Interview with Hal Warheim, August 6, 1999

START TAPE 1, SIDE A

Tracy K'Meyer: Like I said, I'd like to start with the beginnings, some background stuff. Could you just tell me when and where you were born?

Hal Warheim: Hanover, Pennsylvania--a small--

TK: Could you spell that please?

HW: H-A-N-O-V-E-R.

TK: Okay.

HW: Named after Hannover, Germany except is has only one "N." When it got to Pennsylvania. Small town, industrial rural town, an agricultural town, in southern Pennsylvania. Born March 14, 1931. My grandparents were, both my grandparents had farms in the area. My family, immediate family, mother and 1:00father, were the first into the town, into the industrial town, and worked in factories at first, and then my father got into sales and personnel relations and got into management at a small business there. I think they had something like eighth-grade educations at most, and out of a very, very big relationship, I was only the second to get a high school education, the first to get a college education. Neither of my two brothers finished high school, and it was only thirty or forty years afterward that one of my nieces went on to college and got a degree.

But education is valued, I think, primarily because my family didn't have it, and we didn't have a lot of opportunity to do so. Hanover, Pennsylvania didn't have a large cultural vision, it was fairly narrow and local. It was predominantly white, a few Jews, no blacks, although we had an amusement park nearby where the blacks would come up from Baltimore and places like that and use it. Consequently, in that type of culture I inherited all of the typical prejudices of a small town. I don't recall my folks verbalizing racial prejudice, but they did verbalize prejudice against Jews and against Catholics, 3:00especially against Catholics. I think my father would have rather I married the town hooker than a Catholic. In fact, he threatened that if I ever married Catholic, or any of the three boys married Catholics, we would be disinherited. I was disinherited anyway for this kind of stuff eventually. My father was an ardent Republican, represented management, was against labor, was very devoted to the first George Wallace, and I was just the opposite, was pro-labor, Democrat and everything. When I got involved with the civil rights movement and he saw me one night being loaded into the paddy wagon on national television 4:00that was too much, he went and changed his will. I didn't find out about it until I read it as the senior son. But at any rate, I had a lot of prejudicial influences growing up. I don't know exactly what challenged that, except that, my parents always treated me with equality, all three of the sons were treated equal, and I think that was one of the shocks about being disinherited, because that was a departure from that which I thought was a sacred principle in the family. At any rate, we three boys were always treated equally, and I think the 5:00concept of equality got into the marrow of my bones, for one thing. The other thing was, you know, I came to rationalize my interest in social justice through the years in my schooling in theology and ethics and the law. I think the root of it goes back to the fact that my parents put me in school when I was five years old, and I was the littlest kid in the class, I was the runt so to speak, and I was constantly getting beat up by the bullies, which I had to fight back myself and if I fought back I just got it more. I think into the marrow of my bones came the feeling that it is really bad to be bullied, to be mistreated, to be oppressed by bigger people. I think that is really the germ of my existential 6:00concern about civil rights and justice and equality and stuff like that. The first evidence, I think, that I was going to do something about social justice and social inequalities, was, I went off to Providence, Rhode Island to school after I left high school, and in those days we traveled by train. I met a porter, a black porter, on the train coming home one vacation, and it was at the time when I had decided to go into the ministry, so I was going to leave Providence and go to one of the denominational schools, which I did. I was going to preach my first sermon in my hometown church, and naively, I invited this 7:00black porter to come into my home, and I invited him to the service. I don't know if I didn't think he would come, there was no reason that he would come, that I could think of, we had nice conversations on the train, but other than that, I didn't think much about it. But, the Sunday afternoon, when I was to preach that evening, this black man came walking down the street and knocked on our door. Of course, I invited him in and of course my parents and my brothers were there. They were aghast, I don't know if they showed it, but this was clearly the first time, and probably the only time, a black ever was in our home, and certainly to eat with us. Probably the first and only time a black was 8:00in my home church. And I don't know what kind of reaction that got, he certainly wasn't turned away. That's the initial experience I had with, I don't know what caused me to cut across the traces.

TK: No one ever said anything to you about it afterwards?

HW: Like the preacher, or anybody at the church?

TK: Yes.

HW: No, no. My parents were obviously, well, surprised, appalled, but they made him welcome at the table, and we went to the church together, and then he left. He didn't stay overnight. I don't know why I did it, but I did it and it stands 9:00out as a significant memory in my history of these things.

TK: Could I ask, why did you decide to go, did you decide to leave school and go into a denominational school, and then why did you decide to go into the seminary?

HW: Well, when I came through high school, since nobody had ever been to college, college wasn't, didn't seem to be in my future. In the high school there were three tracks, a commercial track which was usually taken by girls who were going to become secretaries, and the academic track, which was for the kind of the elite of the town who were going to go on to college, and then there was the vocational track, which had the woodshop and machine shop, with drafting. Consequently, I went into the vocational track. We worked in the shops three 10:00weeks, then we were in classes three weeks, and that was pretty much my experience as a high school student, thinking that after high school I would go into industry. The wirecloth plant or I would have become a tool and die maker or a draftsman or somebody like that. The sports of the high school too were segregated like that. The shop boys dominated the wrestling team, I lettered in wrestling. Football and basketball were the academic students, and the tennis team as well was made up of academics. But my senior year, I fell in love with a girl who was in the academic class, and I learned to play tennis, I learned to play tennis pretty well, so my senior year I made the varsity tennis team. Two 11:00of my buddies on the tennis team were going off to Providence, Rhode Island to become accountants, in Providence, Rhode Island to a business school. I had such a miserable relationship with my father, that I think I went to college just to get away, just to get out of the house, out of the home, out of Hanover maybe. So anyway, I decided I would go to business school with these two tennis buddies. I went to Providence, to a business college called Bryant College, and in contrast to my high school academic record, I did very, very well. Got all A's and B's, and I worked. Then I got involved in a congregational church up 12:00there, became very close with the pastor, and was given all types of opportunities. I was a drama coach, I was a Sunday School teacher, I was this, that and the other, and while keeping up my studies, I began to feel very really good about doing what I was doing, it was very gratifying, very fulfilling. I guess under those circumstances, which were quite different from what I had come out of, I interpret this to be a religious call of some kind. I never heard any voices or things like that, but the conviction grew, that God really wanted me 13:00to be a minister. So, I stayed up there a semester, and by the end of the semester I had pretty well decided I was going to go into the ministry, and the way to do that was to enroll in a denominational school. It was really a good denominational school, Elmhurst College, near Chicago.

TK: That was Congregational?

HW: Elmhurst, no, it was Evangelical and Reformed. The United Church of Christ, which I was ordained into, is a merger of four bodies, two from the English Reformation and two from the German and Swiss Reformation. The congregational Christian churches got together in 1934, the Evangelical and Reformed churches got together in 1931, and then these four denominations came together into the United Church of Christ in 1957, and it's still the United Church of Christ. At 14:00any rate, Elmhurst College was the school elite for people who were going, Reinhold Niebuhr had gone there, H. Richard Niebuhr had been the president there, you can just name all the biggies in the United Church of Christ or at least the N.R. Church, they went there. Walter Brighaman, who is an internationally known--

TK: I've heard of him.

HW:--. Old Testament scholar was a year in back of me.

TK: Wow.

HW: When I decided to go to Elmhurst, I was terribly unprepared to do academic work as a shop boy. As a shop boy, I had no English composition, I had no foreign language, I had no physics, what didn't I have? The English I had was I 15:00had to write a business letter, I could do drafting, I knew how to run machines and so forth. Very, very weak, so I had to take entrance examinations to get into Elmhurst, and apparently passed them very well, so I was in and the first year I really struggled with things like German and English composition and so forth, but there was a faculty that was very supportive and very helpful, and I was elected president of my class first year (laughs). I had developed some leadership skills by the time I got there, but at any rate, after the first year I did very well, I was on the Dean's List, edited the yearbook, wrote for the 16:00paper, was captain of the tennis team, won the Illinois Conference championship, ran cross country, chaired dances, you name it, I did it.

TK: Pretty active student.

HW: Had a great time, a great time doing it. Who's Who in American Universities and Colleges, which is not big stuff, but it was big for me in those days.

TK: Now, when you come out of college, you are still not a, you still have to go to seminary after that, right? So where did you go to seminary?

HW: I went to Eden Seminary in St. Louis. But before I did that, my senior year, at the close of my senior year, I went abroad to work in an ecumenical work camp in Germany. I was to be gone for the summer, and was to attend a work camp in ( 17:00) Germany, which is close to the Rhine River. I was gone the entire summer, and had a chance to travel in England, France, Austria, Holland, hitchhiking mostly. On a shoestring with other college kids, and this broadened my horizons tremendously. I mean, Chicago was a (chuckles), was a great eye-opener--

TK: I'll bet.

HW: In fact, I did my honors project in the department of sociology, I majored in sociology, on the social stratification of hoboes on Chicago's Skid Row. In 18:00those days there were about seventy or eighty thousand homeless workers, mostly men, in a certain ecological area. I lived there for a while, doing a participatory observation study of the nine missions that were there. I slept in the parks, flophouses and everywhere, so that was my senior honors project. But I went to Europe, and the leadership at the work camp was really bad, they had an American leader and a German leader, and the German leader was okay and the American leader was just lazy. Consequently, things started to fall apart, and I 19:00got sucked into the vacuum and took over some leadership responsibilities, so that when the administrators, the executives from Geneva, came through our work camp, to survey how things were going and so forth and so on, the other campers told them that I had exercised leadership functions and had really helped the camp be a success. On the basis of that report, they offered me a year's job heading up an experimental mobile service team, which was made up of international young men from different countries and different faiths. We were to go around working in emergency situations. It was part of the service to 20:00refugees department that was going on.

TK: Just to clarify, this would be early Fifties wouldn't it?

HW: Yes. I graduated in '50--

TK: Because I was adding up, '31 to '51 about?

HW: I graduated in '53, in '53. I had twenty four hours to, no I had, yes twenty four hours to think this over. And I was practically engaged to a girl I had gone steady with in college, who was a year behind me. I was enrolled in seminary, I was enrolled also at Washington University Graduate School of 21:00Sociology, which I went to simultaneously when I got back. But I took the job for a year, and I was to lead this mobile service team they called it, it was an experiment. I was to journal it, to send the reports on and so forth, and I didn't want to be a leader, I was sort of a facilitator, and they didn't want a leader either, it was that kind of group. And over the, I guess fifteen months I was with them, we had two Americans, one Swiss, one Austrian, one German, one English, one French, I guess that was, there were about eight of us.

TK: I assume this is all male?

HW: All male, yes. We lobbied Geneva for women members, but they didn't buy it. (Laughs) And they were probably right. Because we had enough problems as it was. 22:00But anyway, I joined the team, but first, I only had a ship ticket back to the States. As it turned out, that was worth a hundred dollars, and there was a strike on in Paris, and I had to hitchhike to Paris to cash in the ticket to get the hundred dollars, then I was completely stranded. They gave me money to get to France, where I join up with the team. After we worked there with and orphanage, we worked in Austria at a Uggenhiem, a youth center, and from there we went to Holland, where the North Sea and exceptionally high winds and tides 23:00had broken the dykes in about eighty different places in the middle of the winter and flooded about one-eighth of Holland, 25,000 head of cattle lost, 100,000 people had to be relocated. We went in to help patch the dykes and clean out the wells and dig out sand and go in to a lot of, then after that we were sent to Greece to work in an earthquake area on a couple of islands, and it was there that a number of the team developed hepatitis. I guess only the Austrian and I didn't get it, and so that was the end of that project. But, before hepatitis hit the team, Geneva asked me if I would go on to Berlin to work with refugees in a work camp there. So it was after they pulled me out and sent me 24:00there that the team was decimated with hepatitis. So, I finished out my tour then in Berlin, then came back, visited my girlfriend and off to Eden and Washington University. I went to the seminary in the morning and I went to the university school of sociology in the afternoon, and became completely schizophrenic, which I have never recovered from. In the morning I was taught that truth comes by revelation, typically from God or the Bible, and in the afternoon I was told that truth comes from empirical research. (Both laugh) In 25:00the morning I was told that values is the heart of your profession in the ministry; in the afternoon I was told a good social scientist never allows values to influence your research, your perspective. In those days we believed I think in value free science.

TK: Yes, scientists, you know.

HW: So, I had a great time. In addition, on weekends I worked as a field education student in various churches. I loved studying, and I think the year in Europe had kind of clarified my purposes, and given me a stronger identity of 26:00who I was and what I could do. So, when I came to the seminary I was really dug in. I was elected class president again. I graduated first in my class.

TK: Is that a two year program or a longer one?

HW: Three. And I was at the university, Washington University for two years.

TK: I have a question about seminary experience, which is, you were there '54, '55, those years--

HW: I was there from '54 until '57.

TK: Okay. And St. Louis does have more of an African American population than Hanover did, I'm wondering also with the school integration case, was there much discussion at the seminary about race issues.

HW: No. No. When I was at Elmhurst, there were just a couple of blacks. There 27:00were no black faculty, of course, no black administrators, and just the first black students. There were no blacks in my seminary class, there was one woman. There were no black faculty of course, and there was no instruction in the kind of stuff I eventually taught at Union Seminary in New York and here. We had a couple of the faculty people who were into charity, for example, one of my profs would go down to the mission and he would bundle clothing. There was a lot of 28:00rhetoric about social causes, but there were no faculty models for that. Charity, social service, certainly not political action. Even though my denomination, the United Church of Christ, is probably more radical, and has been more radical, on a number of issues at the national level, for example, we are one of four denominations that will ordain gay and lesbian people, unlike the Presbyterians, the Methodists and, you know, all the rest. Some of the ministers I came to regard as models and mentors for what I eventually did were UCC people. But, not, there were no radicals on the faculty; they were liberal 29:00in rhetoric and into charity and social service and social education when it came to social issues. They were not activists in any sense of the word that I would use that word now.

TK: Okay.

HW: I majored in systematic theology. I had an interest in the urban church because of my interest in sociology. There were no courses in urban church, there were no courses in social ethics, there was a course in ethics. There was something on professional ethics, which I remember as the president taught it, and he said, "Never touch a woman parishioner above the elbow." I don't know 30:00what the hell that was supposed to mean. (TK laughs in background) I think the message was pretty clear, but that's the only instruction I remember out of that course on professional ethics. Ministerial Ethics, I guess it was.

TK: So how did you end up in Louisville? You mentioned Union, so?

HW: Okay, I should say that one of the reasons I went to Washington University to study sociology was the head of the department at Elmhurst tagged me as his heir to be, and he wanted me to come back to--

TK: Let me just turn this over.

END Tape 1, Side A

START Tape 1, Side B

HW: Dr. T.H.W. Miller wanted me to be his successor as head of the sociology 31:00department, and in those days I thought, "Wow! Me? A professor?" that kind of thing. I had never been a very ambitious person, I had always been concerned a really good job on anything I did, and let the chips fall where they may. I never wanted to become professor at the Harvard Divinity School, or president of the church or even president of a seminary or anything like that. I always felt that wherever I was, I could do what I wanted to do, and I would do it as best I could, and that would be enough for me, and it has been. I don't have any ambitions that haven't been fulfilled, I still want to do some writing, but I've 32:00published enough to satisfy me too, except I love to write. And I write poetry. Anyway, when I graduated from the seminary, I had the option of going back to Elmhurst to teach, something like four or five thousand dollars a year, and I had gotten married my senior year, so I began to feel like I really couldn't live on that (laughs). In the meantime, also, I had scholarships, full scholarships, to Yale and to Columbia University, for graduate studies. I chose to go on to Columbia. While I was there--

TK: Was that Sociology graduate study?

HW: No, religion. The department is called religion and society, and it was a new program, and a half-day program, and I was the only one in the department, unlike Old Testament, for example, Walt Brighaman went to Union's Old Testament department and he had all kinds of colleagues, like Bill Stribble and people like that, and I was, New Testament was the same, history was the same. I was the only person in Religion and Society, and it was so half-baked that nobody knew, I forget how many different departments I studied in, took courses in, in order to fill the requirements. I was in sociology, religion, I was in ethics, I 34:00was in philosophy, economic and political philosophy, comparative religions. I came away from Columbia with the broadest possible exposure to everything, which I was very happy for. It made no, had no center, had no focus, and consequently, when it came time for me to do my dissertation, they didn't have anybody at Columbia that could chair something in urban church, for example. It was not a good program, and I think maybe, well, I chose Columbia because of New York City, and that was a good decision too. I love New York, and I loved all the experiences I've had there. New York was a great education for me. I think I would have had a better program if I would have gone to Yale, But New Haven is 35:00not New York City.

TK: That's true.

HW: And, anyway, where was I?

TK: You were about to say, you started to say something about Union, while you were in New York, or while you were there at Columbia.

HW: Well, okay--

TK: Because I left with how you ended up at Union.

HW: Well, I was in the religion, and at the same time I was working for he denomination, department of urban church and evangelism, doing a field study for them

of a number of churches in Waterbury, Connecticut. So, I worked at that part-time for a couple of years, and did a study for them on the way that urban mission developed. Then I got a job as a tutor at Union Seminary, which is just 36:00across the street, in a little department was called Church and Society, that was the academic tutoring I did. I was also a tutor with the department of fieldwork, and I was responsible to supervise all of the students who were in inner-city churches and urban missions situations. My students were involved in racial ministries, gang ministries, prison ministries. The East Harlem Protestant Parish, which you may have heard about--

TK: Actually, I think I have heard the name.

HW: That was one of the big mission experiments. Notorious and very successful in the inner-city of Harlem, and Lettie Russell, which is a name you may know, she teaches at Yale, she was one of the founding ministers. Bill Webber was 37:00another, a former Navy chaplain and on and on and on. They were a great model for urban ministries in those days. In those days, the city was regarded as God's gift to the church. That was a fine piece of rhetoric, and there were quite a few people who really took it seriously, but overall, the church is scared to death of the city. I mean it represents secular culture to the max, and the church still doesn't know what to do with it. Anyway, I did that for two years, then--(pauses)--then, um--let's see, I was approached again to go back to 38:00Elmhurst, to do sociology, and at the same time I was approached by Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, to occupy their new chair of Christianity and Society. In the late fifties, it was very chic for seminaries to set up chairs like this, because the civil rights movement was going on, and there were things fermenting about women and so forth and so on. So, a number of seminaries set up social ethics, or church and society, or Christianity and Society, as I chose to name this. Anyway, Louisville in 1958 decided they were going to have to have a chair in this business, so they set one up. Then, since the seminary was owned and operated by both the Northern and the Southern Presbyterian Churches, which are 39:00now merged into the Presbyterian Church USA, they searched both denominations for somebody who could occupy this chair and do the job for them. They didn't find anybody, because Presbyterians in those days didn't produce people like me. But, the United Church of Christ, because of Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr, produced a lot of these people. So, for example, in the year I came here, Bob Lee, a UCC minister, went to San Francisco seminary; Merrill Lewis, UCC, went to Seabury, which is an Episcopalian center. So, the other denominations were raiding the UCC for people in this field. Finally, after looking into both, searching for somebody in both the Northern and Southern 40:00Presbyterian Churches and coming up with nobody, for the first time they started looking outside the denomination and found me at Union. I came down, I had never been to Louisville before, I didn't even know where Louisville was really, and when I talked to the president at Union about job placements, he said, "is there anyplace you don't want to go?" And I said, " Yes, I don't want to go south." And he immediately thought this had to do with prejudice against prejudiced people. But, I just don't like humidity and heat. So this is as far south as I ever want to go, in particular. Guess, to make a long story short, I looked at Elmhurst again, and I looked at this, and there's really not a lot of jobs like 41:00this in the country. Even though it was chic in those days to set up a department like this, most seminaries didn't have one and still don't have one. In fact, since I left the seminary, they didn't replace me. They don't want anybody like me, we can get into that, but I mean, I wasn't replaced. There is nobody over there teaching now, what I taught. So, anyway, I came down here and 42:00in those days, the recruiting process involved preaching in the chapel, and having a one-to-one conversation with every member of the faculty. Then, at night, and of course the president would wheel you around town and show you what a neat place Louisville is, and in those days they had houses for all the faculty, so you would move into a seminary house. I had never lived in a house, not at least since I left my home, and I was married, a house would look good I guess. I loved New York, and I loved living in an apartment, I became a very provincial New Yorker, and then at night, the entire faculty would assemble down 43:00at the Pendennis Club, where the president had a membership, I tell you this because in those days Pendennis Club was not integrated to women, blacks, Jews, but our president had a membership there, and that's where we went for those faculty interviews. We would have a private dining room and we would sit down, have a nice dinner, and after dinner was over, the candidate was expected to get up and make a provocative little speech that would stimulate conversation while the rest of the group sat around and smoked big cigars. No alcohol, no good bourbon or wine or anything like that, but cigars. They offered me the job, and 44:00I came down, and I think as I went around talking to the various members of the faculty, I sensed that there was no unified vision about what they wanted this new chair to be, or who or what kind of person they wanted to fill it. Everybody had a different idea of what I would do, or what I ought to do. From George Edwards to the other extreme, I would say Harry Gooden, he just recently died, he was the top professor of Christian Education, and Dr. Love was the New Testament, and of course they were very conservative and George was on the other extreme. Along that continuum, there was no clear vision of, or unified vision 45:00of, so I figured whoever took the job was going to have a lot of freedom, lot of independence, and probably a lot of pressure coming from all different sides, and that would cancel itself out, so it really would, and that's the way it turned out. So, I had a lot of autonomy in deciding what I would teach and so forth. When I came down, they promised me that I would have equality with the other departments. In those days, the entire curriculum was required, and so that other departments had at least two required courses, and some, like New Testament, had three. And initially I had one, but I was promised parity with 46:00the other departments, but that promise was never fulfilled. I'm not exactly sure why, I don't know if I didn't fulfill, I wasn't going in the direction that the powers that be wanted me to, or we went through curricular reforms. You know, in a seminary curriculum the Bible is just more important than anything else, and then you have church history which is more important, and doctrine which is more important than everything else. When you get to things like Christianity and Society, or in those days Psychology of Religion, I mean, it is no show. So that promise was never fulfilled, and I felt peripheralized, I felt marginalized, I felt unequal, although for the most part I was treated very well 47:00by the senior members of the faculty. In fact, for the first few years, I would say probably from sixty-, I came in sixty-two, from sixty-two until maybe sixty-seven, crucial date, I was really the darling of the older faculty.

TK: Oh, really?

HW: I was preaching things and writing things, I was more Calvinistic than any of them (laughs). Which is a surprise now, because I don't even have anything to do with the church anymore. But I was the darling of the faculty, I was writing things and preaching thing and saying things and doing things that, not politically active things, but doing things that they really, really liked. I 48:00got a lot of praise, a lot of support and a lot of encouragement, and one guy even thought I was the next Reinhold Niebuhr. (Laughs) Which, Niebuhr was my advisor when I was at Union. He had had his stroke by then, but he was still lecturing and running around from Princeton, Harvard and I didn't get a lot of help out of him for a number of reasons. And he's not one of my great heroes or anything like that.

TK: But it's good on a resume.

HW: What?

TK: But it's good on a resume. (Laughs)

HW: (Chuckles) Oh, yes. Well, it was people like Bob Spike, who was martyred in the Civil Rights struggle. He was my boss when I worked for the UCC and we 49:00would, in fact, he was murdered in the room at Ohio State University where we had stayed on a couple of occasions, and Bill Weber, from East Harlem Protestant Parish, these are the people I really looked up to, it wasn't the really academic people, the theoreticians. I was interested in practical ethics, professional ethics, social ethics that had an activist cutting edge to it, and I admired the people who were doing these things. Now, Niebuhr has a good activist resume as well, but not in the same way that Spike and Weber and Archie Hargroves and Martin Luther King and some of the other people did. So, in those early years, I established a real strong moral relationship, a strong 50:00commitment, to the seminary, which after the other kind of years developed, it took an awful long time for that initial commitment to wear thin, and to the point where I became estranged and alienated from the institution I was working with, and became very critical of what I saw religion and theology doing, vis-à-vis the social issues that I was concerned about. So--

TK: Do you want to, I was going to say, we could either first talk about what you individually did or we could talk about the role of, more about the seminary and what you were teaching, things like that?HW: Those things are related. (Pauses)

TK: It's a little like the chicken and the egg. But one question I was going to ask, just what were your impressions of Louisville, when you got here, in terms of race relations and some of the issues that you might have been interested in?

HW: Well, my social conscience at that point really had not developed to the place where it should have been in the early sixties. I didn't go south to Selma for example. I didn't go on the Freedom Rides.

TK: Were you involved at all with the Open Accommodations, which would have been almost over by the time you got here?

HW: Yes, it was pretty well over by the time I arrived. I participated in that 52:00on the periphery over in Frankfort. That was led pretty much by Frank Stanley, Jr. as I remember it, but I was on the periphery of that. Of course, I knew about the leadership that Louisville had taken in the school desegregation business. What they did very quickly, under the leadership of, I guess the superintendent, was to desegregate very quickly and without a lot of ruckus, so I knew about that. Seminary was downtown in those days, so I spent the first two years of my tenure down at the old building, which is now the Junior, Jefferson 53:00Community College, and the decision had already been made to move the seminary out to Cherokee Park. The argument was that this old building needs so much work, and even after the work was done on it, it will not be a first-class educational institution. As a result, we moved out and it became a (laughs) first-class educational institution. But the seminary moving to Cherokee Park was part of the churches' flight to the suburbs in the fifties and the sixties. I mean a lot of churches moved out, the seminary, well went out. And of course, the churches put up an awful lot of money to pay off those new buildings very quickly. I mean, there was no substantial debt at all. And Frank Colwell, the 54:00president in those days, who raised most of the money, raised it down at the Pendennis Club, from rich Presbyterians who also belonged down at the Pendennis Club. Then we moved out to the seminary, which was a loss for me, because for my department, because for me, us, the department, the work, the students to be down there in the heart of the city, made it easy to go to meetings, for example, that were held downtown by the NAACP or Urban League, or whatever else was going on. But to go back to this good relationship with the seminary, I was at the seminary three years, first I was called to be an associate professor, I was given tenure in three years.

TK: Wow--

HW: It was wild, they liked me that much, and there were a couple of other 55:00seminaries that liked me too, and wanted me, and when Louisville found out about it, they quickly gave me tenure. So, I had tenure in three years, and I guess the next step comes to this Open Housing thing, 1967. As I recall, the civil rights organizations were trying to get an Open Housing Bill, or Ordinance, passed by the Board of Aldermen for about two years. There was a Republican administration, Mayor Schmeid, and Republican Board of Aldermen, who vacillated 56:00and postponed and promised and didn't do anything. And consequently, the black leaders, and the white leaders, but mostly the movement was led by black leaders at this point, got tired of the game, and I guess, just decided to go to the streets with it. I was on the board of the Civil Liberties Union at that time, and I was chair of their Minority Relations Committee. I think it was in the fall of sixty-six, that the black leaders, along with some white leaders as 57:00well, formed the Committee on Open Housing, or something like that, I could look it up, but you could look it up. And the leaders were, A.D. Williams King, who was the brother of Martin Luther King, Hulbert James, Leo Lesser, of course Anne Braden was there, Lukie Ward, I don't remember George [Edwards] being in the inner circle of that, Charlie Tachau certainly, anyway I've ticked them all, and there were some other black ministers whose names just don't come to mind at the 58:00moment. They set up this Committee on Open Housing, which was a coalition with representative from a number of places, and I got on the committee by virtue of representing the KCLU. So, they decided they were going to put some pressure on the city administration to do something, and started marches and demonstrations went on for a while, then the city went to the courts and got an injunction against the marches. It was when that happened that the spit really hit the fan, this was in the winter I think, maybe February, March, April, May, certainly May, it was April and May, end of March maybe, I think, if I remember correctly. 59:00At any rate, we, I say we, the Committee on Open Housing, with support from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we had access to them, their wisdom, their experience, maybe money, I don't know, but Martin Luther King came here a couple of times, we had Hosea Williams, who was one of the chief organizers for Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who was here quite a lot and helped to develop strategy. We decided to march against the court injunctions, which meant, automatically, that we were subject to arrest and of course prosecution, all of that. We decided to do that, and strategically chose the South End of 60:00Louisville for the marches. Which, was really a very wise move because of the reaction that we generated, and the more reaction, the more hostility we generated, the more the people on the fence and on the periphery of the movement decided, "Hey, this has gone too far, let's get this behind us." So anyway, we started marching in the South End of town, eventually driving our cars out to the University of Louisville and then going from there. And of course, always accompanied by police, and usually when we decided to march on a given street, when we got there, there were just hordes, masses of what we called hecklers along the streets, waving Confederate flags, throwing concrete, bricks, rocks, 61:00cherry bombs, yelling, hooting, jeering. So usually we were glad the police were around, because they protected us.

TK: How many of you were there?

HW: Not great numbers. There were probably a hundred marchers, maybe a hundred and fifty at max. And a lot of young people, a lot of teenagers for example, particularly when they started arresting people, because the older folks, who had jobs, certainly couldn't afford to be arrested--

END TAPE 1, SIDE B

START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

HW:--charges on which I was arrested was contributing to the delinquency of minors.

TK: Oh really?

HW: Yes. Well, they had a lot of charges. I mean, Charlie Tachau was arrested on--

TK: Drunkenness or something wasn't he? No?

HW: No, conspiracy, I mean in those days that particular charge carried with it a penalty of something like fifty years in jail or something like this.

TK: Oh my goodness!

HW: I don't remember the specifics, I shouldn't try to get specific about it. But it was a major felony.

TK: What was the racial mix of these marches and ( ) as well?

HW: They were mostly black, mostly black, and when the demonstrations became illegal and generated so much hostility, it split the forces, the civil rights forces that were behind it prior to that. For example, prior to the injunction 63:00we had a number of Roman Catholic priests who were involved in the demonstrations and in the movement. Once the marches became illegal, the archbishop pulled, who was, I can't remember his name anymore, but he was a very conservative guy to begin with, but when they became illegal, all the Roman Catholic priests disappeared. To his credit, Bishop Marmion supported, Bishop Marmion interestingly enough, I learned just a couple of years ago, is a member of the Pendennis Club, (laughs) which is a curious, curious thing. I would have never suspected it, because in those days, Bishop Marmion really supported his 64:00Episcopal priests in the movement, so that you had a Charlie Tachau and there were a couple of others who he stood behind, and they were there representing his good conscience. So anyway, the Episcopal priests, but it split the black leadership as well. There were skirmishes among some of the blacks.

TK: What were the sides, I mean not necessarily the people, but how did it break down, what was the debate there?

HW: Well, it wasn't, the dissent is never over the goal. Everybody wanted open housing, at least in the black community. But it was over the tactics, and the tactics were felt to be extreme and counterproductive, and that kind of thing.

TK: Because it was violating an injunction? Or--?

HW: And causing so much unrest and disturbance and hostility. And I don't know 65:00how true this is, or how true it still is, but there were leadership turf issues there too, I mean as to who was going to lead and who was going to call the shots and who would get the credit for it. I felt this was really beneath the black leadership, but that has been not uncharacteristic of our black community in the years that I have been an observer. So that you had the NAACP, and you had the Urban League, and then you had this Open Housing committee and so forth.

TK: Well, there certainly seems to have been a lot of organizations in Louisville's history, a lot of different civil rights groups. So, you said, and 66:00I have read in notes at one point that there might have been some conflict. Did SCLC come in to help or did, how did that happen?HW: Well, I suppose A.D. Williams King, who was Martin Luther King's brother, called up and said, "Hey, come on up."

TK: So they sent volunteers?

HW: Yes. Hosea Williams was the chief organizer and they also sent other people up whose names I don't remember anymore, but there were a number of really good, dedicated, savvy people that came from SCLC.

TK: So you were attending these marches. How regularly would you go?

HW: Every night.

TK: Every night. Could you describe one, sort of walk me through an evening then, what would happen?

HW: Yes. Some of them I led and some of them I was back in the pack. We marched, 67:00as I remember, every night for six weeks. Monday through Friday I think, we didn't march Saturdays or Sundays, but we marched every evening, for I remember, about six weeks. Freedom songs, chants, I've so sick of those things after a while (laughs), even today I have a kind of revulsion against singing "We Shall Overcome," you know, when I go to gay-rights marches or this, that and the other. Six weeks of that was quite enough. Anyway, like I said, we first went out and gathered, driving our own cars, but then the hecklers started to throw 68:00rocks and slabs of concrete into the cars and smashed windows and dented fenders and that kind of thing. So then, we hired U-Hauls, and we all piled in the back of the U-Haul trucks and drove out to where we were going to march. Then they banged up the trucks in the same way. So finally we had to go to Cincinnati to hire U-Haul trucks. But we would gather at certain places and we would be picked up and we would sit in the back of the U-Haul truck and we would go out to the South End of town, and then we would unload in the presence of police, we would line up and then we would start marching down between this gauntlet of hecklers, with the ( ) and the Confederate flags and so forth and so on. They were nasty 69:00and they were also dangerous. One night I was marching in back of Martin Luther King, who was hit in the face with a rock. A young, to-be mother was marching to my side and she was hit with a slab of concrete, there were cherry bombs exploding around, like I said we were grateful that the police were there, they were shooting off revolvers, it was spooky. It was scary. Then, after a while, I guess the police decided, what's his name, Bill--.

TK: Warner, you said before.

HW: Bill Warner, I guess, maybe decided to try to stop these illegal marches, or 70:00maybe as safety director he was just concerned about our safety, or just the public peace. They started to gas and arrest people. When they started doing that, of course, they would arrest first I think they arrested the leaders, that is to say the people who were on the front of the line. And then we started putting the leaders back in the middle of the pack, then they arrested everybody. We would exchange places, I mean, I would lead some nights, and there would be somebody else leading another night, and somebody else yet another night. But after a while, the police and the safety director knew who the leaders were, but the arrests I remember were after we were tear-gassed and 71:00everybody was taken, I mean any number of people were taken.

TK: You were arrested on one occasion or more than one occasion?

HW: Just, I think one occasion. I was just arrested on one occasion. But I was leading that night. I was gassed and I was hauled away in a police car as I remember, and taken down to the jail. And as a leader that night, I was arrested on felony charges, everybody else was, there were four of us, I guess, that were leading that night, I was a white and there were three blacks. They arrested the leaders on felony charges and they arrested everybody on misdemeanor charges. They put all the misdemeanor people in a big cell or two, where they sang and 72:00had a good time. They separated those of us who were under felony charges and put us in with real felons, so that I was in with a bank robber, a rapist and I forget what the fourth one had done--

TK: Oh my goodness!

HW: And then the other three blacks were treated the same way. I remember being put in the cell, and these three people asking me what I had done (laughs), and I say "I was leading a civil rights march," (still laughing). It boggled their mind.

TK: And these are whites, because it was segregated cells. So were you in the--

HW: The three felons I was in with were white. Anyway, on that particular night, in the middle of the night, I was taken out of the cell and taken over to the 73:00old county jail, which was around the corner, with the three blacks who had also been arrested on felony charges, and we were put into a big room with glaring lights, and benches that were bolted to the cement floor, and just put in there. No place to lie down, no water, I don't remember any toilet facilities either, but we were put in there in the middle of the night and just left there, no explanation, no nothing. We would talk among one another and, not about anything significant, because we figured maybe we were being heard. Then, later on in the night, a white drunk was thrown in there with us, for some reason, and we 74:00figured that he was an eavesdropper, so we didn't really talk about anything much. Although I remember that blacks in intimate conversation very often refer to one another as "niggers." And they call each other "nigger." And one of the badges of honor that I brought out from that night was that they called me "nigger" too.

TK: Oh, really?

HW: I was a "nigger," "us niggers." (laughs)

TK: Uh huh. (Laughs as well)

HW: I felt really good about that I guess. I was a "bro" now, I guess you might say. Anyway, in the morning then, we were all taken over to court and arraigned, 75:00and Dan Taylor got us out, and I was never convicted. Most of us were never convicted, maybe none of us were ever convicted because the laws on which we were arrested were challenged and decided to be unconstitutional. We were able to get rid of some laws as well as establish a law about open housing.

TK: Just two questions but then I want you to go on with the story.

HW: Did I cover the demonstration?

TK: The description of the march? Did you, this may seem like a silly question, but did you fear for your physical safety, literal physical safety or either during the marches or afterward during your arrest?

HW: Well, at one point my picture was on the front page of the Courier-Journal 76:00leading a demonstration, and I was identified as who I was. Consequently, I got all kinds of hate mail, most of it unsigned, most of it obscene. The phone would ring constantly at night, I would be in bed sleeping and the phone would ring, and I didn't know if it was somebody who needed me, or somebody from the movement, or what, so I would pick it up. There would usually be nobody there except somebody breathing very hard, which is a spooky sound, especially in the middle of the night when you are coming out of a sleep, and sometimes it would be real bad stuff. One call I remember said something like, "Your time has come, 77:00you're going to get yours." or something like that. It spooked me a little bit, I didn't know if I should go out and start my car or not. Marching in the South End, I was scared of the heckler, yes, I was afraid, sure. I was afraid. And my wife, who did not share my civil rights sentiments and who did not understand what in the hell I was doing, she was a Missourisan and Lutheran, I was used to seeing a radical, social activist background. Misourrisans and Lutherans are just the other end of the world, and she didn't understand this, and she feared and felt that she had to explain me to the public. Like when we went to church, 78:00they didn't understand either, and she felt like she had to explain me, which I kind of resented, actually. I didn't want to be explained, I wanted to be understood, I guess. But yes, courage is sometimes defined as fear that said its prayers, or something like that. So, if I was courageous at any point, it was not without fear, it was in spite of the fear. I never feared that they would do anything to my wife, but I was criticized by fellow pastors in the UCC. I got 79:00criticism and no support from the seminary. My church became the ACLU, and I got into this because of the ACLU, not because I was professor at the seminary, although, the way I defined my job at the seminary, it was the most important thing in my job to be where I was. It was not my job to be sitting in the library writing about this, it was my job to be out there doing, modeling, striving for what my department was all about. And that activist orientation to my work was something that the seminary never understood, expected, wanted and 80:00so forth. They were happy when I was saying things, and preaching things and writing things and publishing things about this. And I guess they looked forward to the day when Hal Warheim would have a shelf of books like Reinhold Niebuhr on this that and the other thing in my field, and I felt that if I was going to achieve anything, it had to be part of organizations that had the power to change the social structures that were evil.

TK: I have so many questions, I don't know where to start. How did your students react?

HW: (Pauses to think) I guess I can answer that generally from a career of 81:00thirty, maybe thirty-five years of teaching in this area, and also for clergy who get involved in this kind of thing. Ministers and teachers like me typically have fans, not followers. I had a number of students who admired what I did. I had a handful of students who went with me, and George Edwards and one other part-time faculty member into the trenches, into the fight. I see a lot of ministers like that around town, I think for example Jim Chatham has, down at 82:00Highland Presbyterian Church, has a good social conscience and has done lots of things, and his congregation adores him, but they don't follow him. Although they'll go to Habitat for Humanity and knock a couple houses up and they'll give money to this that and the other thing, and they'll have, they'll march on Easter Sunday morning to have a joint service with a black congregation, but you see Jim Chatham at an anti-war demonstration, or an anti-death penalty demonstration, you don't see, well, that's a model for, and Gil Schwoerlucke, and George, George Edwards probably has the record at the seminary for having had more proposals voted down in faculty than anybody else in the history of the 83:00school, or ever will. I can remember George bringing this proposal and that declaration and lets--he brings it up, he raises the issue, gets voted down, you know, until the next time. In this particular civil right, on this particular civil rights issue, we had three faculty, George Edwards, myself and I can't remember his name but he was teaching Doctrinal Theology on just that year I think, he was not, not on tenure track. The three of us were the three faculty that got involved, participated in the demonstrations, got arrested, went to 84:00jail. And then there were a handful of students who got involved and did the same thing as we did. Not a majority by a long shot, I'd say maybe twelve at most, at most. When they started arresting us, one of the city's tactics was to put exorbitant bail bond charges on us. They wanted to break our treasury, which was not very substantial, and there were a couple of people who even mortgaged their houses to come up with the money to get us out of jail. They put these 85:00outlandish charges on us, exorbitant charges on us, so that they could charge us these great amounts for bail, and the treasury was weak, so each of us was sent out to see what kind of money we could raise, so George and I, we went to the faculty for support, moral support and also some financial support. And the conclusion of that was, the faculty said, "We think everybody should do on this issue according to their conscience." Which was no support at all. "We think it's good for you to do this if your conscience dictates this,

but for the majority of us, our conscience doesn't dictate this. So we got nothing, not even moral support from the faculty for this, as I remember. We 86:00certainly didn't get any money. And we went to the student organization, the student body I guess was about a hundred or something like that. The student body, by a vote of something like 51-49, gave us some money, I don't remember how much.

TK: That was close.

HW: But it was support and it was financial. So, on that matter, the student body as a whole was supportive. But that's kind of too like fans vs. followers. We had twelve followers so to speak, but we had maybe half the student body were fans. Board of Directors was an entirely different thing. I mean they were worse than the faculty. They were concerned about our conservative constituency that 87:00gave them money, and who really didn't like what George Edward and Hal Warheim and some of these students were doing. So there was hell to pay from them. Did I answer your question?

TK: Yes, and actually that's interesting about the students too. I hadn't thought about that, but, I mean in terms of the students voting in terms of sort of moral support but not actually doing something.

HW: And we got some money too. I don't remember exactly how much it was, but they came up with something.

TK: Did you do, and you talked about this everyone going off to do some fundraising, did you do any other activities like that, other than marching in other words, in the open housing fight, what other kinds of activities related to open housing were you involved with?

HW: There were strategy meetings, there were marches, there was reporting, back to the ACLU, the KCLU in those days, it's now the ACLU of Kentucky.

TK: Could you describe a strategy meeting?

HW: Not very well conducted meetings, but the core were, Lukey Ward, Anne Braden, I was in on them but I was not very prominent, I was just there, and I learned. Martin Luther King was there a couple of times, A.D. Williams King, Hosea Williams and some of the other people from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They would talk about what they were going to do, and why they were going to do it, and what was working, what wasn't working, and what's the city going to do next, and strategy stuff. I remember one piece of strategy 89:00in particular, that was quite controversial. These marches were going on as Derby Week, or the Derby, well Derby Week, it's now almost two weeks, the Derby Week was approaching. And Hosea Williams came up with the idea of running a couple of black kids across the homestretch during the Derby. Well, this was quite a provocative tactic to be suggested, and it didn't fly exactly highly in the strategy meeting, as I remember. But, the Courier-Journal was really supportive, I mean, without the Courier, I don't think we would have been as 90:00successful as we were. But they were supportive in those days with the Binghams in control, it was a good town to work in because of the liberal support from the Courier. So, we had, we were very careful about our relationships with the Courier, and particularly with Barry Bingham, Sr., and I was one of the liaisons to the Courier, particularly to Barry Bingham, Sr. I remember, Ray Bixler and I went to Barry Bingham, in his big office at the corner of Fifth and whatever it is, to find out how Barry Bingham, Sr. would react to this particular tactic. Because we figured it was a little controversial, and we didn't want to lose 91:00him, so we thought we had better check it out with him first. We went down, as I remember, in his very erudite, I'm not sure what other words to use, way, he hit the ceiling. Barry Bingham didn't hit the ceiling, but you knew this was an explosive idea. He came down pretty hard on it, and Louisville, it was Barry Bingham. Sr.'s town, and the Courier, one of the days in the year, maybe the only day in the year, when his town gets into the national eye, and Barry Bingham was not going to allow Louisville to be in the national eye with someone running across the track on Derby Day. So, I took that information back, and I 92:00don't know if it was just because of that, but it didn't have a lot of support either in the strategy meeting, and consequently, it was rejected.

TK: Let me turn this over.

END TAPE 2, SIDE A

START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B

HW: However, some of the core leaders, like Anne Braden, Charlie Tachau, A.D. Williams King and a couple of others, had been arrested, I think it was, on contempt of court, it may have had something to do with the marches that were illegal and so forth, anyway, they were arrested on contempt of court, and they weren't put in jail immediately, but strategically the city decided to put them 93:00in jail the beginning of the weekend and the first part of Derby Week. That's the way it went. Consequently, the key leaders designing strategy were in jail, on the Monday prior to Derby. Churchill Downs was having races, and while they were in jail, Hosea Williams got a couple of black kids to run across the homestretch on a race anyway.

TK: Not Derby though?

HW: Wasn't Derby, it was the Monday before Derby. It was during one of the races, he had two black kids, as I remember, run across in front of the horses, from the infield to the outside on one of the races. Contrary to what the 94:00strategy group had decided, contrary to what Barry Bingham would have liked, Hosea Williams, who was really headstrong, independent organizer and strategist, decided he was going to do this anyway, and did it. It exploded, and it exploded in our favor. Because that Monday night, and another thing that went on continually were rallies in churches, black churches, where people would come in and sing, and on a couple of occasions Martin Luther King was here and preached, and other speakers would speak and we'd sing and chant and so forth and so on, and sometimes at the close of the meetings we would file out of the church and 95:00march down the street and go in front of City Hall and things like that. That was another thing that went on, on a regular basis. Well, by the time those leaders were put into jail, those church meetings were starting to dwindle in numbers and enthusiasm. The night after those kids ran across the track, the church was packed, and it was packed full of enthusiastic people who, I guess, finally realized that we were for real, we were serious, we were damn serious, dead serious and would go to any length to get this ordinance. I don't think that had registered before those kids ran across the track.

TK: Really?

HW: It just mysteriously pumped new energy into the movement. Then, of course, 96:00the leaders got out of jail, and I don't remember that they, I don't think they publicly criticized Hosea Williams, they may have done it privately but I didn't hear that. But at any rate, they got out of jail and this event, plus the ongoing demonstrations which were just about petered out now, because we didn't have any more money for bail bonds, in fact, the demonstrations were, I think, finally defeated because the financial resources were depleted, but we practically closed down Derby Week. All kinds of events were cancelled. The parade was cancelled, the Derby Parade was cancelled. There were other events cancelled, but that was the big one, I don't think the Steamboat Race was 97:00cancelled. In fact, I don't know if they had a Steamboat Race in those days. But at any rate, the parade was the big thing, and they were so afraid of riots and demonstrations and so forth they cancelled the parade, they cancelled a number of other things where they expected trouble. Then Derby went on without any trouble, but they were scared to death about Derby, but soon thereafter, the marches were phased out. Then, with the support of the AFL-CIO, the Kentucky AFL-CIO, Sam, I can't remember the name of the leaders in it, but at any rate, 98:00with the support of the labor movement here, the local labor movement here, and other black leaders, I think maybe Susie Post was involved in this too, we designed a voter registration drive, and I was on the executive committee of that, along with a number of other people. As a result of that voter registration drive, I think we registered about 5,000 new voters, particularly in the West End, particularly blacks, and that seemed to make an impression on people, and particularly the Democratic candidates for Aldermen, with whom somebody entered into a deal, that if these people, in the liberal community and 99:00the people who were now tired of all of this fuss and stuff going on, would support them in the election, if they would promise to vote for the open housing ordinance. So, when the election was held, the Republicans were thrown out, the Democrats went in, and we got the open housing--

TK: Almost right away, right?

HW: Yes, almost right away. There was also another group. I said Dan Taylor was the only attorney that would come out on the point with us, get us out of jail and represent us and support, that was true. A number of attorneys were scared to take that kind of stand. But there was a young attorneys group in town, Bill 100:00Martin, who taught at the law school at one point, and who is now president of Franklin College up in Indiana, he also went off and got a theology degree, he blamed me for that, as it turned out he became double competency in theology and law as I was. But, Bill Martin and a number of young attorneys researched open housing laws and ordinances around the country, and were responsible, I think, for drafting the ordinance that finally was passed.

TK: One of the things I was going to ask on this, because you are doing a lot of 101:00this behind the scenes type stuff, there were also these sort of public forums, public discussions, I think that was fairly early, maybe even before the marches. Were you involved in that in any way?

HW: No. No.

TK: I think Ray Bixler was involved in that.

HW: Probably, I mean that would be his, one of his sports I think.

TK: One of my questions I have is, you said that you were doing this as an ACLU person, not a seminary professor, but what, I don't even know how to phrase this question, but what difference, if any, does it make that you are a white person doing this. I mean, what do you think your contribution was in that way, or did it make any difference at all?

HW: Oh, I think it was very, it was important to me, as a white person, to do 102:00this. I would think it would be important to have whites in a movement like this, for the blacks as well. I still call them blacks. I can easily call them Afro-Americans, but in my lifetime, I have heard blacks called "niggers," "Negroes," "Blacks" and "Afro-Americans." As far as I can tell, the nomenclature hasn't made a Goddamn bit of difference, so far as their rights and benefits in this society are concerned. So, I'm willing to go with Jesse Jackson, who says, "We want to be Afro-Americans." That's all right with me, but I'm more interested in the substance than the nomenclature with this issue. So, I'll 103:00continue to call them blacks, which is what, I guess, where I got fixed. There were a number of white people involved, significantly involved. I think of Charlie Tachau for example; I think George Edwards. Bishop Marmion not on the front lines but certainly the support he gave his priests. I can't think of an awful lot--well the women, Anne Braden, Lukey Ward, there were a number of significant whites. I think that was important, that it was a black and white show. And sometimes there were more whites in the demonstrations than blacks, actually.

TK: Really?

HW: Yes. (Pauses) Not often, but I can remember a few.

TK: In the marches you mean.

HW: (barely audible) The marches.

TK: Another thing I wanted to ask you about was a little bit more about the ACLU and its role. First, how did you get involved with it, because you said you were in the ACLU before you were in open housing, so how did you get involved?

HW: Well, as I said, I was the chair of their Minority Relations Committee, and I don't remember what else I did in that regard, but when the open housing issue began to take off, I was the logical person to represent the KCLU on that open housing committee, and that's how I got involved with it. The seminary didn't 105:00send me down.

TK: No, I guess not.

HW: The United Church of Christ in this area didn't send me down. I think the way I defined my job motivated me to go where I went. Officially I went as the representative of the KCLU.

TK: This may be a hard question to answer because I don't know if you can separate it, but did your religious beliefs send you down, or did your political beliefs send you down?

HW: Well, they are hard to separate, because, as I said, I was a small kid that got beat up a lot, and consequently identified psychologically, existentially with people who get beat up. Over the years, that got rationalized with both 106:00political rhetoric and theology. In terms of political affiliation, I have always been a Democrat, I have always been a liberal Democrat, love the Bill of Rights, and democratic theory, quality freedom and all that. Of course, the social justice themes of the biblical tradition and theological traditions, the prophetic traditions have always been where my religion has been at. I pretty much left the church because the church is not interested in that kind of thing. I had my real fights with the seminary over those kinds of things. So, my home, 107:00my church, have been people who are interested in civil rights and civil liberties and that kind of thing. In 1992, I founded the Religious Leaders for Fairness.

TK: Oh, you founded that?

HW: Yes. And led the group for about five years, until I thought a pastor or pastors should really head that up, because, a lot of clergy can't identify too well with a professor type, but they can identify more with a pastoral type who has to face a congregation on Sunday. I don't know how true that is, because the 108:00group hasn't grown any since I've left, but the kind of ministers that were involved in that organization were in my church, they were my colleagues, they were the kind of clergy that I really felt good with, wanted to work with and liked and so forth. How did I get off on that? (Laughs)

TK: Because I had--I forgot what I asked that got you on it, but it was interesting anyway. But I did want to, because you brought up that you had left the church, when did that happen?

HW: (Sighs) Well, I haven't demitted the ministry; my name is still on a congregational roll here in the area. But I have been to church, I can't remember when. I am bored to the bone with religious ritual and a lot of the 109:00pious rhetoric and concern about afterlife that so much of the religion in this area is concerned with. I don't need it anymore, I don't know if I ever needed it. I think I have always been critical of ritualized religion, I have always been interested in the morality. The Trinity has never made any sense to me, I have never heard anybody make sense of it. I'm not interested in the theoretical aspects of religion, although I feel quite informed and educated about them. I can discuss all kinds of theoretical, theological--

TK: You ought to, yes.

HW: --stuff and the history of it. But it's always been the morality, the 110:00ethical consequences and so. And earlier, coming up in a very traditional church in Pennsylvania, I was interested in the petty morality of it, the sex and card-playing, the dancing and all that kind of stuff. Now, that kind of petty morality doesn't interest me, in fact, it seems like a diversion from bigger stuff. And so, when Bill Clinton gets caught in adultery, I am less interested in that than what he does about welfare rights and hospital rights and anything else that really has to do with his office. I don't overlook it, and there is a 111:00relationship, but when it comes to balancing these things, Monica Lewinsky is small potatoes compared to Kosovo and some other things.

TK: Obviously, you're still involved today, bit I'm curious in terms of civil rights stuff after open housing. Were there other issues in those next few years that you got involved with? What were some of those?

HW: At one, let's see, well, we can come back to some of this other stuff later. At one point, I organized what I called a program of Clinical Education in Prophetic Ministry. You probably (are) more aware of the clinical education in pastoral ministry or pastoral counseling, that puts students out into the field and they do counseling or pastoral conversations, as they call them. Well, I set 112:00up a program in clinical education and prophetic ministry, which was political activistic fields, where we put students, typically in teams. Because the "Lone Ranger" is a very counterproductive role model for prophetic ministry or politically active ministry. Individuals can't do anything, giving modern power structures, urban systems and so forth, you really need to be part of an organization. So, consequently, set up teams and put teams of students into various issue, like housing. We worked on the city incinerator, we tackled the 113:00Civilian Police Review Board idea back in the Seventies, and put together a coalition of nineteen organizations and couldn't get it through. And I don't know if the present coalition is going to be any more successful than we were. Certainly they have more highly visible cases, we didn't have any killings or anything like that, but we had a lot of, we worked down in the Smoketown area, and the West End, and Butchertown, and what else--Civilian Police Review Board--(pauses)--housing, environmental pollution, any number of things. In one 114:00phase of that, we also involved a number of churches and laity, and consequently there was an educational component, a formal classroom educational component to it and then the fieldwork. At one point, we met down at JCC in a classroom down there, had 50 lay people involved with the students. They would work with the students on various projects, and that went on for several years until the seminary pulled its natural plugs on it.

TK: So that was all through the seminary? Your course?

HW: Yes.

TK: Seventies or Eighties or both?

HW: Seventies.

TK: Seventies, wow, that sounds interesting.

HW: It may have gone into the Eighties as well.

TK: Would the seminary have records on something like that?

HW: I probably have records.

TK: It might be something I would like to look, because something like that would be interesting to follow up on.

HW: I'm pretty sure I have a lot of those materials. We had a little newsletter that I wrote and some of the students involved wrote, but I needed financial resources to run it, and I think pastoral counseling got anything they wanted, they got studios, they got this, that and the other thing. They got all kinds of money and all kinds of stipends. I mean, I had to fight for a student assistant, and I was told I couldn't have one by the dean, and the dean went on sabbatical, 116:00and the acting dean apparently was not prejudiced against the program. I went to him and asked for a student assistant, I immediately got one, you know.

TK: University politics.

HW: And I would submit a budget, and would give it to the dean, he would take it to the administrative council, or at least he told me he did. He really didn't because I had a vice presidential friend who was there and he never submitted my budget and told me there wasn't any money and on and on and on. Anyway, how did we get on to this?

TK: I had asked what you--

HW: Oh yes after--

TK: --after the open housing things.

HW: Well, in addition to that, on campus, I was able to establish a hunger task force. The inclination at the seminary was to give whatever money we gathered 117:00and whatever work we did for programs like Dare to Care, which were ameliorating, simply ameliorated the situation. Now if you look at Dare to Care statistics, which as a public service thing, a charity thing, maybe ten years ago they were feeding 80,000 people. Now they are feeding 95,000 people. The problem gets worse despite everything they do. And they are willing to hand out, three or four bags of groceries a year to somebody in need, and what do you do the rest of the time? Instead of going the Dare to Care route, or the charity route, we went to the Bread for the World group, which I helped organize the local chapter of that years ago, when Bread for the World sent an organizer 118:00here, and I worked with them, we set that up. I used to work with them. But anyway, our hunger task force went with the Bread for the World group, which is essentially a lobbying organization. Just as a footnote to that too, one of the things Bread for the World does is they have an annual offering of letters, there is a worship service and then everybody brings their letter or writes their letter during the service and then put them down at the altar and send them to their Congresspeople. The last year that I was at the seminary, this group had an offering of letters in the chapel, the president got all out of whack about it, said "You're politicizing the worship, you're politicizing the 119:00worship." He didn't come to me about it, but he came down hard on the student leaders, and it crushed them, I mean, you know a president coming down on them. But, in addition to doing the Bread for the World, at the seminary, or the hunger task force at the seminary, we were able to get, I think, about four or five churches in the area to become associate members of Bread for the World, which helped organize them that way. I organized a gay rights thing over there.

TK: On campus?

HW: Yes. And then finally the Religious Leaders for Fairness in '92.

TK: Which George talked about in his, he talked a lot about it.

HW: George is still on Religious Leaders for Fairness, or with them, I should 120:00say. Since leaving the seminary and leaving the leadership of that, I have directed my energies more with the Fairness Campaign rather than with, I don't consider myself a religious leader anymore. Number one, I don't have a following in the church, so by that standard I am not, and on the other hand, I'm not as religious, (laughs)--

TK: Not as religious as some of the--

HW: In that sense anymore.

TK: When did you leave the seminary?

HW: Ninety-four I think it was.

TK: Was that regular retirement?

HW: No, it was a resignation.

TK: And how did that happen? Go ahead, I've got about a minute left on this tape.

HW: I just--(pauses)--I don't think I got burned out, because I got burned out a 121:00couple of times in the course of my career, I knew what that feels like. It was, I don't know.

END TAPE 2, SIDE B

START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A

TK: You were how old when you left then?

HW: I was in my sixties, I was near to retirement, but, and they wanted to call it a retirement, but it was a resignation. And without any thanks from anybody, 122:00after ten years on the board of the KCLU they gave me a nice plaque for my service. I didn't even get a letter of thank you from the president or the board, and as I said, I wasn't replaced. So, I am, have been, the one and only professor of Christianity and Society in the history of the school, the first and the last. I said one of the greatest compliments I've ever been paid in my career is I have not been replaced by the seminary. (Laughing) It means--

TK: You were so good--

HW: Maybe I was pretty good at what I was doing.

TK: Did you say you also had a law degree?

HW: Yes.

TK: When did that happen? Just to clarify so I don't have to get that.

HW: Yes, this was another influence from the KCLU. When I was on the board, for the first term, I was working with a number of lawyers. They were being able to do things on community issues that I was jealous of, I mean they had power, powers as officials of the court, and they could do things that I as a preacher couldn't do. I was envious of that, envious both for myself and for my students and for the ministry as a profession. So, what I did was, I established a double competency program at the seminary with the University of Louisville Law School 124:00and the University's Kent School of Social Work which enabled our brightest students at the seminary to get both degrees at a savings of a year to a year and a half. So they could come out for example with both a JD and an M. Div. or a JD and an MSSW and have a bag of professional tools that would enable them to do some of the stuff I thought politically activist ministers should do. And in those days, I was content to have lawyers who were theologically literate as well as ministers who were legally competent. My dream was that these students, these ministers, would go out into inner city churches and they would not only 125:00be pastors to inner city congregations, but they would also do legal aid work for their congregations, many of whom could not afford a lawyer. And the same thing was true with social work. So I negotiated both of those packages with local schools and later on, it got expanded so that our double competency students could do degrees at, for example, any law school, almost any law school in the country. For example, one of our students went to the University of Illinois simply because he could get in-state tuition. So he got his degree from us, but got his law degree from University of Illinois. One from Texas and so 126:00forth and so on. This later got expanded, and I didn't do this work, but the idea of double competence later got expanded so that our students could do this with almost any field, for example we had two that became doubly competent in medicine--

TK: Oh, interesting--

HW: One in the arts, one music, a couple in sociology and so forth. Now I think the program also includes education, so you can get certified and have a theology degree as well. And then, this program attracted some national attention, so that some of the big universities like Harvard and Yale looked at it, Emory looked at it, I think Harvard decided that "this is too avant-garde," I mean, they don't have to do anything to attract students. We did it to attract 127:00good students, you know, it took a really good student to do this.

TK: Right.

HW: But Emory picked it up and couple of other seminaries and law schools picked it up. This Bill Martin, who was on the faculty here and then went to Emory to get his theology degree--did he go to Emory or did he go to Columbia? I don't remember, but at any rate, he went there because the program was there. Vanderbilt did it, schools like that did it.

TK: I have Martin written down.

HW: Anyway, to pursue this thread, I started this before I went to law school. I 128:00finally decided to go to law school because I was tired of going downtown and having my lawyer friends do legal research on issues that I was teaching about at the seminary, because just about every social issue that I was teaching about had a legal dimension to it, and consequently I needed legal information. They were very helpful, but I decided I wanted to be able to do this myself. Principally, I wanted to be able to learn how to use a law library so I could do my own research. So I went out to the law school, and I signed up for legal research and civil procedure initially, and I decided I would take them for audit. You know how that is; after a while I was sloughing off. I wasn't doing the work and I wasn't getting the education that I wanted, so I decided that I 129:00really need to take these courses for credit if I'm going to get anything out of them. I went out to the law school and said, "I want to sign up for credit." They said, "You can't do that unless you take the LSAT and pass it." So, in the middle of the semester, I went and took the LSAT and passed it, and so I took those two courses. Then I took a couple more courses, and I took a couple more courses, and a couple more courses, and I went to summer school, and one day I looked up and I was twenty-nine hours away from a law degree. So I took fifteen hours at night the first semester (Sigh from TK) and fourteen hours at night the second semester in addition to teaching. I told myself, "If you don't break down, if you don't become crazy or sick, or whatever, I'm going to do something 130:00really nice for you at the end of this." And lo and behold, I made it through, and I remember finishing my last paper on the morning of Derby Day in 1978. Four o'clock in the morning, I finished that paper, I drove it over and dropped it in the mailbox of the prof, went out and partied all day and all night at Derby parties, and I think as a result of what I had been doing all year, I really did get seriously sick. Consequently, that summer I didn't do anything except lay around and study for the bar exam, and took it, and felt awful, I had walking pneumonia as I remember. In the night before the bar exam, I developed impacted wisdom teeth. (TK laughs) I was in sad shape to do a two day exam, it was 131:00miserable. I thought, "Well, you know, I'll be able to take it again, at least I have the experience of going through it once." But lo and behold I passed it, and I became an attorney, and I practiced part time, working, taking cases I was interested in or felt competent in. Cases I could work into my teaching schedule. Kind of became, pro bono attorney to students and staff out at the seminary, particularly the black staff, who were constantly getting into some kind of trouble, also with the administration. I couldn't take any of those cases, but I could send them to my friends. Of course, that didn't set very well 132:00with the administration either, because when, for example, they fired an assistant librarian out there, and I won't go into details, but she came to me, and I thought maybe she had a cause for action. I sent her off to an attorney, and of course the administration knew I sent one of the staff to an attorney, and some of the staff would come to me with problems they had with the administrators. At first I got in the middle of that as a mediator, I would represent them, they were not particularly articulate persons, and of course they were really outgunned when they sat with the Vice President-in-charge-of This, That and the Other Thing. Finally, I became convinced, and started 133:00spreading the seed when I would talk to these people that, "You really need to unionize. You really need to unionize." Things got bad at one stretch, I think it was in the seventies, and finally convinced them, I forget if the process involved signatures, no, that was the second step. The first step involved getting in with a union organizer, and one winter Saturday morning, I got them down at the union office with an organizer. The next step then, was to get them to sign that they wanted to vote with reference to a union. I had some conference or speaking engagement off campus that took me out of town for maybe 134:00a week or ten days, and when I came back I said, "How did you guys do?" They said, "There is no union." The president had gotten the leaders of this group into his office, gotten them down on their knees to pray about this. Two things you never do with Farrell: You never get on your knees to Farrell, and you never close your eyes in Farrell's presence. (Laughs) And he prayed them out of it, I mean he is articulate and knew human nature. Also, the ringleader of the staff was no longer there. But, while they didn't get a union as a result of this, they got a staff organization, so the secretaries and the maintenance people and 135:00everybody now came together in a staff organization, but it was led by administration, so it was never, and there was always a faculty representative, but I was never the faculty representative.

TK: That is interesting.

HW: Obviously.

TK: Obviously, yes. That's interesting.

END INTERVIEW