University of Virginia Library

Background of the Congregation

Understanding the creation of the Congregation for Reconciliation demands recalling the milieu of our society in the spring of 1968. For four years the nation had experienced "long hot summers" of violence and upheaval, and there seemed little reason to believe that the heat would not once again ignite the smoldering nerve ends locked in ghettos across the land. Born in the early 1960s, the hopes and dreams for cracking the barriers to racial justice now seemed crushed by hundreds of outbursts, rebellions, and riots in urban America. The mood of the country was shifting dramatically from sympathy for the causes espoused by the civil rights movement toward determination to legislate against riots and uncover organized conspiracies. The short-lived War on Poverty was already faltering badly, while in Southeast Asia another war, draining the national treasury as well as the collective will to deal with domestic problems, continued to escalate.

There were other moods in the wind as well. As we moved from the mid to the late 1960s, the concepts of power and powerlessness came increasingly into vogue. Such labels as "black power" and "student power" reflected the ambitions of those groups for more control over their own destinies. An anticolonialism term, "liberation," also came to encompass movements such as Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation. During the heyday of the War on Poverty, the phrase "maximum feasible participation" signified an attempt to bring recipients of government spending into the decision-making process. Simultaneously, students on

campuses across the nation confronted university administrators with demands for a greater voice in academic affairs under the rationale of "humanizing" the bureaucracy. The goal was the reduction of impersonal formal organizational structures and the attainment of greater accountability from large organizations to their clients or patrons. Ralph Nader's consumer advocacy, arguing that consumers should hold business accountable for its products and by-products, reflected the same mood.

The cry for "power to the people" may have been tainted by its association with the Black Panthers, but nonetheless that sentiment expressed the core of the political ideology this country has had since the eighteenth century, harking back, in essence, to "Taxation without representation is tyranny."

In the 1960s, however, the tyrant role fell not to colonial rulers but to the elites of institutional bureaucracies. Formal organization, like a modern plague, had spread to infest almost every, aspect of life. Decision-making moved further and further from those whose lives were affected. And unlike politicians who can be called to account periodically, most of the decision-makers were practically unreachable, nestling in the remote, mysterious, and villainous "power structure."

In this context, the "solution" of decentralization sprouted and soon grew to panacea proportions. There are those scholars, of course, who have argued that large organizations, for survival's sake, must decentralize, become more adaptive and responsive to their members, and allow greater participation in decision making. They see this necessity as created by the need to respond to turbulent environments, by the continued professionalization of lower management, and by the dependence upon technocracy (scientists and engineers) in some large organizations. [1] The "Beyond Bureaucracy" thinkers form the science fiction wing of organizational scholarship, and, like science fiction writers in general, they are prone to moralistic and idealistic flights of fancy about the ability of man to triumph over bureaucracy. [2] More importantly, however, they are welcome prophets reflecting a cultural mood, a national longing.

In the real world, organizational power yields only to counter power. Dissatisfaction with organizational policy or products, whether from workers, clients, or the public at large, is ignored as

long as possible. Only when the dissatisfaction generates its own power base does it merit attention, and the likely response of organizational leadership is a public relations campaign to legitimize standard procedure and discredit opposition.

Studies of debureaucratization are scattered throughout the scholarly literature. Summarizing several of these, Katz and Eisenstadt cite a tendency to relax hierarchical authority in the presence of physical danger and isolation. [3] Both these conditions make superiors more dependent upon their subordinates. And dependency, they argue, forces superiors to rely more upon personal means of motivating compliance than upon authoritarian directives.

In industry, unionization has created a degree of dependency of management upon labor. For clients, customers, and the public at large, however, there is seldom any coordinated process for redress of grievances against corporate irresponsibility. When watchdog and advocacy structures emerge, such as regulatory agencies in government or groups designed to handle public complaints, organizations ordinarily attempt to infiltrate them and neutralize their effectiveness. Thus the emerging public sentiment favoring the enforcement of corporate responsibility has been continually stymied by mechanisms for protecting the incumbent power.

Such was the national cultural milieu in which the Congregation for Reconciliation was established. The traditional conservative environment of Dayton, Ohio, provided no immunity to the tremors which rocked our society. If anything, Dayton's conservative past may have exacerbated the community's difficulties in coming to grips with the problems it faced.

Dayton, at the beginning of this decade, was a city of 243,600 residents. Including its suburbs, the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) boasted a population of over 850,000, with a median household income of $12,343. Dayton, the historical home of the Wright brothers, is a leader in aviation research and home of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, one of the largest air installations in the world. Although General Motors is the single largest industrial employer, and National Cash Register has its corporate offices here, the city has a diversified industrial base

producing paper, rubber, air conditioners, refrigerators, aircraft instruments, accounting machines, and machine tools.

The city population grew steadily with each census report from the turn of the century until 1970, when it fell to just under the 1950 level. This overall trend, however, masks important racial differences. During the postwar years, the black population increased more rapidly than the total city population. In 1950 blacks constituted 14 percent of Dayton residents; this percentage grew to 22 in 1960 and 31 in 1970. But while blacks were almost a third of the city population in 1970, they were only 11 percent of the SMSA. Their percentage in the surrounding suburbs ranged from .2 to 12, with most clustered at the lower end of the range.

This picture is by no means uncommon to urban America. Dayton, like most industrial centers, has a heavy concentration of black population in the inner city, surrounded by lily-white suburbs.

Racial income differentials also follow the usual pattern. In 1970, the median income of black families was 71 percent of the median for the total SMSA. Seventeen percent of black families earned incomes below the poverty level in 1970, almost triple the percentage for all families in the SMSA.

Nor was Dayton immune to the turbulence which swept through urban ghettos during the mid 1960s. Three times during the summers of 1966 and 1967 Dayton's ghettos erupted in violence serious enough to receive the attention of the McClellan Riot Hearings. [4] The first incident occurred on September 15, 1966, when a black resident was shot and killed by a passing motorist, alleged to be white. This prompted looting and vandalism and three cases of arson. Unprepared, local authorities had to call in the National Guard to restore order. Fifty-four persons were arrested; four civilians were injured. A second incident, again involving looting, vandalism, and six cases of arson, occurred in mid-June of 1967 and resulted in estimated property damage of $200,000. The alleged precipitating event this time was an inflammatory address by militant civil rights leader H. Rap Brown.

Dayton remained tense throughout the summer. Then, on September 19 of the same year, a protest rally following a police shooting of an unarmed black resident resulted in the third civil

disturbance within a twelve-month period. For three days there were sporadic incidents of arson and looting. When this outburst ended, 203 persons had been arrested and seven had been injured, including two policemen. In short, Dayton knew the tremors of racial conflict at first hand.

In a Dayton Daily News editorial just days before the final eruption, the editor decried the patterns of residential segregation isolating black and white citizens from one another. Pleading for breaking out from educational, social, and residential ghettos, he concluded, "There is a constituency for change in the suburbs, probably wider than most suspect. It is vague now, unformed. It can be brought together and put to work. That requires leadership. Who will provide it? Where, in God's name, are the churches?"

Throughout the 1960s, religious leaders of America had played an increasingly progressive and aggressive role in multiple struggles for social justice. The resolutions of the 1950s had given way to action in the 1960s. [5] This heightened level of involvement would eventually lead to disenchantment with clerical activities and result in significant backlash within the institutional church, but in 1968 the ideals of ministering to social ills still rallied ever greater involvement. The aura of crisis and the spotlights on injustice pushed more and more church leaders toward greater commitment to immerse the institutional church, with its power and pocketbook, in the struggle for brotherhood. In the context of this chaos, the supports for the Congregation for Reconciliation were created.