When I Was a Campus Minister

In 1971 when I was a campus minister representing ten denominations at a southern state university and I was just a child of twenty-five (I didn’t really represent all ten did I?), I taught an adult church school class in the downtown

Presbyterian Church using Will Campbell’s Up to Our Steeples in Politics. It was Sunday and as I didn’t have any preaching responsibilities given that I was a campus minister at a state school, I was asked to teach by a persuasive Christian Education person.

How could I, a twenty-five year old, teach anyone anything let alone something of significance regarding the Christian faith? One of the members of the class was a young, very young but not quite as young as I was president of a local bank.

He said that he was sick of all the minority (meaning black) poor people who kept complaining about how life had been hard and that they had been denied rights and privileges that so many others took for granted.

He said that he wasn’t part of the Civil War and that it was time for them (meaning blacks) to stop griping and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. When he said it, there was this (what I thought was a slow motion) really long period of silence.

I thought that silence was just me and my righteous really Yankee Christian mind trying to comprehend what it was that the really young Southern racist banker had just said, but, in reality, it was just about everybody else in the class

(except his really dull, smiley, oblivious Southern Belle wife) who just sat there not knowing what to say in part because they were respectful Presbyterians but also because they were just flummoxed by the statement.

This was the South, but it was the mid-south being Bowing Green, Kentucky (a border state) and nobody wished to appear racist, but mostly all the other members of the class knew that the very young president of the bank

had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had never worked a cotton picken’ minute for anything he had and, most of all, his daddy had been the president before him. It took me, a stupid Yankee originally from

the south side of Chicago whose parents had fled the Roseland area with the rest of the white flight to the suburbs, to say, “Now, Cleon, what do you think Will Campbell would have to say about that?  Shall we all turn to page 93?”

Even at twenty-five, I knew he was a dumb-ass privileged southern white boy, but it was a Presbyterian Church and, besides to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have anything to brag about given my southern (that is south-side) background. And besides,

I was only twenty-five.  Thank God for page 93.