Faith & Democracy #2: Pastor Olden
How My Grandfather's Quiet Faith Shaped His Involvement in the Struggle Against Segregation in 1963 Birmingham.
He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist. — Saint Francis of Assisi
My grandfather, Pastor Olden Moore, was both profoundly wise and, at the same time, immensely practical. Kind and generous, he and my grandmother not only raised their seven kids, plus me, their first grandchild; their house was always open for anyone who needed a meal, or simply a safe place to be. Olden was a minister and a singer and a master harmonica player.
I remember hearing him playing the most beautiful version of the Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, full of soulful, plaintive vibrato, and I’d hum along. (Listen closely to the recording, and you’ll hear the signature keyboard-playing of Sir Elton John in the background.)
My granddad could often be found, on autumn Alabama evenings, sitting on the porch, smoking his pipe and carving something; usually for me and my train set; which was a continually growing monstrosity that vexed my grandmother. He epitomized class and old-world style with his hats, and overcoat worn over his suit, his bow ties, suspenders and hand-pressed shirts, his well-trimmed mustache and meticulously shined wingtip shoes.
Saturday afternoons often found him and six-year-old me, reading our respective newspapers and childhood books, or him laying into some household chore that there wasn’t time for during the week. Though a pastor on Sundays and when people needed him, he made his living as a handyman. He’d fix things, build sheds, or whatever other work he could find. He was an artisan carpenter who could make anything out of wood, but his was a difficult era in which to be a colored man trying to raise a family; no matter how talented.
Further, men of his generation, especially in the wake of World War II, were met with new challenges like automation; which reduced the supply of good-paying jobs that relied on manual labor. This forced all men, whether deemed Negro or white, to compete for the same jobs, and in Birmingham, the most segregated, racially oppressive city in America, that didn’t bode well for men like my granddad. The best jobs around, at the time, were at the steel mill, but rare was the colored man who landed one of the few that segregation allowed. Olden was not among them.
Colored women had an easier time finding work, as Caucasian women of almost any means still hired them to help keep their homes. Having a domestic back then was akin to having a nice car today. So, both my grandparents worked. For my grandfather, the challenge was finding a way to both stay with and provide for his family in an era when most colored men could only do one or the other. But this choice was not without cost: He was forced to take whatever work he could get whenever he could get it, no matter how menial, low-paying or unpleasant.
Yet, whenever he got home, he showered, shaved, shined his shoes and got dressed like the gentleman he was. There was a quiet dignity in this; that in spite of the common labor he was willing to perform for his family, he always saw himself as more than his work, while recognizing that every job mattered to someone. He sought to instill this same sense of responsibility and self-regard in his sons; me included. It was from him that I first heard the ideas encapsulated in Martin’s Street Sweeper sermon:
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’
While he had to step off the sidewalk into the muddy gutter and lower his eyes for white-presenting couples passing by, he was determined to never allow his dignity to be sullied. In Me and Mary, I describe questioning him about this after one such incident on downtown Birmingham’s Second Avenue; him, head bowed, hat in hand, me, indignant on his behalf. “Shoes can be shined, son,” he said, kindly, with his hand on my shoulder; as if he’d revealed a great life secret. And in a sense, he had. There’s something important about choosing one’s battles.
Growing up, I was completely oblivious to the terror with which my grandfather lived; not so much for himself, but for us, his boys. In his era, the threat of the Ku Klux Klan was a very real one, and as a minister, he’d sat with many a father who’d cut their sons down from lynching trees or, even worse, never found a body to bury. “Bombingham” lived up to its name; I don’t know the number of times he helped dig out homes and churches that had been dynamited.
Bearing witness to this kind of cruelty and finding the courage to stand against it would be his generation’s burden. He was one of many southern coloreds who’d reported for the draft in WWII, but who was rejected after the military reached its racial quota for the area.
So, he and others did the work needed to keep a nation functioning, while fighting for that nation’s soul. He’d join a quiet charge, one led by African American ministers, and two decades later, that charge would culminate in Martin’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. But, imagine, if you can, what people like him and my grandmother Mary could have accomplished in a world that was less against them and more for them; if the America they loved so much had loved them in return.
Their stories are repeated time and again throughout our history; ones of people who were good to a nation that was not good to them, who remained true to a people that was not true to them. This was my grandparents’ experience, and the experience of so many of their contemporaries; lives impacted by systems instituted before they were born, and dating back to Reconstruction. Theirs was a generation simultaneously limited and empowered by the era that shaped them.
Unable to be on the front lines, they’d do the next best thing; they’d instill within their children the conviction that history does not determine destiny. And those children, from the Birmingham Crusade to the Little Rock Nine, knowing their parents would lay down their lives for them, did what their parents were not allowed to do: They marched.
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Faith and Democracy is an open series of articles that explore this pivotal point in our nation’s history, the longstanding role that faith and spirituality, both for better and worse, have played in shaping the society we’ve become and are becoming. Pastor Olden, adapted from This Land Is Your Land, is the second article in the series.
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RD Moore is an artist, minister, lifelong social activist, emancipationist and founder of the Mary Moore Institute for Diversity, Humanity & Social Justice (MMI). He credits the people who crossed his path starting in his formative years in post-Civil Rights-era Birmingham for the person he’d become and for his unyielding faith in who we can be together. Known for his intimate storytelling and insightful understanding, his work continues to explore that fertile space where diversity, spirituality and humanity all intersect. His blog, Letters from a Birmingham Boy, can be found here.