Category Archives: Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs

Dr. King & the FBI: Orgies & Commies & Wiretaps, Oh My!

Suppose for a moment that the bullet at the Lorraine Motel had missed Dr. King that evening in April, 1968. Suppose he had continued with the campaign there in support of sanitation workers — and then gone on to lead the Poor Peoples Campaign in Washington that summer.

Besides these boiling issues (along with the continuing Vietnam War), there were others waiting to ambush him, and one of these was sex.

The male chauvinism behind much of his and others’ behavior was corrosive to the cohesion of the key cadre of the movement: marriages were broken up; colleagues parted ways; many rank and file supporters backed away. These patterns were not “victimless.”

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Is There Life after Death in Quaker North Carolina?

So will there be a rush among the meetings which had quit the old North Carolina Yearly Meeting to join (“rejoin”?) FCNC? Wait and see. Greene did not sound sanguine about the prospects.
But never mind: some of the longtime pastors said they had a remedy: outreach & evangelism. They asked that endowment funds in the budget targeted for church extension be allowed to accumulate for about three years, to finance a big church planting project. And to start the process, they proposed to bring in a “church multiplication” expert from Barclay College in Kansas to do an intensive “kickoff weekend” next spring.
Clerk Greene was for it: “If we don’t grow, we die,” he said. The outreach work may be the FCNC’s most important mission: everything should support it. He asked for approval for the plan. He got it, but it was another subdued murmur.
Indeed, the mood that morning deserves specific mention: if the doors had burst open then, or at any point in the three-hour session, and a SWAT team had rushed in, determined to arrest anyone showing signs of enthusiasm, they would have gone away empty-handed. If there was any excitement and exhilaration among this group, they left it at home.

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Another Look: My Campus Crusade for Free Speech, 1963

While we worked on finding another suitably notorious Communist, we also set out to get a right-wing spokesman. This one was easier.
            What was the most right-wing organization in the country? The Nazi Party, of course. And George Lincoln Rockwell, its flamboyant leader, was only too happy to talk to anyone who would listen. One telegram and he was set to go.
          When Rockwell came, we moved to a smaller theater space in the student center, where it was still standing room only. Rockwell’s speech was a bombastic stream of bizarre sociological and anthropological “facts” that added up to, “they’re bad and we’re good.”  I remember him saying that there were “breeds of people, just like breeds of dogs.” Dennis and I did not sit on a platform with him, as we had the others; the front row was close enough.
Several people walked out during his presentation advocating racism, anti-semitism & national socialism.
         Rockwell caused lots of talk. A few days after his speech, some sociology professors held an open discussion they titled, “Is George Lincoln Rockwell a Closet Homosexual?”
           While many dismissed Rockwell as a kind of evil clown, and he was murdered by own of his own in 1967, he remains a cult figure for sectors of the rightwing which are still around.

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