The Noble Endeavor: A Memoir of F.O.R. in the Twentieth Century

by John Swomley

An almost unacknowledged part of twentieth century American history is the fact that the Fellowship of Reconciliation was a pioneer of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States. I am one of the few still living who participated in the beginning of that movement. The story deserves to be told.

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I first met James Farmer at a meeting of the National Conference of Methodist Youth in 1937 in Evanston, Illinois. He was then a student at Howard University, the son of a professor there. Farmer was so impressive in his speaking and appeal to fellow students that I wanted to keep in touch with him as I entered Boston University School of Theology. Methodist students were not alone in their analysis of world events which led us to feel the US might be drawn into war, which did indeed begin in Europe in 1939.

About the same time I met a Black staff member of the New England Student Christian Movement, Jeff Campbell, who also worked part-time for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He persuaded me to become a member. I decided to organize small groups in colleges in New England to oppose war. I forwarded the dues from these groups, about $40 a month, to FOR to support Jim Farmer to do similar work in the Washington, DC area around Howard. These were still Depression years, but the pacifist students who attended contributed ten cents at each weekly meeting.

When I graduated from Boston University in 1939, FOR offered me a position as Youth Secretary to organize a youth staff and movement. When Farmer graduated, I urged FOR to employ him as its first Race Relations Secretary. About the same time George Houser, a White student from Union Seminary in New York whom I had also met at the Conference of Methodist Youth, was released from Danbury Federal Prison where he had spent a year and a day as a non-registrant draft resister. He also agreed to come on the staff.

Both Houser and Farmer began work in Chicago. Houser formed an interracial FOR group of pacifists at the University of Chicago. That group’s activities were important in the establishment of the national Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was organized by both Farmer and Houser in 1942.

In 1942 I was promoted to become Associate National Secretary of FOR under A.J. Muste, with more responsibility for administration and organization. In 1943 I brought on the staff Perry Saito and Kenji Okuda, two Japanese-Americans, who, along with James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, Wilson Head, and Bob Tandy, all Black, made the Fellowship of Reconciliation a pioneer as a completely interracial social action and social service organization. There were also ten White male and female youth secretaries working on subsistence pay, as well as older staff of at least six White men and women led by A.J. Muste and John Nevin Sayre, all committed to the ideals and practice of racial equality.

During the wartime years, the FOR staff decided to hold Race Relations Institutes in cities throughout the North on weekends. These began Friday evening, e.g., with a prominent scientist presenting evidence that dispelled the claim by some blood donors and recipients that there was a difference between Negro and Caucasian blood. In wartime this was reassuring in connection with the national blood supply. Along with participation by a prominent theologian, it also asserted the common humanity of all, without regard to pigmentation.

Then on Saturday our staff, as many as twelve at some Institutes, took groups of Blacks and Whites into restaurants, bowling alleys, theaters, amusement parks, department stores, and other places for what were called “sit-ins.” These were courageous nonviolent actions designed to show the unfairness of discrimination and the support of Whites in an effort to stop it.

Often the Institutes led to the formation of CORE groups or FOR groups to continue the action locally after the Institute was over. (Surviving records of these actions may use one or both names. One distinction was that members of CORE groups might not be pacifists.) In this, the first organized challenge to Jim Crow laws—the actual opening up of places of public accommodation in the North and border states—began, from Denver to Cleveland and Washington, DC. Such organizing was important in the beginning of the civil rights campaign.

At the same time during the early years of World War II, our interracial staff engaged in speaking tours, especially in colleges and northern cities. The most effective speakers were Jim Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and Perry Saito, whose mischievous grin often challenged people to guess whether he was Chinese or—horrors! Japanese, at a time when many thought all Japanese-Americans were, or ought to be, in the “relocation” camps.

(Perry was born in Wisconsin and not subject to the relocation laws. FOR cooperated with the American Friends Service Committee and other religious groups to find jobs for some West Coast internees to leave the camps. Shizu Asahi, first relocated by the Methodist Church; and Martha Higashida, whose dentist father was relocated by AFSC, worked toward the end of the war as secretaries in the FOR office at 2929 Broadway in New York.)

In 1944 I went to Washington to represent FOR on a team comprised of every major peace group, including Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren as well as major denominations, to oppose the government plan for permanent universal military training (LJMT) of every eighteen-year-old in the country. The team grew to include farm, labor, and educational groups. It became, in the end, the only coalition ever to defeat the Pentagon on any issue it badly wanted.

Although Muste encouraged my doing this work, I also returned to New York on weekends to continue FOR administrative work, so my speaking on racial issues could not continue. However, in 1947, I strongly felt that one strategy to prevent adoption of peacetime conscription was to exploit the contradiction between segregated armed forces and the growing opposition to segregation. The House and Senate Military Affairs Committees, in which peacetime conscription was being promoted, included many Congressmen from the Deep South.

In the fall of 1947 I met with Bayard Rustin and William Worthy of CORE. Out of that meeting, A. Philip Randolph was enlisted in the formation of the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training. (Randolph was president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.) On November 3, 1947 the Committee was officially launched. It included 118 Negro leaders in labor, church, education, and political life, from university presidents and Black journalists to Joe Louis, the world heavyweight boxing champion. The Committee’s chair was Grant Reynolds, who was the New York State Commissioner of Corrections and a World War II chaplain. A. Philip Randolph was secretary-treasurer.

I arranged for a delegation of Reynolds and Randolph to meet with Senator Robert Taft, Republican majority leader of the Senate. He promised them he would not permit peacetime conscription to be considered in the Senate so long as there was a segregated armed force. As a result of this and other conversations with House leaders, President Truman, who wanted conscription, ordered desegregation of the armed forces.

Southern Congressmen resisted Truman’s order, and the Secretary of the Army announced that he would not enforce desegregation. On March 31, 1948, in hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, A. Philip Randolph, referring to the recent death of Gandhi, said, “The conscience of the world will be shaken as by nothing else when thousands and thousands of us second-class Americans choose imprisonment in preference to permanent military slavery…. I personally will advise Negroes to refuse to fight as slaves for a democracy they cannot possess and cannot enjoy.”

Although there was further resistance from Southern senators, Universal Military Training was temporarily shelved, and on July 26, 1948, President Truman issued an executive order to end segregation in the armed forces.

In the meantime, another major step in the campaign for racial equality had already occurred. It was a “Journey of Reconciliation” planned at the FOR office by George Houser and Bayard Rustin, co-secretaries of the Racial-Industrial Department of FOR. The Journey, a two-week interracial bus trip through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky in April, 1947 would aim to test and enforce the Supreme Court decision, Irene Morgan v Virginia, which outlawed racial discrimination in interstate travel.

Participants in this joint FOR/CORE project included Houser and Rustin, Bill Worthy and others—a total of eight Blacks and eight Whites. Their training and procedure was to have Negro participants sit in the front and Whites in the back of the bus. If the police arrested them, they would go peacefully.

In twenty-five tests of Jim Crow seating, twelve people were arrested and jailed. Some who had been arrested were found guilty and sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang. Others were saved from mob violence by Charles Jones, Presbyterian pastor and FOR member, who enlisted University of North Carolina students to come to their rescue. After taking the beleaguered Journey participants to the Joneses’ home, the students escorted them to Greensboro, across the county line.

Jim Farmer had left the FOR staff in 1945, before the Journey, and was working with a labor organization. Nevertheless, his work with CORE continued. The moving and dramatic Freedom Rides he organized in 1961 also made a difference by calling national attention to the brutality of segregation.

With Farmer’s departure, Bayard Rustin became the only major Black leader and speaker in FOR. He spoke eloquently, and often ended presentations by singing a Negro spiritual with his clear tenor voice. With or without companions, Rustin engaged in nonviolent actions in restaurants and elsewhere. For example, he was once refused service in a lunchroom in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania. He persuaded the proprietor to let him sit with a hamburger and a cup of coffee in front of him for fifteen minutes, promising that if a single customer left because of his presence, he would go without further protest. At the end of a quiet fifteen minutes, she removed the cold hamburger and coffee and asked, “What’ll you have?”

Bayard was homosexual in a time when police could and did arrest and publicize arrests of people reported or caught in compromising situations. This happened to Bayard, and there was wide publicity. At A.J Muste’s request, I was present in private sessions with Bayard. A.J. stated that Bayard could continue working for FOR so long as there were no further public arrests. With Bayard’s consent, Muste arranged for him to visit a psychiatrist at FOR expense on the assumption that this might help him avoid future problems.

In 1953 Bayard was arrested by police in Pasadena, California. The situation involved a homosexual encounter and he was carrying over $400 in his pocket, the contributions from a meeting at which he spoke. There was nationwide publicity. Glenn Smiley, a White Methodist minister and FOR’s Southwest Secretary, bailed him out of prison. When he returned to New York, A.J. asked me again to sit in on his session with Bayard.

Accounts that have appeared in Bayard’s defense differ.

Neither Muste nor I was judgmental or accusatory. Muste’s position was that if Bayard would give us a solemn promise that he would not again be involved in any sexual situation that could be publicized, he could remain on the staff. If not, he should resign. Bayard chose to resign.

Before long, Bayard Rustin began to work with the War Resisters League. He later worked with A. Philip Randolph, and it was in that capacity that he did the major organizing for the March on Washington in 1962 (at which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech).

In 1953, the FOR National Council arranged a date for A. J. Muste and John Nevin Sayre to retire as Co-Secretaries and for me to become their successor as National Executive. My first major staff move was to invite Glenn Smiley to leave California and become National Field Secretary, and to employ as his successor in Los Angeles a public school administrator, Wilson Riles, who was Black. Glenn’s first big assignment (in 1954) was to go to Orangeburg, South Carolina, where the first major boycott and nonviolent action of the civil rights movement had taken place.

Earlier that year, a group of Blacks had petitioned for integrated schools in Orangeburg. The White community’s retaliation had included foreclosing mortgages and stopping deliveries of milk and bread to petitioners’ homes. From then on, no student in either of the two historically Black colleges would buy or drink milk, purchase Coca-Cola, or eat bread. The first boycott in the South had begun.

I asked Glenn Smiley to go and investigate. As a result of an extensive report from Glenn, FOR launched a campaign for food and clothing for those in need in Orangeburg.

The famous Montgomery bus boycott began in December, 1955. FOR staff decided to become involved. I phoned Glenn, who was already in the South, and asked him to go to Montgomery.

Glenn said that he first met with Martin Luther King on February 14, 1956. Bayard Rustin had been there earlier. The various books written about the boycott differ. Some indicate that Rustin had started to persuade King to accept nonviolence. But some indicate that Rustin was seen as a liability, not only because of earlier adverse publicity about his sexual activity but because there were allegations that he had falsely represented himself as writing for British and French newspapers.

In Parting of the Waters, Taylor Branch states, “Rustin knew the baleful signs. He called John Swomley, executive director for the FOR in New York, with an urgent message for Muste and the others” describing what had happened and “he told Swomley sadly that he would not be staying long...but he implored Swomley to trust his judgment and send someone on the next plane.” I cannot recall any similar reference in other books, nor do I remember the call. Other books have Rustin leaving Montgomery shortly after Glenn arrived.

In any event Rustin returned to New York, but thereafter planned to go back to Montgomery with the idea of getting the boycott called off temporarily while he organized a workshop or school for nonviolence. His goal was to recruit a hundred young Negro men to promote it, not only in Montgomery but elsewhere in the South.

However Jim Farmer and A. Philip Randolph called a meeting of twenty or so people, including Norman Thomas, Charles Lawrence (the Black chairman of the FOR National Council), and others, as well as myself. On February 19, I wrote Smiley about that meeting and its decision not to support Rustin. I wrote, "We should not try from the North to train or otherwise run the nonviolent campaign in Montgomery as Bayard had hoped to do, but rather to expect them to indicate ways in which we could be of help.”

The group also suggested preparing Whites to support the boycott and to prepare them to negotiate with Black leaders. I asked Wilson Riles to join Glenn, and on April 6 they held an all-day meeting with seventy White ministers in Alabama.

The situation in Montgomery was tense. During Glenn’s early visits, we conferred nightly by phone, with Glenn speaking in guarded language. I kept him constantly aware of my phone number and mail address if I was traveling. In early March when I was in Columbia, Missouri, he reported King’s decision to wage the completely nonviolent campaign that he had been urging him to undertake.

Smiley led role-playing sessions in churches in preparation for dealing nonviolently with harassment or with problems that might arise once the boycott was won and people went back on the buses.

Glenn did not work steadily in Montgomery but visited other hot spots in the South. After he and Wilson Riles had established contacts in Augusta and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as in Florida and elsewhere, they felt the time had come to hold a South-wide meeting of the most militant Black leaders. They felt it was vital for the major organizers to get to know each other and also to discuss a South-wide strategy.

Glenn Smiley put together the meeting. It included the following Black leaders: Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy from Montgomery; Matthew McCollum; Dean L.L. Haynes of Claflin College and Father Parker of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church from Orangeburg,, South Carolina; Murray Branch and Dean D.R. Brazeal of Morehouse College; M.L. King, Sr., of Atlanta; Oscar Lee of the National Council of Churches in New York; Charles Lawrence of FOR; James Thomas, head of the eleven Negro Methodist colleges; and others from Tallahassee and other places in the South. The Whites who were present included Glenn Smiley, A.J. Muste, Will Campbell, and myself.

The two most important decisions made were to unite those in heretofore chiefly underground movements in the South, and to hold training conferences “for both white and colored minorities.”

Various training conferences were indeed held, though no record was kept. The December 16, 1958 Minutes of the FOR executive committee carried this report: Glenn Smiley “stated that he had been in Birmingham where a bus boycott was in progress. Growing out of this visit, three Negro leaders were invited to Nyack for orientation into pacifist thinking: H.H. Smith, F.I. Shuttlesworth, and J.L. Ware. Oscar Lee came in later. Other participants besides Glenn were A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, John Swomley, Charles and Margaret Lawrence.” Charles Lawrence, the national chairman of FOR, was a college professor and his wife, Margaret, was a psychiatrist. At that meeting, Glenn announced that Martin Luther King, Jr. had decided to join FOR

The Montgomery bus boycott continued for another year, until its end on December 20, 1956. King and Smiley rode together on the first bus to have a group of Blacks in the front—a photograph that was on the front pages of newspapers across the country.

King was by that time the best-known Black person in the country. He was in New York shortly after the end of the boycott, staying at the Waldorf Astoria. A.J. Muste and I called on him there. We wanted to invite him to come on the staff of FOR, with no responsibility other than to speak and organize a nationwide nonviolent movement to end racial segregation. We would raise the necessary funds.

King listened, and then told us of other job offers, including a college presidency and theological teaching. He said he was declining all offers because he wanted to devote himself to the work in the South and building an organization there. We thoroughly understood his position and told him we thought it the right thing to do.

We three had been together at the meeting of Black leaders from Deep Southern states. It has always been my conviction that the meeting at Morehouse College was the spiritual beginning of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the group that King went on to found, and that his South-wide leadership was accepted then, even though it began in Montgomery.

Another important pacifist-inspired movement was organized in 1948-59 in Nashville, Tennessee around a young Black student and draft resister, James Lawson. He had met and been inspired by A.J. Muste and joined the FOR while a freshman at Baldwin Wallace College. When faced with the military draft he refused to serve, and spent time in prison. His interest in Gandhi led him afterward to go to India as a short-term Methodist missionary. He was in India when the Montgomery boycott began.

When Lawson decided to enroll at Vanderbilt University, Glenn Smiley recommended that we appoint him as a part-time FOR staff member. He became the center of a significant group of Black students in various schools in Nashville, holding workshops on nonviolent action. His work and influence led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Members, including Lawson, were involved in the Freedom Rides led by James Farmer through Alabama and Mississippi.

Although at this time Bayard Rustin and James Farmer were no longer staff members of FOR, they continued to play a significant role in the civil rights movement. As indicated earlier, Rustin was the chief organizer of the August 28,1963 March on Washington where King gave his “I have a dream...” speech, with an attendance estimated at 250,000 by the police, but at 400,000 by others

James Farmer as head of CORE led thirteen recruits on the Freedom Rides through the South in 1961. At stops in Alabama and Mississippi they were met with massive violence. After one such incident, Diane Nash, a leader of SNCC, volunteered to bring others from that organization whom Jim Lawson had trained in Nashville. They would continue the Freedom Ride. Those young volunteers (including Lawson, who was their spokesman) experienced hatred and violence and ended in Parchman Prison, one of the worst in Mississippi.

Lawson, a man of great courage and integrity, later served a Methodist church in Memphis, Tennessee. As the world knows, Memphis became the scene of one of the last episodes of violence against the effort to achieve the dream of equality of Martin Luther King. Lawson and other Black leaders were helping to dramatize the economic privation and indignity endured by a largely Black group of garbage workers. Lawson became their advisor in trying to form a union. He asked Dr. King to come to Memphis and take part in a march with the workers.

It was in Memphis that the eloquent voice of Martin Luther King was stilled by a bullet.

The tragedy is described in a number of books. One is The Children, by David Halberstam, which begins with Jim Lawson’s early life and the steps that led him to his role in the tragedy. Another book is less well known: Orders to Kill, written after an exhaustive investigation by William Pepper, an English barrister. Pepper comes to the conclusion that King’s murder was planned and carried out by some person or persons in the US government or in its employ.

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Some colleagues from Nashville and SNCC are still alive and active. Of the earlier FOR staff participants in actions of the 1940s and 1950s, only George Houser, Jim Lawson, and I are still alive and active.

Jim served a large Methodist church in Los Angeles until his retirement, and for a time became the Chair of the National Council of the FOR that he had served so well during the civil rights campaign.

George not only helped organize the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) but later the American Committee on Africa, working effectively on both continents. This work is outlined in his book, No One Can Stop the Rain. He is presently working on his Africa slides for the Amistad Research Center.

My own work for racial equality continued after I left FOR to teach in a theological school in Kansas City. For example, I organized the first public march to the Board of Education to ask for desegregation of the schools. During the four days of riots in April 1964 sparked in Kansas City and various other cities by the fury of the Black community over the assassination of Dr. King, my students were active, and I then persuaded Chief of Police Clarence Kelly to appoint a special officer of human relations.

The last time I saw Bayard Rustin was at an ACLU National Board meeting more than twenty years ago. He came in late and pulled a chair next to mine. Though he was a member of the Board for a time, he seldom attended. He said he had given up smoking and was no longer a pacifist on international affairs, but still believed in the efficacy of nonviolence at all other points.

The last time I talked with Jim Farmer was in his home in rural Virginia, where he was confined to bed with both legs amputated and his eyesight gone because of diabetes. We had several hours of reminiscing and before I left he sang for me every verse of the old labor song, “Whose Side Are You On, Boy?” He had just received the Presidential Medal of Liberty. His death was announced on the front page of the New York Times on July 10, 1999, with a full page inside outlining his importance as a leader for civil rights.

I last saw Glenn Smiley in September 1993. I had been asked to speak to an International Conference of Koreans in Los Angeles. After speaking I went to see him, and to my surprise he was in a hospital bed and unable to speak. I held his hand and asked him to squeeze mine if he could hear me. I told him how important his life and contribution to FOR and Martin Luther King had been, and how much I valued his work and friendship. Each time he squeezed my hand. I sat next to him for several hours and when I left I told him I would be back the next morning. He died that night.

In closing this account I want to pay tribute to the tremendous contribution of the major FOR leaders, Glenn Smiley, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, James Lawson, Wilson Riles, A.J Muste, and, of course, Martin Luther King.

John M. Swomley, former executive secretary of FOR and Professor of Christian Ethics at St. Paul School of Theology, continues his research and writing. He is editor of the monthly Facts for Action and lives with his wife Marjorie in Kansas City, Missouri.