Talk Racial Situation
Diocesan Press Service. September 3, 1963 [XIII-11]
Sarah Patton Boyle, noted humanitarian and author, and the Rev. Robert W. Castle, Jr., priest of an inner-city parish, recently appeared as guests on Episcopal radio programs and gave their views on a crucial topic: the racial situation in America.
Interviewed on "The Good Life," Mrs. Boyle described herself as being raised as a typical Southerner who took segregation for granted until, at 44, she met an eminently qualified Negro lawyer who was being refused admission to the University of Virginia. The experience changed her whole life, and Mrs. Boyle soon found herself completely out of step with the people around her in her efforts to hasten integration.
Author of The Desegregated Heart and winner of the NAACP 1963 Civil Rights Award, Mrs. Boyle pointed out that there is no stigma attached to living next door to a Negro in the South--provided you are his employer. She also said that, "the Negro is, by and large, very suspicious of white people, in general, and on the other hand the whites usually think that Negroes are rather devoted to them and fancy themselves as being devoted to Negroes. "
Mrs. Boyle said that she would counsel against intermarriage: "I think interracial marriage would be a very difficult thing. I mean, a marriage is not an easy thing to bring out successfully anyway, as is only too clear from looking around us. And I think that particularly in the present context, where there's so much misunderstanding between the two groups, that an interracial marriage has not as much chance for success as the ordinary marriage. So I would counsel against it for that reason, but not on a racial basis." Asked if she had any concrete suggestion about a peaceful solution to the racial situation, Mrs. Boyle stressed one major point: "... I think I would just simply offer a consciousness of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man."
As rector of St. John's Church in Jersey City, N. J., Father Castle was able to speak in depth on changing neighborhoods. In his "Viewpoint" interview, he stressed the unemployment problem for non-white males and said that this resulted in family upsets: "I find, most of all, that within the Negro parishioners of my parish, that increasingly the Negro is faced with the fact that he is living within a matriarchy, where the woman can get the job much easier than the husband, where the woman is often the person who keeps the family together and this, of course, causes all sorts of emotional problems within a family and often causes lack of incentive and loss of hope for the husband in the marital relationship."
Asked if the inner-city had any effect on the rest of the country, Fr. Castle replied, "if we are not able to solve the racial crisis which is much a part of living within the city, then we will indeed lose the city and the states and the country itself and we will have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of the world." In conclusion, Father Castle said, "I think the Negro has come to the point in his fight for freedom where he doesn't really care whether the white man is willing to change his attitude or not."
Father Castle was selected as one of the 10 outstanding young Americans by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. His story appeared recently in The Episcopalian.