Religion: Calvin Marshall: Peace and Power

"Long before there was a college degree in the race, there were great black preachers, there were great black saints and there were great black churches. The Man systematically killed your language, killed your culture, tried to kill your soul, tried to blot you out—but somewhere along the way he gave us Christianity, and gave it to us to enslave us. But it freed us—because we understood things about it, and we made it work in ways for us that it never worked for him."

The voice is impassioned, resonant, "hooting" occasionally in the honored tradition of black preaching. Now and again the shouts of the preacher roll from behind the doors of Varick Memorial Church and out onto the quiet streets of Brooklyn's black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Pastor Calvin B. Marshall, stentorian proponent of black Christian radicalism, is reminding his parishioners that Christianity has a proper place in the black revolution.

Though his own black denomination (and indeed his congregation) is basically middle class, Calvin Marshall sees no anomaly in preaching a radical Gospel. He is chairman of the Black Economic Development Conference, whose field director, James Forman, stunned U.S. churches and synagogues last year with a Black Manifesto demanding "reparations" of $500 million for the years of suffering that blacks endured at white hands, and the years of neglect by white churches. Though B.E.D.C. has collected less than $200,000 so far, other black groups and caucuses within white denominations have also been recipients of sizable "conscience" funds. And with its own gifts, B.E.D.C. has already started a publishing house (Black Star Press), a radio station in Cleveland, community organizations in Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland. "The whole concept is Christian," explains Marshall, "penance and restitution."

At 37, the strapping, bearded, 6-ft. Marshall is a magisterial figure in the pulpit. On his clerical robes, he wears the cross-in-the-fist button of the National Committee of Black Churchmen, and the black, red and green "liberation"* colors—which are evident elsewhere in the church: on a prayerbook on the altar, in a flag on the wall.

For Marshall, radicalism is Christianity's heritage. "If you have any understanding of what Jesus was talking about," he says fervently, "you realize that Christianity in its inception was a very revolutionary kind of movement. There was a very real reason for putting Christians to death. Christians were troublemakers; they were constantly agitating for change, pointing to the sinfulness of the social order." Yet Marshall cherishes the traditional pieties of black Christianity.

Sense of Worth. For years, he explains, blacks found their sense of worth in Christianity. "If we were nothing here, at least we were children of God. At some far-off point in time, all these things would be rectified and we would get our golden slippers. Our religion had to mean more to us. We had to emote, we had to lose ourselves in it. We had to sing and shout, and after it was all over we had to have a big meal and have something going on Sunday afternoon. Because when Monday came, it was back out into the fields, or back to the janitor's job, or back in Miss Ann's kitchen scrubbing the floor."