That They May Be One 2/18/45
Scripture: I John 2: 3-17
Text: I John 3: 10a; “He that loveth his brother abideth in the light.”
In Honolulu, a woman was speaking to a newspaper reporter. “It made me realize how cockeyed the world really is, she said. She is Mrs. Mary Y. Munford, now serving at the United Seaman’s Service office, in the Hawaiian capital city.
She was describing her experiences with American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, of the 100th infantry division, nearly all of them from Hawaii. She had served in Italy as a field director for the American Red Cross while the men of the 100th were engaged in some of the bloodiest campaigns in Italy.
“At first it gave me quite a jolt,” she admitted. “Here were boys, obviously of Japanese ancestry, fighting against Germans on Italian soil. I saw the 100th division first in Naples, when they were fighting the battle of Cassino. That was a terrific winter. I don’t know whether Hawaiian people can visualize the terrible cold and dampness.
“I saw them again in Rome, where we had organized a rest camp at the Forum Mussolini, a beautiful structure of marble and chrome intended originally for the Olympic games of 1944. We held a swimming meet in the pool, and, of course, the Hawaiian boys won all the firsts. It was after Anzio, and before the north Italian campaign. They were resting from a terrific battle, but they were all very gay.
“Of course, they had a wonderful reputation for fighting, but the thing I like to remember is that when they were on furlough they were always such gentlemen - boys you could be so very proud of. And they were so nice to us. I wore leis almost every day; I realized, then, how cockeyed the world really is.”
Now of course Mrs. Munford was talking to a reporter for a Honolulu newspaper, and her remarks were intended to compliment the men of the 100th to their families and communities at home. But remember that she is a white American, of New England stock, from Springfield, Mass. and Stamford, Conn. Her remarks were made in sincere appreciation of fellow Americans of a skin color differing from her own and ours.
To those who have seen American soldiers in, or near, the thick of the fighting, it doesn’t seem to matter tremendously whether the skin is colored brown, yellow red, black or white. Their loyalty and manhood make them one in a way we hardly grasp here at home.
If such unity of purpose can be found among Americans, surely it is not impossible for us to find a unifying purpose with people of other nations - with all the peoples of the world who are interested in constructive righteousness. I grant that it is not easy; but it seems that we ought to consider it possible and to work for it.
What do we have to do with the brown-skinned, wooly-haired, people of New Guinea and the Solomons? Well, a lot of our soldiers have written home with enough enthusiasm about those people, some of whom are descendants of cannibals, so that I heard an army chaplain say only this week to a group of us ministers: “After I hear the men, returned from the Southwest Pacific, talk about the accomplishments of missionaries among those Island people, I’m going to promote mission study, and giving, harder than ever, when I get back to my church after the war! I’m more than ever sold on missions.”
Well, I rather think we do appreciate those people a bit more after receiving the letters sent home from there by some of our men. But they are a long way off. What of some of the people who live nearer to us - the American Negro, of course - and the American Indian? Is it possible to develop community of interest between these folk and white folk on some sort of unifying basis?
Of course our personal prejudices and a superiority-assuming racial pride are our chief obstacles now and always. It would be healthy for us to remember that, in a spiritual sense, God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” [Acts 17: 26]. It comes a lot closer than we think to being literally true in a physical sense, too. No technical reason - only prejudice - keeps the blood of Caucasians segregated from the blood of Negroes in our country’s emergency blood banks.
There appears this priceless story in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Report for 1943. “It was in West Africa in 1927 that a blood specimen was taken from a black native named Asibi who was sick with yellow fever. This specimen was inoculated into a rhesus monkey which had just been received from India. Asibi recovered but the monkey died of the disease. All the vaccine manufactured since 1927 both by the Rockefeller Foundation and the government, and other agencies as well, derives from the original strain of virus obtained from this humble native. Carried down to the present day from one laboratory to another, through repeated cultures and by enormous multiplication, it has offered immunity to yellow fever to millions of people in many countries. Wherever today in yellow fever areas the armed forces of the Allied nations are stationed. they are protected from the disease by vaccination from this same strain. Through the creative imagination of science, the blood of one man in West Africa has been made to serve the whole human race.” And it is the blood of a man whose skin was dark colored, and whose features were not Caucasian.
Other men and women of his color - not in Africa, but in our land - struggle with increasing impatience for their place in American life - struggle against some obstacles, chief of which is the prejudice of us who have white skins and European features; in the prejudice of employers and labor unions, of schools and community clubs and even churches. Are we going to tackle this problem which we usually call the “Negro” problem but which a recent writer insisted on calling the “white-man” problem at its very roots - at the prejudice level? We Americans can get somewhere with it if we will. And the hour for it is so late that I heard Congressman Walter Judd say with deep feeling last fall that now is our last chance. God is on the side of the colored people of the earth and they will destroy us if we persist in holding them down.
Then again to the smaller minority group - the Americans of Japanese ancestry. A man was riding on a cross country bus bound for Los Angeles. He was reading a popular magazine. In an article written in lavish praise of America, he saw this paragraph: “Our birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, asserts that ‘all men are created equal -- with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’” A little further on he read this: “Today 134,000,000 people still believe in the same ideal which was declared in the first breath of life this nation drew --- We still dare to believe that the most practical thing on earth is an ideal.”
While reading that article, the reader glanced out of the bus window. There, in the land where 134 million people have faith in the ideal of equality for men, in liberty, in the pursuit of happiness, he saw a long stretch of barbed wire. It was not a ranch fence. Behind the fence, on barren land, lay gloomy barracks for more than a mile in straight, unimaginative rows; in these barracks some ten thousand men, women and children, presumably created in that equality with us of which our Declaration of Independence speaks, and presumably endowed with those same inalienable rights the rest of us claim for ourselves, must live their lives, find their liberty, and pursue their happiness. That was Manzanar camp where Japanese evacuees were confined - aliens and citizens alike!
We’re going to be long time living that down - or up. If we really believe our American principles, we had better be doing everything we can to blot out the kind of spirit that made that possible or seemingly necessary.
A young college student, enrolled in a college in Nebraska, was visiting his parents in one of these relocation centers. Later he exclaimed, “What a strange place to come to! This can’t be America!”
The same young man, Yoshio Fukuyama, went on to say, “What has happened to the Japanese American is but a small segment of the greater problem of racism that sears the world. I must be equally concerned about the rights of Negroes, Jews, and other minorities in American life. I must be sensitive to the needs of war victims wherever they are, who are suffering anguish and pain far beyond anything we have yet experienced. I know that how America solves the problem of one-tenth of one percent of her population will determine her effectiveness in the greater world problems. I know that, more important than how you minister to us, is how we Japanese Americans will minister unto the needs of others.”
Well, there is a young man speaking (incidentally on the general subject, “A slant-eyed view of a cock-eyed world”) who is more than an oriental and more than an American. He is trying to be Christian, and in so doing he becomes the finest kind of true American. Our hand of friendship ought to be extended to such as he.
Let me repeat another story as told by a teacher of graduate students in Chicago. Dr. Fred Eastman says: “I have seen the creative spirit work upon the chaos of race relations in Chicago. Some years ago, in our student body at the Seminary, were two boys from the South - one white, the other Negro. They came with the prejudices you would expect - and their prejudices were in conflict. But as they studied in the same classrooms the life and teachings of Christ, the leaven of the Gospel began to work in them. After some months, the white boy came to the conclusion that either his race prejudice was wrong or Jesus was wrong. He must find out. Being a practical young man, he decided upon an experiment. He wrote a note to the Negro, asking him to be his roommate the following term. When the Negro youth received that note, he could scarcely believe his eyes! He took it to some of the leading Negroes in the city and asked advice. They told him he had better not accept. Perhaps the white boy had been studying too hard. Or he may have written in an emotional mood which would soon pass. Anyway, if the experiment were made and turned out a failure, it would only increase the tension. So ran the counsels of caution. But the Negro youth had also been studying the Christian way of life. Moreover, he didn’t want to show less courage than the white boy. So he accepted the invitation, and the two boys roomed together the following year.
“Then came a Sunday in February - Race Relations Sunday. Early that morning,” says Dr. Eastman, “I was asked to substitute for a white minister who was to have spoken at a large Negro church. I agreed, although I had no sermon prepared on the subject of race relations. What to do? As I paced the floor, I suddenly recalled those two boys. I hurried over to the Seminary, found them, and told them they were to be my sermon. Each would take just ten minutes to tell what the experiment had meant to him. They would tell the simple truth. If it had been a mistake, they were to say so. If it had succeeded in part and failed in others - that too must be reported.
“Together,” says Eastman, “we went to the church. When the time came for the sermon, I gave them an introduction of less than two minutes. Then each told his story - a bit falteringly but honestly and sincerely. They had not solved the race problem. They had not come to any conclusion that might be called radical. They found that there was still a great gulf to be bridged before complete understanding could be reached. But of this they had become convinced; they were on the right road, and it was the road of brotherhood. They had formed a David and Jonathan friendship, and each paid tribute to the helpfulness and kindness he had found in the other. When they sat down, that great congregation of Negroes burst out in applause. They had seen the creative spirit at work in their midst. Since that year it is a common thing for men of different races to room together in the Seminary.”
It is worth adding that this Negro student, Arthur Gray, was called last year to the pastorate of that very church - the Church of the Good Shepherd - whose spire can be seen beyond the west end of the University of Chicago’s Midway.
Isn’t something like that the hope - and the only real hope - of an improvement in the relations betweeen the races of mankind? The spirit of Christ put to effect in a few practical neighborly ways can do more than all the carefully laid plans of mice or men can hope to accomplish by laws, regulations, restrictions or customs.
“He that loveth his brother, abideth in the light.” And in that light they may be one in the spirit of understanding.
--------------
Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 18, 1945