Yes, very definately. I mentioned my father a while ago. He was a rare
character. He had a very deep sense of justice and fairness; we learned
this as children. And nothing is learned so quickly by a child as
inequity or unfairness. He taught us the value of
every person. He never let us say a slurring word about a black person.
He had a tender feeling for poor people—people we call today "marginal"
and "disenfranchised." There were words we did not use in those days,
but we learned this from my father. And later on I learned from him the
value and meaning of a labor union, because he was a member of a labor
union with the railroad called the Order of Railroad Conductors. So that
all through my life my father—more than I was aware at the time—was a
role model for the sense of fair play and justice and tenderness for the
rights of people.
But when I came to Raleigh, Jay, I had gone only to Baptist schools and I
had a traditional upbringing in my home: it was a Southern, puritanical
background. My church was Southern Baptist, Wake Forest is a Baptist
institution, the Louisville Seminary another Baptist institution, so my
education in some ways was restricted. Though neither of these schools I
went to put a bar on my curiosity and my inquisitiveness. When I came to
Raleigh there was a man here in the United Church, named Carl Voss. He
was fresh out of Union Seminary. You remember Union Seminary in the days
of Harry Ward, Reinhold Niebuhr and Henry Sloan Coffin, the great
intellectual and rebellious Christian leaders. And my association with
him was a fascinating thing. He opened up to me worlds of reality that I
had just not known about, what with my conventional
education. And he told me the things I was supposed to read. He told me
I should read The Progressive Magazine, and The Nation, and The New Republic, The
Christian Century, and later on I discovered Christianity and Crisis. And these magazines coming to me in
the late 1930s and early 40s had a transforming influence on my life.
They opened up to me vast worlds of injustice and economic repression,
of unfairness, and I began to deal with these issues and relate them to
the Bible. And I went through a great revolutionary experience; it was
exciting. It was exhilarating. And thereafter I could never be the same.
And so this man, Carl Voss, his friendship, his courage, his
intellectual integrity, his dashing verve, was a thrill—all that was a
thrill to me.
But then after my father, and after Voss and after the writers I became
acquainted with in The Nation and The New
Republic and so on, "way leads on to way," as Robert Frost
would say. These things that made for other things. But at that time,
the great Dr. Frank Porter Graham was at his height of influence and
leadership in North Carolina. The man I mentioned in Pittsboro, Dr. W.R.
Thompson, superintendent of schools, was a personal friend of Dr. Graham
and he and I used to talk about Dr. Graham. You can imagine me: I was
23, 24 and 25, unmarried, first church and living in
company with a man who was introducing me, personally, to Dr. Frank
Porter Graham.
And I saw what Dr. Graham was doing then and many years afterwards. I saw
that, first of all, he was a loyal alumnus to the great University of
North Carolina. I saw that he loved the South—the southern traditions. I
saw that he was deeply devoted to his Presbyterian church. I saw that he
loved all kinds of people: people who were in the establishment, people
who were rejecting him, criticizing him, excoriating him. I saw that he
loved people who were black, people who worked in textile mills, people
who were on the farm sharecropping, people who were migrants, welfare
people and that he identified with all these people and tried to bring
them into the mainstream of American opportunity. And I saw that he was
a man of sensitivity, of inflexible courage. I saw the way he stood
behind his pastor in the Presbyterian Church, Reverend Charles Jones, in
the days when the Presbyterians were in the process of removing him from
his church, largely because of some of the social stands this young
minister was taking. I learned that every time somebody left his church
Frank Graham would find out how much contribution he offered to the
church and try to make it up himself personally, if he couldn't persuade
other people to do it.
I saw how he dealt with organizations that were supposed to have been
charged with being communist infiltrated. I remember one time there were
8 people on a committee and 2 were declared to be communists. And
therefore everyone said, "You must get off of that committee." He said,
"Well, if 6 good, American capitalist people couldn't handle 2
communists, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. These communists were
Americans, and we're going to work with them and we'll not let both of
them take charge."
And I saw the way he loved Thomas Jefferson. He had a great sense of
American history and he was devoted to the Constitution. He had almost a
sense of veneration for the Bill of Rights. And all of these things
together—culture, religion, tradition, background, love of people,
intellectual acumen, identification with the disadvantaged people—all
these things swam into my ken, and I said, "That's my man. That's my
hero. That's my Frank Graham."