The Black Manifesto’s Radical Year, 1969–1970
“From April to December, all hell broke loose.”
Gayraud Wilmore, Presbyterian civil rights worker and theologian, recalled the events of 1969 which surrounded Jim Foreman’s promulgation of the Black Manifesto, a call to Christian churches to pay reparations to Black people.
Gay and Jim had worked together in the 1960s, most prominently as part of an umbrella group of voter registration campaigns in Mississippi called the Hattiesburg Ministers Project. They met again in April 1969 under the auspices of IFCO, the Interreligious-Foundation for Community Organization, which had organized a conference on Black economic development on the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit. Forman was carrying a copy of the Black Manifesto, and mentioned it to Wilmore.
“Forman came to me with the manifesto and talked to me about it and said this is what he was going to do the next day. I asked him if he had talked with other clergy and he had but I don’t remember who else he talked to. I don’t think I saw a document. I just talked to him about it and I was not aware of the full implications of what he was talking about. I said, yeah, why don’t you do it, you know, that kind of thing. My attitude was that this might be something that would be worthwhile.”
In Wilmore’s telling, delivery of the Manifesto caused a confrontation within IFCO, Forman “steamrolled” the proceedings, and amid allegations of vote-rigging, the body approved the Manifesto.
A few days later, on May 4, 1969, Forman would climb to the chancel at Riverside Church in New York City and declaim the Manifesto, only to be drowned out by the church organist, and abandoned by the majority of the congregation, who walked out in silent protest.
From Wilmore’s perspective, “from that point on we were carried along by the momentum of events rather than deciding what the events would be ourselves.”
Later that year, Muhammad Kenyatta, of Forman’s BEDC, led a group which confronted the Philadelphia Society of Friends yearly meeting. The General Council of the UPCUSA likewise spent much of the summer debating the case for reparations.
In the 1982 interview, Oscar McCloud asks Wilmore why the church took so long in deliberation:
“Well, one of the reasons it had some difficulty responding was that while these discussions were going on the offices of the United Presbyterian Church were being occupied back at 475 Riverside Drive.”
Splinter groups of SNCC and BEDC occupied the offices of the Board of National Missions, COEMAR, and the National Council of Churches through May and early June. Depending on the political stripe of the occupier, they were called either sit-ins or “liberated territories.” Staff of the Interchurch Center got a restraining order and Forman’s people left by June 9. The action split the staffs of the church and the NCC, many of whom supported the BEDC. The National Council of Black Churchmen called a protest retreat to reassess strategy. A group called the Ad Hoc Committee for 475 scheduled teach-ins on the case for reparations.
Other bodies were learning to respond to the call for reparations with the rhetoric of self-determination. In June of 1969 the Presbytery of Detroit deputized its chapter of Black Presbyterians United to convene a broad-based economic development group for the inner city. With the same hand, the presbytery rejected the Black Manifesto, “[affirming] the principle of self-determination.” John Quick of BPU announced the agreement to a meeting of the Synod of Michigan and received a standing ovation, while white allies of the BEDC occupied Synod offices.
On May 15, 1969, at the General Assembly in San Antonio, Forman again presented the Black Manifesto. Wilmore missed it. His hotel suite at the time was being occupied by a group of militants with automatic weapons.
Wilmore spent the better part of three days listening to the occupiers and de-escalating the situation. His hotel was in view of the assembly, and the militants made clear that from Wilmore’s balcony, Presbyterian commissioners were within range.
Forman, while not strictly a pacifist, did not call for revolutionary violence. In Wilmore’s telling, the group that took over his hotel room “belonged to a little offshoot or radical offshoot of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that was being courted by Castro and by the Cuban Revolution at the time. Where they got those guns, I don’t know, but those guns were under my bed, packed down in creolin or whatever they call that stuff you pack down new weapons in. And they opened it up and showed ’em to me.”
In plenary, the moderator of the Assembly, Ganse Little, was explaining to the gathered commissioners that the scheduled report of the General Council, the coordinating mission body of the UPCUSA, would be given over to two pressing presentations. Forman, recognizing the related concerns of Brown pastors, yielded the leadoff spot to Antonio Medina, a Presbyterian minister in Los Angeles, who introduced Eliezer Risco editor of La Raza, described to the commissioners as a “barrio communications paper.”
Risco began by linking the struggles of Black and Brown people in this country to the ongoing struggles against colonialism in the Third World, noting that the World Council of Churches at a meeting in Madras had called for the global church to dedicate itself to the self-determination of peoples, and laying responsibility for the crises of the Third World at the feet of the church in the United States, with its “missionaries, money and Marines.”
“The church by omission sometimes, sometimes by silence, but many times by active collaboration has inflicted to people throughout the third world some of the same ills that colonization has brought to the third world. And that doesn’t apply only to people who are third world people in Latin America Africa and Asia, but also to people who are members of that third world here in the U.S.
[…]
I repeat if the church is going to survive the crisis, the church has to make good that promise of self-determination because people throughout the world are involved in a revolutionary struggle for self-determination and liberation.”
One ruling elder commissioner, asked to reflect on what happened at the 1969 assembly, said that upon coming home he was “accused of Communist leanings, and criticized strongly for being willing to lead our United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. down the road to bankruptcy to pay blackmail to Brown Power and Black Power militants who demand reparations from it” Noting that the structure of the church allowed the heat of the deliberations to cool in the saucer of the General Council, he notes that his own opinions changed. “Instead of viewing each item of business as something to be dissected and analyzed to see how it would affect me, I felt compelled to try to view it as Jesus would.”
A teaching elder commissioner pointed out that the UPCUSA had received reparations itself for damage to mission buildings in the Second World War. “Are yesterday’s mission buildings in the Far East more valuable that today’s people in America?”
The Assembly initially considered immediate allocation of $150,000 from the BNM, COEMAR, and BCE to be used by IFCO. One commissioner from Catawba Presbytery, Corine Cannon, recognized the body’s distaste for militancy: “When this money comes, it’s not going to Jim Forman. It’s going to the Black community.”
By the fall of 1969, IFCO would announce more than $20,000 in grants to community organizations, including $12,500 to a voter registration and community organizing group led by Leroi Jones, also supported by $20,000 from the Presbytery of Newark.
Muhammad Kenyatta and his BEDC cohort continued to occupy the Quaker meeting house in Chester, Pa. until the Chester Society of Friends elected to permit the occupation for another year. Kenyatta heralded the move as “the most significant victory so far in the nation for the Black Manifesto”
The UPCUSA General Assembly would call for a committee to present a plan to the 1970 General Assembly to create a grant-making body “to help deprived and dispossessed people.” Interviewed about the nascent fund in January 1970, Edler Hawkins of COCAR said it would be modeled on the churchwide building needs drive, the Fifty Million Fund. Asked to respond directly to white fears that the Black Manifesto amounted to blackmail, Hawkins was measured “We have to consider the responsibility of the church to deal with the needs of people, while at the same time building in the whole principle of self-determination.” asked whether the new fund would support poor whites: “It would be inclusive of poor people of any race or color, including whites.”
The Synod of Catawba would present to the 182nd General Assembly in Chicago a plan for more than $17 million in economic support, including $2 million directly for Johnson C Smith University. They weren’t alone in presenting plans. Additional calls for support came from Native and Mexican American groups, from Black Presbyterians United, and from Forman’s Black Economic Development Conference — still asking for $25 million dollars in reparations.
In response the Assembly authorized the creation of the National Committee on the Self Development of People as an office of the General Council, assigned gifts from the 1971 One Great Hour of Sharing campaign to SDOP, and assigned the committee to plan a major fund-raising campaign for SDOP.
At the end of the Assembly, moderator William Laws led commissioners in a collection for SDOP. Commissioners undertook a day of fasting on May 27 and set aside the cost of their meals for the new fund. Ushers brought in $5178.60. The commissioners then stood and sang the doxology.
By August COEMAR and BNM would pledge 1.25 million to the new fund. By September leadership of the new Committee on the Self-Development of People would be handed to a Union Carbide chemist from Chicago, Dr. Lloyd M. Cooke, and the committee would have its first meeting in New York that November.
Over the next few years SDOP would shoulder abuse at the hands of the Presbyterian Layman for allegedly supplying money to Colombian revolutionaries, and it would overpromise its grantmaking capacity and endure a grantmaking moratorium. It would issue grants in excess of the Synod of Catawba’s $17 million proposal by the end of 1985. SDOP would cross Jim Forman’s threshold demand of $25 million at the end of 1990. The Presbyterian Church would ultimately respond to the Black Manifesto, little by little, over twenty years.
Sources:
Gayraud Wilmore interviewed by J. Oscar McCloud, 1982. CASSETTE 858; Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA
Presbyterian Life, 15 July 1969; 15 September 1969; 1 January 1970.
GA Daily News, 1969.
From dream to reality : a contextual history of the first twenty years of the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People / by James A. Gittings ; with editor’s introduction by John A. Robinson. (1993)
