“It was devastating. And were it not for this lady I don’t know what I would have done,” Taylor confesses. “She fooled me, innocently. The architect sat in our home, and . . . I asked him how much it was going to cost [to rebuild the church]. He said it would cost a million dollars. My heart went straight down. Black people in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1952 couldn’t raise a million dollars. But Laura said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him. It won’t cost a dime over $750,000.”’ Taylor says that he was so anxious to believe her that for a year and a half he “traveled on that delusion.” He laughs heartily as he reports that it cost nearly $2 million. In his view, his wife’s figure turned out to be a “merciful deception.”
Though naysayers said that Concord would never rebuild, the congregation not only erected an edifice on the very grounds of the fire but also added a gymnasium, an educational building, and a full space underneath the sanctuary, doubling the church’s seating capacity.
Less satisfying was the outcome of the bitter 1960 confrontation between Taylor and J. H. Jackson, then president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., the nation’s third largest Protestant denomination and the group to which most black Baptists belong. Jackson’s conservative social and political views put him at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and those ministers sympathetic to the cause of civil rights. Because of their disagreements about civil rights, and the issue of incumbency (Jackson had been president of the convention since 1953 and in the process broke convention limits on presidential tenure), Taylor agreed to run for the convention presidency at its annual meeting in Kansas in 1960.
A bitter fracas ensued. Hundreds of supporters of each candidate physically struggled and fought, leading to the accidental death of a loyal Jackson supporter and certain defeat for Taylor’s team. The next year Taylor joined with King and other ministers who seceded from the convention to form the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., which currently has a membership of more than 2 million people.
More than 30 years after this painful period, Taylor harbors no animosity toward Jackson, who died in 1991 at eighty-four. “Jackson had an ingenious and peculiar appeal to black people, as Reagan had to white people: J. H. Jackson could weep with the idea . . . that he was being put upon by powerful people . . . who were attacking [him], and he was weak. He had a gift for that.”
Taylor even manages to find humor in illustrating this dimension of Jackson’s appeal, which turned on his great gift of storytelling. H. H. Humes, a childhood friend of Jackson’s, recalls hearing Jackson preach about the hardships that afflicted his parents in attempting to send Jackson to college. “When it looked like he couldn’t go back to college, his mother said, ‘The boy must go.’ And the father said, ‘We don’t have anything but a mule.’ But she said, ‘The boy must go to college.’ And the father said, ‘We won’t have any way to get the crop.’ But the mother said, ‘The boy must go to college,’ and they finally sold the mule. Humes was weeping as he came out of the church. And someone said to him, ‘Well you grew up with him. What did they do for a crop [since] they sold the mule? [Taylor’s voice affects a weepy tone] ‘Oh,’ Humes said, ‘Jack’s people never did own a mule, but I just can’t stand to hear him tell that story.”’ Taylor breaks into laughter, trailing it with “Lord, have mer . . . ” The last syllable of his plea is erased by more laughter.
Taylor’s enormous gift of humor, his ability to acknowledge the humanity of his opponents, gives him the grace to accept and overcome his own failings. When I asked him about the thorny problem confronting the black church in its treatment of women in the ministry, Taylor confessed that he had to grow into his enlightened position.
“As with the white male, an exclusive preserve [of black male power is] under threat of invasion . . . I had to have a conversion myself. I knew theoretically this was wrong, but prejudice is not a rational thing.”
Taylor’s conversion occurred in the late ’60s at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, where he was teaching a class on preaching. There Taylor encountered white female students whose fresh viewpoints helped change his views on women in the ministry. “As they presented the gospel, I saw a new angle of vision . . . I had an interesting, and to me a humorous, thing happen. The young women of Colgate came to me and said, ‘You know, you’re just like all these other people here. You use all this sexist language.’ Well, I was really stung. Who am I, having suffered from being excluded so long, to [exclude others]? And so I worked on it.”
Taylor reports that after he delivered the Luccock Lectures at Yale Divinity School, a female faculty member thanked him for his inclusive language. Feeling good about the acknowledgment, he went back to Colgate to report this fresh triumph to his female students. “I saw some of the young women in the hall, and I told them what had happened. And I said, ‘You know, I want to thank you girls . . . ’ ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘you don’t say girls. Say women,’ ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It takes a little learning.’”
Since that time, Taylor has developed an acute analysis of gender relations, particularly in black culture. “I was greatly troubled by the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas situation, and more troubled than almost anything by the attitude of [many] black women. I reached the conclusion that black women have been so put upon that they have developed a kind of psychological scar tissue, so that they’ve learned to take in stride things that ought to outrage them. And that distresses me. I am tired of the way black men misuse black women, and the way black women apologize for and accept what black men do.”
It is above all Taylor’s unsurpassed ability to preach to preachers—his keen sense of the preaching mission and its encumbrances and opportunities, its joyous peaks and its seemingly bottomless sorrows—that make him a popular presence among seminarians and seasoned preachers alike. In his homiletics class at Princeton, Taylor ranges through the history of the English pulpit with formidable ease, sharing stories of history’s great divines. He whips out tattered pieces of newspaper, whose margins are covered with notes drawn from a massive and virtually infallible memory bank of preaching lore and legend.
On one of the days I attend his class, Taylor produces a snatch of paper ripped from the previous Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, which he reads religiously, along with the New Republic (“I despise almost every word in it, but it gives me good targets to shoot at”), the New York Review of Books, and the daily New York Times and Newsday. Taylor reads a review describing the ingredients of a great novel—from its descriptive power to its presentation of a wide view of humanity without losing its link to individual characters. He reminds them that great preaching contains the same elements.
His desire to help other preachers has endeared Taylor to audiences across the nation. It has made his sermons to ministers legendary. Black preachers, especially, collect sermons with the zeal of avid fans of baseball cards. At conventions of black denominations, the tapes of famous ministers sell briskly. These tapes are especially circulated and reproduced among younger preachers, serving as models of preaching excellence and training in the high art of sacred speech. Some even preach the sermons to their own congregations, trying out fresh ideas and new words they have gleaned from master storytellers. Frederick Sampson’s “Dwelling on the Outskirts of Devastation,” Jeremiah Wright’s “Prophets or Puppets,” Charles Adams’s “Sermons in Flesh,” William Jones’s “The Low Way Up,” and Caesar Clark’s “Elijah Is Us,” have all acquired canonical status in a genre of religious address that treats the plight of the preacher. Several of Taylor’s own sermons, including “Seeing Our Hurts with God’s Eyes,” and “A Wide Vision Through a Narrow Window,” neither of which appear in his books of published sermons, are classics of the genre. They amply illustrate the astonishing range of his pulpit gifts.
In “A Wide Vision Through a Narrow Window,” Taylor, speaking on a text from Job, details for his audience of preachers at Bishop College’s L. K. Williams Institute in 1980, the price of authentic preaching. In an arresting metaphor
he reminds us that for eighteen chapters Job’s friends had turned against him, “driving cold steel into his already bleeding spirit.” The nineteenth chapter—the chapter containing Taylor’s text—is Job’s “reply to their gloomy countenances, and their long, bitter indictment of his calamity, as they sit around the pallet of his misery.”
Taylor employs and repeats the sermon’s theme to sharpen his portrayal of Job’s predicament, a condition where “the window has narrowed out of which he looks upon the landscape of life. Once there had been the homes of children, and fruitful fields, and lowing cattle and bleating sheep. But now, the window has narrowed.” As if being forsaken by earthly friends were not enough, Job faces, as do all ministers, the prospect of feeling forsaken by God. Speaking through the voice of Job, Taylor says that “it seems that God has overthrown me. Now here is where the window does narrow to a slit. If God be for us, then what difference does it make, who is against us? . . . But, my father, if G-a-w-w-d be against us, what else is there left? I don’t know why, in the solemn appointments of God, that there are times when it does indeed seem as if we’ve got not a friend in earth—or in heaven!” Taylor thunders. And then he emphatically completes the sentence, with a staccato verbal surge, “left!”
Taylor eloquently rephrases the theme of his sermon in question form. “And my brother preachers, you say that you want great power to move among men’s heartstrings?” Taylor incants in almost mournful tones. “You cannot have that, without great sorrow. G-a-w-w-d can fill only the places that have been emptied of the joys of this life.” He then challenges them with examples drawn from the lives of other suffering servants. “Dale of Carr’s Lane in Birmingham [England] had particularly toward the end a terribly lonely existence. Charles Spurgeon in the Metropolitan Tabernacle [London] had rheumatism and gout that made life unbearable for him. Frederick W. Robertson of Brighton [England] was so sensitive that the least thing shattered him like the piercing of an eye. George Truett, who charmed the American South in the first four decades of this century lived in the after-memory of a hunting accident in which a friend was killed by his own gun.”
Taylor restates his theme later in the sermon. He then implores his congregation of preachers to look beyond the peripheral signs of preaching greatness to the real source of pastoral insight—the common bond with one’s hearers provided by suffering. “Now you may tickle people’s fancies, but you will never preach to their hearts, until at some place, some solemn appointment has fallen upon your own life, and you have wept bitter tears, and gone to your own Gethsemane and climbed your own Calvary. That’s where power is!”
Taylor rhythmically measures his speech, repeating the forces that cannot by themselves make for great preaching. He builds up tension for the ultimate release in the announcement of what constitutes the power of proclamation. “It is not in the tone of the voice. It is not in the eloquence of the preacher. It is not in the gracefulness of his gestures. It is not in the magnificence of his congregation. It is in a heart broken, and put together, by the eternal God!”
Taylor wrestles with some of the inevitable sadness that life brings—for instance, the suffering that comes with aging. “I have reached a very unflattering and unenviable time. I have more money than I have time. And that’s not good. It was much better the other way. But then I’ll take it—what can I do?”
As we discussed his fifty-two years of marriage to Laura, he said, “I sometimes see her lying in repose now, and [he pauses], a great sadness comes over me because I know one of us must leave the other. I don’t know which I fear the most. [He pauses again]. But, what can we do?”
Tragically Laura was struck and killed by a New York sanitation truck in February 1995. Despite this great loss, one suspects that Taylor will do what he has always done, whether life favored him or assaulted him. He will, as long as he is able, preach the Word of God. That has been his peculiar gift and burden, his bread and butter for more than fifty years. And out of his own suffering, he has shaped a ministry that has spoken to the hearts of men and women throughout the world. And because of his peculiar gift for making mortals see the light of God, no matter how dimmed by human frailty and failure, who can doubt that it will continue to shine on him in the hour of his greatest need.
Seventeen
“SOMEWHERE I READ OF THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH”: CONSTRUCTING A UNIQUE VOICE
There is little doubt that the most controversial book I’ve written is I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. Many black readers were outraged that I spoke openly about Dr. King’s shortcomings in the book, especially allegations that he was a plagiarist and an adulterer. Ironically, many of my critics never read the book. Only when I appeared in the media and explained my love and admiration for King did the attacks subside. I argued that we must confront King’s failures honestly since they are part of the historical record, but that his flaws cannot diminish his legendary status. I was also keen on being frank about King’s failures so that the younger generation might believe that they didn’t have to be perfect to be useful. In fact, the failure to address King’s all-too-human behavior only strengthens the hand of his enemies, since they will be free to distort King’s memory with their own jaundiced and bigoted views of his life. Better to tell the truth and still claim King’s greatness, than pretend that King wasn’t a human being who had shortcomings like the rest of us. This chapter addresses the rich oral traditions from which King drew in developing his style of speaking, while confronting King’s plagiarism in academic circles. I make a distinction between King’s oral borrowing—part of a well-established tradition of verbal sharing that, while not exclusive to black culture, does have unique resonance—and his literary lapses on the page. I also attempt to explain the psychological elements that may have driven his actions, while offering an account of the racial pressures that may help explain his behavior. Perhaps the greatest vindication of my efforts was supplied by Andrew Young, who told me that my book was honest and necessary, and that I had gotten King and his courageous cohort right. Coming from one of King’s most trusted lieutenants, Young’s words have been a blessed source of peace.
AT A RECENT CONFERENCE ON BLACK MALES, I shared keynote responsibilities with two other speakers. One of them was a forty–something civil rights leader and Baptist preacher. It was February, known in my circles as “National Rent-a-Negro Month”1 in homage to the flurry of Black History Month activities that colleges and corporations cram into those twenty-eight days (as if no other time was appropriate to recognize black achievement). I hustled into the conference late, arriving just in time to hear the closing comments of the civil rights leader, who by now was “putting on the rousements”—firing the crowd up with his astute analysis of the crises confronting black men. He was sailing fast now, punctuating his speech with powerful phrases he knew would elicit the audience’s approval, an old trick that we Baptist preachers use to send our congregations out to do the Lord’s work.
Just as the speaker reached the climax of his oration, I was whisked to the back entry of the stage to await my turn to speak, since all three keynoters were presenting in rapid succession. As I watched my colleague finish, I got an even better sense of the glorious rapport he had established with his audience, a sublime connection that gives both parties a rush that few other events can match. As he offered his husky-voiced parting thoughts, the crowd leaped to its feet, and so did I, gleefully grabbing him as he came off stage in a brotherly bear hug, wrapping him in the audience’s affection as their unofficial emissary.
“Hey, Doc, how ya doin?” my colleague brightly greeted me.
“Man, you tore it up,” I enthused. “I got a hard act to follow, boy.”
“Aw, man,” he graciously responded, “you know you gonna turn it out.”
“I don’t know, brother,” I shot back. “You look like you killed everythang in there. And what ain’t dead, you done put in intensive care.”
We both cracked up, bathing each other
in the occasionally obnoxious mutual admiration to which Baptist preachers are eagerly given. As I was being introduced, my colleague offered his regrets about having to leave for another engagement. I readily understood, since I would have to leave right after my speech for the next town in my Black History Month tour.
As the crowd warmly greeted me, I let on that my colleague was difficult to follow but that I’d try to do my best (a Baptist preacher way of begging for sympathy and winning the crowd). My grasp at pity seemed to be working, as the crowd urged me on with “amens” and “go ’heads.” I slid easily enough into my speech, but at a crucial period—or, more exactly, at a crucial three-minute passage that I had used in many of my speeches over the past year—I felt the enthusiasm of the audience flag. Usually my passage drew uproarious guffaws and penetrating “humhs,” but now I was greeted with sprinkled laughter and moderate “huhs,” the kind that feel more obligatory than genuine. I pressed on, not giving it much thought, chalking the lukewarm response up to my poor delivery or to having misjudged my audience. But the rest of my speech went well. I too got a standing ovation and was grateful for the audience’s loving endorsement. But after my speech, I wondered again why my passage hadn’t gone over as hugely as it usually did. Not until later did I discover what had gone wrong.
Three weeks after my keynote speech, I had a speaking engagement in a nearby town. The woman who picked me up from the airport for the hour-long drive to the university remarked that she had attended the conference on black males and had enjoyed all of our speeches.
“I know you must have wondered why, when you got to a certain point in your speech, people didn’t respond as enthusiastically as you perhaps thought they would,” my host offered, impressing me with her savvy while piquing my interest.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 33