Sixty Years of Ministry: White Supremacy Continues

In marking the 60^th anniversary of my consecration as a deaconess (June 6, 1960), I reflect on my first call to a congregation in St. Louis. I was well accepted, liked. However, people said Norma had one problem: “She likes Negroes!” I began my call to public ministry a few months before John F. Kennedy was elected president. I was serving during the March on Washington August 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech.

 Three weeks later white supremacists bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing 4 Sunday School girls and injuring 22 people. Burton and I joined a protest demonstration in St. Louis. It so happened that members from my congregation saw a picture of me marching and brought a complaint. When the Voters’ Assembly met to decide if I should be fired, I was not allowed to be present because women then could not vote in that church.

Fast forward to my diaconal ministry of being a community organizer in Detroit during the “riot”—we called it a “rebellion,” the bloodiest of “The Long Hot Summer” of 1967. It began as a confrontation between black residents and the Detroit Police Department. Nearly 2,000 U.S. Army paratroopers were deployed, adding to 800 Michigan state police and 9,000 members of the National Guard, to “quell the violence.”  After MLK’s assassination in 1968, protests returned in Detroit. Nearly 200 cities experienced arson and sniper fire. It was Holy Week.

Pres. Lyndon Johnson had just released the “Kerner Report” investigating the 1967 “riots,” which stated: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget. . .” The causes named were poverty, lack of housing, lack of economic opportunities and discrimination in the job market. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

Saturday I marked the 60^th anniversary of my consecration by being with deaconess sisters, via Zoom: a number in the Twin Cities, and others from all over Minnesota, the N.D. border, Wisconsin and northern Iowa. Diaconal ministry is a call for prophetic service. Sunday, Trinity Lutheran Church here in Mason City, via on-line streaming—included my anniversary in the announcements and prayers: “Dr. Everist was later ordained and taught for 41 years at Yale Divinity School and Wartburg Theological Seminary. She worked for social justice as a community organizer in the inner cities of Detroit and New Haven, CT. She served parishes in St. Louis and in New Haven and Hamden, CT. Her formation as a deaconess has shaped her entire career as a pastor, professor, author and servant leader.”

Sixty years later: the issues are in front of us today. We are all involved and called to activate change. As Pastor Gerrietts this morning prayed, “Continue to strengthen her, and each of us, to be bold in our proclamation of the Gospel.” Our calling is now—and urgent!