“…and keep all this?”
I grew up in the orbit of Princeton University, fifteen minutes away in a small town. Princeton was so ubiquitous that folks sometimes referred to it, in a tone more frank than ominous, as “The University.” Concerts, field trips, summer camps happened at the university; parents worked there. Princeton was one of the pattern-setting centers of livelihood.
It has a large, proud campus. A stone and iron gate, topped with carved eagles, guards its front entrance. In the past decade, it’s put up a twisting, aluminum library, designed by Frank Gehry, and a gargantuan Gothic dorm underwritten by Meg Whitman’s eBay millions. Loiter among its arches and paths, and you’ll find that, without exception, its green embroidery—lawns, trees, flowers—is elegant, precise. Behind every turret, you have to guess, there’s a platoon of custodians, waiting to dash out and fix things up when you’re not looking.
Princeton is a beautiful place, and that beauty serves a purpose. It testifies to the value of knowledge wrested from ignorance. It promises a hopeful future for the fellowship of scholars.
Walking through its campus yesterday, I thought about the Reverend Will D. Campbell.
Campbell died in early June. He was, for most of his career, a preacher without a congregation: In 1956, death threats prompted him to leave his chaplaincy at Ole Miss; afterward, he worked for the National Council of Churches, its man in the south tasked with civil rights. A few years later, he got tired of the National Council and left that, too.
His civil rights record staggers. In 1957, he was the only white person at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s first meeting. Later that year, he walked with the Little Rock Nine as they approached the city’s Central High School. In 1961, he traveled with the Freedom Riders, and in 1963, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, where police turned dogs and fire hoses on the protesters.
And he was, once, invited to preach at Riverside Church in New York City.
Riverside Church traffics in the same Neo-Gothic filigree as Princeton, and sits adjacent to another Ivy League school, Columbia. It also sits a few blocks from Harlem. It is a magnificent structure, and the congregation housed there boasts a long history of social justice advocacy. For Campbell’s sermon, the church asked, might he address how local race relations could be improved?
What happened next comes from Lawrence Wright’s 1991 profile of the Reverend:
Campbell climbed into the nine-ton pulpit of sculpted limestone. He stood there dwarfed by the towering nave and the gleaming organ pipes. “I’ve been invited to enough of these affairs by now to know what you mean,” Campbell began in his twangy Tennessee drawl. “What you mean is ‘How can we improve race relations in New York City…?’” and at this point he paused significantly, casting his eye over the magnificent stained glass, the opulent icons, the velvet-padded mahogany pews, all paid for with Rockefeller millions, “‘…and keep all this?’”
In one of the videos I found of Campbell, he announces his right to be completely wrong about anything at any time; I retain an identical right here. But in the telling I heard of this tale, as best I remember, he paused again, stared at the congregation, and said:
“The answer, my friends, is: We cannot even hope to.”
