I went to hear Dr. Charles Rice, chaplain at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, on Martin Luther King Day, not so much because of the occasion as because David Weatherspoon, the college chaplain, had recommended him warmly. He didn’t disappoint.
This was true although in some ways he was a difficult speaker. It was not always easy to see where he was going, and one had to listen carefully throughout the hour-long talk. But it was a talk well worth following, right from the beginning when he quoted another speaker who attacked King’s “I have a dream” speech as “just rhetoric.” At the time of that speech, Rice said, King had the rhetoric but had not yet developed a program.
Instead of the dream speech, Rice said, he wanted to talk about “a King of the night side of American history.”
“America likes its innocence,” he said, describing the current national attitude as “racism without prejudice” and “the inability of a nation to actually face its own shame.” Many believe that racism no longer exists or has become incidental, Rice said. He described conversations with people who believe in “the bootstrap theory” and who wonder why blacks simply don’t follow the path of other minorities—ignoring or forgetting two and a half centuries of slavery followed by another century of institutionalized racism.
He told of his difficulty in responding to a letter from his 10-year-old niece in Harlem, who wrote about the problems of her neighborhood. And how he finally wrote back:
“Do not let your circumstances dictate your behavior or your dreams. You are somebody. You are living where your countrymen and women want you to live. They expect you to fail. You have to fight back.”
On paper this sounds confrontational, but Rice didn’t come across that way. He backed his comments with examples and statistics about the disparities in income, living conditions, job security, and incarceration between the nation’s black and non-black populations. This is the “night side” of America, which King was beginning to address at the time of his assassination—“the other America,” King called it in a 1968 Chicago speech.
Rice’s title for his talk was “Meeting Martin Again for the Second Time.” He explained that as a child he did meet him briefly when King visited his church. But the second and transformative “meeting” was reading a book by King on a transatlantic flight, which moved him to leave the military and begin a new career in the ministry and education.
The program was a long one, with the speaker willing to spend as much time as the audience wanted. In that respect it reminded me of a visit by Ralph Nader to campus many years ago. Rice took a lot of time to answer several audience questions, including one from a student who noted that several campus organizations address multicultural concerns, but that there still seems a divide between the majority and minority populations. How do you bridge that, she wondered?
“Start small,” Rice advised. Make the individual and small-group contacts that eventually will break down barriers between people.
He was also asked whether grass-roots or high-profile leadership is most important for the nation’s black population today. Paralleling his answer to the student, he came down solidly on the side of grass-roots activity.
There was much more, but these were a few high spots. I took fragmentary notes, some of them already unreadable. But a couple of them I’ll continue to think about: “What does it mean to be human?” And do we love people unconditionally or “because they deserve our love?”
