AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF THE DEEP ORIGINS OF THE CHICAGO FREEDOM MOVEMENT

EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW with DAVID JEHNSEN
By Seth McClellan, July 24, 2006

(Transcribed by Emily Hoover on December 8, 2006)

Seth McClellan (SM): WHEN YOU GOT INVOLVED IN CHICAGO, WHO WERE YOU… HOW’D THAT HAPPEN?

David Jehnsen (DJ): I grew up in the Church of the Brethren. It’s one of the three historic peace churches: the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Quakers. And for nearly three hundred years (and in the case of the Mennonites case, longer), we have been a religious denomination that has opposed violence and slavery as a way to solve problems—that both were a violation of the Creation.

So even before there were soldiers in Vietnam, I had decided at the age of 18 to be a Conscientious Objector. And so, my project turned out to be here in Chicago. Some of our volunteers went to Africa, to Haiti, to Mexico, to Europe, but I had decided to work on a project that dealt with race, because race and religion are going to be the cause of future wars… so I arrived at the project site . . . . The West Side Christian Parish was a joint inter-denominational effort of what was then called the Chicago Community Missionary Society. (It’s now called the Chicago Community Renewal Society).

It was an inner-city Protestant parish, sponsored by five denominations, including the Church of the Brethren.

And so I was assigned to a church . . . and started working with young people; I started working with young gangs – guys on the street . . . .

Then Dr. King wrote a letter, inviting the various church groups in Chicago to send a delegation of church leaders, an inter-faith delegation, to Albany, Georgia, in August of 1962. Because I was under selective service, the parish did not want to let me go, even though they were going to send three people. And just before the day it was going to happen, and the minister I worked for was going to be the one going, he said . . . . “David, I have a medical emergency and need to have an operation tomorrow. I know they said you can’t go, but here’s the money.”

So 35 of us including Rev. Porter, John Porter here, were called the Albany Delegation; and . . . we went down there and we spent anywhere from three to five (and in some cases seven) days in jail for a prayer vigil in support of Martin Luther King’s movement and the Albany movement.

There was a delegation from Detroit, from Washington DC, from NYC and from Los Angeles. So there were about 80 church leaders. I was nineteen years old. I had just turned nineteen a couple months before that but I was determined to be a part of nonviolent campaigns.

So that was the beginning and when we came back that delegation met off and on for two years to provide support for the southern movement. . . .

SM: AND…YOU WERE WORKING ON PREPARATION IN CHICAGO?

. . . I took advantage of any opportunity that existed to connect work to end slums and or to solve the problems with economic and racial injustice on the near West Side to the movements in the South. And one of the specific things I did, because I served on a committee on peace education for the American Friends Service Committee, was to see to it that any time C. T. Vivian or any of the other southern ministers would come up, that they would come in and speak to my ministers’ groups . . . .

Well, Jim Bevel was one of the speakers that I had at the church, and we were kind of talking, and having a reflection; and he said, “David, he said, I can see where were moving to a larger organization; a larger effort; a more permanent effort”; and he said, “there’s a young pastor named Shelvin Hall at Friendship Baptist church on the West Side out in Lawndale . . . . and you tell him I sent you, and I’ll talk to him, I think he could really help to organize a really broader group.”

So I did, and between Shel and myself, we organized over the next 90 days . . . The West Side Federation . . . and we worked out of [Reverend Hall’s] church and about that time they were going to have a big rally, in June [1964], at Soldier Field, and [Martin Luther King] was going to speak . . . I said that I think we could take three or four thousand people to this rally. . . . And wouldn’t that be dramatic to have a bunch of people from the West Side come in to that rally as a group.

Well, so we went to work on it . . . So it gave an opportunity for this group of ministers and organizations to show that they could really deliver a group of people. . . .

SW: SO IT SOUNDS LIKE, WHEN THE WORK WITH DR. KING STARTED, THERE WAS A REAL FOUNDATION.

DJ: Yes—there’s one more step to it.

Because what happened at that same time is Bernard LaFayette came to the West Side working through the American Friends Service Committee. And right after that rally there was an institute, up at Lake Geneva, and Bernard and I were standing in Lake Geneva, in water up to here, and were just talking and getting acquainted, and he said, “Well, David what do you do?” And I said, “Well, I have laid the groundwork, I hope, for a movement from the north to the south in terms of nonviolent movement.”

. . . . And so I told him what I was doing and I said, the reason I’m here is they said I did a good job at the Soldier Field rally bringing the West Side delegation in and they thought I deserved a week’s vacation. . . But anyway so Bernard was asking me this and he was looking at me and said, “That’s why I’m here. Maybe we ought to work on this together.” That was 1964. So that’s what we did. He worked for the American Friends’ Service Committee . . . which was out in Garfield Park and I worked for the West Side Christian Parish which moved, later on in that year, to Garfield Park . . . . So we started working together and we had a similar philosophy both of nonviolence and of organizations. And we were both good organizers, and we knew that there were always going to be good leaders who were very charismatic, and up front, but we knew that the question of who’s going to develop the future leadership always has to be first on your plate.