ROOTS: THEIRS AND OURS

The TV presentation, Roots, based on Alex Haley's novel, scored something of a coup in its recent 12‑hour showing. The production people say that TV will never be the same, for Roots will turn the industry in a different direction in home entertainment. Something like 200 million Americans saw at least part of it, which makes it the most successful "cram course" in the history of education. And its lessons came across with no uncertain sound, even though it set off a debate that will go on and on. Potential advertisers were hesitant to buy time in that they did not think whites would be all that interested in the story of a black family, which was a reasonable conclusion. But everyone was in for a surprise, Alex Haley included. He be came a celebrity almost overnight.

I presume that at least two out of three readers of this journal watched the series, and surely the reactions among them would be as varied as with other segments of our society across the land, black and white alike. The general reaction among whites, so the reports indicate, is that they did not realize that slavery was so grossly evil. A common reaction among the blacks was anger and resentment. A black boy in a Dallas school was led to beat up on some white boys in revenge for the way Kunta Kinte was treated. Other blacks were saying, 1 told you so!, while other whites were nursing their guilt feelings. Whites and blacks alike were made more conscious of their history, and in a TV interview Alex Haley said that many people he had met expressed interest in looking back into their own roots.

 

The point of this essay is not to review what appeared on the TV screen or in the novel itself (which I read only in condensed form), but to look at "roots" from a different perspective ‑ in reference to our own history as Christian Churches‑Churches of Christ. As I watched the story on TV, I found myself comparing dates and events in Disciple history, asking my self where "we" were then and what we were doing, even in reference to slavery itself. When Kunta Kinte was captured in Africa, the Glas‑Sandeman Haldane reform was brewing in Scotland. At this time the British had already revolted against the slave trade and by 1772 had passed a law that if ever a slave sets foot on one of their isles he would automatically be a free man. It was largely the work of the Quakers, who almost single‑handedly staged such opposition against the system as to arouse all of England. About the time Kizzie was sold by her master, separating her from her parents, Alexander Campbell began his work of reform in this country, knowing almost nothing about the institution of slavery. By the time Chicken George was bargaining with his master for freedom in Virginia, Campbell was in the Constitutional Convention of the same state using his influence against the system that enslaved him. When the "Night Riders" were working havoc among recalcitrant blacks, Isaac Errett was writing in behalf of justice for blacks as editor of the youthful Christian Standard.

 

We were there, that's for sure. In 1850, the year of the Fugitive Slave Law (as well as the year Campbell addressed both houses of Congress, based on Jn 3:16, in a plea for peace on the grounds of God's philanthropy), we had 310 churches in the South and 543 in the North. It was reported by the Anti-Slavery Society that our people owned 101,000 slaves, while the Methodists and Baptists jointly owned upwards of half a million, which would make the Church of Christ on a per capita basis, the largest slave‑holding church. What was the attitude of our folk toward the slaves and how did they treat them? A few facts and scenes from here and there might be interesting.

 

1. Barton Stone owned slaves but set them free soon after the great revival at Cane Ridge, as did the families that made up our first "Christian" congregation at Cane Ridge. Some slaves continued as members at Cane Ridge, occupying the balcony during services. In many churches believing female slaves sat with their masters to help care for the children.

 

2. Alexander Campbell wrote in 1845 (Mill. Harb., p. 259): "1 have set free from slavery every human being that came in any way under my influence or was my property." His wife Selina wrote in her Home Life that Alexander. bought two black boys from a Methodist preacher, promising them their freedom after a few years, which he granted. He also had other slaves, probably inherited from his father‑in‑law, which he also set free. He put them on a pension once they were liberated.

 

3. We also have documentation from an ex‑slave, who became a bishop in his church, that he personally witnessed Mr. Campbell "with his own hands baptize many colored men and women." This was common among our people in that day. The slaves would drive their masters to "meetin' " and linger in the yard and listen to the preaching. The simplicity of our Plea appealed to them (they couldn't even understand most preaching!) and they would request baptism, which was usually performed by the master. It was common for our slaveholding brothers to teach and immerse their slaves, and then bring them into the assembly. Many a lean‑to were built to accommodate them in buildings where there was no balcony, and they never in those days encouraged separate churches. Old church rolls from those days show whites and blacks listed together. One entry read: Ella (Parrott's). That meant that Ella, though a sister in the Lord and a member of the congregation, was owned by the Parrott family, also members in most cases. An odd part of this story is that once freedom came many Negroes rejected their master's baptism and were rebaptized by a black preacher. And we did have numerous black ministers.

 

4. One black, preacher was named, believe it or not, Alexander Campbell, who was some years older than the white Alexander Campbell. Converted at Cane Ridge, his master set him free to preach to those of his own race. Working also as a janitor, he saved enough money, with some help from his former master, to buy his wife's freedom. Alexander and Rosa (you'll want to remember their names since you'll be meeting them one day) reared two sons who also became preachers.

 

5. Another slave, Alexander Cross, obeyed the gospel and showed such promise that in 1850 the newly formed American Christian Missionary Society bought him, set him free, educated him and sent him to Liberia as a missionary.

 

6. As early as 1819 Thomas Campbell, then living in Burlington, Ky., invited some Negroes who were milling around a grove one Sunday to his meetinghouse. They gladly accepted. He sang hymns with them and taught them the scriptures. He was reprimanded for this, being reminded that Negroes could not be addressed except in the presence of one or more whites. Indignant over such injustice, he declared that he was shaking the dust of such a community from his feet, and moved away in protest. They tried to lure him back since they needed him as a teacher, but he was adamant in his decision. And he also liked to move!

 

7. Sarah Parsons, a white girl, heard the gospel from Elder Samuel Rogers while visiting with relatives, but she was deemed by her physician to be too ill to be immersed. Returning home to Griswold, Mo., she asked her father to baptize her, but he declined, not believing himself worthy of such an act. She had learned enough to assure him that it did not matter who performed the act. When he still refused, word went out to preachers here and there to come and help the sick girl obey the Lord, but preachers were scarce. She finally prevailed upon a Negro "Mammy" who was known for her Christian piety to baptize her. A tub was prepared in the house and the old Negro servant immersed her mistress into Christ. The girl died soon after this. When Elder Rogers came for the funeral, he immersed several others who had been led to Jesus by Sarah's faith. A sick white girl immersed by a black woman slave! How would that have gone over in Haley's TV story?

 

8. One slave who became a preacher, William O'Neal, was hired away from his owner by one of his white brothers in the Lord and was put to work preaching to other slaves. Like the black Alexander Campbell, he also worked as a barrelmaker and made enough money (along with a $2,000.00 gift from a white brother) to buy his and his wife's freedom. They had no children, but adopted six orphans into their home, one of which was white!

 

These stories out of our own history, along with numerous others, reveal that the white man's nobler impulses were not completely dormant during our antebellum period, as Haley's novel largely implies, and that our own people in the Christian Churches were not so completely duped by the slavery system as to lose all semblance of Christian charity. The way Haley tells it, the blacks were the good guys in white hats and the whites were the bad guys in black hats. We must not be mislead into believing that the blacks were all noble and the whites ignoble, which, with but few exceptions, is Haley's thesis. About the only reason a man would own a slave girl is that he might sleep with her! That was, of course, a common evil in a cruel system, causing Abraham Lincoln to bemoan a situation in which men sell their own sons on the auction block, but Roots is a classic example of over‑playing a fact of history.

 

Except for one or two rather illustrious exceptions, Roots presented every white character as bestial, and these exceptions were mostly the poor, ignorant whites. Why not depict such a scene as Thomas Campbell in Kentucky flouting an unjust law in order to sing, pray and study with slaves? Since he didn't get the job he wanted in Washington and would have had time for it, Ronald Reagan would have played an elegant Thomas Campbell, with the proper head dress of course. I can see Ronnie approaching the idle blacks with compassion, inviting them to worship ‑just he and the blacks worshipping together in a humble cottage. Being a Disciple, Reagan could lead a beautiful scene of white teacher and black slaves together with the Lord, and he would teach them magnificently and simply from the Book, like only Thomas Campbell, "the man of the Book," could. And what righteous indignation he would show when called in question for teaching the scriptures to any of God's children! Reagan could really have done it right.

 

Or why not have a few scenes of whites making financial sacrifices in order to free their black brothers so that they might preach the gospel? How about a scene with the distinguished Alexander Campbell pleading with the legislators of Virginia, following the Nat Turner uprising in 1831 when the legislators met to try to resolve the blight of slavery: "It is in the power of Virginia to free herself from this evil without loss of property . . . to deliver us and our brethren in the East from all the curses, direct and indirect, which are found hanging upon that vine brought from Africa . . . If you do this you will have the countenance, support, prayers, and thanks of every Virginian in all the hills and valleys of the West." Shall we give that part to Charlton Heston?

 

How about a scene of the Cane Ridge revival, after which all the families of Barton Stone's congregation, following his example, one by one freed their slaves. Or of a missionary convention buying, freeing, educating a slave for the mission field,

 

Well, scenes like these would not fit Haley's purposes. In his research he was looking for blood, the whip and chains, and fornicators ‑ and of course he found them since they too were there. He found his ancestors to be noble savages, highly intelligent even if uneducated, and so magnificent as to be free of vengeance! When Tom Harper overpowered the white man, he returned good for evil! He has no Nat Turners in his family tree, not even any blacks too irresponsible to have handled freedom if it were given to them. Barton Stone gave time, money and effort to free the slaves so that they could be colonized in Liberia, as some were. But he insisted that if the slaves were freed suddenly and turned loose upon society, as the radical abolitionists wanted to do, that he himself would flee the country! They must not have generally been as smart, peaceful, loving, and enterprising as Chicken George and Tom Harper.

 

I am for giving a novelist his rights, but when 200 million Americans are led to believe that they are seeing history on TV some of us also have the right to insist upon a more balanced presentation. Many of our people, heretofore with only blurred concepts of American slavery, will think of that horrid system only in terms of the whip and fornicating white masters. They will not think of a compromising Henry Clay, an agonizing Abraham Lincoln, or a praying Alexander Campbell, not to mention thousands of sincere Americans who were victimized by a system handed to them by fate and over which they had no control, and who could not have freed their slaves if they had dared to, many of whom demonstrated such concern and benevolence toward their slaves as to make rich drama for either stage or screen. People can be caught up in an evil situation without they themselves behaving sinfully, just as in a war.

 

Another thing about all this for the believer is that our roots are in the loins of Abraham, the father of faithful, and not in either Africa or early America, whether we be black or white. One's roots cannot only become an obsession, as they apparently did to Haley, but an exercise in arrogance. Suppose some ancestor did come over on the Mayflower or was once an African prince after the order of O. J. Simpson. So what? What does that make you? The believer is what he is because of Jesus, and his citizenship as well as his roots are in heaven.

 

We are pilgrims in this world and neither Africa nor America is out home. We look for a city with foundations, whose builder and maker is God, not to any place in this evil world. Those are the roots that should concern us, and with such an awareness of our true roots we might start bearing the right fruit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, honesty, gentleness, self‑mastery.

 

Such fruit will eventually so nourish society as to weed out all forms of tyranny over both body and mind. Physical slavery still holds some three millions captive in Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Arabia and Northern Africa. Many millions more are enslaved through various forms of self-imposed tyranny, whether it be egoism, narcotics or willful ignorance. Institutions, including churches, enslave still more through partyism and obscurantism, and these mar the soul and oppress the spirit as much as any bull whip ever did.

 

Roots and fruit are the only answer. The apostle Paul thought the fruit was answer enough for Onesimus when he penned a note to his master, Philemon. Perhaps Philemon could not or should not set him free, not then at least, but he could love him. And that is where freedom has to begin, whether for Kunta Kinte or for us. —the Editor