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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0071, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Bishop Paul Hardin presided over the Council of Methodist Bishops during the 1960s and started the process of integrating the denomination. In this interview, he recalls how he got involved in Methodist ministry and became one of the first theology students at Emory University. He also describes some of the issues unique to leading a southern congregation, especially controversy over racial integration. Hardin served as pastor for the First Methodist Church of Birmingham throughout the early 1960s and remembers welcoming black attendees while excluding the White Citizen's Council against the wishes of his congregation. He used humor and personal conviction to oppose Governor George Wallace's segregationist stance and push white and black pastors past their reservations about working together. His commitment to interracial cooperation stemmed from his support of the reunification of the southern and northern Methodists in 1939 and from his father's early support for integration. He feels his life work contrasts with Martin Luther King's criticism of him and other progressive ministers in the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
Bishop Paul Hardin helped bring about racial integration of the United Methodist denomination in the 1960s. He recalls several points in his long ministry career when white and black pastors opposed his efforts to move ministers to other districts, accept church members of other races, and dissolve the Black Methodist district. Supportive church members helped him withstand criticism of his personal stance, even when he faced pressure from conservative ministers on one side and Martin Luther King on the other.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Bishop Hardin, can you just state your name and when you were born and where, and we'll see how it picks up your voice.
My name is Paul Hardin Jr. I was born in a little town called Goldville at that time, not in Chester, though I give Chester as my birthplace and rearing position. My father was a bookkeeper of a cotton mill in Chester, South Carolina. He moved over to Goldville to become superintendent of a cotton mill. That's in Lawrence County. About, I suppose eight of nine months after he got over there, they offered him the superintendency of the mill he had just left as a bookkeeper. Since he was a native of Chester, he returned to Chester. I have always given Laurens County as my legal place of birth, but ordinarily I say that I am a native of Chester, South Carolina.
When do you consider that you began your ministry in the church?
Do you mean when I thought about going into the ministry?
When you thought about going into it and why?
You have to give Wofford College a good deal of credit for that. My background and rearing were not particularly pointed toward the ministry. My father and mother were social people, not that that meant anything against them because Dad never drank. Mother never drank, of course. That was just not allowed in our family, but we did play bridge together and things of this type, and we loved to dance.
Was that approved by Methodists at that time?
Well, let's say that it would be slightly frowned upon by the average Methodist preacher and the parsonage family. But we always enjoyed that kind of life. I don't remember Mother and Dad doing much dancing, but they encouraged us to be as graceful as possible in all things we did. Dad was a college graduate. In fact, Dad was a better student then I. Dad was, I think, a straight A student at Wofford. Mother was a graduate of Wintrop College. We children had an educated background. Mother and Dad argued for years over whether molasses was plural or singular. This kind of thing. So I went to Wofford, and I sort of grew up at Wofford. I went to Wofford as a green freshman, literally. I thought it was time for me to buy clothes for myself, and so I went downtown and bought a suit that I thought was a lovely gray. It turned out to be green.
You and I have the same problem.
Do you have that problem, too?
I have that problem.
And I went to college as a green freshman! But I did the things at Wofford that my father had done. I joined the same Kappa Alpha fraternity that he joined. And I enjoyed Wofford very much. But later on towards the latter part of my years there, part of the junior year and most of the senior year, I began to think rather seriously about what I was going to do. First, I wanted to be a lawyer, and then I shifted away from that. I have to confess that Billy Sunday came to Spartanburg in my senior year.
What year would that be?
That would be 1924 or possibly the fall of 1923. But I didn't admire his
antics in the pulpit. I didn't like seeing him crawl over the pulpit and
down on the other side, standing on his head, and all that sort of
stupid stuff. But he made me think. He was a forceful preacher, and
while I wanted to laugh, I also was touched. I didn't go rabid or
anything like that, but he got me to thinking. So then I decided to
teach school for a year. I got a job in my own high school before I was
twenty-one years old. I taught at Chester, English and history. I signed
up to teach another year. I laugh and say I taught a year and a week. I
did. I signed up with a slight increase in salary to teach the second
year, but about a month before school convened, I'd really had a
spiritual experience in that I faced up to reality, and I knew that I
could not go ahead and get married, for instance. We didn't have places
at that time that you could take a bride, and you'd be sure to get a
church somewhere around Atlanta. We couldn't do that. So we had to
postpone our wedding. Dot and I were engaged at that time. And I still
tease her and tell her there's a spot on the ceiling where she hit it
when I told her I was going to be a Methodist preacher.
This is the late '20s? This is '29?
This was back in '22, '23, and '24. He was losing everything he had. Now, I had a car all four years I was in college. This was part of my life, but it didn't mean we had money. It meant we had automobiles. Anything I rode in was for sale. Anyway, I borrowed money and went to Emory, and I did three years work in twenty-three months. I took an extra minor every quarter and I went four quarters, the year round. And then I got out of school in late August and went down to Cheraw, South Carolina and worked in the drugstore that my grandfather owned. I jerked soda. I enjoyed a certain degree of notoriety. I was the only soda jerk in town with an A.B. and B.D. degree. And then Dot and I got married just about a week or ten days before the Western North Carolina Conference met. And I came up to Asheville and joined the Western North Carolina Conference on trial. Now, there was a reason for that. I was related to nearly everybody in South Carolina. I didn't want to start down there. I really had just multiple relatives.
I understand that.
So I came into the Western North Carolina Conference, and started at Matthews which is now the fastest growing Methodist church in the Western North Carolina.
Knotty Rembert, now, Knotty is a nickname, of course, for Dr. Rembert,
who was a Bible teacher Wofford. He helped me more than anyone else to
make a decision. As I told him, I had not been brought into the Kingdom
by any blinding experience. I just had to make a decision. He said, "God
gives man certain talents.
Do you think that your experience was characteristic of your generation of ministers?
No, I don't think so. I was with boys who, from the time they could crawl around, they had thought about being Methodist preachers.
Oh really.
I hadn't. I didn't want that. I didn't want to quit dancing. I didn't
want to quit playing bridge, although I did none of those things to the
detriment of my mind or body. And yet, I know Dot and I have danced a
thousand miles together in our life. She, incidentally, was one of the
best ballroom dancers in South Carolina, and I wasn't a slouch.
What do you remember most about Emory at that time?
I wrote a thesis on the religious influence of college life on a group of college students. That was my thesis.
That was an important issue at that time, wasn't it?
Very. And they've got a copy of it down there in the library at Emory. I
sounded out and interviewed a number of representative students in the
different classes, trying to look
He just learned it and he wanted to. . . .
That's right. He wanted to let everybody know what he knew, you know. But it was pretty stupid. And I'm sure that I cost him his job. I didn't mean to, but that was just the way the ball bounced. And I found that a teacher of biology in the undergraduate school perhaps had the most profoundly good influence, religiously, on students of anybody on the campus. And that was a revelation.
By his example?
Well, an example was that he let them understand that you can be intelligent and you can look at the facts of science without being irreligious. This was an important thing in that day.
That was really important at that time, wasn't it? That was the time of the Scopes trial.
Sure, that's right.
A little while afterwards.
And it's the time when Methodist preachers in Georgia thought that
anybody that went to the seminary at the university
When was Candler founded?
The School of Theology was founded about 1918 or '19, somewhere in there. I've forgotten the exact date.
So you came there in just. . . .
I went there in 1925 after teaching a year.
A lot of Georgia ministers were suspicious of this thing, right?
Yes. And very few of them, comparatively, had graduate degrees in the field of religion.
Did you get the impression that they had gone to college?
Some, yes. Just because they didn't understand the seminary, didn't mean that they weren't normally decent and intelligent people. But they didn't know what was going on at the seminary. They just heard what somebody said about professor so and so, Smart, for instance. Dr. W.A. Smart was one of the ones and Shelton. Dr. Shelton was supposed to be a Godless nonbeliever, you know.
Were they in Bible or were they in theology?
Well, one was in theology and one was in the field of Hebrew and history. Dr. Andrew Sledd was "suspect."
Oh yes, I know who Sledd was.
Andrew Sledd married the bishop's daughter.
That's right he did.
Yes, and the bishop was ready to throw him out of the church. I remember one time the old bishop walked in on a discussion. Some of the professors were discussing a debatable matter. When he walked in, they all got quiet. They just shut up. The old bishop, Warren Aiken Candler, said, "Well, what were you talking about?" And nobody volunteered the information. He said, "I don't care whether sister Isaiah had twins or triplets. You better read up on that book. It's a good book." This was the kind of thing he would give them. Anyway, it was a developing time.
Yes, it was.
And W. A. Smart was a keen man. He had a great contribution to make. When we left the seminary, there were sixteen of us who formed a "round robin" letter, and Smart represented the seminary. And that thing still goes around today. I think it's on about it's 214 or 15th round.
How does it work? That's fascinating.
The letter comes to you. Now, it's down to about six or seven letters. It started out with sixteen. When it comes to me, my letter is on top. I read it to refresh my mind. And then I write a new one and put it at the back. So it moves gradually forward. It's a magnificent thing.
It's a wonderful historical document because it tells you about the change and development over these most important years.
It's just about to peter out right now. But I think some of us have almost complete files on it.
I think those files are historically significant.
We had some very fine scholars in that group.
Do you think the research files will go to Junaluska?
Yes, they probably would, although I think I have them still in my files here, most of them, a lot of them.
Well, those are important for understanding the development of Methodism in the 20th century, especially from the '20s to the present. That's fascinating.
I'll have to check into that.
Why did you do that? Did you have a feeling of camaraderie. . .?
Yes, we felt like we would keep in touch with each other. There were four of us very close friends, and we had a good deal to do with the organization of that letter and the setting up of it. Out of the four, three became bishops.
Who were they?
Which was interesting. Bishop John Bransome from Florida, Bishop Ed Pendergrass, native of South Carolina but elected from Florida, and I. And of course, I was elected from First Church, Birmingham, Alabama. So I've gone a long way around to answer your questions as to when I first began to think in terms of the ministry.
Then you came up here to Matthews.
I joined this conference up here and they sent me to Mathews. Now, I
wasn't particularly dumb. I knew I was going to
He must have been on in years by that time?
He was seventy-five and I was twenty-six. And he just took me on as a protegee. One thing that was interesting, he was a member of the book committee and got a copy of everything that Methodist Publishing House published. If he ever read a book, I never saw it. He just turned them on over to me.
How wonderful.
Right on down to my house, without some of them even being opened. I guess in a way he did the best thing that he could have done with them. He gave them to a mind that was starving for all the information it could get, and he wasn't going to read it anyway. But he loved the church, and he was a good member of the book committee. He had business sense, and that's what they needed as much as anything else.
What do you think was the major problem as a minister, and problems among the church—what were the laity most concerned about in the '20s and '30s?
Well, the southern laity in some places was most concerned about the church getting out of hand and these young preachers coming in, too liberal, they thought.
You're one of those young preachers?
Yes, I was one of them. But I didn't give them the whole dose at one time. My father came to hear me preach one Sunday at Asheboro. I'd been there about two years. And I preached a sermon on race relations. It was race relations Sunday. And after the sermon was over, he followed me back to the parsonage, and said, "Son, those people will run you off tomorrow." I said, "No, Dad, they won't run me off tomorrow. I've been here two years. Now, if I had done that when I first got here, they probably would have tried to run me off." But I had a man once come to me, I was his bishop, and I had to move him every year. And he came to me and he said, "You move me every year, and you've moved me because I preach the gospel too strongly for these people. You've moved me because I rock the boat." I said, "No, I don't move you because you rock the boat. I have to move you because you have never learned how to rock the boat successfully." And there's a tremendous difference.
Yes, Yes. Well, race, you think they were really more anxious about race than anything else, or were they concerned about Darwinism or science?
They were more concerned, primarily, about the feeling that they were going to be forced together in the church, as they were going to be forced together in the public schools. This was beginning to dawn on them. That was a feeling growing in the country that the type of segregation we had and restrictions that we put upon blacks about the use of toilets and so forth and so on, that this had to crumble someday, and they did not want to see it happen. But I laughed, when I went to Birmingham, they some of them. They weren't laughing all together. They said that just because I was from "North" Carolina, I was a Yankee.
When did you go to Birmingham?
I went to Birmingham in '49.
So you had been in the ministry for about twenty-two years?
I was the minister there for eleven years.
After you went to Birmingham?
After I went to Birmingham, and then I went to South Carolina, my own native state, as a bishop. That was a shock to them and a little bit to me. I had not expected them to send me, but they did a wise thing. As a native son I could say and do things in South Carolina that other people couldn't have done. I went down—you don't care if I ramble?
Ramble!
Not long after I got to Columbia as a bishop, I was invited down to a
little town, Allendale, on the way to Florida on 301. Anyway, it's a
lovely little town, and the Methodist church has the prettiest name,
Swallow Savannah United Methodist
R. J. Boyd was your great-great-grandfather."
Great-great-grandfather. I said, "Now, if any of you have moved into
Allendale in the last 130 years, I want to welcome you to town."
That's nice.
And it just made all the difference in the world. You know I'm the only Methodist Bishop in the world who has ever presided for twelve years (or any time) over an annual conference of which his great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather were clerical members of that annual conference. That's why it helpful to send me back to South Carolina.
When did you go, in '60?
I went there in 1960 and stayed until I retired in 1972.
You got a difficult assignment?
Yes, but it was fun. was fun. And I guess in a way the greatest obstacle to
a successful merger and the two annual conferences in South Carolina was
the "Black Power" group. They didn't want to merge. They had that power
block and those men were making, actually making, the appointments,
about seven or eight of them in this little tightly knit group. They had
the bishop, who's name I don't care to mention, in their hands. And even
after he left that conference and went all the way to California, he
tried to run that organization by long distance.
They had a vested interest in that?
That's right. They had all the appointments that were worth having, and if others didn't play ball with them, they'd see that this guy got bumped. It was a terrible situation.
What were the general problems when you came in, the first thing you had to do?
Well, this was the basic one. I got no cooperation from them. The first
time I visited the conference as the bishop, there was almost open
discourtesy toward me. And I refused to let it bother me. Finally
though, it got so rough that at the end of the first year, I had to
remove a man who had only been in the cabinet for two years, one year
with the previous bishop and one with me. We would have a meeting of
the
What did they want?
They wanted to run the conference. They wanted all the best appointments. They weren't interested. . . .
Of the newly integrated conference?
Well, they didn't want to integrate.
They didn't?
No, no, they didn't want to lose control of their power block and the appointments.
So they benefited from the situation.
That was the only conference of any size, the only black conference of any size. You see, they had over three hundred churches.
That's a lot.
They had about 138, I believe, members of the conference, pastors. So
that was the only thing the blacks had,
How many white churches were there in South Carolina?
About I think somewhere around 850 to 900.
So the ratio was about 8 to 3.
Yes.
How do you integrate a conference in 1960?
Gradually we came nearer to it. On January for three successive years we
had a meeting of blacks and whites from every section of the state. We
let them come together in the hotel for a weekend. We took over the
hotel. We had speakers to come in. I had black bishops and white bishops
to come in. And we just talked and prayed together, and it was a
marvelous experience. It really was great. Some of the bishops I brought
down from the North were better preachers than some of our southern
bishops were. And some of the white bishops who came down demonstrated
the feeling of devotion to the cause that was beyond any sort of racial
feeling. It just finally began to melt itself. Then I had two meetings
of the annual conferences together. I brought the whole two conferences
together. I had the secretary of this conference sitting up here with
me, and his conference there and the secretary with the white conference
here, sitting with me. And the white conference members out there. And
we discussed it. I was in a swivel chair conducting two annual
conferences.
And the Lord helped me. I grinned and I pointed, I said, "I know you. I
can't hardly get you to take a white one!"
Which of the white churches got black preachers first? How do you manage that?
I can't tell you that exactly. It was sort of an intermingling gradually,
and it has not been as rapid as I think it ought to be. But it is doing
it. It is going that way. When big churches like the church in
Greenville, South Carolina, one of the stronger churches, they first
took a black associate minister. And they began to feel that this move
was for real. Then we began white. . . . Let me tell you something
interesting, the black people basically don't want in the white
churches. Apparently, they really don't want in them. They
Matter of style.
Sure, that's right.
Does it still continue to be a matter of style?
To some extent. Blacks are getting better educated all the time, and they are coming into conference offices that are putting them out over the conference and this kind of thing. I laughed at Scott Allen. Do you know Scott Allen very well, Bishop Allen?
No, I don't.
Well, he's a black, and he's a good bishop. He was the last editor of the
Advocate of the South-central jurisdiction, the
black jurisdiction. I told a story on him last Sunday. We had a "big
doing" here. We opened a big building that's new, and he started a
movement when he was the bishop here in this Western North Carolina
Conference. He organized what we call the Century Club, members of the
churches around through here who will give a hundred dollars or more to
Givens Estates. And he called those people members of the Century Club,
and it has brought about $150,000, which is not hay even now. But I told
a story on Bishop Scott that's typical. He was trying to initiate a new
man in the cabinet. Fellow had never been a member before, and he was
kind of taking him under his wing. And walking in, the fellow was trying
to show his interest in learning, and he walked into the room and he
asked Bishop Allen, "Bishop, which end of this table is the head." Scott
said, "When I sit down, that's the
You can integrate the conference, in terms of when you come to meet, the annual conference, and you can have black ministers and sometimes white ministers in white and black churches, but probably not often. But you can't integrate congregations.
Not that way, Unless you can find some lay person who will give strong
leadership, and say now, "Look, this is our bounding duty as good
Methodist people, for us to set an example." I was down in Meridan,
Mississippi, preaching in a series of services. At that particular time
I was president of the Council of Bishops, and I was preaching for thme
there in Meridan. And when I got there the pastor told me that they were
very much afraid that some of the blacks were going to try to crash the
evangelist services, just as a matter of testing the bishop or
themselves or the congregation. And I told him, "Now look, not only am I
a bishop, I'm the president of the Council of Bishops, and everybody
your ushers turn away from the door, they're turning me away too. So
you'll have to just let them know that when they don't let a black in,
they let me out. I'll just quit and go home." But nobody came. The last
night I was there I told them, "You are some of the loveliest, most
cultured people I know of in Methodism," and I said. "If you let
yourselves be part of the problem instead of part of the solution, I
don't see how the Lord can ever forgive you." And I
Style of confrontation, sharpening differences.
Yes.
Well now, you were there for twelve years in South Carolina?
South Carolina, twelve, yes.
Did you see much improvement over the period of time? I think there was, wasn't there?
Yes, I saw a good deal, but I've seen even more since. I was followed by two good bishops. Actually, they both have held a stick high, and they've moved cautiously but firmly.
Going back to thinking about the integration of congregations, it would be hard to integrate standing congregations. The only way you can get an interracial congregation is to create one from scratch?
It's easier to do that way because you get volunteers. You could, way
back yonder, a good while ago, you could have blacks in your services if
your people knew that you believed it was the right thing. I remember in
Birmingham, I used to have black people in my Sunday night services.
They would
Those were difficult years in Birmingham. You were there in the '60s.
But they came. And my people knew that I wouldn't allow them, you know, to do anything else but accept them. I didn't have to bully them. They just got the feeling that this is part of it, and we're going to take it.
You were a whitness at the beginning of the civil rights movement then?
Oh yes. Let me go back to my childhood. My father was one of eight
children. He grew up on a farm about four miles out of Chester. His
father was a very large landowner, and he gave eight children an
education if they would take it. Dad was one of the younger children and
went to Wofford, and as I said, he went to Wofford in very fine shape.
As we got along in life, we found out that certain things were
inculcated in that family that maybe every family didn't get. In the
first place, they had, to
Well, I just wondered about your ministry in Birmingham.
It was a delightful experience. I had anonymous letters by the dozen, but
I never let them bother me. One fellow was a persistent writer, and I
nicknamed him. I called him "Old Bashful." I started telling the
congregation about him about two or three years after I got there. He,
of course, thought I was awful. That I was a Yankee, and that I was
trying to bring blacks into the church and so forth and so on. And I
would tell the congregation, "Well, I had another letter from ‘old
Bashful' this week." And I'd tell him what he was trying to tell me,
you
E. Stanley Jones?
E. Stanley Jones was coming to preach for me, and he did a good job. I
said, "Stanley Jones is going to be here, and I want us all to come. We
all need to come. You need to come. I need to come. ‘Old Bashful' needs
to come."
You watched the civil rights conflict in Birmingham, right?
Yes, I did. Of course, as a bishop I took the Alabama-West Florida Conference for three and a half years when Bockman Hodge died. We had to divide Alabama. There were two conferences in Alabama, north Alabama and south Alabama. Nolan Harmon took north Alabama because I had just been in that conference for eleven years, and I took south Alabama. We were together, working our ways together. So it was a thing that had to be worked as best we could. I went to south Alabama and found a real, old Frazier. Do you know the preacher Frazier down in south Alabama?
No.
Frazier was the cock of the walk. He was the most conservative man in the
conference, and he dominated the
Can you talk about the nature of the conflict in south Alabama?
Well, there were a few men in south Alabama who were very liberal. Some of them had left during the days when Bishop Franklin was over there. Franklin was a sweet person, but Franklin was not a strong character. And we had an exodus from south Alabama of young preachers that ought not ever to have left Alabama. But Franklin was out of the country, for one thing, when they were taking the first black student into that University of Alabama. Franklin was overseas, and some of his crowd got away while he was gone. They just said, "I'm not going to put up with this kind of stuff," and went out. I remember when I went up to Drew University to preach up there, oh, some years ago now, maybe ten years ago or less, the pastor at the church there at the university was a Mississippi man who left Mississippi during that period.
There was an exodus from Mississippi.
They went from both, Mississippi and Alabama.
Did you have much problem with the White Citizens' Councils in South Alabama?
I would say it seemed like a lot. As I look back on it now, it was not
really a lot. They tried to get meeting space in my church in
Birmingham, and I forbade it. Some of my lay people on the board felt
like we ought to let them have it. That they had a right to their side.
I just told them frankly, "If you
Were there any, I should know this but I don't, Methodist churches that simply split or left the denomination?
Yes, some. I went to court three times. [I went to court over Union Springs, Alabama. We won. I also went to court twice in South Carolina and won both suits.]
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[I went to court] three times. Union Springs was the most notorious case.
Union Springs tried to pull out lock, stock, and barrel, and I told them
they couldn't do it. I sent the district superintendent. I had an
engagement that morning. I think it was in Mobile. But I called the
superintendent of that district and told him to go and be present at the
church that Sunday morning that they were going to have it. "You tell
them that they cannot do that. It's illegal, and it would normally
necessitate an expensive court case." But anyway, two of the men
escorted him out of the church. So then I got a lawyer to take our case,
and we sued for the property. And in the long run—we could have gotten
quick action in the federal court—but we wanted the local, the south
Alabama court, to make the ruling. And they finally had to rule in our
favor. Well, that put a
In the meantime, I turned right around and moved the preacher. The preacher that was at Union Springs, he was the ringleader. He was going to take them out. Go with them, see. Well, he went, but he didn't take the church with him. The church now is coming back fairly well. It took them, I guess, ten years to get back on their feet. But Lord, what a loyal group, about twelve or fifteen people, made it. They weren't going to let that church go.
That's wonderful.
Two brothers were on the school board, and their sister taught in that school. And even though they had her fired because she stuck with the church,. . . .
Oh my.
Can you imagine? I see her about once every year or so up at the lake, and every time I see her, I just tell her, "You're the apple of my eye, absolutely."
This is not a question that I find easy to ask, because I don't. . . . But I'll ask it anyway. It has to do with the difference between Methodists and Baptists in the integration problems, civil rights actions of the '60s. Do you think there were any basic differences between the two denominations, or Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists?
Yes. The Baptist, on the whole, were far more antagonistic, openly, about
integration of any kind. That doesn't mean that we had people who were
lily white. They weren't. But the Baptist were more so. We are
overlooking something that ought to be brought into this. After I had
gotten hold of the Alabama-West Florida conference, and Bishop Harmon
had gotten hold of the north Alabama conference, we had this showdown
when Martin Luther King came to Birmingham, and he issued the letter
"From a Birmingham Jail." Now, that letter, "From a Birmingham Jail,"
was addressed to six people. I was one of them. Bishop Nolan Harmon was
one of them. The Episcopal bishop was one of them. The Presbyterian
minister was one of them. And the other one was a liberal Baptist who
was, I believe, the director of the Baptist organization in town there.
He was a very forward looking man. The way that thing came about. I
think it was about two weeks before the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
came out, the governor, on the steps of the
Why do you think he did that?
Because he wanted prominent people to address it to. It wouldn't have
much influence if he'd addressed it to a backwoods Baptist church. But
here were three bishops, a
Was it pastor Goodson?
No, Governor Wallace was the man who was the block of everything. He
wasn't going to move an inch, not an inch forward. Dot said I was rude
to Wallace. I didn't mean to be. But he was a delegate to the annual
conference over which I presided. And one morning after we'd just opened
the conference, somebody came up to me to tell me that Governor Wallace
was out in the hall. And I thought, well, if he comes in, I'll have to
present him. He's the governor of the state and he has that right. I
kept waiting for him to come in. I could hear him talking out in the
hall. He was politicking out there. He wasn't hurrying in. And then,
just about the time that we were deeply into something very important,
he came sauntering down and sat down in the front seat. Well, I nodded
to him, and then went on with the debate. And then I interrupted and I
said, "The chair's aware that the governor of the state has entered, and
it's always a matter of importance when the governor of the state
arrives. We're delighted that he has come. We were going to give him the
floor a few minutes ago but he was detained in the hall, and we're now
deeply into a situation which must continue, and I'll ask the secretary
to direct us in our discussion." I just turned away. Dot said, "Paul,
you ought to have had him
Those were exciting years to be a pastor and a bishop at the same time. Those are difficult years because you were presiding over change in which personality very easily got inflated and hurt. Politics—it takes a great diplomat to do that.
Well, one of the men down there, one of the conservative men, wanted very much to be on a district, and he was a power. I had men call me asking me to put him on a district. He, himself, came to see me. Wanted to get on the district. And I said, "I'm sorry. I have to pick men that I think will work warmly and closely to me. I just don't believe that you can do it. I'll have to confess that I doubt myself whether we would be compatible to the point where we could do intelligent work and make intelligent appointments. And so, I'm sorry but I just have to have people in my cabinet that are more in line with my thinking than you are." So we didn't put him in.
You talked about blacks' resistance to the integration in South Carolina and wanting to maintain their network of control, did you have white ministers split? Or did you have them generally. . . .
Yes, they were split, most notably when they were voting for
representatives to go the general and jurisdictional conferences, and
they would just openly do things that were absolutely unethical. I mean,
they would say things about each other that were not true. Exaggerate,
he does
I know Joe.
Yes, of course you do. I met Joe about twenty-five years ago up in Washington, D.C. I said, "Joe Bethea, what are you doing up here. You ought to be in Dillon, South Carolina." He said, "That's where I'm from." You see, South Carolinians know where everybody, by name, is from. And I knew he had to be from Dillon. That's where the Bethea are.
I was very much impressed with him.
Joe's fine.
He was superintendent in Raleigh when I went there, and I talked to him about certain things in the church. And he and I wrote chapters in the same book together. I really am impressed by him. I'm impressed by the way he deals with people. I'm impressed by his preaching too.
I had a letter from Joe just about ten days ago asking me to do the ordination sermon at his conference next spring. And I will. I'll go down and do it.
What problems do you think he's having?
He's doing fine.
It's not as blatant now.
No, I think things have—I'll tell you. . . .
This is nineteen years later.
Well, let me say this, you've got, in South Carolina, a degree of culture. You've got black preachers in the conference down there who are third generation Methodist preachers in the conference.
That makes a difference.
It makes a difference. I had somebody from Mississippi ask me how in the world we did what we were doing in South Carolina. And I told them, "With no reflection at all, but we've got third generation preachers in the black conference." And we've lived together in peace and harmony. And we have. The easiest place to put a black district superintendent was Charleston. Now, does that surprise you?
The Methodist church in Charleston was originally black, and it was founded by Asbury.
Well, in Charleston you had a culture, both white and black, that was
superior to the culture in some southern most states. They had lived
together in love. At that time, they didn't want to actually be
together, physically, legally, and all that, but they loved each other.
Listen, we had two girls cook for us, my mother. I was preaching at a
Mother's Day sermon here in Asheville not too long ago, and I said, "You
know, the thing that we think about naturally when we think about
mothers, we think about what good cooking we had, you know. What good
food mother had." I said, "My mother was an atrocious cook." Well, they
just broke down and really laughed—the idea of saying that my mother was
an atrocious cook. Well, she was. She didn't cook. She grew up in a
family that was a big family and had
What's the relationship with the AME/AMEZ churches in South Carolina?
Well, it's not very close. When I was in Birmingham as a pastor, I used to get invited down when they had an annual conference, maybe in Birmingham. They'd ask me to come down and preach a sermon or something. But it never has been very close, not anywhere I've ever been anyway.
Central jurisdiction, what about the CME church, because the CME church came out of the old church?
I frankly never had a whole lot of relationships with them, never did. I'm thinking if there's anything else that would be enlightening. I had some rough knocks. I remember I had to make. . . .
Tell me about your rough knocks.
Oh, I had some rough knocks. But I remember I made up appointments at an
annual conference once, and the wife of a preacher thought that I had
not been just with her husband. And I was glad my wife was in another
room and gone to sleep. And she spent at least twenty minutes cussing me
out over the
What do you think were some of the lost opportunities which white ministers ignored over a period of time?
I think that the biggest mistake most of them made was that they ignored
or did not realize the loyalty, deep down, of their members to the
church and to Jesus Christ. I think that they underrated,
underestimated, what they could count on. I remember when the decision
was made about integrating the schools. I called the brightest laymen I
had in my church in Birmingham. Multi-millionaire, he'd made it himself
in the insurance business, although he never got to be president.
Somebody else owned the business, and he did what he did, Phi
But that's important though. I forget right off hand the name of the man
but he was a Baptist preacher from Lynchburg who taught at Yale while I
was there. And he was saying that white ministers who have already made
clear their position on race relations were in a far better position to
take a stand for integration after the Supreme Court decision than other
people were. He said you had to have established your credibility
You mentioned something about the difference between Methodists and Baptists in terms of integration crises. In terms of looking back over a life that spans a lot of changes, 1920s and the integration of the '60s and '70s, has the ministry and has Methodism changed, do you think, considerably over this long period of time. Or are we pretty much where we were back in the '30s?
No, I think we changed. I think for one thing we have a greater percentage of graduates who have had post-graduate and have had wide exposure to angles of thought that permeate the atmosphere as well as the school room and the classroom and the church. Yes, I think we've changed. I don't think we've come all the way by any means. I don't think that. But I think we have changed and are continuing to change.
In terms of preaching and in terms of Bible preaching, do Methodist preachers preach the same way that Baptist preachers preach?
By and large, no. Baptist preachers are more informal, more, I started to
say, ardent, but I don't mean that in the word, the definition of
ardent, but shall I say, enthusiastic. Now, you've got a few Baptist
preachers that are just fine. They're great. My idol when I was coming
along was S. Parks Cadmen, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and people of that
type. I didn't care whether they were Baptist or what they were. I
wanted to be that type of person who could lead people in a way that we
thought we ought to go. But Baptist people, of course, one thing,
there's the old saying, you know, that there are more
Why are they getting bigger and why is Methodism getting smaller?
Well, for one thing I think our Methodist preachers are better educated
but poorer salesmen. Bill Stedger wrote a book once called Advertising Jesus and Other Sermons. The point he was making
was that we've got the best product in the world,
Jesus Christ, the Christian religion, but he said we're the poorest
salesmen he's ever seen. And I think he's got a point. I think that most
people, well, when we had got robed and vested choirs and all that. I
love it. I think it's just great. But if you don't get out and scurry
around, you don't invite people to come. . . . I opened the doors of the
church every Sunday morning and night at Birmingham. One day a man came
down and wanted to be baptized and join the church. And I said, "You've
been baptized before, haven't you?" He said, "Yes sir, I've been
baptized before." I said, "Do you want to really be baptized again?"
"Yes sir, I want to start from scratch. I want to be baptized." I said,
"All right." I knew him. He'd been coming to church steadily. So I had
the baptismal font there. I kept one ready, and I read the service and
he knelt. And I put my hand on his head and I said, "Michael Patrick
O'Malley." Somebody over here on the side said, "Rome lost one that
time."
The new evangelical movements, or evangelicalism, seems to be, since the early '70s, becoming stronger. There had been a lot of changes since you retired from the episcopate. Maybe you're happy that you don't have to face them. I was thinking in part of feminist theology. I just wonder what your response is to this and various other changes in the church, in theology and all this.
And I realize that we were lacking in dignity and beauty in many
instances. We were still a country church here, there, and everywhere.
And I would not for a moment criticize. I had a vested choir. I had as a
director of my music at Birmingham the Dean of the Birmingham School of
Music, the man
No, I was just thinking about the changes that have taken place. It's been quite remarkable. But you've seen change too. I think that this change from, coming to Emory when it just started, and then to preside over the integration of the South Carolina conference. That's the difference between the 19th and the 20th century.
That' right. And of course, no one person did it all. No two or three people did it all, but everybody combined. I still think that those meetings were held in January for three straight years prior to the merger of the annual conferences in South Carolina. That those meetings were very valuable.
Yes. Sounded like it was an old testimony meeting.
It pretty much was. And then some of the blacks came in there and
preached marvelous sermons and some of the whites were inspired to do
better themselves, I think.
We're all getting old. You're just further along than I am. You have more wisdom than I do.
Every once in a while it shocks me to realize that we're now almost at the end of the 20th century. And I have lived all but three years of it. I was born in 1903. It's been wonderful, a wonderful experience, the things I've seen. I went out to a country church out here on the river, called Horseshoe, North Carolina. It's on the French Broad River, and I preached out there at that little church. And the preacher introduced me and said, "I don't think Bishop Hardin has ever been to Horseshoe before." When I got up, I said, "Your preacher's wrong. I've been here before. I was here in 1916." I said, "Of course, I didn't come in a car. I came in a canoe. There were thirty boys in ten canoes, and we stopped here because we saw a little grocery store up on the bank up here, and we were hungry. We went up and spent about twenty minutes and some money, and when we left, there wasn't a sardine or a cracker in that store." And they were just dumbfounded. This guy here, he was here before some of us were here. There's some advantages about living a long time, if you just don't get dumb.
Who were your role models as a leader?
Well, I told you I loved the preaching of S. Parks Cadmen and people of
that type. Bishop Edward D. Mozand was the most intelligent, progressive
bishops of the Southern Methodist Church that I knew in my lifetime. He
was a South Carolinian. Elected a bishop from Texas, and he was my first
bishop. I joined the conference under him, and I'll have to tell you a
story on John Bransombe. John and I were in school together at the
seminary, and one day Bishop Mozand was speaking to the
I just thought of something, you were a minister and had been one for quite some time when the church united in '39.
Yes, and I stood up and voted for it, and my chief layman from Wadesboro, right across the aisle from me, voted against it. That was the funniest thing I've ever been in. When the vote was taken, first we stood, those who were for it. I stood. Then those who were against it. Here came my chief layman, right across the aisle! But I think he had me for dinner the following Sunday.
Wadesboro, what were they opposed to?
Getting back with the Yankees.
I guess it was, wasn't it? Candler was opposed to it.
Oh yes.
What were your greatest challenges as president of the Council of Bishops?
I was called by the New York papers, what I thought about, what's his
name, Khrushev, pounding his shoe on the desk at the United Nations
I can't believe it.
Yes, they called me. "What do you, as president of Council of Bishops, think of that?" And I just laughed, and I said, "It beats fighting." That's all I said, "It beats fighting."
That's a great response.
END OF INTERVIEW