“Keep up the agitation” - Rev. Jerry Forshey and a KKK Cross from Jackson, Mississippi

Abstract

I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in our struggle for freedom Some have been kicked out of their churches, and lost support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have gone with the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. These men have been leaven in the lump of the race. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times.-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Letter From A Birmingham Jail, April 1963REV. GERALD E. FORSHEY Chicagoan, but not by birth. He in Long Beach, California in 1932, the son of casino pit boss. Influenced by Methodist ministers while attending UCLA, Forshey decided to train for the ministry at the Iliff School of Theology after graduation. He went to Denver as a blue collar kid with expanding horizons. He left seminary with a theology and sense of mission that would shape his life and work. He also met and married his wife Florence, who came to study in Denver from her home in Mobile, Alabama.2Chicago became their home in 1958, when Rev. Forshey took an assignment as pastor of the Armitage Avenue Methodist Church, mixedrace, inner-city parish near Lincoln Park. In ways that Jerry and Florence Forshey could not possibly have foreseen, their lives would be intertwined with those of thousands of other migrants headed to Chicago, most of them African American coming from the Deep South. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, half million migrants came to Chicago and their arrival affected nearly every aspect of city life.Like many other migrants, Rev. Forshey was entranced by the big city and all it had to offer. He witnessed the explosive growth under Mayor Richard J. Daley that included the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the construction of the expressway systems, new mass transit lines, convention center, and the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, as well as the opening of the then tallest building in the world-Sears Tower.Forshey not starry-eyed idealist; he spent years working in string of Methodist congregations as the white pastor in racially mixed or all-black congregations. Rev. Forshey lived in neighborhoods that were going through rapid racial change, and his approach to the ministry shaped by the experiences of his congregants, both black and white. The black migrants' very presence forced existing residents and institutions to change-often in wrenching, and soul-searching ways in the face of ingrained patterns of racism. He watched as his African American congregants scrambled to find housing in city where strict racial segregation maintained through custom, coercion and sometimes violence.3Because of his ministerial appointments, Forshey came to devote himself particularly to the cause of civil rights. Not only did he see the problems encountered by his own parishioners, but he also saw connections to the southern Civil Rights Movement. He arrived in Chicago just few years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating schools (Brown v. Topeka, KS Board of Education) and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that catapulted the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence.Forshey moved to action by the challenges posed by segregation in housing, education, and jobs in Chicago, but he heeded the call of national civil rights leaders and became part of church desegregation efforts in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. Spurred on by his experiences in Chicago and Jackson, Forshey worked for the desegregation of the Methodist Church. Separated before the Civil War over the issue of slavery, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Methodist Protestant Church merged in 1939. It new denomination born segregated. …