My Brother’s Brother 4/11/43

Scripture: Genesis 4: 3-16

Two months ago, it was my privilege to take a brief trip into the South; traveling as far as Birmingham, Alabama, and then on another fifty miles or so to Talledega and the campus of Talledega College. It was my first visit into the real South of our nation; the first opportunity I had had to see a small portion of its land, a few hours of its life, to meet a few of its people.

I have met Negroes before - studied with them in graduate school, heard a few of them speak in public, seen them and sat with them in the Chicago elevated trains. But on this trip I saw them and met them, for the first time in my experience, in the South. I saw the “Jim Crow” separation of white and Negro in railroad stations and on trains, heard of its practice in restaurants. I saw the pleasure of eager, educated Negroes over the promise of employment for people of their race in a vital war industry at the same rate of pay granted to white workers on other shifts. To those of us who have always lived in the North, it is almost unbelievable how important that can be to the minds of colored folk.

In the scriptural story of the beginnings of man on this earth, there is recorded the frank, and sorry, story of friction between brothers; of sudden, overwhelming hatred; of fratricidal murder;

of judgment on the murder.

A perfectly characteristic human trait appears in the story when Cain, asked by the Lord, “Where is thy brother?” deceitfully denies knowledge and disavows responsibility for wrong in the irritated retort, “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The answer given to this evasive, petulant question was neither a “yes” nor a “no.” But the Lord held Cain to his responsibility with a more searching inquiry: “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”

For more than a century, Protestant Christians of America have had a lively interest in missions for spreading the knowledge and faith of the gospel to all sorts and conditions of people everywhere. Their support guaranteed by those who stay at home, missionaries have gone to the peoples of every race in every part of the globe with the light and the practical application of the gospel. And their record of work is one of which, on the whole, everyone may be proud.

This missionary spirit has also looked toward betterment of belated, underprivileged, races and classes under our own flag. Our Protestant churches have taken an interest in the condition and problems of the Negroes (particularly of the South), of the American Indians, the Puerto Ricans, the various Oriental and European groups who have come to these shores, and certain American highlanders in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia.

Those who have served as foreign missionaries or as home missionaries, those who have helped to support their work, those who have served on the various boards which study and administer the work, have done a great piece of Christian business. Sometimes it becomes discouraging, sometimes it is highly hopeful, always it is challenging. There have been setbacks, but there has been great progress.

Consider, for a moment, the matter of higher education for American Negroes. Just 27 years ago, in 1916, there were less than 2,000 Negro college students in the United States. Last year there were 40,000. To prepare 40,000 students for college education requires a proportionate increase in public school students, which has been made possible by the influence with such philanthropy as that of the Julius Rosenwald Foundation has had upon Negro public schools of the South.

Well, churches have been interested in a number of the Christian colleges for Negroes. I think that Christian folk have been inclined to answer for Cain the question put to him by the Lord, “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.” Especially have we felt that we are our brother’s keeper in the case of the Negro, whose ancestors were brought to this country as captive slaves, exploited, much of human dignity denied them. Now that Negroes are theoretically free, there are many who consider it a Christian, and a humanitarian duty to help them gain their rights as human beings and citizens. Some of us are impelled all the more because we belong to the advantaged, majority group, while they are a minority group in the land.

Dr. Oscar Maurer speaks, in academic terms, of our tendency to “major in minorities.” It is about this point of view that I wish to speak for a few minutes. Do we, who are a part of the racial majority, tend to think of American life as made up of composite groups? Do we think in terms of the Negro problem, the Indian problem, the Japanese problem, the Italian problem? And how about our religious classifications? Do we Protestants think of the Catholic problem, or the Jewish problem? How shall we adjust our lives to Negroes, Indians, Japanese, or Italian? What shall be our relationship to Catholics; to Jews?

I do not know that we can ignore these labels, these classifications of people. But I am thoroughly convinced that we are more than half blind if we see only groups, or classes, or races.

My friends, there is no special way to treat Negroes, Indians, Italians. There is no special way to treat Lutherans, Jews, Buddhists, Congregationalists or Methodists. We are not looking squarely and wholly at our fellow men until we regard Roland Hayes, Julian Long Elk, Masao Yamada, and Fiorello La Guardia; until we know Michael O’Brien and Israel Goldstein and John Fox. We are not classes, primarily. We are all people!

Here is one of the most vital and violent points of conflict between the Nazi-Fascist point of view and a Christina point of view. We are not as the Nazis would have us believe, primarily a race, a class, a volk. We are primarily sons and daughters of almighty God, individual men and women, boys and girls - each a unique personality - perhaps refined, perhaps coarse; perhaps a genius, perhaps a dullard; perhaps of one color, perhaps of another; perhaps male, perhaps female; professing perhaps one creed, perhaps another - but each of us a person endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, and certain obligations and responsibilities. Our emotions are similar, our opportunities should be parallel.

I am not my brother’s “keeper!” Nor is he mine. I am my brother’s brother. And he is my brother.

When I sit down at table with black Dr. Joseph Fanning Drake, I know that I am dining with a man whose mind is keen, alert, experienced, more highly trained in some fields than mine. When I speak with Masao Yamada, now a United States Army Chaplain with the forces from Hawaii training in Mississippi, [Camp Shelby] I recognize a vigorous personality, an alert mind, a patriot as fervent as any other American patriot I know. When I go to a restaurant as the guest of Abraham Akaka I am treated to food and conversation that could characterize equally well the hospitality of Hawaii or Wisconsin.

Meet men as men; judge people on their own personalities and merits; be a brother to your brother! He doesn’t want your condescension or patronage. His first desire, and his first need, is your respect for what he himself is.

The founding fathers of our country’s democratic framework had a Christian insight when they built a governmental pattern for man and man, (not as a member of a class), with certain inalienable rights - life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, freedom to worship, freedom to develop his mind and soul.

To be true to that pattern we need to work continually at the tangle of majority - minority, class and creed, sort of thinking. Certain injustices against the Negro in our country are repeatedly perpetrated. Wrongs against Jews must be overthrown - not because they are wrongs against Jews but because they are wrongs to human beings! The unspeakable brutalities against Jews in Europe smell to the gates of heaven, not primarily because they are perpetrated against a supposed class of people, but because they bestialize the human race!

We shall be getting somewhere as sons of God when we can say: “It is my brother who is suffering these things.”

When the sons of Jacob went to Egypt for grain during the famine they were closely questioned by the prime minister whom they did not recognize as their brother, Joseph. When they started home to Canaan with the grain they had purchased, the prime minister commanded them to bring back with them their youngest brother Benjamin, in whom he had become interested. He made it a condition of their return for any more supplies. “Except your brother be with you,” he told them, “Ye shall not see my face.” [Genesis 43: 5].

My friends, I have a notion that God Almighty, in the preservation of that story, speaks to each of us and to all of mankind. “Except your brother be with you!”

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, July 11, 1943