No Turning Back -- A Review

Gurdon Brewster. No Turning Back: My Summer with Daddy King. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007. xiv + 233 pp.

There is book-learning and then there is experience. Both are important, but it’s experience that usually transforms lives. This is especially true of the Rev. Gurdon Brewster, an Episcopal Priest and the retired chaplain at Cornell University. In the summer of 1961 he served as an intern at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. This was early on in the Civil Right’s movement and Jim Crow continued to reign in the South. As summer intern he would live and work with Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., better known to his congregation as Daddy King. He went to Atlanta from New York’s Union Theological Seminary as part of a program sponsored by the seminary’s Student Interracial Ministry that was designed to introduce young students to this movement of change in America. It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that he would return to New York a much different person from the one who set out for Atlanta at the beginning of that summer.

This is a lovingly constructed memoir that takes us not only into the life of the author, but more importantly into the lives of Daddy King and the members of his church. Along the way we spend time with the senior King’s famous son. We also encounter many, both black and white, whose world views were formed by racism and prejudice. In the course of that summer experience, Brewster became part of the King family. Daddy King became a father to him – for Brewster had lost his own father at age 14 – and he became in many ways another son to Daddy King. Although Dr. King plays an important role in this story, it is the father’s story that stands out. It is the father’s life experience that forms the context in which America’s most important civil rights leader emerged.

It is Daddy King’s journey from sharecropper’s son to pastor and civil right’s leader in his own right that gave his son the foundation to take up the challenge of awakening America to the cancer that ate at its soul. Much of what we learn about Rev. King comes from Brewster’s morning breakfast chats, which interestingly enough the young intern would prepare each morning during his stay in the King house. From these conversations we learn how oppressive segregation really was and how it dehumanized people created in the image of God.

As a northern white Episcopalian, serving in a black Baptist church could be and was awkward at times. This was a different world, one that could present dangers to his life – not from the Black community, but from a white community that despised those who would befriend African Americans. Religiously and spiritually it was a different world as well. It would stretch him as he learned to pray and preach in a context so foreign to the one he had been raised. But the people lovingly welcomed him and helped him discover within the resources that would enable him to serve faithfully.

His ministry would call upon him to work with the church’s youth – and their own experiences would help him see how demonic segregation was, how it made both black and white its victims. He learned that sin was not just individual, but systemic in nature. His first taste of this came as he was walking through Atlanta with a group of students. They came upon the city’s leading department store, and seeing a lunch counter he invited the youth in for a cold drink. They stood outside, knowing that this was not allowed. He discovered that while he could order a drink and use the rest room, those simple things he took for granted weren’t part of his new friends’ world.

In time he would learn other lessons. Wanting to bring together his own youth with those of the community’s white churches, he suggested to the two King’s the possibility of a youth conference featuring Dr. King as speaker. They knew the difficulty of such an enterprise, but they encouraged him to try. It would come off, but he would run into hostility and complacency. Even the church was infected by racism in ways he couldn’t have imagined – even supposedly progressive churches. He was asked on more than one occasion: “what do those people want?” And he was told as well that he should be patient, that change takes time. As the summer drew to a close he discovered that despite his own cautiousness and even fear, he had become a subversive, one who didn’t fit in either world.

He would learn as well what it meant to engage in nonviolence and he would wonder how Dr. King and the others could do what they did. It was a question he raised many times, and when he participated in a nonviolence training conference – as the only white in the conference – he would have his own buttons pushed in ways that hurt and even offended him. He discovered that he wasn’t yet ready to seriously engage in nonviolent resistance to the evil that is racism, but he also learned that he had become part of a beloved community that overcame boundaries. Still, the lessons he had learned reminded him of the difficulty of change.

This is a story full of joy and sorrow. He crosses boundaries and makes life long-friends. His eyes are opened to the dark side of human life, and he realizes what it’s like to be a minority – for as a white in the black community he was the minority. It is a lesson that few in the majority culture have ever learned. That lesson makes clear that it’s not easy to move about in a world that’s not your own. He experiences his own fears and is introduced to the fears of those who had experienced oppression for so long. He learned of their scars and their methods of coping, methods that included preaching and singing.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was and is a man who changed the destiny of a nation. But his ministry did not take place in a vacuum. It was forged in the context of many other voices, including that of his father. We who read this memoir may not have the opportunity to experience what he did, but Gurdon Brewster offers us a window into the lives of people like Daddy King and his son Martin, people who lived the gospel and showed us how to nonviolently resist evil. Reading this book will prove to be a blessing to those who seek justice and mercy in this world.