Opening Remarks—Martin Luther King Day Chapel
Service
Daniel F. Sullivan— January 19, 2004
Some of you in the chapel today know that for some years
now, St. Lawrence has sponsored a group of pre-doctoral fellows—Jeffrey
Campbell Fellows they are called—in which the University
provides a combined teaching and research fellowship to outstanding
graduate students of color so that they can complete their
dissertations and enter the professoriate, hopefully, if the
fit is right, at St. Lawrence. I bet, however, that like me
until I began to think about the relationship between the University
and the Universalist Church in anticipation of our sesquicentennial
two years hence, you know little of why these fellowships came
to be associated with Jeffrey Campbell. Who was Jeffrey Campbell,
anyway, and why bring him to your attention on Martin Luther
King Day?
One answer is that he is probably the closest anyone has
come to being the Martin Luther King, Jr. of St. Lawrence.
At his death in the mid-1980’s, his obituary in the St.
Lawrence Magazine said this:
Life was not always easy for SLU’s first African-American
graduate. The only non-Caucasian on campus could have retreated
into a shell, but that was not Jeffrey Campbell’s way.
During his years as an undergraduate student (graduated in
1933) and as a theological school student [St. Lawrence had
a Universalist Theological School, housed in Atwood Hall, until
1965], he rarely rested. As editor of the Hill News he
took the opportunity to fill the pages with his social vision.
In 1934, as a member of the executive committee of the American
Student Union, he helped organize the first nation-wide student
anti-war demonstration. In addition, he found the time to serve
as a student pastor in Winthrop and as vice-president of the
Young People’s Christian Union of New York State Universalists.
Until his death he continued to work as an activist for peace,
labor relations and race relations. He organized New Hampshire’s
Farmer-Labor Party, and ran for governor of Massachusetts on
the socialist ticket.
He ended his career as a teacher and chaplain at the Putney
School in Vermont.
My strong suspicion is that Richard Eddy Sykes, St. Lawrence’s
president during Jeffrey Campbell’s undergraduate years,
had his hands full with this precocious and stunningly intelligent
student activist. In 1934, in the alumni magazine, he published
a piece entitled “How I Would Achieve the Ideal University,” in
which he laid out the changes he would make in St. Lawrence
if he were president:
Entrusted with the guidance of a Liberal Arts College my
first pleasure would be to select a motto. I think I should
like Fides et Veritas, translated into English and
seriously considered.
My first care would be to emancipate my institution from
the ignorance, sham, and stupidity of the outside world. Any
attempt of that existing society to foist it’s prejudices,
shibboleths, and emotional biases upon my students by even
such subtle media as bequests, endowments, trustee-prestige,
or social sanction would be hailed by me as a signal to sever
incriminating relations with that particular part of the octopus
known as the status quo.
Education for neither the past nor the present but the future
would be my goal . . . . .
[I would adhere] tenaciously to my creed of liberty of thought
and expression in every field whether that thought agrees with
the views of the trustees or not. . . . . . . .
We tend to think of the 1960’s as the time when college
students found the courage to raise such issues with their
institutions—Jeffrey Campbell was thirty years ahead.
But one of Campbell’s most powerful writings, and the
one John Hurley, the Unitarian Universalist Church’s
historian, believes most anticipates the later speeches and
writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., was entitled “Personality
Not Pigmentation,” published in 1940 in The Christian
Leader, the newspaper of the Universalist Church. Hurley
describes the circumstances surrounding the publication of
the essay:
Jeff Campbell had recently performed the marriage ceremony
for his sister Marguerite, who had married a Theological School
student named Francis Davis. Marguerite was black; Francis
was white. The editor of the Leader, John Van Schaick, published
an editorial condemning the marriage . . . . . and pointing
out that Davis would never be called to serve a Universalist
church because his wife was a Negro; Van Schaik also attacked
Jeffrey in the editorial.
Campbell began by speaking eloquently and positively about
his experience at St. Lawrence, both as an undergraduate and
in the Theological School:
From start to finish the six years of close fellowship which
I knew with faculty and students of that Theological School
has been one of the richest I have known in an experience abundantly
blessed with such fellowships. Every opportunity or advantage
which the school could make available to any of its students
was placed at my disposal. Undergraduates from the South who
had stated that the day I entered the building they must leave
for good remained to become friends whose esteem I hope to
merit to my dying day.
Later he described his ordination—the fairness and toughness
of the examiners, and the horrible dilemma with which they
struggled, for the Universalist Church, while in doctrine powerfully
opposed to racism and for inclusiveness, nonetheless practiced
the racial discrimination so characteristic of American society.
Finally the committee voted ordination. It did so with more
travail of spirit. There was the genuine fear of kindly people
who disliked seeing a harmless idealist hurt. At this point
they might well have been right had the crux not been a problem
of racial prejudice about which the mere accident of birth
compelled me to know more than any of them possibly could.
There was a second, far deeper, fear. It was so deep I doubt
if any of that committee could have placed a finger on it.
I felt it in this way. They wanted their church to be the kind
of institution which could unite its theory with his practice.
Inwardly they knew that it was not, nor, within the limits
of their imagination, could they see it becoming such. They
feared lest that central weakness be demonstrated to the world.
Through no connivance of my own I happened to be a walking
demonstration of that weakness. Failure to ordain me would
have been an even more flagrant confession of the same failure.
In that dilemma they were caught and the whole denomination,
not to mention liberal Christianity, with them. . . . . .
Actually all America is faced with the same dilemma. Neither
the “Great Democracy” nor the Universalist Church
can be true to itself without recognizing in word and intention
the fact that “He hath made of one blood all nations.” The
unique factor of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets is that they
never say “all men should be brothers,” but
that they already are. It is the refusal of men to act on the
reality of their common brotherhood which has produced the
Hell in which we blindly struggle today.
This amazing Laurentian needs a biographer.
Let us pledge on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of 2004 to
use the occasion of St. Lawrence University’s sesquicentennial to bring
the life and thought of Jeffrey Campbell, Class of 1933, forward
for all to see. Were we as an institution, in the end, affected
in important ways by this man? Can we find ways to better shape
our future by understanding this part of our past—in the
same way that we use Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for that purpose?
Let us make it so!
