William Wilbur Miller Barbour: A Faith Full Witness for Human Rights - Paperback

What began as a question about a face in a photograph became,

in time, one of the most important questions a biographer can ask

about the past: not merely who was this person, but what did his

life cost him, what did it build, and what does it ask of us? William

Wilbur Miller Barbour left no autobiography, no collection of private

letters, no public monument with his name on it. He left instead the

harder thing: a career of twenty-five years spent in the spaces between

the law's promise and American life's reality, doing the work the law

could not do, building the conditions for genuine human community

in cities where the word community was used to describe what racial

exclusion had produced and preserved. He died at forty-nine, in Los

Angeles, in March 1957. He had been working all week. He was still

working when his heart gave out. The movement he had been building

toward since his graduation from Elizabethtown College in 1932

would culminate, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights

Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, in legislation he did not

live to see signed. He was a builder of foundations. He never saw the

structure rise.

Barbour learned, in ways no classroom could teach, what it meant to

labor against odds for something larger than oneself. He built foundations.

He laid groundwork. He worked in the soil of human rights

and human dignity at a moment when the harvest was nowhere in

sight, when the arc of history showed no visible signs of bending in

the direction anyone who cared about justice might have wished. He

did not live to see what rose from what he planted.

He brought to the work a dual formation few men of his generation

could claim. The Anabaptist and Pietist tradition of the Church of the

Brethren had pressed into him, during his years as a student at Elizabethtown

College, a mandate both institutional and theological. The

prophetic tradition of the African Methodist Episcopal Church had

formed him from childhood in a conviction equally deep and equally

demanding: racial hierarchy was incompatible with the Gospel. These

two traditions arose from entirely different histories and wholly distinct

experiences of American life. In Barbour they converged on a

single claim. The Declaration meant what it said. The Gospel demanded

its fulfillment. The gap between democratic promise and

democratic practice was not a fact to be accommodated but a civic

failure to be opposed, by specific, costly, theologically grounded work,

in specific cities, in institutional settings, for as long as it took.

He spent twenty-five years opposing it. At the Semiquincentennial, it

remains opposed. His story belongs to this moment.