Rev. Calvin Morris Reflects on His Work with the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs

Rev. Calvin S. Morris, Community Renewal Society

Rev. Calvin S. Morris, Ph.D. serves as Executive Director of the Community Renewal Society, a faith-based social justice advocacy organization in Chicago focusing on race and poverty. A civil rights and human rights activist, he worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., serving as Associate Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation BreadBasket (now Operation PUSH) in Chicago from 1967-71. He was Executive Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, from 1973-76. He was also a university professor and theological dean from 1976-1998. Morris is frequently invited to preach, speak and lecture.

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When I returned to Chicago, after an absence of 27 years, to become the executive director of Community Renewal Society, one of the first sister organizations to whom I was introduced was the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. I had been aware of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs during my first stint in Chicago as associate director of SCLC’s Operation BreadBasket, now Rainbow PUSH, which was at the time under the direction of the direction of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, who Dr. King named national director of BreadBasket in 1968. At that same time I was appointed associate director.

I had known Rabbi Marx during my earlier years in Chicago and was keenly aware of the work of JCUA. Soon after my return, the city of Chicago experienced the death of two African-Americans, both in their twenties, a male and female, who were killed by Chicago Police under rather unsettling circumstances.

Members of the Chicago advocacy communities rallied in light of both of those events, and the Rev. Donald Benedict, retired executive director of the Community Renewal Society and founder of Protestants for the Common Good, urged the formation of a coalition of organizations to work for the reformation of the Chicago Police department and its relationship with the black community. Jane Ramsey, the executive director of JCUA, and I were chosen to be co-conveners of that coalition of groups, soon to be called the Justice Coalition of Greater Chicago.

For more than a decade, JCGC worked to bring former Chicago Police Cmdr. John Burge to justice and demanded that a special prosecutor be named to look into the allegations of torture under Burge’s watch, advocated for the videotaping of confessions, urged the creation of an independent police review board, and called for the expungement of records of non-violent offenders who had served their time.

Rev. Morris, Carol Steele and Jane Ramsey at a Coalition to Protect Public Housing rally

During that time and since, Community Renewal Society has worked with the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs to assure that the residents of public housing would benefit from new housing to be constructed on the land where the high-rise gallery apartments were to be demolished. Along with other partners within the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, both organizations stood with and in support of the residents of the Chicago Housing Authority, always cajoling, demanding, and making our presence felt at the CHA commissioners’ hearings.

We warned them, from the very beginning, that the rush to demolish that housing had the potential of scattering gangs located within those complexes to other adjoining neighborhoods, and voiced our fear that turf battles for dominance in the South Side drug trade would emerge.

JCUA and CRS have worked closely around issues affecting the voiceless and the disempowered and have stood together in the empowerment of us all.

Rev. Calvin Morris Reflects on the Civil Rights Movement

Rev. Calvin S. Morris, Community Renewal Society

Rev. Calvin S. Morris, Ph.D. serves as Executive Director of the Community Renewal Society, a faith-based social justice advocacy organization in Chicago focusing on race and poverty. A civil rights and human rights activist, he worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., serving as Associate Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation BreadBasket (now Operation PUSH) in Chicago from 1967-71. He was Executive Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, from 1973-76. He was also a university professor and theological dean from 1976-1998. Morris is frequently invited to preach, speak and lecture.

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When I came to Chicago in 1967, ostensibly to work on a PhD at the University of Chicago, where I had been admitted hoping to study under the famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin, those intentions were derailed by my college friend, Jesse Louis Jackson, and his challenge to me that it was time to make more concrete my commitment to the Civil Rights Movement of that day. It was an offer I could not refuse, and sometime thereafter I met Rabbi Robert Marx, founder of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.

A 1968 Operation BreadBasket rally in Illinois (photo from LIFE.com)

Accepting Jesse’s invitation, I moved to join the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation BreadBasket in Chicago. Dr. King was the leader of SCLC and we all served at his pleasure. Rabbi Marx, Rev. Clay Evans, the late Al Raby and Rev. Arthur Griffin, along with the Rev. Donald Benedict, Executive Director of Community Renewal Society, were individuals among many who had invited Dr. King to Chicago the year before.

Rev. Calvin Morris Reflects on a Lifelong Friend

Rev. Calvin S. Morris, Community Renewal Society

Rev. Calvin S. Morris, Ph.D. serves as Executive Director of the Community Renewal Society, a faith-based social justice advocacy organization in Chicago focusing on race and poverty. A civil rights and human rights activist, he worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., serving as Associate Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation BreadBasket (now Operation PUSH) in Chicago from 1967-71. He was Executive Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, from 1973-76. He was also a university professor and theological dean from 1976-1998. Morris is frequently invited to preach, speak and lecture.

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In 1954 I met an individual who would be my most enduring and beloved friend. We were both 12 years old.

Paul Ira Keyser and I met at Friends Select School, a Quaker secondary institution, located in center city Philadelphia, just a block or two from city hall and its iconic statue of William Penn, the founder of the city. Paul was a Jew and I an African-American. His family members were Conservative Jews and mine Christian.

We would spend more than half a century learning about each other, our familial backgrounds, our likes and dislikes, our political differences, and a relationship that superseded all of the aforementioned. We became friends for life.

Paul Ira Keyser and Rev. Calvin Morris

We did not always agree. I remember, on one occasion, mentioning to Paul that the American Medical Association did not allow black physicians into its membership. Paul insisted that just could not be, so I suggested that he ask his physician father whether it was. Paul returned to school the next day and admitted that his father affirmed what I had said.

When we met, the second World War was not yet a decade removed, and we talked about the war, the Holocaust, racism and anti-Semitism, and we learned about the troubles of our “tribes”, as Paul referred to them. Montgomery, Alabama and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was a year away when we met.

I learned from Paul about the American Jewish Appeal and the Anti-Defamation League. He garnered from me an understanding of the NAACP and the Urban League. We talked about everything: our crushes on girls, the varsity sports we played together, and the familial challenges that were ours. Paul introduced me to chamber music and I exposed him to the Negro spirituals, jazz, the blues, and gospel music.

After high school we kept in touch with each other when we went away to different colleges. When I married, Paul was the best man at our wedding, and when he married I officiated at the wedding, since his first wife was not Jewish. As friends we shared our innermost feelings, fears and hopes with each other. We knew each other’s parents and siblings, and when my mother died (I was 26 years old) Paul was there.

There was no event, no aspect of our lives that did not include the other. He became a PhD in micro-biology and I a PhD in American and African-American history. But most of all, we were the best friend that the other ever had. I was an African-American and he was a Jew and since his passing there is, in my heart, an empty space that will never be filled.

Has this anything to do with race relations and relations among Blacks and Jews in the macro? I fear not. But, in the micro world of true individual souls, one a Jew and one an African-American, our friendship endured and, in memory, still does.