‘A Time for Burning’ and the Persistence of Thinly-Concealed Racism in America
The seminal Direct Cinema portrait of church segregation in Omaha, Nebraska, turns 50 this week.
The scene is Goodwin’s Spencer Street Barber Shop in Omaha, Nebraska. The time is the mid-1960s. Reverend Bill Youngdahl is sweating bullets, and not from the heat. He’s being roasted by a firebrand black community leader and barber, Ernie Chambers. Brought together by filmmakers William Jersey and Barbara Connell, the conversation is staged for the benefit not only of the white, flat-topped Lutheran preacher but also for the camera. The subject is “race relations,” in the broadest sense. Both men are young, magnetic idealists. Only one of them will have a job when the film, A Time for Burning, is over.
“You did not take over this country by singing We Shall Overcome,” Chambers orates. “You did not gain control over the world by dealing fairly. You’re treaty breakers. You’re liars. You’re thieves. You rape entire continents and races of people. Your religion means nothing. Your law is a farce.”
Jersey has since commented that the Reverend Youngdahl made perfectly articulate responses to much of what Chambers had to say. He and Connell simply chose not to include them. The real story wasn’t the dialogue, but the image of this idealist white preacher having 400 years of history laid on him like an especially hot shave. It’s one of the great scenes of American documentary cinema, the indelible core of A Time for Burning.
The film, which was produced by the Lutheran Church in America, was released 50 years ago this week. It received an Oscar nomination but has since somewhat faded in the collective memory behind the more heralded masterpieces of Direct Cinema. Yet its subject, the failed integration of two Omaha churches, is a small story at the very center of American life. And in the current political climate, the five decades since its release feel like merely a blip in the centuries-long history of racial discrimination.
At the center of the film is the doomed ambition of Reverend Youngdahl, newly-appointed pastor of the all-white Augustana Lutheran Church. His idea is a simple one. He wants the families of his church to visit the homes of the members of Hope Lutheran Church, a black congregation only a mile and a half away. This baby step is met with resistance from his own parishioners, however, and by the end of the film he resigns from his post.
But the ugliness of the blowback does not come in the way that we imagine. The faces of the Augustana elders do not contort with the violent screams we would recognize from the famous images of Southern segregationist protest. Rather, these Lutherans go out of their way to desperately conceal their own bigotry. It’s a fruitless endeavor, of course, but they try anyway. One man loses coherence entirely, cutting off his own sentences and returning with cowardly intransigence to a refrain of “This is not good.”
A Time for Burning is full of these conversations. The white Lutherans’ refusal to put their bigotry into simple terms renders them nearly catatonic. And it’s not just caused by the presence of the camera. One gets the sense that Youngdahl, as a living representative of Christian morality, gives them more anxiety than even Jersey and Connell. The pressures of decency, however, cannot make them change their commitment to never share a meal with a black person. It simply encourages them to obscure it.
It is therefore a breath of fresh air to hear from the pastor and youth of Hope Lutheran Church, who are a blend of outraged and flabbergasted by the intransigence of their neighbors. The central revelation, however, is still Chambers. The barber operates on an entirely different level of awareness. He talks about imperialism and colonialism, echoing Martin Luther King Jr. on the subject of the Vietnam War. Like many activists of this era, he has already set his sights beyond the legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement. The white Lutheran congregation, meanwhile, can’t even catch itself up to the present.
In a way, this rift in temporality is the central subject of A Time for Burning. Augustana Lutheran Church refuses to be dragged out of the 1950s while the film’s black subjects are already standing with one foot in the 1970s. Yet even this framework is too small. American culture and society have never really followed a linear timeline. A Time for Burning doesn’t easily fit into a static landscape of the past because the past itself has not yet been put to rest.
Of course, it is easy to look upon the documentary classics of the 1960s and see a departed world. Black and white and edited with a different sensibility, the most prominent images of Direct Cinema seem preserved in amber. George Wallace is long gone. The Kennedys and King were robbed of their chance at continuity, their legacies instantly stiffened. Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is about as compelling a case as any, capturing with remarkable clarity the stasis inflicted upon the Kennedy White House by the combination of aesthetics and mortality.
But the world of A Time for Burning is not gone. Ernie Chambers, for one, is still around. He’s now the longest serving member of the Nebraska legislature, representing the same neighborhood where he used to cut hair. The state’s only elected atheist, his tense encounters with organized religion hardly ended when Youngdahl walked out the door. He sued over the legislature’s practice of beginning each session with a prayer in 1980. (He lost, and the case was used as precedent for a similar decision in 2014.) In 2007 he sued God, for reasons too complicated to explain here.
The churches are also still there, occupying the same buildings as they did in the 1960s. Augustana Lutheran appears to be a more progressive congregation these days, though A Time for Burning appears nowhere on the church website.
American churches more broadly are still quite segregated. Only 20% of Americans attend churches where at least 80% of parishioners are of a single racial or ethnic group. This percentage is rising, but very gradually. The numbers take on more political significance when one thinks about the video released by Mike Pence to be shown in churches just before the election. Churches are as political as they ever were, and they very well may have thrown their weight behind a movement as contorted as the one that sent Youngdahl packing.
Still, this troubling continuity is often obscured by the doctrinaire optimism of the last eight years. Jersey, in a fairly recent episode of Doc Talk, falls into this trap himself. In a moment of reflection, he discusses a point of contention between himself and Chambers. Unlike the legislator, who would argue that little has changed in the intervening years, Jersey sees a changed world. His evidence? The election of Barack Obama.
And there you have it. This clip, of course, is more than a few months old. This kind of triumphalist view of America’s 21st century now looks like utter nonsense, armchair history from a comfortable distance.
That said, one thing that has developed and shifted countless times over the years is the form that euphemistic racism takes in public. Not every fight has ended with a white church elder retreating to the most linguistically simple of retorts, a refrain of “This is not good.” There have been moments of much more artfully dishonest language, from Lee Atwater to Mitt Romney.
But as Ava DuVernay’s 13th so brutally shows in its final act, we are now in a moment much closer to that of A Time for Burning. George Wallace is dead but Jeff Sessions is Attorney General. Steve Bannon is at CPAC making such horrifying statements as “If you think they’re going to give your country back to you without a fight you are sadly mistaken.” Anyone with even a passing familiarity with conservative politics in the Obama era can tell you what he means by “they” and “you.”
It can be impossible to bear. But A Time for Burning still exists, and it’s in the public domain. It’s offers no blueprint for how to resist this sort of hateful rhetoric and intransigence. Most documentaries don’t, and those that do are often wrong. If anything, A Time for Burning is a particularly demoralizing portrait of how truly difficult it is to fight such internalized brutality. But as a living document, it restores our memory of a past that many of us have been so determined to forget. It’s a wakeup call, a reminder that none of this is new and that if there is continuity in oppression, there is also continuity in struggle.
Below is the first half of A Time for Burning via YouTube. For the second half, or to watch the whole movie at one location, head to archive.org.
