A reflection on the experience of being in dialogue with segregationist preachers 50 years ago.

Dialogue, the two-way conversation we value highly as Anabaptists, is never easy. When one opens conversation with someone who is not just other but truly other, the dialogue makes some peculiar and surprising demands on us. More than 50 years ago, I learned some valuable lessons about hearing clearly and attempting to be truly heard. And far better than many of my other annuities, it has had a regular and rewarding set of dividends.

The year was 1957. The place, the deep south, Atlanta and Montgomery, Ala. A sabbatical from church planting in Saginaw, Mich., allowed Irene and me to spend a school year at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University, a “black” institution of learning, we would have said then) and learn firsthand about the racial crisis and the emerging civil rights movement.

As Christmas approached, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, in response to public charges that “the pulpits have been paralyzed” on the segregation-integration question, invited ministers of many faiths to give their views and printed one article every Sunday. I was appalled by the logic, alarmed by the hermeneutic, astounded by the effrontery of the articles and could not return to class with my fellow students without having opened conversation with these pastors.

Martin Luther King Jr., an emerging leader in the civil rights movement, came from Montgomery to visit our class and talk about the boycott and his ensuing imprisonment. Later I received an invitation to visit Montgomery, have dinner with the Kings at the Ralph Abernathy home around their long dinner table and visit the Kings’ parsonage. All this helped me find my voice, and I wrote my first attempt at dialogue with the author of the article “Bible Orders Separation and Love, Harwell Says.”

The first reply to the newspaper’s challenge came from the Rev. J. W. Harwell, pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Madison, Ga.: “Let’s face it. Integration is integration, whether compelled by law and military force or brought about by deception from church pulpits.” Harwell claimed to examine segregation and integration fairly in the light of the Bible, where “eternal principles are clearly set forth, namely, the principle of love and the principle of separation” (his emphasis). “The Bible does not teach the universal brotherhood of man and Fatherhood of God,” he argued; it teaches universal sinfulness of man, and “God does not desire for mankind in a sinful state to dwell together as one great people. He has therefore established laws of separation.” He supported this with Genesis 6, on mixed relations causing the flood, and Genesis 11, on “Babel causing separation and scattering of people.” He wrote: “Integration breeds lawlessness. God knew this tendency of man’s depraved nature when he made his laws of separation.”

As I reread the yellowed clipping, I recalled praying through my many feelings before writing, “If you care to engage in a friendly discussion by letter, I am sure both of us can profit.”

So our conversation began. Three letters from me and three responses from him explored our differing theologies. His last letter despaired of our ever gaining anything from the other since his way of reading the Bible to find “a principle,” like God-ordained separation marked by “God-created skin color,” did not convince me to extend the Babel story of God the great Separator into a social design for clearly divided societies with different privileges and opportunities. My insistence on beginning with the teaching and life of Jesus seemed to have no relevance to his thinking—Jesus was about spiritual things, not social realities, and the gospel is about new birth, not a new community of disciples.

Dialogue means finding common ground, and I sought to affirm his concern for separation of the believer from those practicing evil, but it didn’t work. It only conceded that there is a principle of separation, and thus we must obey it. I sought to find a common concern for the welfare of every person. He agreed but saw that each would fare well in separate situations. Dialogue sometimes grows as we share our own story, and so we talked of family issues, but moving it beyond into the family of God ran head on into the walls of segregation.

I learned from our dialogue that no one changes because of biblical quotations and definition of the text’s meaning. Text gets answered with text, biblical quote with biblical quote, and when assumptions are made, they are called simple logical deductions. When boundaries are drawn, they are justified as self-evident, God-given natural divides. I had long known that no one changes except in relationship, and I tried to create a way to relate as brothers, but that failed as well. We were brothers in name only, in a theological sense of parallel ministers with a common language of piety, but we remained strangers and would, I feared, go on as strangers.

If we are to judge by the letters alone, we failed to touch each other’s souls. Dialogue demands presence, and only when there is a history of presence between the lines or beyond the page do we truly meet.

But I was a slow learner, so a month later, when the Reverend Billy Cobb of the Dunwoody Baptist Church answered the Atlanta Journal and Constitution challenge with his article, “Doctrine of Segregation Plainly Taught in Bible,” I decided to try conversation by means of correspondence once again. Rev. Cobb was unequivocal: “All through the Bible is plainly taught the great doctrine of segregation or separation.” He saw segregation of the family, of the Jews, the church and the nations as fulfillment of this sovereign principle. He quoted from Genesis 10 and 11 to tell us we dare not break these divinely instituted boundaries. One text in the New Testament, Acts 17:26, served as the final word—God has appointed “the bounds of their habitations.”

“Whites, follow the plain teachings of God’s Word. … Negroes, forget and forgive … and keep your race pure.”

This time I tried my best to build relationship first—appealing to our common faith in Christ, our shared roots in the Bible, our love for the church and its mission. I introduced myself, expressed my commitment to be teachable, then followed with a series of carefully worded questions about equating separation from evil with segregation, how this could possibly be related, if it could be, to race? I ended warmly, and sent it off with hope of dialogue.

The long letter he returned took every sentence I had written with sincerity and sensitivity. His position wove a continuous fabric from his reading of the Scripture to the current practices of Southern life. Satan was the author of integration; God has willed the absolute separation (biblically, he said, this is the same as segregation). But he, too, ended with the same brotherly warmth I had offered him. Now here was my hoped-for chance to dialogue. So I responded by quoting the words of Jesus from the Gospel of John and Paul’s word to the Ephesians, then laid out my heart for the mission of reconciliation.

I was finding it hard to talk his “separation by divine command at Babel” language. Would he find it equally hard to talk my “reconciliation as taught by Jesus and Paul” vocabulary? He did his best—nine pages of reinterpreting the texts I had offered through the lens of separation as a governing principle of Scripture interpretation. It was a heroic effort, and he ended by quoting me, “Brother Bechler, in our understanding we are ‘separated by the pen and the words we use.’ We are trying to arrive at an understanding of each other’s position with a different meaning as to the word itself and the issues involved. I believe, could we be in harmony as to the definition of segregation, we would be closer together in our thoughts and interpretations than we realize.”

He was right. If I ordered my life by his principle, his world would make complete and consistent sense; if I yielded my life to a gospel of reconciliation, it did not. So we did it again in the next interchange and came back to the same impasse. We paused for a month, then each tried once more. We had touched each other deeply, and I sincerely expressed my longing to sit and talk face to face. I spoke of how important it was to me to converse with someone who was seeking to know and obey the will of God, even when we heard the call of Jesus leading us in such different ways.

Looking back, my words were a lament that we could both long for common fellowship, but we had differing visions of how to be fellows and how to climb aboard the same great ship. A sense of loss hung between us. We were reaching across a wide space, and our arms were much too short. He expressed it in a final paragraph of blessing, of benediction, with a surprising affection and brother-to-brother “koinonia” (fellowship).

Sometimes dialogue results in increasing mutuality; sometimes it only confirms our differences and individuality. Sometimes we must admit that the process—or the participants—fails; sometimes, to our surprise, it works. Looking back, I now recognize that those that fail may actually connect us deeply, and only God knows what the outcome of the conversation ultimately may have been.

Dialogue doesn’t mean we come to agreement. It doesn’t mean the common ground becomes our totally shared ground. It allows us to have separate grounds—and a no-man’s land in between—but with a safe path that crosses over with no pitfalls, no landmines—to continue a troubling metaphor—a way to reach each other. Dialogue is how we work at this process of co-discerning, and even when we do not reach either unity or unanimity, Jesus is present. We want to see walls crash, separation end, gates open, bridges reach across, and on those occasions when we do experience all of the above, we celebrate. When we do not, we grieve and let go, knowing the Spirit of God is still present on both sides of this conversation about faithfulness.

LeRoy Bechler, was a church planter of a reconciled congregation in Saginaw, Mich., a long-time pastor in Los Angeles and the conference minister for evangelism for Southeast Mennonite Conference. This article was written with a bit of encouragement and expansion by David Augsburger. The documents from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the letters in this 1957 dialogue are going to the Mennonite Archives for future readers or researchers.