Love in Action

Mac Herrling ’72 recalls one of the first off-campus Short Terms, to East Harlem in 1970, led by a young religion professor and defined by a Black woman who personified love in action

by mac herrling ’72

FOR ME, THERE WERE TWO DISTINCT versions of Bates — the before times, and then the more chaotic, Age of Aquarius times.

When the Class of 1972 arrived at Bates in 1968, we performed rituals from the 1950s. We wore Bates beanies and stood on Bobcat Den tables to sing the school song. We played played Shoe Toss and Pass the Orange.

Then 1969 hit, a tsunami blasting down College Street, washing away men’s crewcuts and the bottom half of women’s skirts. In March, William Baird brought to campus his one-man crusade to legalize abortion. October brought Moratorium Day and protests against the Vietnam War. John Shages ’70, dressed like Uncle Sam, led us back and forth in downtown Lewiston as we shouted obscenities about President Nixon and raised our fists: “Hell no! We won’t go!”

In December, Yippie co-founder Paul Krassner came to campus and talked about class warfare, Jimi Hendrix’s penis, the military-industrial complex, and how to join the radical underground.

In January 1970, my classmates Mark Winne, Fred Wolff, and Robin Wright, joined by Doug Hayman ’71 a week later, turned in their draft cards to the local board. There were weekly teach-ins by student antiwar committees. Rich Goldstein ’71 and Bill Lowenstein ’72 organized meetings to plan out the next protest.

For a few of us, the portal from 1950s Bates to this new one was provided by Garvey MacLean ’57, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ who had just become the college’s first multifaith chaplain.

He answered our questions with a drawl of his native Dorchester, Mass., and he always knew what to say. Within days of his arrival, he was leading discussion groups about human values and sexuality. We became DOGs: “Disciples of Garvey” (no one ever called him “Professor MacLean”). He held small groups or “micro labs” where we got into raps about parents, broken hearts, perfectionism, suicide, the war, and sex — “the penile-vaginal thing,” as he described it. Garvey seemed to know about and understand it all.

We asked a lot of him, but he only asked one thing of us: to come to New York City in spring 1970 for a Short Term course, “Religion in the Secular City ” to “transpose our discontent into action.”

The course was founded in 1968 by MacLean’s faculty colleague Arthur Brown, associate professor of religion, and it was among the first courses to head off campus during Short Term, which itself had only been around since 1966. It drew its name and purpose from the book Secular City by theologian Bryan Cox, who urged readers to find a way to speak to God outside organized religion. Even “standing in the picket line is a way of speaking,” he said. “By doing it, a Christian speaks to God.”

MacLean described the course as “Love in Action.” The real revolution was happening on the streets, he said, asking us to see the hypocrisy of modern religions that preached compassion but didn’t stand up to fight for people who needed their power.

We DOGs didn’t hesitate, quickly hopping on his version of the Who’s Magic Bus to New York City and Manhattan. By this point, the wealthy city was hurtling toward the political, social, and economic dark days of the mid-1970s.

Street jugglers threw red balls 20 feet in the air. Men fallen-down drunk snored in doorways. Glamorous women strode by in big hats and 6-inch heels. Young women in flowing tie-dyed dresses sold flowers on the corners. It was the heyday of New York’s Hare Krishnas, and they were out in full force, chanting in their orange and saffron robes. Bankers and ad men sneered at it all.

Greasy-haired men dressed in rags begged for donations so they could get home to Arkansas or Toledo. Freaks with beads and headbands hustled to sell you news sheets about where to find LSD and dope and support the revolution. Whole families appeared in raggedy street clothes performing folk music to raise funds for their commune.

Our base was Manhattan’s Upper West Side, at the West Side YMCA. From there, we found our way into the preternatural mystery of the brio of Spanish Harlem, where we worked with the interdenominational East Harlem Protestant Parish, which focused on social justice and community action.

On our first day, we popped out of the subway at the Harlem–125th Street station ready to fight oppression, a small herd of white suburban virgins, pale as daikon radishes, our senses quickly overwhelmed. We smelled roasting meat, frying tortillas, rotting garbage, rain hissing on the sidewalk, and the permanent aroma of bodies sweating from the oppressive heat wafting up from the pavement.

We tried to take in a tornado of purple, green, red, orange, pink, and black shirts and pants moving in a swarm of smiling and yelling faces, black and brown, spilling onto and over broken heaving sidewalks. Music seemed to blare from every nook and window: funk, blues, rock, and cha-cha-cha played on guitars, congas, trumpets, and harmonicas.

We were in East Harlem to help community members with antipoverty efforts, being sponsored by Massive Economic Neighborhood Development (MEND), a War on Poverty program that began in the 1960s.

But it didn’t feel like these folks needed help from a group of white kids. I had seen hopeless, grinding poverty in Lewiston, where people knew they were poor. But here, there was energy. Artists drew murals on vacant building walls and storefronts, and set up easels on the street in celebration of spring and hope. Raw, wiggling, crazy, screaming hope. Everyone and everything was happening on the street.

Our boss at MEND was Blorneva Selby, supervisor of MEND’s community action program. She epitomized the convergence of all this energy. At age 44, Selby was in a hurry to help her children and her neighborhood, ready to lift them up with the power of a 747. She was a social worker / activist / pastor / grandmother / saint / wise counselor / translator / humanitarian. A Black woman, she lived out of her heart, advocating for people, her people, all people. She lived in the now

For us, Selby was like Virgil escorting Dante through Hades and out the other side. Her sweet Southern patois dripped with generosity. She talked about getting out of a bad marriage and about “no account” boyfriends — and fighting racism her entire life.

In the years that Brown and MacLean took students to East Harlem, Selby was a constant. Jane Goodman ’78 took the course in 1975, and worked in Selby’s church. She remembers Selby’s piece of advice on her last day, so well suited to an uncertain young college student: “She said that I would get to know myself better as I got older.”

Selby and everyone we met treated us with respect despite our youth, race, and heads stuffed with “knowledge.” We attended services at her church, the Church of the Resurrection on 101st Street, where we were literally and figuratively embraced. Everyone sang. If it was off key and loud, it didn’t matter. The building shook and rocked with spirit.

Downtown was the WASP-y Marble Collegiate Church, where Norman Vincent Peale told parishioners they could think themselves to success. Here, the congregants — including powerful developers who were literally bulldozing poor neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal — sang in a whisper, as if unwilling to disturb the status quo.

During our stay, we ate on the cheap. We dined at the Horn & Hardart automat. We practically lived at Blimpies, the sub shop around the corner. I saw the shredded lettuce in my dreams for months afterward.

We made it onto The Dick Cavett Show, knocked on Katherine Hepburn’s door (no answer), loitered at museums, and watched street performers. From the elevated train, we saw Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx stretching to the horizon with thousands of square, gray graves that dwarfed my sense of being. We were children at play in the adult world.

Returning to Bates in fall 1970, we had left the Fifties behind. There were still Sadie Hawkins dances, but the world had cracked open and there was no putting it back together.

As for me, I tried to bring Spanish Harlem with me wherever I went after Bates, like Hemingway did with Paris — A Moveable Feast. I fashioned a career in journalism, writing about the urban poor, rent control, and changing the justice system, then did social work in Massachusetts and Maine.

As for the Short Term course itself, Arthur Brown took back the reins within a few years. After suffering a massive stroke in 1978, he retired from the faculty but was later able to write two books of poetry; he died in 1989.

Blorneva Selby’s granddaughter Juetta Wallace says that Selby, who died in 1989, was “always vibrant in our community,” and she’s petitioning the city to have an East Harlem street named for Selby.

Garvey McLean left the Bates faculty in 1978 to return to parish ministry; he returned for Reunion last year.

What I and my fellow DOGs owe our mentor thanks for is a path — toward careers that were Love in Action, working on behalf of those who lacked a voice or didn’t have the resources to lobby for change. Turns out, that Short Term had a very long arm. n from the edmund s. muskie archives and elsewhere

Give a Ring

This silver Bates cigar-band ring belonged to the late Jane Libby ’56, a noted editor of archaeological publications. She co-edited the scholarly book Pendejo Cave (2003) with legendary archaeologist R.S. “Scotty” MacNeish, which suggested a much earlier human inhabitation of North America than scholars previously thought.

Bobcattin’

This photo by George Conklin ’53 shows a Texas-style derrick, near what is now Lane Hall. It gushed water high into the air during the 1952 Mayoralty campaign. Replete with skits, stunts, shenanigans, and contraptions, Mayoralty thrived during the mid-1900s — an epic, three-day student campaign to elect a mock mayor of Bates. In 1952, the Texas-themed campaign of “Smilin’ Jack” Davis ’54 defeated the Hollywood-inspired campaign of “Lymelight Lynn” Willsey ’54.

This ceramic Bates stein belonged to the late Margie Gregory Wright ’45, who used her chemistry degree to land her first job, selling scientific equipment. She later taught science and health in Baltimore, and was a consultant to a family-life discussion group for the board of education.

What Goes Around

Feb. 19 was the 550th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, whose stained-glass depiction can be seen in Gomes Chapel with other great Western thinkers, including Marie Curie and Leonardo da Vinci. The chapel’s stained-glass imagery was designed by Charles J. Connick, whose work in the Gothic Revival style is found worldwide.