Howard: From Picking Cotton to Pushing Racial Justice

Choir members from Calvary Baptist Church of Jamaica, New York, swayed as they sang black gospel hymns prior to the installation of M. William Howard, Jr., as new president of the National Council of Churches (NCC).

And perhaps that was appropriate. As the youngest person and the second black president of the NCC, Howard may do some moving and shaking of his own within traditionalist elements of the largest ecumenical body in the nation. It’s thirty-two-member Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations claim some 41 million people on their rolls.

Howard, 32, grew up in Americus, Georgia, a place he calls “one of the toughest anti-civil rights towns in the nation.” He attended a segregated high school, took part in black demonstrations during the turbulent 1960s, and became a disciple of the late Martin Luther King, Jr.,—killed during Howard’s senior year at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Howard came through these experiences without forming a hatred for whites. Instead, he says that he developed an “openness to people.” Tall and thin, polished in speech and manner, Howard graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and became the pastor of First Baptist Church of Princeton, New Jersey. He was named director of a leadership training program for black pastors and laymen within the Reformed Church in America.

But Howard hasn’t forgotten his upbringing. “If I were to say that picking cotton in the hot sun in southwest Georgia, and hearing grandmothers being referred to as ‘girl’ by teen-age, white men has not informed my ministry, I would be telling you a lie.”

Indeed, the American Baptist clergyman has become a specialist in racial justice while serving in several leadership capacities within the NCC and the World Council of Churches (WCC). Before his election as NCC president, Howard was moderator of the controversial Program to Combat Racism—the WCC agency that gave $85,000 to the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), which is fighting the bi-racial, interim government in Rhodesia. Howard asserts the monies were for humanitarian purposes only and that he supports the grant “fully.” (He was not with the WCC when the grant was issued.)

As with several other black leaders, Howard has said there are “political prisoners” in the United States—men who, he says, often commit criminal acts against property: “They are driven by some of the limitations imposed upon them by structural injustice.” Howard is a close friend and supporter of Ben Chavis, the imprisoned United Church of Christ official who was convicted along with the so-called Wilmington Ten in a firebombing incident during racial disturbances in 1971 in that North Carolina city.

As leader of the council for the next three years, Howard promises to strengthen existing NCC racial and social justice programs. At the same time, he will pursue the “biblical mandate for unity.” Howard was pleased when the NCC governing board members held a Bible study at their meetings last spring—a first for the NCC.

He is disturbed by criticism of the NCC as a “monolith.” “It is encouraging,” Howard says, “to see liberals and conservatives debate and struggle with the issues on the assembly floor, then affirm each other on a personal level off the floor.” He says many church people who come to NCC meetings with pre-conceived notions about its secularism or liberalism are “literally shocked when they find out how members of this body really struggle to be faithful to their understanding of the Gospel.”

But many evangelicals may feel uncomfortable right now with Howard, not knowing what exactly to expect. Howard notes his commitment to evangelism but says he is not part of the evangelical movement. He has a “tremendous respect” for liberation theologians.

“In many ways the church can’t speak with its mouth if it’s not speaking with ministry to people where they hurt,” Howard said in an interview. “I come from a tradition where words and action are synonymous.”

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