In Black America; Tribute to the Late Reverend Dr. Samuel D. Proctor, Part 2

From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. The time I spent in Nigeria, learning about Africa, and having a chance to bring 709 or 5 seconds of their food pieces there to help them to produce a larger swelling of educated leadership for that country. They're having a terrible time right now, but I'm grateful that I had a chance to participate in that. That was a very high point in my life, and serving the Abyssinian Church in Harlem

was another high point in my life. That was wonderful. And then in the colleges, having a chance to create a wide-ride circle of friends to last a lifetime, it'd be hard to point to one thing, and then, in my life, it's not a lot to me. And my wife and my sons, you know, and my brothers, we are friends. And then there'd be a very, very close, and they've been so all of our lives. These things have meant a lot to me. My four sons and I are very close, and we've got a lot of time, you know, in bowling at us, and then there's a little boat on the river for the thing. So it's been beautiful. My life doesn't own me. My God had a good time. The late Reverend Dr. Samuel David Proctor, distinguished minister, educator, and author, died of a heart attack while talking to students at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. He was 75. During his lifetime, he served as president of two universities,

Virginia Union and North Carolina A&T State University. Proctor was pasted marriages of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. The prominent educator and clergyman served as associate director to the Peace Corps in Nigeria and Washington under President Kennedy and Johnson. He was the Martin Luther King Jr. professor emeritus of Rutgers University and visiting the professor of the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University and author of three books. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, I'll tribute to the late Reverend Dr. Samuel David Proctor, part two, in Black America. When I was at Virginia Union, my own college, I had a good time, but I was a private school and I had a very young family. And one of my boys had a terrible time with a heart of congenital birth defect.

And so after 11 years at Union and five years as president, I took the position at North Carolina A&T that promised that I wouldn't have to be away from home and from family so much. But shortly after I was there, Canada was elected and the Peace Corps began, and my whole family, we all packed up and went to Africa. And then all of life was different from then on, because we were in another orbit, and my son had his operation. He had a new heart built, virtually a brand new heart. He's getting along very well now. He's mad with the family and the sacrifice of his church and school social work up there in New Jersey. So everything worked out. But the great thing about that is that I have a circle of friends right now who are my alumni from these schools. You know, a governor-wilder from Virginia was one of my students at Virginia Union. And then Jesse Jackson was the quarterback of my football team and the president of my student body at A&T.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, he was the grandson of slaves. Proctor was brought up during the Great Depression and grew until adulthood during a time of total segregation. But that didn't stop him from earning a doctorate in theology at Boston University in 1950. He went on to become president of two universities, Virginia Union University in Richmond in 1955, and his alma mater, North Carolina A&T State University, in 1960. He served in the administrations of President Kennedy and Johnson. He acted as a teacher and advisor to the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesse Jackson. In 1972, he became pastor of Abacinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York, where he seceded the late Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. During his lifetime, he denounced white racism. He spoke out strongly against black separatism. He rejected black studies programs and packaging of certain music and television program as, quote, black culture end of quote. Also, he condemned African-American leaders

such as Clans Thomas and Thomas Sol. In June of this year, Dr. Proctor died of a heart attack at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was in Iowa, speaking to students at Cornell College. This journalist first met Dr. Proctor in 1988 in New York City, while attending the National Conference on black student retention. We met again in 1991 and 1996, when he was on tour promoting his latest book, The Substance of Things Hope 4. On this week's program, we conclude our tribute to Dr. Samuel Duet Proctor. How important is it to church to rekindle or refocus itself to some of the problems that we're having today? If the only agency we have that we control to the extent that nobody supervises us, so we can say what we want to say. It is not that we want to say anything contrary or different from what other people of good we might say, but it is nothing like having your own people

in their own institution determining their own future. That's what the church allows. More than that, we need moral education and the church specializes in that, although we don't all live up to it, we're not perfect people. But that's the direction in which we are tilted and that's the way we're leaning toward decency. And while the world is pulling everybody's elevated, the church is tugging for, and we can't afford to give up on the generation. We need to teach them human decency, teach these young men to take care of their responsibilities as parents and fathers, and the church specializes in that, in spite of our weaknesses and our failures, that's our main, main function and responsibility. And another thing, we are a comfort station when life gets hard and burdensome. They know where to come to find shelter in these storms of light, and they know where to come to find friends

who have been through it before, and they will hold their hands while they go, oh, you can't make it without an institution like the church if we didn't have it, we'd have to invent something just like it to do what it does for our people. Did it take on an added responsibility when you became president of one of the two colleges, Virginia Union and North Carolina ANT? Well, I'd had one behind the other. When I was at the Virginia Union in my own college, I had a good time, but I was a private school and I had a very young family. And one of my boys had a terrible time with a heart of the congenital birth defect. And so after 11 years at Union and five years as president, I took the position at North Carolina ANT that promised that I wouldn't have to be away from home and from family so much. But shortly after I was there, Canada was elected, and the Peace Corps began, and my whole family, we all packed up and went to Africa. And then all of life was different from then on,

because we were in another orbit, and my son had his operation. He had a new heart built, virtually a brand new heart. He's getting along very well now. He's mad with the family and this activist church and school social work up there and in New Jersey. So everything worked out. But the great thing about that is that I have a circle of friends right now who are my alumni from these schools. You know, a Governor Wilder from Virginia was one of my students at Virginia Union. And then Jesse Jackson was the quarterback of my football team and the president of my student body at ANT. I mean, I don't have any great haves, but the great haves that I have came about with guys like Wilden, Jesse Jackson, you know, in school. Jerry Maywright was one of my students down there and then Congressman Fontroy. Oh, a lot of fellows who've done and women too, who've done extremely well. There's a Bishop Kelly of the United Methodist Church,

the first woman, black woman bishop of the United Methodist Church. He would want my students down at Virginia Union. So I've got alumni all over the place from these two colleges that I serve. So it leads up to my next question. Obviously, this book tour that you're on is somewhat of a reunion. Everywhere. And some of my students and some of my old friends and I thought they'd died. They'd turn up at these book signings and I'm just having a good time. It's work, but it seems like fun to me. When I go home, I tell my wife, how busy I've been and she says, I can tell, you've not been out there working. Good time. But it really is very inspiring to see people doing so well. I just left one of my young ministers here in Dallas where I am, Reverend Harkins, who was one of my assistants at that incident. He's here in a big, strong, beautiful church at New Hope Baptist Church. He and I just had lunch together. Well, I make me feel good when I have that to go through. Well, that's good.

You've been blessed. Reverend Proctor does, at this point, does life seem rewarding? Have you accomplished the things in which you set out to accomplish? Well, you know, I wish I had 20 more strong years to go. Okay. Well, I could get more deeply involved in the education of a lot of our young people. I've been retired since 8 and 9, but I've been in some kind of a teaching situation ever since then. But right now, I'm teaching courses at King State College in New Jersey. Just having fun. And I had a class yesterday and just debating and discussing and having exchanges with young students who in the center of New Jersey facing all of these crises, this political situation we're facing and all of that, it's so invigorating to be a part of their lives. And I hope I can add some hope to them. They're a burden of cynicism and despair, you pessimism.

But my job is to come and show them the longer term perspective on these things to see and show them what things we're like, what we things are now, and what things can be like if we don't give up too soon. And so I'm supposed to be the agent of hope, the person with the longer term perspective. And it takes you meditate and patience to do that. And I just ask God to give me that so I can help these students. And I wish I could do it for another 20 years. I've been reading about the suicides, the group suicides, the plural suicides in all part of the country. And then you see a rash of them in one high school. Now the big discussion in North Jersey is how they can have chemical-free proms because all during the graduation season good-looking youngsters headed for college and other careers are killed because they leave the proms depending on one chemical after another.

And I wish I could get closer than to tell them, don't worry about one romance that's busted. They may have three or four of those to go yet before it's over with. In fact, if my wife had her way she would have divorced me every night of days. But thank God we took some pledges that we just could not escape. But the flimsy's excuse would drive them to look for some kind of an escape. But Jesus in an old fashioned sort of way called us to learn of him. Learned from me, he said, and my heart, this reverberates down the corridors of time with such relevance and validity. Learned from me for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And his life was tough. How could he call it an easy yoke? And a light burden. The clear implication is that there was a way

to make that yoke easier. And there was a way to make that burden lighter. Now when Jesus was at home, and now's we're doing the so-called side at the Ishmael's 12th or 30th, he must have seen a great many yokes. And because he wasn't a carpenter's home, he knew the difference between a yoke clumsily made that fit poorly, that injured the ox and all of the pressure points. Likewise, he saw yokes that were well-made, conforming to the anatomy of the ox, beveled at the angles and sanded where the surface was rough and granular. So he knew what an easy yoke looked like could feel it. And when he said my yoke is easy, it meant something. Everyone knew the analogy that was made. The key however is to do what he said do. Learn of me. Learn of me. And we need to know what it is that we should learn about him. Here's a problem.

We all have a religion about Jesus, but we don't much have the religion of Jesus. What he's asking us to do is to learn of the religion that he had that piloted his life and not go and invent another religion about him and his salvific work. Something about him and some other metaphor for what he did for humankind. Surely, Savior, Lord, all of that. But Jesus was a person with loyalties, with an outlook, with an inherited religion, with a relationship to God, and he's saying, if you want your yoke to be easy and your burden to be light, then learn of me. You know, you could go back and create a whole new theological movement in the world by saying, this movement now is built not on the Pauline notions of a religion about Jesus. This movement is built on discovering

the religion that Jesus practiced and knew himself. Very mystical, very service-oriented, and heavily dependent upon a notion of the pregnancy of God in the human heart. Our religious practices would be so different if we started out all over again to learn of him and to go about it the way that he meant about it. I hear all of my friends talking about the second coming of Jesus, but I'm awful afraid that if he came back now, he'd be crucified again. We're so out of sync with what his religion was. I remember one Sunday morning I was preaching about this in church, how I got off one and I can't remember. And I said, you know, Jesus had friends and we wouldn't want to be hanging out with at all. You know who the friends

of Jesus were, that woman with that curved spine, the man with a withered hand, and another child with demons, and somebody who was Paul's and lepers. I said, you know, if Jesus gave a party, you wouldn't want to go. You wouldn't want to be there with Jesus' friends. But, you know, folk in New York come to church drunk sometimes, you know, and they were the ladies sitting back in the church. You know, he'd been drinking somewhere, and she answered me, right in that great big church, she hot up right back and answered me, the nerve of her. She said, that's a lie! I would go to Jesus' party! And the devil got it to me. I said, I know you would. You'd go to anybody's party. You'd be the somebody's party all night long. She missed my point. But I don't think the others missed the point. I know I didn't miss the point. Because I know I don't have friends like that. I want friends who belong

to the capital of Christianity. I want friends who belong to the first Baptist church. I want friends who belong to the first Baptist church. Who go to church dressed up and parked those burets in benches all these are my friends. Who've got CDs and zero coupon bonds and money in the bank and brick homes in the air condition. When I get loans from these other people, I want to hang out with. And the last somebody I'd find myself headed toward would be somebody with a with an hand, or somebody pauls it, or somebody demon possessed. Think of that. How we've turned that thing all around. One of the most vulgar remarks I've ever heard in my whole life was made by Mrs. DiValier when she said that the Pope was coming to Haiti. And somebody said, why have you spent so much money? She said, but I had to spend about four million dollars to get the palace ready because the Pope was coming. What a vulgar thing to say

ought to think the Pope, the vicar of Christ. The earthly agent of Christ is coming and it costs $4,000 to get the palace ready. What kind of religion is that? You talk about Jesus coming again, a second coming. We ain't ready for a second coming. We haven't handled the first coming yet. What a vulgar way to refer to the vicar of Christ. It costs $4,000 to make this place comfortable for him. I know the Pope must have been embarrassed by that. I believe that the main thing we need to learn from him was his constant fellowship with God, the theocentric nature of his life. Tennisin said, thou seemest human and divine, the highest holiest

manhood thou. Our wills are ours. We know not how our wills are ours to make them divine. Human and divine. And yet, despite this divine in him, Jesus never took it for granted. He prayed to God with a sense of otherness and awesomeness. He wanted persons beyond himself to God. The life of Jesus was theocentric. And he led his followers from where he found them into fellowship with God. Do this, do that, do the other. That you may be children of your father who is in heaven. It is still true that our faith in Jesus has our save and Lord should result in our awareness of the presence and power of God. He came unto his own and did not receive him. But as many as did receive him, what did he do with them? To them, he gave the exocere, the authority, the license,

the privilege, the power, the access to become the daughters and sons of God. That's what he did for them. So if our yolks are to become in an easier fuss to wear, if our lives are to become more tolerable, our burdens ease it to bear, we need access to the inexhaustible power of the living God. And we learn that from Jesus. You see some funny things every now and then. I was in Arkansas at a place called Petagene Mountain. Governor Rockefeller of Arkansas had an automobile museum up there. I was dying to get up there with old upmobiles and chamblers and pierce hours and hutsons and stutterbakers. I know more cars that they don't make anymore than I know cars that they make now. That's how long I've been around here. I'm as old as dirt.

But I went up there to see all of these old automobiles. These pierce hours with those headlights coming out of the hoods, you know, defenders. And on my way up there, all by myself, I know no one really knew where I was going. I was at a conference and I've been roaming off by myself. I'd heard about that museum. I just had to see the old dozen birds and stand the steamers, you know. And I couldn't wait to get there. But I was delayed because I saw a tree on the side of the road going up Petagene Mountain with a knot tied in the trunk. Can you imagine that? A tree that had gone on and grown up anyway with a knot tied right in the trunk like a shoe string. I said, Sam, have you been drinking? No. Did you see what I saw? I saw what you saw there just a two of us here.

And I parked that avis car and backed up and said, little tree, tell me about yourself. And then I began to speculate. The tree has grown. What happened? Well, first I thought some kids were playing out there and one of them just took a little sprig out of the ground and gently tied one loop in it, you know, and walked on the way. And that little sprig said, I'm going to grow anyhow. This is supposed to cut me off and I'm not going to let it. I'm growing now. Then there was a gang from the prison out there from the corrections center out there cleaning up the highway and they had a break lying down in the grass. We had plenty of time to think about it about six, eight years to think about it. He just tied a little knot there and went on. Well, the highway department had lunch. And then the fellow eat his little peanut butter and cheese sandwich and then he drank his little Budweiser and then he decided to

just tie a knot in it. No tree, who did this to you? And I can hear the tree trying to say to me, I don't remember who he was or what his name was, but he did it. And then what did you decide to do? Well, I just depended on the same natural processes that would have caused me to grow anyhow. I kept drilling down into the bosom of the earth, drawing up minerals and moisture. I kept spreading out my little leaves, you know, for the sunlight, you know, photosynthesis and chlorophyll. And the next thing I knew, that knot was still there, but I was becoming a tree. Well, the difficulty in finding a publisher for your book. No, they came to me as a matter of fact. A literary agent came to me and said, we've read enough bad news about Black people. In there's some good news. You better believe there's some good news

that comes from within. And I'll talk about it at the drop of a hat. If you let me, one of my students down at Duke asked me, why didn't we commit suicide when we were living through all of that bit of racism? And he was amazed when I said to him to die. They never crossed our minds about committing suicide. We were so busy praising the Lord and trying to find hope for the next day's journey. We didn't have time for despair, you know. And the cup for us was always half full. For others, it might have been half empty, but it does. It looked half full. And it was that kind of a spirit that we had. And so right now, I've got the blessed privilege of being able to convey that through this book, you know. And to show that, to show to the larger white community that Black folk are not what has been portrayed on in the press, we are more than that. And we never had been just that.

You know what I mean? It's coming out of slavery. The first thing we did was to start building schools. We've got 115 colleges that we helped to get started for our redemption and our emancipation, you know. They don't know about that, you know. And the next thing is, we built strong churches. And even to the extent of Greek ladder fraternities and sororities, if you've almost absurd that we needed that. But we did whatever we had to do to demonstrate that we were thoroughly human and had the same aspirations as anybody else, you see. And so did I have trouble with the book now? And they came and asked me to write a book like that. And I said, but I haven't read it whenever you are. How long did it take you? All right, it took about 18 months. But that's because of the way publishers do. You know, every time you write one page, somebody thinks you ought to say more about this and less about that moment. But nobody ever tried to change my message,

as you can see in the book. Right. Say it in the book, and I say on platforms all the time. Correct. And I'm so grateful that a publisher will allow me to say these things without trying to give me some political agenda, you know. And, you know, so many of the books that we get published are sensational. You know, you've got to kill your mother. You've got to go to prison and find Jesus and jail or something like that. You know, you've got to come out of the drug culture. These things are real. They're a part of our experience. They need to be ripped about it. But for heaven's sakes, somebody ought to tell the other side and say that not all of our life has been pathological, you know, that we've had some strong, strong influences operating in the black community and some great successes in the black community. See, nobody ever writes about my daddy. A guy that never loses a job, stays on one job for the four years, educates six children, brings his pay home every week to the same wife

and is living in the same house for some years. This has been a tribute to the late Reverend Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, the distinguished minister, educator, and noted author, died last June at the age of 75. If you have a question or comment or suggestions, ask the future in black America programs, write us. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for IBA Technical Producer, Cliff Hargrove, I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today, and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in black America cassettes. Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in black America cassettes, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712.

From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Join me this week on in black America. You can't pick this up at a bar somewhere. You don't get this at a gang meeting. You get this from being around people who have spiritual orientation and who have a moral orientation to life. Attributes to the late Reverend Dr. Samuel Duet Proctor, part two this week on in black America.