The angry young man is now a mystic elder.
In the 1960s, the Rev. Gilbert Caldwell was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, sometimes right at the side of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
He had heard King for the first time in 1957 at the “Prayer Pilgrimage” in Washington, D.C., on the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that eliminated the “separate but equal” rule in public schools.
The grandson of a plantation slave, the son of a Southern preacher, Caldwell was electrified by King’s words.
But as that decade grew increasingly turbulent, Caldwell – a young minister at the United Methodist Church of Boston – became increasingly disturbed.
It’s tempting to wonder how King and Malcolm X would have aged, and what prophetic leadership they might have wielded in the 21st century. King protégés like Caldwell, now a retired minister in Denver, offer a clue.
Caldwell had served as master of ceremonies at a Boston rally when King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference confronted the Boston School Committee about its segregation policies.
He had become vice chairman of the group’s Boston chapter.
He had attended the March on Washington, participated in “Mississippi Freedom Summer” by helping black Mississipians with voter registration, and had walked in the Selma-to-Montgomery March.
He had been swept away by the excitement that fellow civil rights workers exuded, particularly the contagious enthusiasm after striking another blow for black freedom.
Something shifted internally. This son of a Southern preacher who had been passive about racial injustice suddenly discovered his inner fire.
“Gil Caldwell was an increasingly angry man,” writes J. Anthony Lukas in “Common Ground,” a chronicle of those days.
“If he admired Martin Luther King, he also respected Malcolm X for ‘daring to describe what it is to be black in America.’ And he was disturbed by the assimilationist style of his own church.”
Caldwell believed the black church, like many other organizations, spent too much time “trying to be white.”
“Way ahead of his time”
In the decades since King and Malcolm X were assassinated, Caldwell, 72, has devoted his life to fighting what he calls “America’s original sin” of racism.
“He’s a prophetic witness,” says Chester Jones, general secretary of the General Commission on Religion and Race of the United Methodist Church.
“He’s way ahead of his time in terms of some of the issues that we’re struggling with every day.”
Over the past four decades, Caldwell has served as minister of four predominantly black and four predominantly white churches, including Park Hill United Methodist Church in Denver, from which he recently retired.
The art of healing – individual, national, geopolitical – now dominates his mind.
This is a civil rights activist who soldiers onward, despite surgery in 2000 for a brain tumor. The operation damaged nerves in his right leg, so he now wears a leg brace.
He walks slowly, with a limp and a cane. Yet he’s still on the front line.
Three years after his surgery, Caldwell and his wife, Grace, walked with throngs to the Lincoln Memorial for the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington.
He even has a new battlefield – gay rights – and was arrested, along with 187 other activists, during a nonviolent protest against what they considered anti-gay policies by the United Methodist Church.
He has just published a book, “What Mean These Stones? Lessons of Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Million Man March, the Millions More Movement,” which probes the meaning of religious faith and democracy in America.
And his illness inspired him to explore concepts of wholeness.
The comfort of other faiths
Caldwell is reading Andrew Weil’s “Healthy Aging,” and experimenting with holistic medicine.
“I’ve gone to Boulder for acupuncture, and been introduced to the medicines of the East,” he says. “That’s been meaningful to me.”
He’s also growing his spiritual life, drawing from religious traditions other than his own Christianity.
“I found myself exploring the Kabbalah,” he confides, reaching into the breast pocket of his gray suit and fishing out a white laminated card.
With a gentle smile, he hands over the card as a gift. It is titled “Who Is a Mystic?”
He has gone to the trouble of having a quote by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner from the book “Kabbalah” printed to hand out to friends.
“A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions and discontinuties that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity,” the card reads.
“Just beneath the apparent surface, everything is joined to everything else. To a mystic, therefore, what we call reality is but the myriad refractions of that ultimate, underlying unity.”
Caldwell beams with youthful enthusiasm.
“I love that mystic idea,” he says. “There is a mystic in me that I’m letting come out more than ever. It doesn’t soften me, but it makes me less anxious.”
As a child, he used to laugh when his grandmother said she did nothing unless she felt divinely led.
“As I reflect on my life and what’s happening to me now,” he says, “it’s a sense that something deep within me, but beyond me, is leading.
“Therefore you’re no longer concerned about looking foolish or falling flat on your face. You can laugh.”
This new attitude, along with the nation’s crises, has led him to seek out his white heritage for the first time in his life.
It happened back east this summer at a family reunion, when Hurricane Katrina hit.
He and his sisters watched families seeking lost loved ones, which reminded him of 9/11, when people embarked on the same poignant search.
One of his sisters began to talk about their ancestors, the white Caldwells who had owned the plantation where their black relatives had been enslaved.
For years, his wife and sons had been involved in genealogy, but Caldwell himself resisted: He refused to dilute his intense focus on racial justice.
“I thought that I would become soft in terms of my commitment,” he says. “But the truly grounded person never worries about being soft, but being authentic, and therefore does not want to shut out portions of one’s life.”
He pauses a moment, lost in deepest thought.
“That’s one of the challenges racially,” he says. “I talk about being a ‘race man.’ I have to explore how much of me has been suppressed because of my attention to race.”
Sometimes he wonders what he might have become if there had been no segregation.
“What would have drawn my attention? What gifts would have emerged if I’d been able to give my attention to them?”
Rude awakening out West
Harlem was home in 1997 when Caldwell received the offer to pastor the Park Hill United Methodist Church. Two years earlier, he had led a large group of African-American men from his church – St. Mark’s United Methodist in Harlem – to participate in the Million Man March.
He loved his work in Harlem, but adventure beckoned.
“I was excited by this multiracial church,” he says. “I wanted the opportunity to explore race in the West.”
His vision of the American West, unfortunately, was incorrect.
“I had a stereotype of the West as being ‘live and let live,”‘ he says. “One of my phrases is, ‘I want to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.”‘
The dominance in Colorado of social and religious conservatives came as a big surprise.
So did his discovery about Park Hill, legendary for its integrated neighborhoods and churches, which led to another of his stock phrases: “It’s difficult to talk about race in racially mixed company, especially in Denver.”
He came here expecting that a place with a long history of racial integration would be open to discussing race.
“There seems to be a politeness and gentleness here,” he says. “It’s almost the price to be paid for racial togetherness is not to talk about race.”
But he moved onward, sitting on the board of Iliff School of Theology, joining the Rotary Club of Denver, and making good friends like Phil Campbell, then minister of the Park Hill Congregational Church.
Caldwell is passionate about a fully inclusive church, so when Campbell founded Colorado Clergy for Equality in Marriage, which supports same-sex marriage, he went straight to the civil rights veteran. Caldwell has spoken out against a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and is a founding member of United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church, helping to create their platform on racism, sexism and heterosexism, the belief that heterosexuality is superior.
Together, the two men – one black, one white – made time to team-teach anti-racism workshops in Denver, and co-chair the Human Relations Committee in Park Hill.
“He’s been willing to speak his truth, and push the agenda in very appropriate and clear ways in terms of the racial divide that remains in our country,” says Campbell, now director of ministry studies at Iliff School of Theology.
“I am grateful for that, because the systemic and institutional expressions of racism continue to be very present in our country, yet we live in a time where our interracial friendships have improved, and overt racism has lessened.”
“The beloved community”
On Monday, during the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration at Tattered Cover in LoDo, Caldwell will lead a lively conversation about race, democracy and religious faith.
He can hardly wait.
“Martin King talked so much about the beloved community, and one does not hear much about that love of community today,” he says.
“We are being dominated by a lot of religious talk with the introduction of a limited view of values that has no depth.”
One of his favorite passages comes from the fourth chapter of Luke in the New Testament, in which Jesus reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah about preaching good news to the poor, proclaiming freedom for prisoners, and the release of the oppressed.
“It’s about liberation, about freeing people,” he says.
“The suggestion is that one must be concerned not only about individuals but systems, and communities of people, particularly in terms of the poor. That is one of my concerns about the church response to Katrina. There is charity, but I am not sure there is justice.”
These feelings, in general, extend from the church to the current political administration.
“I think we must pay more attention to ‘the least of these,’ to see what is happening to them,” he says.
“Because what happens to them has a way of spreading and affecting everyone, in terms of pension rights, health care, gaps in income between CEOs and middle-class workers.
“That’s what’s happened within the African-American community, and the nation needs to look at that, and realize it’s happening to everyone.”
He’s not stuck in blame. Or, rather, he’s equal-opportunity in his criticisms: blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats, can all do much better in transforming the world.
As he acknowledges the contradictions in others, he sees the same in himself. He asks the tough questions, colleagues say, but always in a spirit of love.
The activist now realizes he has been a mystic all along, which changes the lens through which he views the world. “I have respect for all humanity, with our frailty and our failings, and that’s clearly what I saw in the life of Martin King,” he says.
“As I reflect upon it, King was clearly a mystic.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com.
Spreading a wider gospel
Today: the Rev. Gilbert Caldwell will speak at the 2006 Martin Luther King Unity Walk in Highlands Ranch. The walk starts at 2 p.m. at Fox Creek Elementary School, 6585 Collegiate Drive. He will give the keynote speech afterward at Highlands Ranch High School, 9375 Cresthill Lane.
Monday: Caldwell will speak at the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration. 7:30 p.m., Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th St.
Thursday: He will give a talk called “Racism and Heterosexism” at the monthly meeting of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays Boulder. 8 p.m., First United Methodist Church, 1421 Spruce St., Boulder.
Excerpts from Gilbert Caldwell’s book, “What Mean These Stones? Lessons of Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Million Man March, the Millions More Movement”
“The failures of federal, state and local governments to respond to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina apparently was not a ‘values issue’ to many religionists. Economic inequities that seem to continue to impact persons of color disproportionately do not seem to find their place on the values agenda of either the religious or political right.”
“Without making excessive negative judgments about the relationship of the Bush administration to Halliburton, that relationship is a model of how … contracts and capital used in re-building New Orleans and the Gulf Coast could go to black firms and other firms that were dedicated to the economic empowerment of our nation’s third world: the black community.”
“I believe that the 21st century needs to be reminded, over and over again, about what it has meant and what it means to be black, in color yes, but more so in identity, in a world that historically seems to have said and is saying, ‘if you are black, stand back.”‘
“My ‘Blackness’ must compel me and other black persons, no matter how ‘integrated’ we are … to tell the story of the ‘Black Journey’ to those around us. It is a story of tribulation and triumph. It is a story embedded in the spirituals, blues, jazz, cuisine, the black church, the Nation of Islam, the success of black athletes, writers, actors and actresses, preachers, teachers, colleges and universities, factory workers, janitors and maids, those in prison and those who are not, rap and hip-hop, Bill Cosby AND Michael Dyson (not either/or.)”
“(MLK) has been my guide and my guru. … But also there has been a bit of Malcolm X in me. Years ago I decided that to fail to confront racial injustice was to fail not only those who shared my racial heritage, it was to allow those who were warped by their racial insensitivity to remain stuck in the immaturity of their bigotry.”
