The Force of Conscience

Week by week, the U.S. civil rights revolution burns more deeply in its intensity, shifts into bewildering new directions, expands fiercely in its dimensions. Leaders follow and followers lead.

Congressional timetables are upset. Negro organization officials find themselves riding a crest they cannot control. Negro moderates suffer vilification, or the threat of physical harm, for their moderation. White politicians who have achieved power through their championship of civil rights find themselves hooted by audiences who think they have not been civil righteous enough.

As the revolution moved relentlessly forward last week, the most significant development was that the white clergy, which in the past has played a sympathetic but generally nonactivist part, threw itself wholeheartedly, and even physically, into the struggle. Priests and ministers, rabbis and rectors were on the march. The U.S.'s foremost Presbyterian official was jailed--along with other church leaders of different denominations. Nuns appeared on civil rights picket lines. Several thousand miles from the U.S., in Vatican City, Pope Paul VI expressed his keen interest and concern for the civil rights struggle in America. He told visiting President John Kennedy: "We are ever mindful in our prayers of the efforts to ensure to all your citizens the equal benefits of citizenship, which have as their foundation the equality of all men because of their dignity as persons and children of God."

The arrival of the white U.S. clergy on the front lines of the civil rights battle is of great moment. That battle inevitably will go on for years. No matter how long it lasts, it will never be finally solved by political maneuvering, or in legislative chambers, or by court decisions, or in street fights. The ultimate answer can be found only in the conscience of the nation. And the active, unequivocal participation of the churches and churchmen is vital to achieving that answer.

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