The Negro & the White Conscience; Volume 2, No. 3: Christmas 1963
Menlo Park, California: Layman's Press, 1963. Quarto (8 1/2 by 11 inches), original orange photographic wrappers, lettered in white, 96 pages. Fine. Item #1716
THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THOMAS MERTON'S "LETTERS TO A WHITE LIBERAL"
First edition of The Negro and the White Conscience, a pivotal issue of the early—Catholic—incarnation of Ramparts magazine. Illustrated throughout with drawings and photographs, including a striking cover photograph of Father August Thompson, a Black priest in his Roman collar. An exceptional copy.
Founded by Edward Keating, Sr. as a literary quarterly for Catholic intellectuals in 1962, Ramparts magazine was headquartered at first in Menlo Park. The magazine ("Ramparts challenges the best minds in America") was arguably the most important alternative forum of the day. Black Catholic priests involved in the Civil Rights movement had led Keating to realize that Racism and War were the most urgent moral questions of the day. Galvanized by Dr. Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in August and stunned by the murderous bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church in September, the focus of this Christmas issue was a Symposium on the Black Revolution.
Dedicated to the Memory of the four young Birmingham girls—"Who Perished While in the Presence of God"—the Symposium consists of five parts: 1. Thomas Merton. Letters to a White Liberal, 2. Dialogue: Father August Thompson and John Howard Griffin, 3. John Howard Griffin. Journal of a Trip South, 4. Bradford Daniel. Faulkner on Race, 5. Thomas N. Williams. The Marginal Man.
A clarion call for a "genuinely Catholic approach to the Negro," Merton's essay formed the basis for Seeds of Destruction (1964). Merton's "location in a monastery...enhanced the powers of radical identification on which his monastic calling depended" (Paul Elie). Specifically addressing Liberals (in part II) and Christians (in part III), Merton charges that "white society has sinned in many ways. It has betrayed Christ by its injustices to races it considered 'inferior' and to countries which it colonized. In particular it has sinned against Christ in its lamentable injustices and cruelties to Negroes."
Ordained in 1957, Father August Thompson was one of the very few Black Catholic priests in the South. "In 1963, while serving at St. Charles Church in Ferriday, LA, Thompson allowed into his home John Howard Griffin (a White journalist better known for his book Black Like Me). He sought to interview Thompson for a Ramparts Magazine article about his experience as a Black Catholic priest and the effects of racism on the Catholic Church. Having him there broke an unwritten code which forbade Whites and Blacks from associating. Angry police menacingly followed Griffin’s car until he crossed the parish line" (NBCCC). Bound with a publisher's postcard insert, printed in red, offering Christmas gift subscriptions to the magazine. The issue also includes a poem by Brother Antoninus ("The Poet Is Dead"), written upon the death of Robinson Jeffers. Gregory Hillis. A Sign of Contradiction: Fr. August Thompson, 1926-2019 (Commonweal, August 26, 2019); Paul Elie. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage; The National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (nbccc.cc/rev-august-thompson/).
Price: $500.00