BC = BEFORE CHARLES [R, 8-22-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of an Old Man—BC = BEFORE CHARLES [R, 8-22-24]

 

Yes, I’ve written about this before. It was pivotal for me and Helen and our friends and generation. But I just saw the obit for Charles Morris in the Bloomington, IL newspaper…

Charles was a math professor at IL State U. When hired, he had just completed his PhD in math at U of IL. A prestigious achievement. Not surprising, though. He had graduated as valedictorian of his high school class when he was only sixteen.

What was surprising, though, was his hire by IL State, a former “normal” school—meaning a teachers’ college—and hence the name of its town, Normal, Illinois, which is about as flat a name as you can get, almost as flat as the prairie it sits on. Normal was a totally white town. No blacks were allowed to live in town. Charles and Jeanne were black.

His obit says that he and Jeanne were part of a team that bought housing in Normal for black students, but it doesn’t mention that they were the first black family that got to buy a house in Normal themselves. Up to then, blacks had to live in the twin city of Bloomington.

Yes, the exceptionally bright Professor Morris could teach students at ILSU, with his fancy PhD, but could Charles and Jeanne walk the same streets those students used? The town council said that the answer was “no.”

Some of us Normal people disagreed. We said the normal practice should be “open housing.” We set out to make Normal normal.

We signed petitions. We talked on radio shows. We made signs. We gave lectures. Helen and numerous other church ladies had coffees in their homes for neighborhood women. One of us even preached a sermon advocating open housing, through the strange mechanism of claiming it was good to keep black people out. “What will happen,” I asked, “if we let PhDs from the U of Illinois live here? Why, then we’d have to let Purdue people in, too.” Nobody else thought that was nearly as funny as this IU grad did, but it had the desired effect, of stirring people up, and giving Methodists permission to favor open housing, since one of their preachers advocated it, however backwardly.

The problem, though, was that I was just one of the Methodist preachers involved, and “the least of these,” to make it worse. I was just a campus minister, which hardly qualified as clergy, since I worked with students, always the most despised and disregarded group in a city where the residents make their money off of them.

The really important Methodist minister was Bill Hammit, Sr. He was the Director of The Baby Fold, our child care/orphanage ministry in central Illinois, and, much more importantly, an elected member of the Town Council.

Through many interviews, the members of the Council had made their views known. One was a realtor, a neighbor where we lived, who espoused the trite and popular excuse that black people would lower the values of Normal homes. The result of those known views was that the Council was evenly divided. But there was one more member.

All the Council members had made their views known, that is, except for Bill Hammit. It had become clear that when he made his decision, it would be the deciding vote.

One day, he came to First Methodist and called into session Gordon White, Senior Minister, and Clarence Young, Associate Minister, and the rabble-rousing John Robert McFarland, Campus Minister.

“You are my pastors,” he said. “Tell me how I should vote.” With one voice, we replied, “You have to vote for open housing.”

“But you’re preachers,” Bill replied. “People will say it’s easy for you to take that approach because you live in parsonages, so you don’t have to worry about the values of your homes going down.”

“Not me,” said Gordon. “I own my own home.” “Not me,” said Clarence. “I’m building my own home right now.” “Not me,” I said. “The Wesley Foundation doesn’t have a parsonage, so I have a twenty-year mortgage.”

“Well,” said Bill, “I guess I have to vote for open housing.”

I felt very good about being part of the start of open housing in Normal, but it still rankles me that I did not push back against Bill’s reasoning. As Christians, as clergy, it was our responsibility to do the right thing, without the smoke screen of “Well, it will ruin our house values, too.”

Charles Morris bought a house in Normal. He lived in it until a few years before his death, when he moved to a retirement center. He had a significant and useful career, rising to be VP of ILSU.

No one even thought to put into his obit, though, that there was a time before Charles and Jeanne that black folks could not live in Normal.

That's normal now.

John Robert McFarland