The Top Ten Things Quakers & Seekers Need to Know About Willie Frye Jr.:

A Preamble: Why should September be Willie Frye month?

Two main reasons:

One, because he was both born (on the 26th) and passed away (on the 9th) in September. And–

Two, because of the remarkable but little-known legacy he left us (Friends and other modern seekers); which takes some explaining. That follows, along with a confession.

1. 1. Willie Frye Jr. was born in 1931 & raised in Bassett, about 60 miles north of Winston-Salem North Carolina, in very rural Virginia, into a very conservative and religiously strict family. His father (Willie Sr.) was a follower of and donor to the John Birch Society, and right-wing radio preacher Carl Macintyre.  Both were loudly anti-communist, considered liberal and communists as the same thing, and were strong supporters of racial segregation. Willie Sr. joined a very fundamentalist Friends church, part of Ohio YM, now called the Evangelical Friends Church-Eastern Region, or EFC-ER. He also wanted all his eight children to become pastors or missionaries; Willie Jr. was his third child and oldest son.

2. Thus it was no surprise that, while still in high school, Willie began taking courses at a nearby fundamentalist Bible college.

3.  In 1951, Willie Jr. married Agnes Jones; they met at Bible college.

4. In 1953, Willie’s daughter Kathy was born, and he graduated from Bible College. He was soon hired as pastor of White Plains Friends Church,  near Mt. Airy (famously fictionalized as “Mayberry”) on the Virginia-Carolina border. White Plains was part of North Carolina Yearly Meeting (NCYM-FUM), which straddled (sometimes fudged) the line between fundamentalist and mainline Protestantism in theology and culture.

Before Willie took the post, he carefully read the NCYM book of Faith and Practice (F&P) and compared it to the Ohio counterpart. He decided that Ohio’s was more “spiritual”; which suggests it was more fundamentalist in doctrine. (Two editions of this NCYM F&P, from 2004 & 2012, are online here. The 2023 F&P from EFC-ER [neé Ohio] is online here.)

5. Spiritual or not, all around “Mayberry,” change was afoot: in particular, within a year the U.S.  Supreme Court issued the historic Brown Decision in 1954, striking down the principle underlying racial segregation, particularly in schools.

Initially this decision did not directly affect Willie Jr. and his new family. But it would. Soon, all across the white South, all hell was breaking loose in response; but across the Black South, all HOPE was breaking loose too.

5A. Willie & Agnes had two more children: twin boys Rick and Bob, born in 1955.

The twins’ infancy was very tough: they were sickly,  colicky, cried much, and slept little. Willie and Agnes were soon exhausted, juggling two babies at once around the clock, plus job and and a toddler.  A few months later the distress deepened when one twin was diagnosed as profoundly deaf.

Coping with these stresses left Willie and Agnes not only worn out but dispirited. Before long, for Willie they spiraled into a religious crisis. As he described it:

WILLIE: [What] was happening to us did not make sense from the orthodoxy of my culture. After all, I reasoned, I had given up a career in business to enter the ministry at what I considered to be a rather commendable sacrifice. Orthodoxy had told me that, although the sacrifice was great, dedication to such a high calling would insure God’s personal care of me, and I would enjoy unblemished happiness and bliss. Instead, I was experiencing untold misery and pain— so I asked why.

A thousand questions followed. Why should we be driven to the breaking point when we had willingly “left all” to follow the calling of God? More important, why should an innocent child be sentenced to a lifetime of severe disability? What about all of the other children in the world who suffered through no fault of their own? How was it that other people had children who were whole and healthy and who slept at night? These questions and many like them rudely shook me out of my smug orthodoxy and set me on a quest for answers that were more satisfying than the ones I had.

. . .  I was a preacher with no message—a Christian with no faith. I was caught in suffering that seemed unfair, and confronted by evil that made no sense.”

6. With these inner queries still tormenting him, Willie and the family moved southeast in 1956  to the rural  Snow Camp NC, where he became pastor of Cane Creek Friends. Seeking help in sorting out his churning faith and thought, Willie soon enrolled at Quaker-founded Guilford College in Greensboro, majoring in religion.

Guilford was not a Bible College; it was religiously closer to the Protestant Mainline, but with some fundamentalist sympathizers. As for Willie’s agonizing about suffering innocents and other theological conundrums, its mainliners and liberals might not have had any better ultimate answers. Yet many  among them found ways to coexist with both their uncertainties and their faith; which was not nothing.

Willie on Guilford: I had time and opportunity to reflect more objectively on my entire religious environment. While I had accepted its doctrines and conformed to its practices, there were certain aspects with which I had never felt comfortable such as its tendency toward emotional displays and psychological manipulations. I also realized that people were making tremendous claims of personal holiness of life which often were not borne out in practice. It appeared to me to be a holiness that was, for the most part, an external and superficial one and the sins that were condemned were the sins of other people.

Consequently, I began to lose faith in the religion of my childhood and youth. It made too many claims that I did not see lived out and it left too many questions unanswered. As Isaiah said, it became for me a “bed too short and a cover too narrow.” The solid ground moved from under my feet, and I was left wondering if I could believe in anything. In desperation, I began to study the Gospels, and to review the life and teachings of Jesus; and, in perhaps the darkest night of my soul, when it seemed that all my faith was swept away, I discovered Jesus of Nazareth in a new way. . . .

He called this renewal experience “mystical,” and said it was strongly influenced by Quaker writers such as John Woolman and Rufus Jones, both icons for the emerging liberal Quaker streams.

Willie also said his now-evolving faith, “is by no means a finished article, for I am still questing. To use another and perhaps a better metaphor, it is a pilgrimage. Some of the paths I have followed have led a circuitous route, bringing me back to orthodoxy; others have carried me far from it. .  .”

One of the orthodoxies he discarded was belief in the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ as a one-time world-saving event long ago. Instead, his connection with Jesus became more personal and ongoing.

(We can’t do Willie’s religious evolution justice in this blog post — but theologians take note: it would be a fine subject for a book; he was far from the only one who was treading a parallel path. And the changes were real and crucial for him.)

They were also hazardous: for fundamentalists, this would be a bridge way too far (or rather, several bridges); and their disapproval could cost “errant” pastors their jobs, their careers, and sometimes more.

7. In 1959, Willie took on being pastor at Goldsboro Friends in northeastern NC. He spent nine years there, and recalled this Friends community as very supportive.

7A. By then, the post-1954 civil rights struggle was underway in NC: in September 1957, Dorothy Counts of Charlotte was the first Black student to enter a white NC school. Facing violence and mobs, she lasted a week. When authorities warned they could not ensure her safety, she withdrew  and went north to Philadelphia.

Early in 1960, lunch counter sit-ins started, close by in Greensboro, and rapidly spread widely.  These protests were countered by the reappearance and rapid rise of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan,  after years of dormancy. By 1964, the FBI estimated that there were at least 12000 active members in 200-plus local “klaverns” in the state; this was more of an organized KKK presence than in all the rest of the South put together. By then there were open Klan rallies with cross burnings at least weekly. Eastern Carolina, where Goldsboro was located, was the Klan’s “heartland.”

Another incident soon occurred closer to Goldsboro. In the village of Elm City, 33 miles north,  an integrated team of volunteers, mainly northern college students, came to town to repaint its venerable First Presbyterian Church, then home to a small Black congregation. But when the initial crew arrived at the church, paint and brushes in hand, it was stopped and scattered by a threatening Klan mob.

That summer was tense all across the South and indeed across the country. Just days earlier, three  workers in the Mississippi “Freedom Summer” organizing project had been abducted. Their disappearance sparked a massive manhunt and continuing nationwide publicity. (This writer followed the daily reports from college in Colorado, 1300 miles away.)

Several weeks went by, yet the media spotlight and public anxiety did not abate; in fact, it deepened: searchers soon recovered the station wagon the three were driving, burned and ditched in a roadside thicket. Then, combing through forests, swamps and rivers, they began turning up bodies of other Black men, who had earlier disappeared and died violently, without previous public notice.

Week by week, the search was frustrated, but hardly fruitless, as it was incidentally unmasking a larger, ruthless racial reign of terror being enacted with impunity across the state. The eight additional bodies they unexpectedly recovered were grisly reminders that a full century of such unpunished violence had continued in the South since the end of the Civil War: researchers have tracked 125 unaddressed racial lynchings in North Carolina, 191 next door in South Carolina, and 84 across the other border in Virginia (not to mention more than 650 in Mississippi alone).

The credible southern lynching tally is in excess of 4000. Not many persons of color may know these specific numbers; but a multitude  share the intergenerational trauma they engendered and reinforced. And the search repeatedly showed that it was not over.

Against this grim backdrop, Elm City Presbyterians managed to assemble a second integrated team of volunteer painters for their North Carolina church. As they arrived in late July, the Klan made more threats. This time, however, officials, including North Carolina governor Terry Sanford, vowed to protect them. State police were sent in; they chased and arrested two intruders who were trying to burn down the building.

With the state police hovering, and news media watching (even the New York Times took notice), the church soon got its new coat of paint. The volunteers were thanked and went safely home. By the end of July, the village was shaken but quiet.

But if Elm City was calming down, the Mississippi search was not: on August 4, the three civil rights workers’ bodies were found, in shallow graves dug in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Among those arrested and charged with the murders was the local deputy sheriff. Two state trials resulted in acquittals; but in a third, on federal civil rights charges, several were convicted and served time, a first in modern Mississippi.

Did Willie and Agnes Frye manage to ignore all this terror and disorder from Mississippi to just up the road?  There were other reminders: a major Klan rally in Goldsboro itself, in October of 1964, that reportedly attracted 1750 supporters. (Kathy Adams told me she did not recall any of this; she was eleven.)

Early 1965 was not much better, and not only on racial issues.  In February president Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam War into a major conflict, one that for the next decade would dominate much of American life (and death: 1600 North Carolina soldiers were killed there, tens of thousands were wounded and multiples more left with lifelong disabilities). Antiwar protests spread rapidly and grew more raucous.

At the same time, the civil rights focus shifted to Selma, Alabama, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead a voting rights campaign that culminated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march and the historic Voting Rights Act. It also yielded a brutal attack on a peaceful march at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge,  and at least four murders.

One killing came just after the march to Montgomery concluded: Viola Liuzzo, a housewife from Detroit who had joined the trek, was returning to Selma that night, and her car was chased by four Klan nightriders. They fired a pistol through her windshield, leaving Liuzzo to crash and bleed to death by the highway.

But one of the Klan nightriders was an FBI informant. The other three were quickly arrested. The next day,  March 27, 1965, President Johnson angrily denounced the Klan in a widely televised speech: “If Klansmen hear my voice today,” he  thundered, “let it be both an appeal and a warning, to get out of the Klan now and return to decent society before it is too late.”

Johnson’s pressure soon produced a crackdown by law enforcement in North Carolina, where local sheriffs and state police had previously given the burgeoning Klan a free pass. Under this pressure, state KKK membership peaked and soon began to decline.

But it didn’t go quietly. The three Klansmen charged with Liuzzo’s killing were tried twice for murder in Alabama, and acquitted. The Klan organized rallies where they were cheered as victorious warriors. In May,  a support rally in Anniston, Alabama drew 1500.

A week later they traveled 500 miles northwest to Dunn, North Carolina, an hour south of Goldsboro. There the three were lionized by a crowd of 6000, as a large fiery cross lit up the night. Their triumphal tour ended that fall, when a third trial that December, on federal civil rights charges, saw the three convicted; one soon died, and the other two served several year prison terms.

8. All this time, Willie Frye was in Goldsboro, doing pastoral work, raising his kids, and not looking for trouble.But trouble came looking for him, in the wholesomely innocuous guise of a couple wanting to get married.More on that in the second part of this post, tomorrow.