"REMEMBERING GAY WILMORE"

“REMEMBERING GAY WILMORE”

            My friend and mentor and adopted father Reverend Dr. Gayraud Wilmore died on April 18 at age 98.  He was tired and ready to go, but like the gospel song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” says it:  “Undertaker, undertaker, undertaker, please drive slow, for that body that you are carrying, Lord, I hate to see him go.”  Gay was a scholar, pastor, activist, teacher, WWII veteran, prolific book and article writer, churchman, and friend and mentor to many.  I’ll focus on my personal engagement with Gay here, but if you want to know more about his history, here is a good link.   https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/wilmore-gayraud-stephen-1921

            He was born in the year when African-Americans in Tulsa were terrorized and lynched, and their wealth was destroyed.  He was born far away in Pennsylvania, but the struggle for justice was a centerpiece of his life.  I first encountered Gay in his powerful book “Black Religion and Black Radicalism,” but one of his hallmark pieces was his co-editing with James Cone a documentary history of black theology.  They were co-founders of the Black Theology movement.  He and Cone were lifelong friends, and I remember Gay’s sorrow at Dr. Cone’s passing in April, 2018.  In a lecture series at Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta in 1999, Dr. Cone had this to say about Gay:  “He is the daddy of Black Theology.  If anyone took risks for Black people, it was Gay Wilmore.  I just want that name to be thought of along with mine.  He was my strongest critic and my best supporter.”  Gay Wilmore and James Cone were among the early leaders in wrestling the control of theology from white males.

            Gay took many risks for Black people, but perhaps his most public one was in approving money from Presbyterian ministers to be sent to the Defense Fund for Angela Davis in 1971, when he was the director of the Presbyterian Committee on Religion and Race.  He was excoriated for that, and eventually left his position and began a career of teaching and writing and mentoring.  I don’t remember when I first met Gay in person, but I remember my first real encounter with him.  After Inez Giles and I had published our book on racism “While We Run This Race,” (Orbis Books) in 1995, Gay led a contingent of folk who met at Oakhurst to talk about the book.  In that engagement I experienced what Dr. Cone had experienced:  Gay was an insightful critic as well as a strong supporter.

            After that, Gay and I co-chaired Presbytery’s Committee to Combat Racism, and we authored a statement adopted by Presbytery in 1997 on the necessity of whites to come out of denial. Gay wrote the original draft of it, and the white opposition to it in our Committee was deep.  I gained even more respect for Gay as I watched him work through that process, without yielding any principles of the statement.  I saw him then in what I would call essential “Gay action:’’ He was gentle but fierce.  Strong, strong, strong, but never denying the humanity of the other.

            He and his partner Lee moved to DC in 2000 to retire and be closer to their children.  We visited him as often as we could after our daughter Susan settled in Baltimore.  He read my blogs faithfully, giving me criticism and support.  In my first year of blogging, I wrote about my pain at the absence of my father in my life.  Gay replied that he would love to be my “adopted” father, and I was delighted.  So, shortly after Father’s Day in 2017, he sent me a formal document “adopting” me.  On our next visit, we shared with him an official certificate – so thank you, Gay!

            After his death, I was looking through some of our correspondence, and I came upon this hand-written note from him in 2018: 

            “Dear Nibs, You have made these closing years, as the century rolls on, of the

            greatest significance to me and to the whole Wilmore family.  Your blogs are

            great!  You never permitted us to be really separated, Nibs, and I thank you

            and the Lord God for that!  You have been a wonderful friend and brother,

            I will be forever grateful….in life and in death.  Love, Gay

            I can think of no greater tribute to give to Gay than the words from Martin Luther King’s sermon “Drum Major Instinct,” preached at Ebenezer two months before his assassination and played at King’s funeral:   “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness.”  Gay was that and so much more, and I join a host of others in saying to him and to God: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”