ABYSSINIAN BAPTIST CHURCH IN HARLEM
“Through my friendship with a Negro student at the seminary, I came together with a group of Negro boys each week and also visited them at home,” he wrote, of what he understood as “one of my most important experiences in America.” He knew that the access he enjoyed was rare, but at the same time, “the results of such an experience are, I must say, deeply distressing.” It was to see “the real face of America, something that is hidden behind the veil of words in the American constitution that ‘all men are created free and equal.’ ”65 The image of the veil, it is well worth noting, Bonhoeffer borrowed from Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk—a book he was reading for Niebuhr.66
It was not only the exuberance and “eruptive joy” of black church worship that excited Bonhoeffer, but the seriousness as well. Among his white northeastern classmates, he’d often had the sense of “talking with schoolboys.” His conversations with Fisher and with other “Negroes and East Asian students,” though in one way entirely new, were nevertheless reminiscent of exchanges in Berlin-Grunewald, the ideas percolating with intensity, concentration, and verve. The “reigning atmosphere” of white Protestant culture in America produced “inordinate confusion” and “lack of clarity” and always left Bonhoeffer “feeling depressed”; but his black interlocutors proved “never for a moment … boring.”67 “It really does seem to me that there is a great movement forming,” he wrote in his notes, “and I do believe that the Negroes will still give the whites here considerably more than merely their folksongs.”68
Abyssinian Baptist Church was founded in 1808 by Ethiopian immigrants and sea merchants who had severed ties with the First Baptist Church in lower Manhattan after failing in efforts to end its segregated seating practices. The dissenters would move several times in the following decades—from nearby 40 Worth Street, to 166 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, to 242 West Fortieth Street—before purchasing land on 138th Street in Harlem between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. Shepherded by Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Abyssinian was the largest black church in the city, with some seven thousand members.69 One New York writer called it the “symbolic capital of black America.”70 It could not have been more different from Fosdick’s Riverside Church, and the difference was to Bonhoeffer a revelation.
A Union student from east Tennessee named Myles Horton met him after he returned from his first visit to Abyssinian. Bonhoeffer, Horton recalled, was in an expansive mood and eager to talk. Horton accompanied him on a most animate walk down Riverside Drive, the whole way Bonhoeffer speaking excitedly—in both English and German, which Horton did not understand—of the preaching, the congregants’ participation, and “especially the singing of black spirituals.” He conveyed the thrill of the flock voicing ascent with the preacher. Completely unguarded, at one point Bonhoeffer stopped abruptly and told Horton that his morning in Harlem was the only time “he had experienced true religion in the United States.” Indeed, he had never seen such joy in worship anywhere before, certainly not in the melancholy north German plains. Bonhoeffer concluded that “only among blacks, who were oppressed, could there be any real religion in this country.”71
His presence at Abyssinian that year coincided with important changes in Powell’s vocation as an urban minister. A skilled administrator as well as an eloquent preacher, Powell had already been senior pastor at the neo-Gothic church for more than twenty years. But with the Great Depression sweeping over the neighborhoods of Harlem as hard as anywhere, he felt summoned to new convictions. For most of his ministry, he had traded comfortably on a notion of Christ as inaccessibly transcendent, the God-man in majesty. Lately, he had begun to dwell on Jesus as one who wandered into distressed and lonely places to share the struggles of the poor as a friend and counselor.72 Bonhoeffer’s later formulation of the “Christological incognito” bears the impress of Powell’s decisive awakening, of Christ going incognito into the world, “an outcast among outcasts,” hiding himself in weakness.73
HARLEM IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Powell welcomed the German theologian into the full life of Abyssinian’s community. In time, the stranger in tailored suit and silk tie would lead a Sunday school class for boys and a Wednesday-evening women’s Bible study. He also assisted with the youth clubs and musical events, on one occasion even preaching from Powell’s pulpit—a rare privilege.
It might well be remembered that in his dissertations, Bonhoeffer had mounted an acrid assault on the German philosophical tradition, hacking through the thickets and thorns of Hegelian dialectic in a desperate bid to rescue the sanctity of the social, relational self from a world-dominating “Transcendental Ego.” While there is an undeniable beauty in those writings, in their unfolding and explication, they had come to seem to him algebraic and wintry. The opportunity to write a sermon for Abyssinian was something altogether different; even though that sermon has been lost, Bonhoeffer’s remarks to a fellow German student shortly afterward survive. Rudolf Schade, who later taught at Niebuhr’s alma mater, Elmhurst College, recalled his encounter with a “beaming and enthusiastic” Bonhoeffer trying to explain, in German, the emotional effect of hearing the black church folk generously answering his sermon with a chorus of “Amen”s and “Hallelujah”s and “Yes, Yes!”74
Paul Lehmann, an affable midwesterner (later to become professor of Christian ethics at Union), wondered whether his German classmate was spending too much time in Harlem. As early as October, Bonhoeffer had signed up for an outing to explore the neighborhood under the seminary’s program called “Trip to Negro Centers of Life and Culture in Harlem.” He compiled an extensive bibliography on “the Negro” through the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library and collected articles on the race issue. With Fisher at his side, Bonhoeffer scoured Harlem’s record shops for recordings of Negro spirituals, black gospel, and blues, most of which he would pack into a carrying case at the end of the school year and take home to Germany. The “spiritual songs of the southern Negroes represent some of the greatest artistic achievements in America,” he told Lehmann, who would remain intrigued by how relentlessly Bonhoeffer pursued “the understanding of the [Negro] problem to its minutest detail through books and countless visits to Harlem.” It was as if he had forged “a remarkable kind of identity with the Negro community.”75 By the mid-1930s, singing the Negro spirituals and listening to recordings of them would become a vital part of the dissident circles in Germany that gathered around Bonhoeffer.
Shortly after New Year’s 1931, Fisher presented Bonhoeffer with a gift he would carry with him the rest of his life, a copy of Johnson’s Book of American Negro Spirituals and sixty pieces of accompanying sheet music.76 It seems unlikely that Fisher over the years cleaved as intimately to the gift Bonhoeffer offered in return, Deutschland: Baukunst und Landschaft, a slim edited volume on modern German architecture.77
Bonhoeffer never wrote an account of his Sunday mornings at Abyssinian. It is a frustrating fact, particularly in light of the ample ruminations of his Italian journals, stylized but evocative of inner life. Yet Abyssinian turned unquestionable Bonhoeffer outward and upward. In the “Negro church” he learned to see familiar things in a previously hidden dimension.78 The scholar Ruth Zerner once astutely observed “that black worship, particularly in song, was so overwhelming and personal for [Bonhoeffer] that he found it difficult to analyze in writing.”79 Indeed, it left him simply, joyously, at a loss for words. On Thanksgiving 1930, he and Fisher, and two unidentified students—one black, one white—traveled by car to Washington, D.C. Fisher had relatives in the district. He showed Bonhoeffer the great monuments, the Capitol, the obelisk in tribute to the first president. He liked the way these landmarks were “all lined up and separated only by broad expanses of grass.” But Bonhoeffer was most taken by the Lincoln Memorial, its “enormously imposing” and exaggerated image of Lincoln, “ten or twenty times larger than life,” and “brightly illumined at night, in a mighty hall.” Bonhoeffer said he would not have b
elieved Americans capable of such a thing. “The more I hear about Lincoln the more he interests me,” he wrote to his parents. “He must have been a tremendous person.”
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER PHOTO SUBMITTED WITH HIS APPLICATION TO UNION SEMINARY, 1930
It would appear, however, that the most enduring memories of Washington came of sojourning “entirely among the Negroes.” American race relations were discussed in detail—not only with Fisher’s relatives but with “leaders of the young Negro movement at Howard College,” as Bonhoeffer noted in the same letter. And “their homes, by the way, were often strikingly well furnished.” This company likely included the philosophy professor Alain Locke, whose influential 1925 anthology The New Negro epitomized the innovations in African American political thought and culture, those animating the Harlem Renaissance and larger trends in black intellectual life.
On Saturday, December 5, Bonhoeffer hurried back to New York City to hear the Philharmonic under Toscanini’s direction, but after a week of intense exchanges and other experiences in the black life of the capital, he found the performance “dreadful” and “shallow.” To be fair, Bonhoeffer had never much cared for the popular Italian maestro, who years earlier had been invited to supervise Germany’s premier music festival, Bayreuth. “As if one of our own people could not have done it as well.”
What became of Frank Fisher? In letters to Niebuhr after 1931, Bonhoeffer would ask after his “Negro friend,” though the two would never see each other again. But on an evening in 1937, Bonhoeffer would tell a gathering of dissident Christians at an illegal seminary in northeast Pomerania that as he was preparing to leave New York at the end of his Sloan Fellowship year, Fisher implored him, “Make our sufferings known in Germany, tell them what is happening to us, and show them what we are like.” Over beer and cigars, huddled around the fireplace in a sparsely furnished manor house, Bonhoeffer shared stories of his travels to Washington and through the Jim Crow South, read passages from African American literature, and led the Lutheran pastors in some of his favorite black spirituals.
After Union, Fisher would teach at Morehouse College before accepting the calling in 1948 to the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta. It was a church of modest size and means on Atlanta’s west side, but its proximity to the consortium of Atlanta black colleges and its significant membership of professionals gave it prestige and influence. Fisher is remembered as a minister who spoke with the precision of a theologian and dedicated his life to practical service in the congregation and community. Indeed, he helped build a vital and nurturing church in a city and region divided by race.80
In January 1957, Fisher was arrested with a hundred ministers from the “Law, Love and Liberation Movement,” sometimes called the Triple L Campaign, for sitting in the whites-only section of Atlanta’s city buses. Among their ranks was a young Baptist preacher who had traveled from his parish in Montgomery, Alabama, just for this purpose: Martin Luther King Jr. Atlanta’s public transportation would remain segregated for another two years, but the Triple L Campaign, like many other protest movements in the South, had been inspired by the remarkable success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which the twenty-six-year-old King had led. The two Baptist preachers, King and Fisher, were soon thereafter linked as fellow travelers in the civil rights movement, and later that same year they combined their energies in launching the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a social justice revival with a bold mission: “To Redeem the Soul of America.” Fisher remained shepherd of the West Hunter flock until his death in 1960 at the age of fifty-one; he would be succeeded by a black Alabamian named Ralph Abernathy, on King’s strong recommendation. It also bears noting that the irrepressible Vernon Johns, King’s fearless predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, would preach his well-traveled sermon, “The Answer of Religion to the Riddle of Life,” at the Union Seminary Chapel on February 4, 1931—Bonhoeffer’s twenty-fifth birthday, though it is unknown whether he attended.81
In the remaining months of the spring semester, Bonhoeffer found his way into one other vibrant counterculture in progressive religious circles. Decades on, in 1976, the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker would present a paper at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Congress in Geneva (commemorating the seventieth anniversary of his birth), describing the pastor’s life as a “journey to reality.” If Bonhoeffer had remained an academic theologian, Weizsäcker wrote, “it seems to me that he would not have been able to resolve the problems he dealt with. In response to historical necessity, he freely chose a path that is more real.”82 That path, on which he first embarked during his American year, passed through not only the black church and the politically charged classrooms of Union but also, finally, circles of the American activist tradition—so that by the end “the real” had achieved the status of a sacrament.83
It was among Union’s faculty and students that Bonhoeffer first encountered the scholarly activist cohort. Through these associations he would visit the tenement ministries of New York, engage with the Women’s Trade Union League and the Workers’ Education Bureau of America, taking notes on the labor movement, poverty, homelessness, crime, and the social mission of the churches. He met with officials from the American Civil Liberties Union, which after its founding in 1920 had focused mainly on the rights of conscientious objectors and on the protection of resident aliens from deportation.
All had connections with religious thinkers, Niebuhr foremost. Since his arrival at Union in 1928, a cadre of social reformers had turned to him for moral and financial support, which, time and again, he provided graciously. Without his inspiration and practical assistance, historian Anthony Dunbar noted in his book Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929–1950, “these movements might not have existed or succeeded to the extent that they did.”84 Niebuhr’s encouragement as well as his help with organizing and fund-raising are evident throughout the letters and exchanges among members of groups dating to this remarkably fertile period for American social theology.
Most of these men and women were earnestly seeking the Kingdom of God on earth. Clarence Jordan, one of the founders of the Koinonia Farm (the name from the Greek for “communion”) in Americus, Georgia (where Habitat for Humanity later began), described the mission of his interracial cooperative farm as “a demonstration plot for the Kingdom.” To be sure, these champions of the Social Gospel hardly had time to sift the implications of Niebuhr’s developing “Christian realism,” and its critique of such utopian aspirations. It speaks to his sensitivities and wisdom that even as he rejected as naive optimism many of the suppositions of the Social Gospel—that the age of perpetual peace was imminent—he still embraced the movement’s transformative energies and never discouraged idealism among the grass roots, admiring the intent of these visionaries if not their understanding. In the same spirit, he also never failed to endorse experiments in radical community arising in the South and around the nation—even as hope for reform in this world was chastened by his own analysis.85
Bonhoeffer’s personal knowledge of the American organizing tradition, however, came more directly through two largely forgotten teachers at Union, Harry Ward and Charles Webber. It also deepened in friendships with classmates whose social imaginations had been excited by the emerging Beloved Community, an international fellowship of peace that crossed national boundaries with the aim to unite all humanity.86
A Methodist minister, professor of practical theology, and “radical socialist” (Bonhoeffer’s terse but apt description), Webber hailed from Osborne Mills, Michigan. He would become known to friends and foes alike as the chaplain of American organized labor. His book, A History of the Development of Social Education in the United Neighborhood Houses of New York, though unlikely summer reading in Friedrichsbrunn, was devoured by Bonhoeffer in New York. Webber was himself a skilled and tenacious organizer. His involvements were extensive: in the 1930s he held leadership positions in the Industrial Secretary for the Fellowship of Reconcilia
tion, the Upper Mississippi Waterway Association, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Richmond, Virginia, and in the 1950s and ’60s he represented the National AFL-CIO to churches and religious organizations.
Webber’s course, “Church and Community,” which Bonhoeffer took in the fall semester, resembled what sometimes is called a “service-learning initiative,” though it was much more than that. Webber used the class to introduce seminarians to the variety of lived theologies in a city facing the first year of the Great Depression, and to the variety of social ministries flourishing there. His subject was life, theology in practice; with Webber’s guidance, Bonhoeffer and his classmates ventured out from the Union quadrangle into a metropolis abounding with innovative faith-based organizing.87 There were “site visits” to dozens of New York churches and synagogues.
Strange Glory Page 16