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Summer Session Kansan
Tuesday, July 21, 1964
'Which Side?' Keynotes Conflict
By Tom Coffman
One of the many songs which has passed through the South with the Negro movement is "Which Side Are You On?" It is sung in tent meetings, church houses, in street demonstrations—sometimes in a low hum by a boy walking the darkened streets at night, sometimes it booms in a chorus passing from mouth to mouth.
"Which side are you on, boy, which side are you on?" A clap of hands, a shuffle of feet—a hum or a roar which calls for the drawing of lines, "Which side are you on?" If one is not a right-thinking Negro, not supporting integration, that is, he may be called an Uncle Tom, a quisling, or a coward.
ON THE WHITE side, the tune takes a different form but has a similar effect. If one is not a segregationist he may be black-listed by the White Citizens' Council, his job may be in jeopardy, or he may lose social status.
A man whose position and tradition lay with the white community yet who favors integration doesn't talk loudly. One of these is the Rev. Ivan Burnett, student and assistant pastor of a Greenwood church. He is
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Wichita Gymnast Is Signed by University
The University of Kansas has signed its first gymnast to a national letter of intent in Roscoe "Stoney" Grisham of Wichita Southeast High.
Coach Bob Lockwood described Grisham as "one of the best gymnasts in the midwest."
Grisham won the Southwestern AAU individual all-round gymnast title last year at Dallas. He was runner-up for state high school titles in still-rings and high-bar in 1962 and 1963.
from near-by Meridian, educated first at Mill Saps College in Jackson, then at Yale University.
To him, the law of the land is integration and the law of his church is integration. What he calls his "witness" to these beliefs is, to say the least, oblique. One Sunday recently he preached from the Biblical text, "Love thine enemy," using the vocabulary of the white community in referring to the student civil rights workers here now.
BURNETT WOULD like to go across town to the office of the civil rights movement. He is curious how the students live and work, but he has decided that such a move would be imprudent.
"I thought of calling them (the project volunteers) on the telephone," Burnett said, "but the Citizens' Council may have their wire tapped. If I drove down, I would be cut from communication with the community right away, because the place is watched 24 hours a day."
Burnett said that ultimately one had to decide where his ministry would be. "I can't have my foot in two communities or I do no one any good."
"I WANT TO LEAD," he said. He likened his duty with some future congregation to that of a man with a huge rubber band binding him to his people. "You have to go far enough ahead so it pulls the people your way, but you can't go so far that the rubber band breaks and the people fall away from you."
Next year Burnett will be graduated from Yale. He wants to return to Mississippi, and he does not want to make that return an impossibility by being too close to the wrong side on the race issue.
A few days ago he told one of the boys of the church, in discussing the race issue, that he favored integration of the public schools. Now he worries whether the boy will keep the confidence.
"MORE THAN HALF of the official board probably belong to the White Citizens' Council," Burnett said. Another fear is that the Circuit Riders, active in Mississippi as lay preachers, will turn their anti-Communist crusade on him and—through a logic which associates integration with world socialism—brand him as an unwitting servant of the Kremlin.
A group of 28 young Methodist ministers in the Mississippi conference recently signed a statement which, in essence, said they favored compliance with federal laws concerning race. Throuh pressurest brought on them, mainly from their congregations, more than half have left the state.
BRINGIN' HOME THE BARGAINS
FROM...
Ray Christian "THE COLLEGE JEWELER" 809 Mass.
BURNETT WONDERS if pressures are not already building up against him. His name has been brought up before the White Citizens' Council, he has been told, but one of the Greenwood elders "stood up and talked for me." When he occasionally comments on the race situation from the pulpit he gets crank telephone calls.
One day a woman member of the congregation overheard him refer to the Negro custodian's wife as a "lady." The white woman hauled out a dictionary and read Burnett the definition of the word, then informed him that no "nigra" woman falls into the "lady" category.
With a small group of friends, Burnett discussed the possibility of establishing a bi-racial committee to open communication with the Negro community, which has been choked off since the 1954 Supreme Court decision on integration of schools. They talk behind closed doors.
One of Burnett's friends, referring to Christ and the application of His teaching, commented ruefully, "I guess that we cater to the Man, but bury the cross."
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