By KAREN PARKER
County Line Publisher Emerita
It has been a very long time since I thought about church camp. Yes, I know many readers will find it hard to believe that this cynical but bleeding-heart liberal actually went to church camp. Hey, it was great. What a thrill to splash in the waters of Green Lake, Wis. (near Ripon), meet handsome young boys from around the state, and sleep in a cabin with (wow) bunk beds and outdoor latrines. Wait! Really? My idea of high adventure has definitely changed. Or as my late-mother-in-law often said, “Roughing it is going to a hotel without a nightie!”
But I digress. I was thinking about church camp because today is Martin Luther King Day. As it happened, I was at camp in August 1963 when Martin Luther King led his now famous march on Washington, delivering his legendary “I have a dream” speech, well known to nearly every American.
The United Church of Christ was always big on social justice issues, and it certainly was not going to allow an event of this significance to go unremarked among us impressionable and captive young minds. I distinctly recall all of us clustered in a corner of the lunchroom, hunched over while viewing a fuzzy picture on a little black and white television. Yes, boys and girls, in those old days, there were three networks — no Fox nor Netflix. Streaming had something to do with fishing.
The spectacle that unfolded before us was spellbinding. With the exception of some kids from Milwaukee, nearly all of us hailed from lily white Wisconsin towns and were essentially clueless about the violence black people suffered in other regions of the country. But we were teens, and despite the historic nature of the event, we likely were even more enthusiastic when “American Bandstand” came on at 4 p.m.
As I thought about those long-ago days, I wondered whatever became of that church camp. I launched an internet investigation and discovered that, by golly, lots had changed, but it was indeed still there. Evidently the camp had a name, Pilgrim Center, which I did not know — maybe that came later. But last fall the name was changed for an interesting reason. But more about that later.
What I did not know was that Dr. Martin Luther King had been a guest speaker back in 1956 at the American Baptist Assembly, also on the lake.
King was a Baptist minister, but a call to speak at a rural facility in Wisconsin was certainly off his usual path, which he noted in his speech. His purpose, however, was to enlist or at least encourage the audience to support his mission to bring about racial harmony with non-aggression procedures. He called it the “technique of non-violence”; perhaps he sensed “peaceful protest” might be a bridge too far for this crowd of northern white ministers.
I wonder what King might have thought of the firestorm touched off by the publication of “The 1619 Project” and the ensuing controversy over critical race theory.
But in 1956, he felt it necessary to educate his audience of white men on the history of black Americans.
“It was in the year of 1619 that the first Negro slaves landed on the shores of this nation,” King told his audience. “They were brought here from the soils of Africa. And unlike the Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth a year later, they were brought here against their wills. For more than 200 years, Africa was raped and plundered, her native kingdoms disorganized, her people and rulers demoralized and the whole continent inflicted with pains and burdens hardly paralleled by any race of people in the whole history of the civilized world. And throughout slavery the Negro was treated in a very inhuman fashion. He was not a person to be respected but a thing to be used.”
No doubt King was well aware that his listeners and indeed most Americans were the product of an education system that whitewashed this country’s abysmal treatment of people of color. No textbooks told of the beatings, the lynchings, and the denial of basic human rights. When King gave his speech in 1956 to that group of Baptists in Wisconsin, blacks were forced to use separate bathrooms, lunch counters, and housing in many areas throughout the nation. Only one year earlier, 14-year-old Emmett Till had been beaten and tortured to beyond recognition after a white woman accused him of whistling at her. In 2007, she admitted she had lied.
Just 100 days after that horror, Rosa Parks stood her ground and refused to move to the back of the bus, touching off the black resistance that King might have feared (correctly) was headed toward violence.
Wisconsin had always been a free state, and perhaps King knew his audience struggled with the concept of how such an attitude could possibly prevail. King had an answer to that. He told his audience, “With the growth of slavery it became necessary to give some defense for it. It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to cover up an obvious wrong with the beautiful garments of righteousness. William James, a psychologist, used to talk a great deal about the stream of
consciousness and he said one of the uniquenesses of human nature is that man has the capacity and the ability to temporarily block the stream of consciousness and inject anything in it that he wants to. And so man has the unique and tragic power of justifying the rightness of the wrong.”
King might well have been speaking of those who justify the events of Jan. 6 as a “few tourists who lost control.”
When King gave his speech in 1956, he likely could not have imagined a black man as president or one on the Supreme Court. He could not have seen the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which overruled absurd requirements to vote such as poll taxes, literacy tests and even in some cases, a requirement to know how many jellybeans are in the jar. He did not live to see that period when we abandoned the states’ rights argument and wiped away the laws that denied humans their dignity and their right to vote.
But we have changed direction again, and “liberal” is now a dirty word.
But evidently not at Pilgrim Camp. That church camp is now Daycholah Center. The name was chosen after collaborative efforts between the UCC and the Ho-Chunk nation. It began when Gary Littlegeorge of Black River agreed to come to come to the camp to educate guests about the tribe. But not until you change the name, he said. It was the term “pilgrim” that means something different to Native Americans. Their landing in the new world spelled the end of the culture and way of life for the indigenous people.
We even had a Doctrine of Discovery to cover that. Dating back to the 15th century, this papal decree issued by Pope Nicholas V “sanctioned and promoted the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian territories and peoples.”
And sure enough. In 1823, our own Supreme Court adopted that idea. It certainly worked to justify our rotten treatment of Native Americans. In fact, in 1823, Associate Justice Joseph Story wrote, “As infidels, heathens, and savages, they [the Indians] were not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent nations.”
Although many churches and countries have repudiated that doctrine, the United States was one of four countries in the United Nations to vote against the 2007 Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
It sounds like old history, but in 2005, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg cited the doctrine in a decision denying land sovereign status to the Oneida tribe’s purchase of property that fell within a 1794 treaty with the nation.
Ah, the things they don’t teach you in school.
So, as it turns out, my old church camp was a sacred place for the Ho-Chunk Nation and other tribes. Long before Columbus landed, it was a gathering place and spiritual retreat, as the presence of effigy mounds indicate. They called Green Lake “Daycholah,” and the Ho-Chunk nation’s flag now flies there along with the American flag.
Judnard Henry, Daycholah Center managing director, said, “Renaming is an appropriate and necessary first step on our journey toward a future where all are welcome and included and have a voice. We will continue to grow as a sacred place of love, a sanctuary, a community of inclusion and belonging, a place to learn, and to connect more deeply to God and all others.”
Martin Luther King would be proud.
