Hard Times (56 page)

 

Everybody was hungry when I was through. The meeting was over before they got to anyone else. Of course, Dr. Townsend loved and revered me in those days. Later on, we had a little quarrel. I felt as he grew old and vegetated, he was exploited. But I respected him to the very hour of his death.

In the meantime, Father Coughlin had developed a great following. He asked if I would deliver the principal address at his convention, aside from his own. The gathering was as big as Townsend’s. At the baseball stadium in Cleveland.

One day I was out at Royal Oak. We were discussing a tour. Out of the clear sky, Coughlin’s door opened, without a knock. There stood Bishop Gallagher, his superior. Beside him stood the proverbial Prelate—tall, wide-brimmed black hat—serious, pallid, no color. As though he were about to announce the Governor had denied clemency.

Gallagher tapped Coughlin on the shoulder and said, “Come with me, Charlie.” They were gone about twenty minutes. Coughlin came back as white as my shirt. He said, “The arm of Jim Farley is long. I’m finished. Our Church has always wanted an ambassador, but Protestant America won’t give one to the Pope. The Vatican is willing to settle for a Fraternal Delegate. Mr. Roosevelt has served notice there will be none, unless I am silenced.” He never spoke out again.

Imagine a man, who had been speaking to twenty million people every Sunday, imagine such a man being silenced. What frustration!

So I was left alone. Huey Long was dead. Doc Townsend was dead. Coughlin was silenced. General Wood lost himself in his business. Lindbergh told me, “I don’t know how to fight Walter Winchell and those others….” But that didn’t stop
me
. My background wasn’t that of a pantywaist. I’ve been mobbed and rotten-egged. Once in lower Louisiana, I grabbed a heckler by the collar, drew him up and held him through the entire speech. Every time I’d make a point, I’d shake him. (Laughs.)

Did I ever tell you about that time in Georgia? A state with a lynching tradition. I was going to speak in a nearby town. We set up the sound equipment in front of the courthouse. Here came the mob. All the little farmers were there, all the little rich. The backbone of America are these little rich.

They grabbed the cable of our sound truck, threw it over the limb of a tree and screamed, “Hang the son of a bitch!” I stepped into the shadows of a store building. The sound men all ran and hid. The mob released the brake and the truck wound up somewhere in a ditch. They began to yell: “Where is he? Where is he?”

I jumped up on a big square of cement and I yelled at the top of my voice: “Here I am. The man that touches me touches a man of God. Who dares be the first?” (His voice breaks; with difficulty he stifles a deep sob. Across the room, his wife weeps softly. A long pause.) They went away.

A few nights later, I got a phone call about three o’clock in the morning. The voice said, “I am the man that led the mob. I’m a member of the state legislature. Mr. Smith, I am convinced you’re a good man. If I can’t have your forgiveness, I won’t sleep another night.” Isn’t that something?

 

POSTSCRIPT:
From the airport at Fayetteville to Arkansas Springs is a stretch of some fifty miles. On the car radio was a continuous flow of hymns—the singers all white—interspersed with commercials. At no time was a black face visible, during the drive. Of young people, there were remarkably few, aside from little children in the company of their pilgrim parents.

After four years in the town of Lebanon, as an evangelist, he was invited to the Vanderbilt School of Religion. It was a seminar for rural preachers. The teacher who most influenced him referred to Jesus as Son of Man—“he cleared the debris of theological crap and let Him rise among us as a challenging human leader
.”

 

I ASSUMED the pastorate of a Presbyterian church in Rome, Tennessee. I took as my text: “Go ye into the world and preach the gospel to every nation.” We must treat everybody as persons. An elder said to me that night at dinner: “Preacher, do you mean that damn burrhead is as good as I am?” I answered, “No, but I mean to tell you he’s as good as I am.” So I had to find another pulpit.

At Auburntown, I said, “Friends, I’ve enjoyed this pastorate and the people, but I must tell you I think of God as a social being. The Son of Man is worthy of discipleship and the Bible is a revealing book of right and wrong.” After that revival meeting, I had to find somewhere else to go.

I come to grief because of a trip I made to Waveland, Mississippi. In 1928. An interracial meeting. I was together with black people for the first
time in my life. At the table I was aware of food sticking in my throat before swallowing it. A friend taught me to emphasize the “e” in Negro—to avoid old terms like “nigra,” “uncle” and “auntie.” I went down to preach to a black church. There were some whites sitting to one side. As the people came out, an old black man was the first I shook hands with. This was in violation of all my upbringing.

I was recommended to a little church in Paris, Arkansas. It was a coal-mining town. They were trying to organize against all odds. We staged a strike and won. As soon’s it happened, I began to get money from Moscow. (Laughs.) But I learned this “money from Moscow” spent quicker and bought less than scrip coupons at a plantation robbersary—that’s the real name for commissary.

Miners began to come around, from as far as thirty miles. They built the thing with their own hands. We thought of building a proletarian church and a labor temple. I canceled my insurance policies to buy the cement for the foundation—they quit paying my salary. From fifteen active members, we now had over a hundred. One of the elders, a merchant, was furious. “You’ve got these cantankerous miners—these blather-skites.” They accused me of Red-ism and corrupting the minds of the youth. I lost my church. The presbytery met and “dissolved the relationship of the Reverend Claude Williams and the church for the good of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

We went down to the town theater for Sunday services. It was filled. Many young people, miners and unemployed. This was ’32, ’33. Black people were coming to my home for conferences. Someone said, “You ought to pull the shades down.” I said, “No, I want to pull the shades up and let the hypocrites see brotherhood being practiced.” I was pretty rash.

The church was $2200 behind in my salary. I refused to leave the manse. They evicted me and sued me for the interest on the money they owed me. One official was the editor of the local paper, the Paris
Express
. We called it the Paris
Excuse
. One was an insurance salesman and another was a retired colonel, who painted his house red, white and blue. So I was driven out and went to Fort Smith.

We staged a hunger march, a thousand or more. The Mayor sent word: The march won’t be held. I sent word back: This is America. The march will be held. He said, “We’ll turn the hose on you.” I said, “You do your duty, and I’ll do mine.” While we were in the opening prayer, they swarmed down on us. A lot of us landed in jail. The vigilantes were on me pretty regularly. So in the spring of ’35, I went to Little Rock.

I worked with black and white unemployed. And taught at the first school of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. In June of ’36, I went to Memphis to prepare a funeral for a black sharecropper who had been beaten to death. His body disappeared. I went to investigate.

Before we got to Earle, Arkansas, five deputies were waiting for us.
They took me out of the car. They got me down, four men held me down. This man had a little four-inch leather strop. He was a master. He gave me about sixteen licks. The woman with me kept count. They made a jelly out of me. Then they said, “Let’s get some of that fat woman’s butt.” They applied the lash to her—five or six licks. They were careful not to damage her hose, as they led her through the barbed wire. They didn’t know whether to dump me in the river or let me loose. They made me sign a statement that I hadn’t been hurt. When I refused, they said, “If you’re not through, we’re not.” I signed. They couldn’t use it because it was an admission that they’d had me. They took me to Highway 70 and headed me for Birmingham. A car followed me for miles. I got away from ’em at Brinkley.

That was my real induction. I learned it’s one thing to preach radical from the pulpit—people will come to atone for their wrongs by enduring a radical sermon—but when you identify with the people in their battle that’s when “you get your money from Moscow.” I’ve been in this fight for forty years. I’ve spent many a night behind the barbed-wire fence.

 

“I was defrocked in 1934. But in ‘42, the Presbyterian people asked me to go to Detroit because of so many southerners there in the auto plants. The established church couldn’t reach ’em. I was to be industrial chaplain
.
They wanted me to put my feet on the desk and get a $5,000 expense account. But I got there out among the people. That’s when the presbytery people began to get complaints. G.L.K. Smith and Carl McIntyre and some of the others put so many pressures on, they fired me.

 

I’ve used the Bible as a workingman’s book. You’ll find the prophets—Moses, Amos, Isaiah and the Son of Man, Old Testament and New—you’ll find they were fighting for justice and freedom. On the other side, you find the Pharaohs, the Pilates, the Herods, and the people in the summer houses and the winter houses. These people like John the Baptist are our people and speak our word, but they’ve been kidnapped by the others and alien words put in their mouth to make us find what they want us to find. Our word is our sword.

I interpreted this for the sharecroppers. We had to meet in little churches, white and black. It was in the tradition of the old underground railway. I translated the Bible from the vertical to the horizontal. How can I reach this man and not further confuse him? He had only one book, the Bible. This had to be the book of rights and wrongs. True religion put to work for the fraternity of all people. All passages in the Book that could
be used to further this day I underlined in red pencil. The Book fell open tome.

The rabble-rousers hated me. I had the longest horns in the country because I was using the very book they were using. I turned the guns the other way, as it were. I interpreted as I thought the prophets would interpret it, given the situation.

 

“
We have a religious phenomenon in America that has its origin in the South. Established churches followed urban trends. People out here were isolated and delivered religion on the basis of what they saw. Store-bought clothes—which they could not buy out of poverty—became worldly and sinful: ‘We had rather be beggars in the House of the Lord than dwell in king’s palaces.’ They were denied schooling. They were called rednecks and crackers and damn niggers. But the Bible was God’s Book. Refused access to medical aid, faith healed the body as well as the soul: ‘We seek another world.’ It was a protest against things economically unavailable. I interpreted this protest and related it to the Bible—instead of calling them hillbillies and rednecks.

“I translated the democratic impulse of mass religion rather than its protofascist content into a language they understood. That’s what got me in trouble with the synod. I was on trial. They asked me how I felt about the divinity of Jesus. 1 said, ‘I believe in the divinity but not the deity of Jesus.’ They didn’t know the difference. The divinity is God’s likeness, the deity is Godship. I had the Son of Man as a carpenter
.

“The preachers tell a story from the Bible, entertain for an hour or so and then come back to it. Young radicals try to clarify every issue in one speech. People are confused, go out and scratch their heads. And the kid says: What’s the matter with those dumb people? The demagogues are smarter—they entertain. I’ve tried to beat them at their own game. But you’ve got to know where to check the emotion
.”

 

In Winston-Salem, when we went out to organize the tobacco workers, the leader said: “If you crack this in two years, it’ll be a miracle.” We went to the oldest church. It was a bitter night. The pastor was a white woman, sitting there with an army blanket around her shoulders and a little old hat. I knew she was the bellwether. Unless I got her, I got nobody.

I gave the gospel of the Kings: Good News is only good when it feeds
the poor. This woman pastor got up and drawled: “Well, this is the first time I heard the gospel of three square meals a day, and I want in on it. I love to shout and now I know every time I shout, I know I need shoes.” First thing I know, she was touching cadence and going way off.