Brotherhood In America 2/13/98
Scripture: Read Genesis 42: 18 to 43: 5
Text: Genesis 43: 3b and 5b (identical); “Ye shall not see my face, except your brother be with you.”
Today (Feb. 13, 1944), we note, is observed as Boy Scout Sunday in this community. The Scouts and Cubs, attending churches in their uniforms, make public recognition of that 12th and last Scout Law, “a Scout is Reverent.” When you consider Scouting as a character-building movement among boys, this 12th law becomes the climax in importance; “A Scout is Reverent. He is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties, and respects the convictions of others in matters of custom and religion.”
Boys, men; fathers, mothers; sisters, brothers, and friends of boys - do you know what that means? It means so much that you may well be all your life finding out more and more about what it means! It means the finest in Scouting. It means something vastly greater than Scouting, of which Scouting is one channel of fulfillment.
Today, the second Sunday of February, is designated by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America as “Race Relations Sunday” in a month that is observed in various ways as “Brotherhood month.” Because I think there is great need for attention to that theme and because I think Scouting bears a direct relationship to it, I have chosen to speak this morning on “Brotherhood In America.”
We in America hope, and believe, that the allied armies are going to defeat the Nazi military machine and destroy the Nazi organization. But a thoughtful man named Herman F. Reissig tells us that military victory can not destroy Nazism. For Nazism is a way of believing and behaving. It takes better belief and better behavior to beat it.
Mr. Reissig lists 11 things that the Nazis believe and do, and lists the way we must go about conquering those things. I will repeat just two here this morning; (1) “The Nazi preaches racial superiority. To conquer him, encourage interracial cooperation.” (2) “The Nazi teaches the young to hate. To conquer him make determined effort to develop appreciation of other races, nations, religions.”
One of the most earnest jobs that Americans must do in the years just ahead is to tackle this matter of the way in which the people of various races and faiths are to get along together. Mr. Hitler’s Nazis have told the world that they have the answer to that problem. The “Aryans,” particularly German Aryans, are and ought to be the “superior” race; the “master” race; above everyone else. They are to rule. All others are to do as they are told by the master race, and certain non-Aryans whom the Nazis don’t like are to be wiped out entirely.
We in America have said, “It isn’t so, and we are not going to allow any such imagined master race to get control over all others.” Yet there are certain things about our life in America that we ought to see, and understand, and act upon, if we really mean that.
Hitler youth has been taught that Jewish people are not only inferior, but undesirable and that they should be exterminated. And the determined work of the Nazis in exterminating Jews makes one of the most horrible chapters in human history. One thing that I believe ought to concern the thought of every man and woman in America, of every boy and girl in this country is this: there is an alarming rise in Anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish feeling in our own country. One worker will say to another, “We ought to get rid of the Jews.” Someone else says, “The Jews are a grasping lot, they are after all the wealth of the country.” Most of that is sheer prejudice and frightfully dangerous to America’s way of living! Of all people, Christians ought to be the last to entertain any thought of persecuting anyone else!
Last December 5th while I was ill with flu, many of you heard Lt. Chaplain Kermit Jones here in my place. (He is Captain Jones now!) You would be interested, then, in looking back to last Sunday’s church calendar to a comment on page 2 by a Navy chaplain (Carl Knudsen, USN). He says, “Many ministers, priests and rabbis have their first real taste of interfaith fellowship in their careers as chaplains. In the civilian world such experiences seem open mostly to leaders celebrating ‘Brotherhood Week’ with the National Conference of Jews and Christians. In the Navy, Brotherhood Week comes 52 times a year.” And in the last issue of “Wisconsin Congregational Church Life,” we see a picture of three chaplains leaving the Chapel at Randolph Field, Texas. One is a Catholic. One is a Protestant (Congregational, by the way.) And one is a Jew. They work together in cooperation while ministering to the needs of men of differing faiths. They use the same chapel building, and they are evidently the best of friends.
It is high time that the rest of us in this country were learning more about how to know, and understand, and get along with each other. In particular, we who are of the Protestant Christian faith must remember that if we consent to discrimination against Jews here, we lose face when we protest against the persecution of Jews in Europe.
We ought never to forget that our Lord, Jesus, was born of a Jewish family; that he was Jewish trained; that he was a patriot, and more than a patriot, denouncing the Quislings of his race and time, who were selling truth and sincerity “down the river.” We ought to understand better that faith which our own Christian faith grew from.
The sands of time are running out faster and faster for the people of the white race on the earth in their relation to all the people of other races. For many generations, many white folk have taken it for granted that their race was superior to the peoples of the black, brown, yellow or red races.
Many of us still act as though we had a right to more privileges than a Negro may have. There are thousands of restaurants in this country where a Negro man or woman can not buy a meal, simply because of the color of his skin! Not only that, but there are restaurants in some states where only colored people are served and where white people can not go in without punishment under the law.
If you or I had been born with only a little Negro blood, we should find that there were many things we were not allowed to do in this country. In many states, we could not ride in the same cars on the train with white people or the people of other races. We should have to use that end of the street car reserved for Negroes. A majority of the hotels of the country would refuse to rent us rooms. If we were laborers, many unions would refuse to admit us, or if we were admitted would not allow us to work in any skilled position. Last October I heard a well informed Negro man say that it is now easier for a Negro student to get a Doctor of Philosophy degree from a great University (difficult as that achievement is for anyone) than it is for a Negro worker to become a master mechanic.
If we joined our country’s Army we should if we were Negro have to be trained in a separate camp for Negroes. If we went up in airplanes after Nazi fliers, it would be in Negro units. If we offered our blood for the Red Cross blood bank, many people would think it should be accepted only for use with Negro wounded.
If we went to school in the South it would have to be in a Negro school, with much poorer buildings and equipment than the white children have.
If we lost our tempers and got into a fight, the law enforcement would be harder on us than on others. You remember news of the shameful riots last year at Detroit. 34 people were killed in those riots. 25 of those killed were Negroes. 9 were white people. It looks like there were enough white people rioting so that the Negroes got the worst of the fighting nearly 3 to 1. And yet more Negroes got punished for that fight than white people. 75% or three-quarters of those arrested and convicted were Negroes. Who killed the dead Negroes? Of course the whole thing is a disgraceful affair. Both Negroes and white folk ought to find ways of getting along peaceably in our country. Meanwhile one thing is clear. If we were Negroes we would find that we took far greater chance of getting into serious trouble over fights than if we were white.
Do you know that there have been many attempts (on the part of white folk) to prove that the Negro is not made as well as the while person; that his body and his brain are not as good, that he is inferior right from the start? One such theory was that the Negro’s brain had a few less convolutions than the white man’s brain. Even high church men have quoted this theory to Negroes. And yet scientists who decided to find out, have discovered that it just isn’t so. The doctor, or research specialist, will find just as many of those ridges and valleys on the brain of a man who died a Negro as on the brain of a man who died a white man.
Why the great differences practiced then in the treatment of black and white in our country? Not because Negro soldiers can’t fight. General Eisenhower had only praise for the 99th pursuit squadron for the way it acquitted itself in the battle for Sicily. The 99th squadron is a Negro squadron.
Not because a Negro can’t be a scientist. Dr. G. W. Carver knew so much about soils, food, and plant products that Thomas Edison would have multiplied many times the salary Carver got at Tuskeege Institute if he could just have gotten him into the Edison laboratories.
Not because they can’t produce good music. Roland Hayes and Marion Anderson and a host of others prove that isn’t so.
When you go over all of the reasons why the Negro might be treated differently from the white person, the only real reason that stands out is that many white people just don’t like the way a Negro looks! No matter whether he is dumb or brilliant; crook or saint; scholar or laborer, civilian or soldier, singer, boxer or actor; too many of us think he ought to have a different place from the white man - and it is always an inferior place which above everything else wounds and infuriates the feelings of the colored man. Color just isn’t a good enough basis for these artificial differences in treatment.
The original American is a man or woman with a copper colored skin. He was mistakenly called “Indian” because a white explorer didn’t know enough yet to realize that he had found, not India, but a country that was altogether new to the white man. The original American, strangely, got along all right with William Penn and the Quakers who were an entirely peaceful people. But he didn’t like a lot of the other white people who came. He shot and was shot, until a majority of his people were killed or died off, his forests and food were taken or destroyed, he was pushed farther and farther inland. And he himself would have been exterminated had not white government finally set aside reservations of land (often poor land, too!) for him. He has had a terrible time giving up what it meant to be a Red man and deciding to live enough like a white man to at least live in a white-controlled country. Is he inferior to the white man, because he isn’t smart, or because he is a coward, or because he is lazy, or because he can’t learn?
Well, one of the funniest and best beloved men of a few years ago was Will Rogers who took pride in the fact that he had some Indian blood. We are told that American Indian fighters in the jungles of the New Guinea area are tough and valuable soldiers. At least one rising Naval officer is part Indian and proud of it. Indian stenographers and typists are now employed in war work in considerable numbers. Indian metal workers are much wanted in war industries.
Don’t they deserve to be understood? Isn’t it all right to become friendly with them? Shouldn’t every Indian, who has the ability, have the chance to try for the same kind of job that a white person with similar ability tries for? He certainly is not inferior just because of the color of his skin. Nor are we superior because of the color of ours.
Down in the state office of our denomination at Madison, there is a girl working as a secretary whose ancestors happened to be Japanese. She is an American, born and reared and educated in this country, saluting the same flag the rest of us salute. I said she is descended from Japanese ancestors. But that doesn’t mean that she is a subject of the Japanese Emperor any more than the fact that some of my ancestors came from Europe could make me a subject of the King of England, or of the Queen of Holland, or a citizen of Scotland. The girl is an American, whose skin doesn’t happen to be white. She belongs to the same race as that of the 100th infantry which sent a baseball team to play here while training at Camp McCoy, and later fought hard and with heavy casualties at Salerno in Italy.
There are thousands of young people like this girl, and of the same race as those American soldiers, who were taken from their jobs and homes in California, Oregon, and Washighton, and put in camps behind barbed wire. That is concentration. I don’t think it is as brutal as Nazi concentration. But it is concentration. And what happened to those Americans along with a smaller number of non-Americans, did not happen to white Americans or aliens who had originated in Germany or Italy.
Something is very wrong about it all. When the radio commentator, H. V. Kaltenborn, came back from a trip to Pacific War fronts, he told the San Francisco Chronicle some very pointed things. He said: “American-born Japanese are doing one of the greatest services for our Pacific armies, and there is no Japanese problem in Hawaii. Why in the world we had to create one here I don’t know. .... In view of the situation on the islands in regard to the Japanese, it is evident the problem has not been handled intelligently.”
Well, what has been done has been done now. But don’t you think that, after the FBI has investigated each case in those camps and has decided that most of those Americans are loyal citizens, the rest of us citizens should use our influence to get the loyal Americans out from behind barbed wire and into the many communities of America where they can work, and worship, and hold up their heads like other Americans?
If we white Americans live in such a way in this country that the crooked Axis propagandists can honestly say that we don’t treat black, yellow, red or brown Americans as well as we treat white Americans are we really much better than the Nazis who say frankly that they are better than those of other races? If we should act like Nazis, why not be Nazis and be done with it?
I think it is one of the foulest things on earth that the color of a man’s skin, or the name of his religion, should determine whether or not he had an equal chance with other people at good jobs, and at all those things which make for self-respect. My belief is so strong about it that I will go further and do something I seldom do. I will prophesy that if we don’t learn to get along at brotherhood with the people of all races the day will come when the people of other races will turn on the white race with such crushing force that our white descendants will one day be forced to suffer the tortures of the enslaved! And the masters won’t be white!
If you doubt that pride, haughty manners, self-superiority, complacent disregard of equal justice for all, are at length punished by revolt, defeat, death and enslavement, read the Old Testament. Read it seriously. Read it faithfully. Read it with a prayer in your soul that we may all learn the spiritual truth that people have learned through bitter ages.
Now I have certain acquaintances and friends that I would not give up for anything. I know several Filipino pastors. Two of these ministers I know well; I married one of them to a splendid Filipino Christian woman. I know a Negro attorney who was clerk of an interracial union church where I used to preach sometimes. I know a number of Chinese ministers and laymen. One of the best American Boy Scouts (an Eagle) who was in the troop of which I was committeeman in Hawaii was from a Korean home. An American physician of Japanese ancestry is one of my truly reliable friends. A German who became a naturalized American was one of my most thoughtful teachers. I would be immeasurably poorer in heart without the friendship of these people along with the scores and scores of people whose color and nationality happen to be similar to mine.
This morning I read as our Scriptural lesson, part of an ancient Jewish story. It had to do with a brother who was disliked by ten other brothers. They found a way to kick him out, permanently, they thought. There came a day when (little did they dream it!) they stood before Joseph’s power in a foreign land and begged for the privilege of buying food for their homes. Joseph looked at them and said something everlastingly important. He told them that when they came back they must bring the youngest (the 12th) brother whom he had never seen. And he kept one of them as a hostage to make sure of it! What he said was this: “Ye shall not see my face except your brother be with you.”
Forget now the old Jewish story and think only of the eternal truth that lies in those words.
It is as though God Almighty looked at all of us, proud Americans, arrogant Britishers, fanatical Japanese, cruel Nazis -- all of us -and said with the sternness of a mighty judge: “Ye shall not see my face, except your brother be with you.”
` Except your brother be with you!
[Unison Prayer, printed in calendar]
O God, fountain of Light and Truth, baptize thy Church anew with thy Holy Spirit. Grant us a new vision and a new charity, new wisdom and understanding, that the Eternal message of thy Son may be hailed as the good news of the new age. Give to every Nation a deeper sense of human brotherhood, a new respect for man and reverence for woman, new loyalty in service, new happiness in work and justice in reward; that our homes may be restored in thee, our cities rebuilt in holiness, and the labor of our hands established in righteousness; through Him who maketh all things new, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 13, 1944