of Christ was not to be confused with a certain cultural dynamic that they had been reared under, where a lot of biases and other things may have emerged, but really didn't contain the reach of the Gospel, "The Good News." Well, that really endeared me to them, because they were getting another introduction to the meaning of the faith. Then, they would see me interacting with love and affection for those same conservative pastors. They would say, like, "How do you do that?" [laughter] I'll say this. To this day, if I were to--and I have, on occasion--bump into students who were at Livingston, sometimes, I don't remember them, but they say, "Do you remember the time…" you see. It had some [impact]. It was all a part of the education. It was all a part of their exploring, being confronted with new ideas, having experiences that were a departure from what they knew in their confined area, but it was a rich period.

I'll just say this. Livingston was created and, for a brief period in its early life, there was a lot of germination and lack of clarity about where it would settle. In that period, you could find what some people would consider richness and some people would consider pandemonium, you see. [laughter] It depends on where you come out. I, for one, felt it was a wonderful period, but it was inevitable that an institution, with budgets and other kinds of accountability requirements, would have to settle on something more conventional.

SI: You were just about to graduate from seminary when you received the offer from the Dutch Reformed Church, or had you already graduated?

MWH: I had not marched. I had not graduated, because I went to work for the Reformed Church in America at that mid-June national meeting. I had graduated from the Seminary the week before, but keep in mind that I finished my requirements at mid-year. So, I was not really taking courses, but, because I was in the local area, I still went to the ceremony. I went to the Reformed Church after formally graduating. At Siena College in Upstate New York, somewhere not far from Albany, that's where that June meeting took place.

SI: The Black Council had been around for a couple years before that.

MWH: Yes.

SI: Had you been following its development at all, or was it all new to you?

MWH: I have to say, to my embarrassment, I'd never heard of the Reformed Church. Now, I went to work for them in June of '72. The church was confronted in June--I said of '68, but I think it might've been '69. By the time my predecessor came, I think he was there for three months, and then, there was a period of a month or two afterwards when I came in, but it was in that June '72 session.

SI: Did you set an agenda for the council? Tell me a little bit about getting into that job and what it called for initially.

MWH: Well, my predecessor had very little time to get the thing going. So, one of the early things that I did was, we convened the people nationally. We brought in a consultant who was from Bank Street College. Do you know Bank Street?

SI: No.

MWH: It's a very reputable teacher training school up near Columbia. It wasn't Bank Street early on but very respected. This guy was a member of the faculty there. [Editor's Note: Bank Street College of Education, founded in 1916 as the Bureau of Educational Experiments, renamed in 1950, and located on 112th Street in New York City, grants graduate degrees and offers many professional development programs.]

We invited the people to think about their purpose, or their mission, and to work on things like goals and measurable outcomes, because my own sense is, it was vital that we collect the various thoughts that people had, because we were in a fertile moment and people had all sorts of expectations. "Let's clarify what they are, whittle them down," so that my job would be clear to everyone and what they would expect of me would be clear to everyone.

That was the first thing. That meeting took place at what was at that time the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge at Newark Airport. People came from California and Michigan and Alabama, Upstate New York, and, of course, all the Boroughs of New York City, various places. That's how we got started. Then, we started going to the regions. We organized around regions. We facilitated gatherings within regions.

One of the things that we agreed would be vital was leadership development. The Reformed Church was open to--and eager to--have African Americans participate in the various sub-units of the church, anything from the Program Committee to the Investment Committee, I mean, all kinds of things. We determined that we have a constituency of eager people with no real training to serve in these roles. So, we had a big leadership development focus.

Then, we discovered that we needed this for both pastoral leadership and lay leadership, because, in those days, we needed more African American clergy. Wilbur Washington was a very unusual guy in that he had actually gone to the theological school of the very church he was serving. [Editor's Note: Dr. Wilbur Washington, Rutgers College Class of 1949 and New Brunswick Theological Seminary Class of 1952, held many pastoral and academic positions in the Reformed Church in America and became the first African American President of the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America in 1988-1989.]

In order to grow pastoral leadership as swiftly as it was needed, we would have to take these people from a lot of different backgrounds, even some Pentecostal reverends--and the Reformed Church is a very structured church. It's really Presbyterian. So, we had to teach the polity of the church--not only teach it, but make sure the reverends were persuaded that it was worth doing, because we had the experience of some pastors trying to make Reformed churches [into] Pentecostal churches, you see.

So, we went through that--lay leadership development, clergy leadership development, and then, another emphasis, self-reliance in the local church. How could you be a true peer participant in the affairs of the church when you were asking the church to underwrite the most basic expenses?

We also had a program of how the images of black and brown people were projected in the church's mission program. See, the Reformed Church--let's say the Elmendorf Reformed Church, which is in East Harlem--[the] Reformed Church would subsidize that ministry. The ministry would cost a dollar and the church would give fifty cents--a lot more money than that--but the way they would raise this money is to make pictures of kids playing in the playground and doing other things, and promote that to people who would help to finance the subsidy.

So, I asked the people who were doing this, "Did you get permission from parents to project their children on billboards?" Of course--they were innocent--they said, "No, we didn't, but we thought it would be okay because their church is getting fifty cents." "No, no. These people may go to the church, but they don't know what your arrangement is with the leadership. If you want to project these people to raise money, you've got to get permission. Wouldn't you insist on that if your child [was photographed]?" "Of course." I said, "Well, you have to [do it]." So, we went through that whole thing. [laughter] It wasn't always easy. Sometimes, Bill Howard was a little bit of a skunk, [laughter] but, over time, when they saw the fruits of some of these things--I mean, really, I left feeling it had been a great experience, I mean, the [service with the] denomination.

Then, South Africa became a big issue. The General Secretary of the church, a really enlightened man, Ed Mulder, and I travelled to South Africa, but I was the "ogre" in South Africa. So, when we went, I was held behind, because, for fifteen years, I would say, I was denied visas to the country, but we'll talk about that. [Editor's Note: Reverend Edwin G. Mulder served as General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America from 1983 to 1994.]

SI: Yes, we will talk about that.

MWH: The Reformed Church has always been a small denomination because, overwhelmingly, over time--I think this is changing now--but, over time, it had reserved its ethnic identity, so that if you went to a place like Pella, Iowa, or Holland, Michigan, you'd find churches--I'd drive around town--it says, "The American Reformed Church," and so on.

I asked--in fact, I remember the first time I asked this question, I asked it in Pella of Wilbur Washington--I said, "Why do you have, like, Grace American Reform or Trinity American Reform? Why?" He said, "Well, that was a signal that they spoke English in that church," because many of the churches still spoke Dutch, see. That prevented the broader appeal of the churches. When I went to Pella the first time--or Holland, I'm not sure which--my wife said, "Well, what was it like?" I said, "Well, in the center of town, they have a windmill, and they still sell wooden shoes in the shoe stores."

SI: Wow.

MWH: Yes.

SI: It is about one-thirty. I want to thank you for today's session. Also, thank Mrs. Howard for the wonderful lunch again. Next time, we will pick up with more of your work with the Black Council and your work fighting apartheid in South Africa.

MWH: Okay.

SI: Thank you.

--------------------------------------------END OF INTERVIEW--------------------------------------------

Transcribed by Jesse Braddell 6/12/2019
Reviewed by Anjelica Matcho 7/13/2019
Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 8/20/2019
Reviewed by Kathryn Tracy Rizzi 3/14/2020
Reviewed by Bill Howard 8/14/2021