Samuel DeWitt Proctor > Quotes

“It's ironic that at the time that school integration began, its enemies had no idea we would end up victims of our major achievement. Today, forty years later, all big-city school systems are largely black and failing; whites and middle class black have fled to the suburbs or private schools. Indeed, effective school integration today is a myth. Instead of attending warm and dynamic schools where they are sponsored and affirmed, black students today are educationally crippled, too often abandoned in urban, drug-infested, violent, crime-ridden holding pens and dealt with like cattle. Clearly, something radically new must occur to generate a fresh start in educating masses of urban black youth.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“we are only stewards of God's wealth.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority

“My seminary training helped me to see how orthodox, fundamentalist Christianity, with its credulous literalism about the Bible, ended up as a religion unrelated to the travails of humans living in the real world. It was a religion that found reasons in the Bible to accept slavery and the subjugation of women; a religion that ignored Jesus, its Lord, and became comfortable with the rich; a religion that subjugated and exploited all of the darker-skinned people of the world for the comfort of the whites; a religion that quietly embraced militarism and bloodshed everywhere. In the hands of fundamentalists, Christianity had become an embarrassment to Jesus.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“With these expectations before us, we are prepared to separate the sermon from all other platform performances and verbal expressions. It is a proclamation of the truth of God, through Jesus Christ, by a preacher endowed with spiritual discipline. The proclamation, informed by the Scriptures, relates to all of life.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority

“When we have all competed to become wealthy, the preacher reminds us that we have an obligation to feed the hungry and to care for the widows and orphans, that we are only stewards of God's wealth.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority

“Martin (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) gave no quarter to compromise, to the accommodation of evil, to caprice or calumny. I often think of him now when I read newspaper columns written by prominent black conservatives, like Dr. Walter Williams and Dr. Thomas Sowell, who are partners with those who consistently try to keep black people from pursuing simple fairness. With their scholarly cant they cloud the issues and drum on themes that draw applause from their cynical sponsors. I wonder if they are ever frightened when they look around and notice who is applauding them.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“At that time, Wake Forest was trying to ease away from religious control in order to attract scholars unwilling to teach under the rubric of religious fundamentalism. Someone got the idea of asking me to come to Wake Forest and speak to their middle class, white student body on the issue of race relations and the rising claims of blacks on the society. For the most part, these students liked things as they were. My job that day was to show them how racial discrimination hurt everyone.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“I chose an invitation from the National Council of Churches, a fragile assembly of mainline Protestant churches with no authority but with a tacit commitment to promote Christian ethics in national affairs….Our chairman was Edwin Epsy, a saintly layman who had lived a lifetime on the side of the angels. He was surrounded by serious and committed church leaders, but they failed to recognize the huge gap between themselves and the people in the pews. When white Protestants realized what their liberal clergy was up to, the money simply evaporated. The better I explained the goals of our mission-to inaugurate a just, fair, and free society with equal opportunity and a higher quality of life for all, just as Jesus talked about-the worse our fortunes became.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“I was only twenty-four years old, and among the first generation of black pastors to have access, on a large scale, to graduate study at seminaries which were lodged in large universities. As we earned doctorates in religion, social activism became as important to us as saving souls.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“Any exercise as important as preaching deserves careful and penetrating scrutiny, an endless search for an evaluative instrument, and a strategy for continuous improvement.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority

“President Johnson raised our expectations to a peak when he pushed through the Civil Rights Bill that year. Automobile horns were blowing all over Washington that day as liberals, white and black, passed each other on the streets and highways, flashing peace signs as recognition. It wasn’t enough. Super-right-wing groups started dropping from trees and crawling from under rocks. Even Barry Goldwater could not control the extreme far-right. Whenever blacks progressed an inch, right-win extremists reacted as though it were a mile. When Howard Hughes died, a note was found among his memorabilia saying that enough had been done for blacks to last them for a hundred years”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“Interestingly, white and black Christians followed the same Jesus who taught love and inclusiveness, but they never worshiped together. Black people hardly gave a thought to this peculiar contradiction. The black church met such a critical need, and was so independent of white control, that no one considered a merger of black and white churches.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“If I made a speech supporting school integration, it was echoed throughout the area. Finding a cross burning on the front lawn was no big surprise, but is was frightening. We knew that the Klan was dangerous and that its activities frequently, and without warning, went far beyond burning symbols.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“When I think about my grandparents making the giant step from slavery to freedom, I realize that none of my own achievements can ever live up to their legacy. Even though everything in the law and the society claimed they were inferior, through all the long days and long years of being beaten back, they held their heads high and made their mark. The lesson I learned early from observing and listening, and trying to construct my own philosophy and pattern of life, was very simple. It was a way of seeing the stars, rather than the canopy of darkness.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“Sermon building is a farce if the preacher has nothing to say.”
― Samuel D. Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority

“Apart from forestalling rebellion, there was a more subtle reason to withhold education. Bible-reading Christians had a basic conflict between their religious beliefs and their brutal ownership of other human beings. To resolve this hypocrisy, they concluded that Africans were some sort of slow-witted offspring of Homo sapiens and, therefore, not quite human. To support this fiction, slave owners put out lamps at night, snatched books from questioning hands, separated blacks from their tribal groups, and created around them a cultural vacuum. This extremely effective practice of first denying education than saying the victim cannot learns continues to compound all the other problems facing us today.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“Great preaching can present Jesus to the modern mind, transposing him from a world of goats, camels, fig trees, and mustard seeds to a world of crack, teenage gun fights, child abuse, stealing in high places, and education without values, keeping alive his transforming and saving power generation after generation.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority

“With the rise of blacks, poor whites like him saw themselves being jeopardized economically. They also saw themselves losing the only badge of preference that they had, the advantage of simply being white. With my presence, this crippled janitor's fragile status was slipping away from him.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith

“President Johnson raised our expectations to a peak when he pushed through the Civil Rights Bill that year. Automobile horns were blowing all over Washington that day as liberals, white and black, passed each other on the streets and highways, flashing peace signs as recognition. It wasn’t enough. Super-right-wing groups started dropping from trees and crawling from under rocks. Even Barry Goldwater could not control the extreme far-right. Whenever blacks progressed an inch, right-win extremists reacted as though it were a mile. When Howard Hughes died, a note was found among his memorabilia saying that enough had been done for blacks to last them for a hundred years.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Sermons from the Black Pulpit

“Intellectual depth is revealed in more subtle ways than simply reminding the people of how bereft of learning they are.”
― Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority