Martin Luther King Day Chapel Service , Saint Lawrence University

Some of you in the chapel today know that for some years now, St. Lawrence has sponsored a group of pre-doctoral fellows—Jeffrey Campbell Fellows they are called—in which the University provides a combined teaching and research fellowship to outstanding graduate students of color so that they can complete their dissertations and enter the professoriate, hopefully, if the fit is right, at St. Lawrence. I bet, however, that like me until I began to think about the relationship between the University and the Universalist

Church in anticipation of our sesquicentennial two years hence, you know little of why these fellowships came to be associated with Jeffrey Campbell. Who was Jeffrey Campbell, anyway, and why bring him to your attention on Martin Luther King Day?

One answer is that he is probably the closest anyone has come to being the Martin Luther King, Jr. of St. Lawrence. At his death in the mid-1980’s, his obituary in the St. Lawrence Magazine said this:

Life was not always easy for SLU’s first African-American graduate. The only non-Caucasian on campus could have retreated into a shell, but that was not Jeffrey Campbell’s way. During his years as an undergraduate student (graduated in 1933) and as a theological school student [St. Lawrence had a Universalist Theological School, housed in Atwood Hall, until 1965], he rarely rested. As editor of the Hill News he took the opportunity to fill the pages with his social vision. In 1934, as a member of the executive committee of the American Student Union, he helped organize the first nation-wide student anti-war demonstration. In addition, he found the time to serve as a student pastor in Winthrop and as vice-president of the Young People’s Christian Union of New York State Universalists.

Until his death he continued to work as an activist for peace, labor relations and race relations. He organized New Hampshire’s Farmer-Labor Party, and ran for governor of Massachusetts on the socialist ticket.

He ended his career as a teacher and chaplain at the Putney School in Vermont.

My strong suspicion is that Richard Eddy Sykes, St. Lawrence’s president during Jeffrey Campbell’s undergraduate years, had his hands full with this precocious and stunningly intelligent student activist. In 1934, in the alumni magazine, he published a piece entitled “How I Would Achieve the Ideal University,” in which he laid out the changes he would make in St. Lawrence if he were president:

Entrusted with the guidance of a Liberal Arts College my first pleasure would be to select a motto. I think I should like Fides et Veritas, translated into English and seriously considered.

My first care would be to emancipate my institution from the ignorance, sham, and stupidity of the outside world. Any attempt of that existing society to foist it’s prejudices, shibboleths, and emotional biases upon my students by even such subtle media as bequests, endowments, trustee-prestige, or social sanction would be hailed by me as a signal to sever incriminating relations with that particular part of the octopus known as the status quo.

Education for neither the past nor the present but the future would be my goal . . . . .

[I would adhere] tenaciously to my creed of liberty of thought and expression in every field whether that thought agrees with the views of the trustees or not. . . . . . . .

We tend to think of the 1960’s as the time when college students found the courage to raise such issues with their institutions—Jeffrey Campbell was thirty years ahead.

But one of Campbell’s most powerful writings, and the one John Hurley, the Unitarian Universalist Church’s historian, believes most anticipates the later speeches and writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., was entitled “Personality Not Pigmentation,” published in 1940 in The Christian Leader, the newspaper of the Universalist Church. Hurley describes the circumstances surrounding the publication of the essay:

Jeff Campbell had recently performed the marriage ceremony for his sister Marguerite, who had married a Theological School student named Francis Davis. Marguerite was black; Francis was white. The editor of the Leader, John Van Schaick, published an editorial condemning the marriage . . . . . and pointing out that Davis would never be called to serve a Universalist church because his wife was a Negro; Van Schaik also attacked Jeffrey in the editorial.

Campbell began by speaking eloquently and positively about his experience at St. Lawrence, both as an undergraduate and in the Theological School:

From start to finish the six years of close fellowship which I knew with faculty and students of that Theological School has been one of the richest I have known in an experience abundantly blessed with such fellowships. Every opportunity or advantage which the school could make available to any of its students was placed at my disposal. Undergraduates from the South who had stated that the day I entered the building they must leave for good remained to become friends whose esteem I hope to merit to my dying day.

Later he described his ordination—the fairness and toughness of the examiners, and the horrible dilemma with which they struggled, for the Universalist Church, while in doctrine powerfully opposed to racism and for inclusiveness, nonetheless practiced the racial discrimination so characteristic of American society.

Finally the committee voted ordination. It did so with more travail of spirit. There was the genuine fear of kindly people who disliked seeing a harmless idealist hurt. At this point they might well have been right had the crux not been a problem of racial prejudice about which the mere accident of birth compelled me to know more than any of them possibly could. There was a second, far deeper, fear. It was so deep I doubt if any of that committee could have placed a finger on it. I felt it in this way. They wanted their church to be the kind of institution which could unite its theory with his practice. Inwardly they knew that it was not, nor, within the limits of their imagination, could they see it becoming such. They feared lest that central weakness be demonstrated to the world. Through no connivance of my own I happened to be a walking demonstration of that weakness. Failure to ordain me would have been an even more flagrant confession of the same failure. In that dilemma they were caught and the whole denomination, not to mention liberal Christianity, with them. . . . . .

Actually all America is faced with the same dilemma. Neither the “Great Democracy” nor the Universalist Church can be true to itself without recognizing in word and intention the fact that “He hath made of one blood all nations.” The unique factor of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets is that they never say “all men should be brothers,” but that they already are. It is the refusal of men to act on the reality of their common brotherhood which has produced the Hell in which we blindly struggle today.