My Mennonite identity was born of the convergence of post-World War II urban missions and African American migration to the city of Cleveland. The Lee Heights Community Church in Cleveland was one of the original 13 Black Mennonite congregations, and is perhaps one of the very few Mennonite churches in the U.S. that has had a racial consciousness to it since its very beginning. Established in 1958, this congregation emerged against a complicated background of race and politics.

Groundbreaking at Lee Heights Community Church

Before World War I, about 10,000 Black people lived in Cleveland. By 1960, that number had swelled to a quarter million, with most Black families living on the east side of the city. The influx, especially between 1940 and 1960, greatly taxed the availability of housing and schools, and they were often inadequate and in poor condition. These conditions, replicated in cities across the country, erupted in the Hough riots in 1966. Tensions rose, as well as distrust of Cleveland’s old guard politicians, setting the stage for the election of the first Black mayor of a major U.S. City. Cleveland was attractive because jobs were available. Black men could find work, especially in the steel and auto industries. Other jobs possibilities were with the post office, and teaching and social work jobs were open for Black women, in addition to domestic positions.

Worship service during the early days of Lee Heights Community Church

As opportunities increased for Black people, so did white flight. Suburbanization and the completion of interstate highways facilitated the shift in housing patterns. As Blacks moved into previously all white neighborhoods, white families moved out. The neighborhood transitions were facilitated by the institutionalized racist policies of realtors, construction companies, banks, and mortgage and insurance companies. Riots along the east coast and throughout the Midwest accelerated the push of Black out of white neighborhoods and helped Black neighborhoods become firmly entrenched ghettos by World War II. ¹

This was the climate when Mennonites began their urban missions projects in earnest.

The heightened racial unrest occurred at the same time white Mennonites were moving from isolated farming communities to major cities. As conscientious objectors to war, Mennonite men who otherwise would have been drafted into military service fulfilled their civic duties by entering into 1-W service, often in cities. Common assignments were located in hospitals and public service agencies. Denominational mission and relief agencies also helped coordinate voluntary service assignments in urban communities; through these avenues many young white Mennonites first encountered African Americans and had eyes opened to the reality of racism and Black discontent in America.

Gladstone Mennonite Church

The Mennonite church in Cleveland church began as a Bible school, run by volunteers from the nearby rural Plainview (later Aurora) Mennonite Church in the 1940s. This ministry was located in the Gladstone area near East 55th Street, and housed in an elementary school. By 1948, over 400 children had attended the summer Bible school, and that year, the program was extended into the fall. A house was purchased and renovated in 1951 for the Voluntary Service (VS) unit, which housed men who were doing 1-W service in Cleveland. In 1952, Vern Miller, a recent Goshen College graduate, and his wife Helen moved into the area.²

Vern Miller, pastor of Lee heights Community Church, with parishioners

Gladstone’s first church council was organized in the spring of 1953 when the church had 35 members, most of whom lived in the neighborhood. The congregation quickly outgrew the original building, and the VS unit was eventually phased out. In 1955, plans for an urban renewal project signaled the end of the Mennonite ministry at Gladstone.³

The Housing Act of 1949, part of president Harry Truman’s Fair Deal [Thank you Linda Rosenblum for that correction], expanded the role of the federal government in housing, and chief element of the plan provided federal funds for “slum clearance” with the promise to build new public housing developments. Entire neighborhoods were razed in order to make room for non-residential public works, and in some cases rebuilt housing that was too expensive for the current inhabitants. Poor people, usually people of color, were pushed out of their neighborhoods, inspiring the pithy saying “urban renewal equals Negro removal.” ⁴

With the mission board’s backing, the Millers decided to move southeast of the first church into the Lee Heights area where there was only one other church. The area had recently been annexed by the city; the land was not desired by industry because it was partially wooded and had ravines running through it. When the congregation formally organized in 1957, they were first known as the Protestant Inter-Racial Parish. These dynamics were the DNA for the new church – a ministry of the Mennonite Church, but interdenominational and community based. The doctrinal statement of the church included a statement of the church’s stance against racial segregation and discrimination.

In 1959, the General Conference Mennonite Church issued a statement called “The Christian and Race Relations” that confessed Mennonites were complicit in “discrimination against racial and minority groups (Mexicans, Negroes, Jews, American Indians, Oriental peoples, and others),” weakening mission outreach. Because “in Christ all barriers of race and nation have been destroyed,” the statement urged congregations to “welcome all persons as brothers and members despite their color” and called on all church institutions to examine their policies and programs. ⁵

The 1963 General Conference Confession of Faith called the church to be a witness against racial discrimination, economic injustice, and all forms of human slavery and moral degradation. ⁶

At a conference on race relations in 1964, Vincent Harding challenged Mennonites, arguing they had come late to the issue even though their very theology and history compelled their response. ⁷

Mennonites in America were no longer as socially isolated, and the fruits of mission efforts meant that people of different racial and cultural backgrounds were now part of the Mennonite family; this diversity necessitated an expansion of Mennonite’s peace position.

Guy Hershberger’s 1941 (revised 1953) War, Peace and Nonresistance articulated the Mennonite stance on non-resistance for the 20th century church. Written in part to explain Mennonites to outsiders, but mostly to help that generation of American Mennonites understand their theology, the book outlined the biblical basis for Mennonite non-resistance, and went beyond military involvement to address issues like responses to labor union tactics as part of a peace witness. Hershberger was clear that a faithful biblical response to violence was to not resist; one did not pick up the sword, and tactics like demonstrations, boycotts and strikes were to be avoided because these were coercive; that is, not nonresistance. ⁸

For this reason, Hershberger could not support Gandhian (and subsequently Civil Rights Movement) tactics of boycotting and demonstrating. Yet he did call Mennonites to a response to racial injustice and racial unrest.

Challenges also came directly from the African American community. In 1945, the Mennonite Biblical Seminary moved to Chicago. While working on a doctorate in history at the University of Chicago, Vincent Harding was called to co-pastor the integrated Woodlawn Mennonite Church, where his spouse, Rosemarie Harding, also served as a lay counselor. The Hardings pressed Mennonites to use their peace and justice theology as a response to systemic racism. This call is certainly relevant for Mennonites today.

Tobin Miller Shearer

J. Lester Brubaker taught me a lesson. He did so back in 1950, fifteen years before I entered this world. That is the wonder of history.

Brubaker wrote an article beneath the headline “Colored Missions.” In it, he used his position as editor of Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Mennonite Conference’s Missionary Messenger to suggest ten ways to “win the Negro of America to Christ.”¹ Starting from the assumption that it was easier to help the “dark-skinned American” than the “dark-skinned African” because it was less expensive and did not require learning a “difficult language,” Brubaker carefully enumerated his motivations and methods for reaching across the color line.²

J.  Lester Brubaker, 1952 Lancaster Mennonite High School Laurel Wreath

His was a daunting task. Two years after he penned his essay, there were still only twelve African-American congregations listed in the Mennonite Yearbook, and they were lumped together with “Spanish speaking” missions and ministries focused on “Jewish People” under the category “Missions Among Different Peoples.”³ What was segregated in print was also segregated in practice. Many retirement and children’s homes run by Mennonites would not accept African Americans. Nearby Virginia Conference continued to enforce its 1940 bishop-approved segregation guidelines for all church sacraments from communion to the Holy Kiss.⁴ And the numbers were small: by 1953 mission worker Leroy Bechler reported only 282 black members of the Mennonite Church in the United States.⁵

To be certain, some African-American leaders pushed back against these walls of racial segregation. James and Rowena Lark had been actively ministering within the African-American community for several years, with James being ordained as a minister on October 6, 1946.⁶ Both Larks had gained notice of the church at large, and in 1951 James would come to serve on the church-wide Committee on Economic and Social Relations (CESR), a group that would, concurrent with Lark’s involvement and the leadership of Guy F. Hershberger, focus on race relations for many years.⁷ Over in Chicago, James and Rowena had started Bethel Mennonite church where they lead an integrated congregation and advocated for full inclusion of African Americans. In a 1950 article, Rowena noted that a “worker” in their congregation, originally from Virginia, became “the first Colored girl ever to attend E. M.C. as a registered student.”⁸

But despite these efforts, segregation in 1950 was, in the Mennonite community, the norm. Integration, however halting, was the anomaly.

In that historical context, Brubaker wrote his editorial. Having studied at Franklin and Marshall College and taught English at Lancaster Mennonite School, Brubaker knew how to wield a pen. He also knew his audience.

And this is where the lesson that I learned fifteen years from before I was born enters in.

Among the many suggestions that he had to offer [see sidebar/image], Brubaker focused on two themes: becoming involved in changing institutions and being nice to black people. As a thoughtful writer, Brubaker was of course more nuanced in his recommendations. He seems to have realized that the problem of racism was not just a matter of individual prejudice, so he called for changes in “church-administered institutions” and for more involvement in efforts to improve economic, labor, and social conditions for black Americans. He likewise recognized that white Mennonites were prone to patronizing behaviors and superiority and so enjoined his readers to “[n]ever show a patronizing or ‘better-than-thou’ attitude.”⁹

But the lesson that Brubaker taught me is just how long the Mennonite Church has been struggling to overcome this dichotomy between advocating for institutional change and fostering interpersonal relationship. When Brubaker encouraged parents to “not teach children to be color conscious” because “they likely will not notice the difference unless adults emphasize it,” he could not have been more distant from the African Americans who in 1950—and for decades previously—had been asking for more attention to the realities of racism, not less. Even for his relative sophistication and nuance, as a white Mennonite from Lancaster County, Brubaker and his co-believers stood at a far remove from African-American leaders like W. E. B. DuBois, Mary Mcleod Bethune, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett who had long been advocating for forthright, nuanced, and informed approaches to racism. Likewise, Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma noted the deep-seated patterns of white racism and prejudice that could not be overcome by avoiding discussion about race.

Brubaker and his contemporaries knew how to encourage each other to be nice, to host black and brown children from the city, and to sponsor children of color at their summer camps. But those actions, regardless of how well meaning, lovingly offered, and challenging they were to implement, missed the mark of the standards set by African-American leaders of the day.

What is so striking is that this same dichotomy is present in the contemporary church. White Mennonites continue to find relationally based solutions far more attractive than the kind of activism promoted by groups affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. The problem now, as it was in 1950, is that the solutions white Mennonites are most familiar with have not been called for by the black community and have not proven effective over time. Addressing violence against black communities, paying reparations for slavery, and instituting community controlled policing have proven historically much more difficult for white Mennonites to support.

Our way forward as a church community will turn in part on how well we come to grips with the very dichotomy that J. Lester Brubaker helped me understand has been part of the Mennonite zeitgeist for sixty-five years and counting.

Works Cited

Bechler, Le Roy. The Black Mennonite Church in North America 1886-1986. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1986.

———. Facts, Considerations and Membership of Negroes in the Mennonite Church 1955. Negro Evangelism Committee, 1955.

Brubaker, J. Lester. “Colored Missions.” Missionary Messenger, May 1950, 11.

Lark, Rowena. “The History of Bethel Mennonite Church.” Our Journal, May 1950, 1-3.

“Policy Governing the Organization of a Mennonite Colored Organization.” 1. Harrisonburg, Va.: Virginia Mennonite Conference; Virginia Mennonite Board of Missions And Charities, 1940.

Shetler, Jan Bender. “A Prophetic Voice in Race Relations?: The Mennonite Church – Missions to Minority Ministries.” Paper, Goshen College, 1977.

Zook, Ellrose D., ed. Mennonite Yearbook and Directory. Vol. 43. Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1952.