Memphis Meet Discusses Views of All Faiths

The third annual Memphis Conference of Protestants, Catholics and Jews met in the Nineteenth Century Club auditorium in three sessions.

The morning session was devoted to the subject of interracial good-will, thus making a bold attempt to expand the idea of good-will not only through the religious barriers but also through racial lines.

As in previous years the Memphis conference welcomed one out-of-town speaker to lead the discussions and make the final night address. In 1932 the visiting speaker was the Rev. Everett R. Clinchy, director of the National Conference of Jews and Christians. Last year it was Professor Alva W. Taylor of Vanderbilt University. This year it was the Rev. M. Ashby Jones, D. D., minister of Central Congregational Church, Atlanta, Ga.

In the morning session, at which as many as fifty Negro ministers of Memphis were present, the first address was delivered by Dr. Jones. It was a presentation of the many complex causes for the white man’s treatment of the Negro in the South, but it also indicated that a good many excuses were no longer valid, and that it was high time the white man began to grant to the Negro citizens the rights of human beings.

He was followed by Dr. T. O. Fuller, one of the South’s best known Negro preachers, who welcomed overtures from the white people in the direction of good-will between the races.

Then followed a forum discussion led by Dr. Jones in which some of the frightful handicaps under which the Negro labors, were discussed, such as degrading slums, poor school and library facilities, the Jim Crow law, discrimination in courts of law, absence of any representation in the making of laws, the levying of taxes. As a result, a committee was formed to revive a defunct interracial commission for Memphis which should form a clearing house of Negro needs and grievances.

At the afternoon session, factors for and against industrial good-will were discussed by Walter Chandler, city attorney; Professor Amberson of the University of Tennessee, and J. Barrow Simpson, a young business man. Dr. Amberson’s talk was literally loaded with dynamite as he laid bare the industrial ills of our time ranging from chiseling and sabotage of the NRA codes down to the driving of share croppers from nearby cotton plantations. He charged the churches with callousness to the plight of the workers and was backed up vigorously by the Rev. Leo Shea, O. P., an eloquent young priest of the Order of Friars Preachers (Dominicans).

Dr. Jones spoke on the subject of “Good-Will in International Relations,” outlining certain attitudes towards world peace which the religionists must take unless the world was again to be plunged into a destructive war that might be the end of our era in world history. He blamed the rise of Hitlerism with its anti-Semitic persecutions not on the German people but upon the victorious allies who betrayed Germany in the postwar period by failing to disarm, and by reducing Germany to a state of economic vassalage. After this speech Dr. Jones led a long forum discussion.

The influence of the Memphis conference is not to be measured by the comparatively small numbers that take part. Each year they are events of major importance in the city’s life, their deliberations being broadcast over the air, and their speeches receiving front page space in the news prints. Thousands of Memphians were appraised of the revolutionary procedure of having Negroes present at a meeting held in the aristocratic Nineteenth Century Club, where in the spirit of greatest good-will the grievances of the underprivileged race were listened to and promise made of efforts to bring about improvements. The same is true of the other meetings. It is the firm conviction of all who took part in the conference that there should be another next year.