The year-round program in the late 1960s and 1970s is a fascinating piece of history. I keep coming back to read about what New York City was like at the time. Malcolm X in Harlem, the Black Panthers, strikes and riots, violence, blackouts, runaways in the Village, graffiti, and the creation of all kinds of new music. Hip Hop with all of its deadly swagger was literally born in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and that's also where our intrepid Shiloh staffers were making up skits about the Good Samaritan with children in their crummy apartments or playing basketball with Brooklyn boys who were better players than they were. There was all this white idealism in the air where those workers came from, thanks to the Civil Rights movement and Bob Dylan and Vietnam protests, a questioning of establishment policies.
We want to change the world! (or at least do SOMETHING!) A questioning of some religious values, too, although I think most Shiloh people longed to find and hold onto the essence of what Jesus was
really about--God's love, they said, and they tried to teach it to the kids through the skits and the basketball and other things.
I can't imagine all the swirling images and competing voices in the minds of these young kids: the burning buildings all around them (they would have to move on, or their best friends would have to move on). There were many, many other children in the streets everywhere but no playgrounds; there were heroin addicts and pushers on the stoops and corners; free breakfasts given by the Panthers; endless trash; angry teachers on strike; white politicians touring the ghettos; and the resignation of a president (some of them watched it on TV at camp). Shiloh workers were taking them on field trips on the Staten Island Ferry where they ran around inside the boat and leaned out to see the statue that promised to take care of the poor, the huddled masses. Perhaps they heard about the group in Queens and Brooklyn called SPONGE--Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything. Perhaps they wondered about black being beautiful.
Some of the donors to Shiloh were saying they didn't think the workers should be
helping these folks
but instead should be
converting. Where are the baptisms? What is this
social gospel you all are practicing? Shiloh was almost completely unique as an urban outreach within the Churches of Christ, and so there was not much of a preexisting model for
how to be in this place from the standpoint of the church as a whole. There are complex relationships that some of these former Shiloh staffers from this time period have with the Churches of Christ, and some of it is painful.
One of things that I've been privileged to ask people about is their journeys of faith and what in direction this Shiloh experience moved them. Some people had very scary experiences in the city that steamrolled the idealism out of them for a while or for good, or at least it might have convinced them to go back closer to home and help people there by becoming a teacher or a social worker. Some absolutely came out of their shy shells when they got to Shiloh--so young, and there was no one else to start this food co-op, so I just did it myself! It was an intense experience for everyone, changing things inside of them. I think that though now most of the people I interview from this period are white and middle class, living in the suburbs and perhaps in empty nests, they each had an experience that my recent interviewee calls "radicalizing," meaning, he says, creating an empathy with the poor and oppressed. I find that is an experience, an identity, that can still be called forward even in the warm kitchens of suburbia. And in those kitchens they recall for me (sometimes with the longing of a lost little love) some of the kids they worked with, and they wonder about them and how they are doing, and whether anything the worker said made any kind of difference.
I'm not sure I'm going to be able to completely answer that question with all its implications in this project, although I'm doing my best to do right by all their youthful idealism and their Jesus-hippie love for those kids (who are, by the way, older than I am). And I'll try to do right by those kids, who were at the time on the edge of so many new worlds and ideas but stuck right in the ghetto heart of the old racist universe. Perhaps I idealize, too, but it seems to me there's a lot of innocence in the relationship between those young groups. That's one of the things I'm recording in the project, and that's what I'm hoping that you who read this will not lose.
