From 1964, even while the struggle to overcome American apartheid continues in the American South, decades of rage come to a boil in the impoverished ghettos of the urban North, and city after city explodes in riot and destruction. Few subscribers to the Firm Foundation live in or near these cities, yet few can escape them in the litany of the television news: Harlem in New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn (1964), Watts in Los Angeles (1965), Philadelphia, and Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn (1966), Newark and Detroit (1967); these cities and many others erupt with volcanic ferocity, as if some seismic shift has overtaken the political "progress" of American race relations.

And so in the depths of winter, 1968, here is Reuel Lemmons, editor of the FF, ruminating on what summer has brought and may yet bring. We find in this remarkable diatribe neither sentimental longing nor pleasant reflection on past delights. Tennessee Williams's languid phrase, "The Long Hot Summer," has by now taken on a meaning quite beyond its author's original intent.

Now that summer is gone, and the weather, as well as the tempers of people over the city-wrecking riots have cooled a little, we want to say something about the ugly mood and anarchist situation that prevails in so much of the land.

When, in any nation, riots and bloodshed make the headlines and the newscasts for days it is a sick situation. Our country has known more of this in the past three years than it has known in the one hundred years before that. When such conditions reach the point of no return no nation can survive them.

Some contend that these are the acts of a downtrodden element of society struggling for its fair share of effluency [sic]. We deny it. They are, rather, the signs of a decaying and dying society. When the people of any land prostitute human dignity in every conceivable manner they can expect the thin veneer of civilization to disappear and barbarity to return to the streets.The abandonment of moral principles and the exultation [sic] of every vice have wrecked nations before.

When the womanhood of a land exploits sex in such a brazen manner, and the manhood of a land sneers at honor, what can we expect? Until America comes to its senses we will have more and more of what we have had. It is a common buck passing practice to blame racial discrimination and poverty for the wrecking, burning and plundering that is going on. We would like to blame others for our own failures. Any sensible person knows that the causes lie deeper than that. There are, and have been, countless millions of poor people who did not feel called upon to run amuck because they were poor. Plundering, and burning, and beatings and murder do not spring from poverty. Racial discrimination does not make one race turn upon its own kind like a mad dog. Pilate may try to wash his hands, but he cannot escape the indictment of history. When a nation turns away from God, and rejects eternal verities of moral conduct, the Sodomitish atmosphere soon manifests itself. And even the fire that burns out city blocks and the violence that runs human blood down the gutters is, in a way, sent from heaven. There is a very real sense in which "every transgression and disobedience receives its just recompense of reward." When we sow the wind we reap the whirlwind.

An indication of our moral abandon is the participation of men who call themselves "men of God" in acts of violent civil disobedience.

Another indication of the anarchy in our midst is the extent to which agitators, anarchists, rioters, looters, and hate peddlers are idolized by the people and praised in the press. News media have their share of responsibility to bear. News has always catered to the lewd, the violent and the degrading. With them it makes spicy reading. It is good business because that is what readers buy their papers to read. Men get their names in the papers, not because of anything uplifting and progressing that they have done but because of the protests they have led, the cities they have burned, the members of their own race they have sacrificed in the riots. The hysterical mob violence of our age is symbolized by "black power" and "burn Baby burn."

The moral decay of the nation is indicated by the fashions of the day, and the pornography that floods the mails and the news stands. Pornography is bad enough hidden under the counters of news stands and bootlegged on the sly. When you have it walking down the street in the flesh, and even sitting in the pew in church you really have a disease on your hands. When sex is given away like chewing gum wrappers on the street corner, and immodesty wears the fig leaf of personal liberty, why be so shocked about a little violence in a limited section of a distant ghetto?

And why try to blame it all off on poverty and racial discrimination. The world always has had, and will have till Gabriel comes, an immense amount of both. Yet these have not in other ages and in other places touched off the wave of blood-letting, looting, and total disregard for law, life or limb that has characterized the past summer. It is only when, and where, the principles of Jesus are forgotten or repudiated until the civilization these principles have produced and the society which they undergird disintegrates, that such heathenish chaos as we are experiencing is possible. It is probably true that Communism is behind most of these riots. It usually is. It is behind them because we produced the hotbed of atheism, materialism, and godlessness which allows Communism to grow. We may combat Communism with the force of armed might until doomsday and never destroy it. You don't destroy an idea with gunpowder. It will only be when this nation returns to the principles of Jesus Christ that we will dry up the bedding ground of Communism. Until that time--it will be a long hot summer, every year.

In the voluminous literature responding to urban conflict in the 1960s, this editorial stands as an astonishing document. That it appears at all may be called most remarkable; no such notice ever appears in the pages of the Gospel Advocate, although Nashville has been a critical center of sustained direct action in civil rights for more than a decade. Social consciousness is no more a part of the mental furniture of Reuel Lemmons than of Benton Cordell Goodpasture, but Reuel Lemmons is traveling everywhere within the borders of the United States and even beyond those borders, and in his travels he is also listening to those whom he meets. He is far more aware of the social diversity and discontent among members of the Churches of Christ than anyone connected with the GA gives any evidence of being. Reuel Lemmons does not like what he hears and sees, but he knows that he should respond to it. He soon reveals the parochial limits of his awareness.

Despite his travels Reuel Lemmons exists, mentally and physically, at far remove from the urban crisis in America. In that he is no different from most members of the Churches of Christ. He has as yet no concrete frame of reference from which he might engage the reality that assaults his senses. His Christian instincts are fundamentally right: "We would like to blame others for our own failures," he writes, but he cannot see those failures for what they are. He and many of his contemporaries among white Churches of Christ cannot see the system of greed, exploitation, prejudice, and neglect that has created black ghettos in almost every American city. Reuel Lemmons has known poor people, many of them, but he has never known poverty in the pressure cooker of a high-rise tenement district where more than 100,000 people may exist within one square mile. He has never known the frustration of daily rejection, humiliation, subjugation, and intimidation. For Reuel Lemmons, America has been a land of opportunity and promise; he has never experienced the rage that rises when opportunity is denied and promises are broken.

Reuel Lemmons knows that the United States has turned away from God, and that it has rejected "eternal verities of moral conduct," but he does not know what those verities are. He has read Amos 5:21-24 and 6:4-5 many times, but he has not yet understood what these texts may truly mean. He cannot comprehend the moral failure in which he is himself a daily participant. Incredibly, Reuel Lemmons seeks the causes of urban violence in "the fashions of the day" and the sale of pornographic literature. "Poverty and racial discrimination" are not real to him, but the miniskirt is another matter! He knows that "the principles of Jesus" have been "forgotten or repudiated," but he does not know what they are or who has repudiated them.

Before the appalling summer of 1968 is over, Reuel Lemmons will have learned some things that he does not now know. His education, and ours, will come at terrible cost. That summer, the longest and the most infernal of long, hot summers, will begin on Thursday, 4 April, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. We are still feeling the heat.

May God have mercy.

dhaymes, his mark +