By Lynn Burnett
Born in 1939, Bob Fitch was the son of a conservative Christian minister. He experienced his family as cold and emotionally withdrawn, and as a teenager gravitated towards the warmth and vibrance of Berkeley’s social justice scene. During that time, he tossed aside what he viewed as his father’s rigid belief system… but went on to pursue a Master’s of Divinity, according to his own understanding of a Jesus whose teachings centered on feeding the poor, housing the unsheltered, and giving company to the isolated.
Bob Fitch began his career as a minister at the famed Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, with a focus on supporting the homeless population and people suffering from addiction. Many were LGBT refugees who had been ostracized and abandoned by their families and communities, and had fallen into severe isolation and despair. The church had begun publishing books about the inequities in San Francisco, and asked Bob to take pictures during his time ministering to people on the street. He took the task to heart, and began studying the works of famous photographers in order to visually portray the inequities Jesus had preached against.
In 1963, Bob had a vision: “I had read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time straight through one night and early morning. At the end of that reading I was entranced; I had a vision of myself being engaged with what I had encountered in the book in some sort of aesthetic manner.” Soon afterwards, he was invited by Martin Luther King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to become a movement photographer. They needed a photojournalist, not only to take pictures of big movement events, but to embed themselves in the daily grassroots movement building and portray the daily work of the movement. And, given the extreme threats Black journalists faced, they needed the photojournalist to be White. For Bob Fitch, it was the fulfillment of the vision he had had while reading Baldwin through the night. Along the way, he also ended up becoming Martin Luther King’s official photographer: many of the most famous pictures of King were taken by Fitch. Bob became a deeply trusted figure: he was often the only White person present during some of the civil rights movement’s most emotional internal debates.
After King’s death, Bob felt uneasy about growing tensions within the movement. During an angry civil rights retreat, he left the meeting and went to meditate in the forest, where he experienced a vision of Martin Luther King urging him not to walk away from the work. Fitch wanted to remain committed to documenting powerful nonviolent movements driven by ordinary people. He relocated to Delano, California, and became a photojournalist for the United Farm Workers, where for years he captured evocative images of everything from life in the fields to strategy sessions to police brutality against workers on strike. The official U.S. postage stamp of Cesar Chavez is based on a photo taken by Fitch. For Bob, photography was both a spiritual experience of being present, in the moment, allowing himself to be guided by intuition; as well as a spiritual commitment to justice. He passed away in the farming community of Watsonville in 2016.
Additional Resources
Ruth Copland: Do We Still Need Physical Community? Arts Interview: Bob Fitch, Iconic Photographer and Photo-Journalist.
Bob Fitch:
Sam Roberts: Bob Fitch, Photojournalist of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 76.
Waging Nonviolence: On the civil rights trail with Bob Fitch.
Wikipedia entry.
By Lynn Burnett
This piece is primarily based on the remarkable book by Marcus Rediker:The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist.
Born in England in 1682, as a sailor Benjamin Lay witnessed the brutality of the slave trade first hand. The experience guided him towards an early embrace of abolitionism, especially after witnessing a slave commit suicide to escape abuse. Benjamin eventually settled in the British colony of Pennsylvania, where he scandalized his fellow Quakers with intense public protests and acts of “guerilla theatre” against slavery.
Barely four feet tall, with dwarfism and a spinal condition known as hyperkyphosis, “Little Benjamin” (as he called himself) once stood outside a Quaker meeting in the snow… barefoot and with no coat. He positioned himself in the gateway leading to the meetinghouse, ensuring that each congregant would pass by him. When they expressed concern for his health, he responded that enslaved people had little protection against the elements, and that the congregants should show the same concern for them. Such actions were not uncommon for Benjamin: he put his body on the line again and again… but in his case, to challenge his own community. His various actions led him to be physically removed – and even permanently expelled – from Quaker meetings on numerous occasions. This didn’t stop him from returning, and continuing to pressure those communities to live up to their professed ideals.
Benjamin Lay saved his most creative and dramatic act of guerilla theatre for a potentially high-impact moment: a regional Quaker gathering that took place only once a year. After traveling 30 miles on foot, Benjamin took full advantage of the Quaker tradition of rising to speak when the spirit moved you: in his case, he rose to deliver a fiery anti-slavery speech grounded in Biblical verse. He ended by holding the Bible high above his head… and then plunging a sword into it. The Bible had been hollowed out, and Benjamin had placed an animal bladder filled with blood-red juice inside. Blood appeared to spray out of the Bible. Benjamin then splattered the slave-owning Quakers at the meeting with the Bible’s “blood.” The message was clear: supporting slavery was akin to murdering the Word of God.
During his life, “Little Benjamin” wrote over 200 pamphlets, condemning animal cruelty, imprisonment, and capital punishment. He singled out slavery, however, not merely as a cruel practice… but a demonic one. Benjamin Lay’s language was uncompromising: those who practiced slavery bore the “Mark of the Beast,” and were responsible for creating Hell on earth. He urged Quakers to take a stand, and expel church members who owned or traded in slaves. Benjamin Lay also boycotted the slave-labor industry by making his own clothes. In 1738, a printer he had befriended published his book “All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates.” It was the most militant anti-slavery tract to date. The printer was Benjamin Franklin, who kept his own involvement anonymous.
In his later years, Benjamin Lay embraced a self-sufficient and hermetic lifestyle, living in a cave out in the Pennsylvania countryside with a constructed entryway to protect from the elements. He filled the cave with books of poetry, theology, and history; spun his own flax clothing; kept goats for milk; gardened; harvested from fruit trees he had planted; and made his own honey by tending to an enormous beehive.
In 1758, when the Pennsylvania Quakers passed a resolution disciplining any slave owners and traders, Benjamin exclaimed “I can now die in peace.” He did so the following year. Decades after his death, Quakers would rise to the forefront of the abolitionist movement: many of them kept images of Benjamin Lay in their homes as a source of inspiration.
Additional Resources
Books
David Lester (author), with Paul Buhle & Marcus Rediker (editors): Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel.
Marcus Rediker: The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist.
Articles
Abington Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends: Info on Benjamin Lay.
Susan Hogan: ‘In the belly of hell’: The Quaker abolitionist disowned by his faith for condemning slave owners.
Marcus Rediker:
Nic Rigby: Benjamin Lay: The Quaker dwarf who fought slavery.
Wikipedia entry.
By Lynn Burnett
Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, and received his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1933. In Berlin, he studied under some of the greatest Jewish scholars of the era, and was ordained as a rabbi. In 1938, the Gestapo arrested Heschel and deported him to Poland. The Nazis soon invaded, and Heschel’s network helped him escape briefly to London, and then to New York City in 1940.
During the war Heschel organized with the Jewish American community, advocating for the U.S. to accept more Jewish refugees. Heschel was deeply dismayed by the disinterest these efforts encountered. He was unable to even relocate his own family. His mother died in a Nazi bombing, and his sisters perished in Nazi death camps. Heschel never returned to the lands where these terrors took place: “If I should go to Poland or Germany,” he said, “every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated.”
Like so many others, Heschel came to believe that the indifference of ordinary people was one of the greatest roots of the Holocaust. The rabbi developed a theology rooted in social action, based on the scriptural teaching that people were made in God’s image, and must be treated as such. Heschel taught the Hebrew prophets as figures who took this teaching to heart, and thus became great disrupters of indifference. In his words: “What is the essence of being a prophet? A prophet is a person who holds God and men in one thought at one time, at all times. Our tragedy begins with the segregation of God, with the bifurcation of the secular and sacred.” For Heschel, God was ever-present, including ever present in every human being. Indifference to humanity became indifference to God.
Because Heschel took seriously the teaching that all people were made in the image of God, he viewed all forms of bigotry as affronts to God. As someone who had watched racism descend into the ultimate horror of genocide against his own people, Heschel was especially passionate about racial equality. This led him into the arms of the civil rights movement. In 1963, he gave the opening address at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago, where he spoke alongside Martin Luther King. Heschel’s words were uncompromising: “Racism,” the rabbi said, “is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking . . . Racism is satanism, unmitigated evil.”
During much of his speech Heschel specifically addressed White people. He urged them to take responsibility for their actions and beliefs, and to take it upon themselves to end racial inequity. “There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.”
“Daily we patronize institutions which are visible manifestations of arrogance toward those whose skin differs from ours. Daily we cooperate with people who are guilty of active discrimination. How long will I continue to be tolerant of, even a participant in, acts of embarrassing and humiliating human beings, in restaurants, hotels, buses, or parks, employment agencies, public schools and universities? One ought rather be shamed than put others to shame.”
Heschel then urged the audience to take concrete action:
“What we need is a total mobilization of heart, intelligence, and wealth for the purpose of love and justice . . . The plight of the Negro must become our most important concern . . . Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation? . . . Our concern must be expressed not symbolically, but literally; not only publicly, but also privately; not only occasionally, but regularly.”
It was at this event in 1963 that Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King became fast friends. They continued to work together throughout the remaining years of King’s life. Their most prominent moment together came when Heschel marched next to King in Selma: in the rabbi’s words, “our legs uttered songs . . . I felt my legs were praying.” When King famously spoke out against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967, Heschel followed him as a speaker. In 1967, the war was still supported by most Americans, and King received significant backlash for embracing an antiwar stance. Heschel had embraced such a stance a full two years earlier, when he began organizing interfaith clergy against the war. He, too, received backlash… and became a moral model who influenced other spiritual leaders, including King, in taking the risk.
Martin Luther King described Heschel as nothing less than a “great prophet” of his times. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s prophetic voice did not only speak out against all forms of injustice… it also spoke up for love, beauty, and awe. To see one another as beings in the image of God was to live a life of joy, connection, and wonder. Heschel thus had another very important message for White people: racism hurt them. It cut them off from seeing the beauty in one another. This separation from one another was a separation from God. On a stage shared with King, Heschel’s message rang out: “One hundred years ago, the emancipation was proclaimed. It is time for the white man to strive for self-emancipation, to set himself free of bigotry.”
Additional Resources
Books
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a prolific author. You can browse his many books here.
Shai Held: Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence.
Edward K. Kaplan: Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul.
Julian E. Zelizer: Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement.
Articles
Robert Erlewine: The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Abraham Joshua Heschel:
Cornel West: The Radical Heschel: Remembering the prophetic legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Wikipedia bio.
Stanford MLK Institute bio.
Videos and Podcasts
Shai Held: On Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Call of Transcendence.
Abraham Joshua Heschel:
PBS: Spiritual Audacity: Spiritual Audacity: The Abraham Joshua Heschel Story.
Julian Zelizer:
