Mennonite Weekly Review

In December of 1967, Bethel College students stepped into a first for their campus. A dance was held for young women and men, not square or folk dancing, but the kind of couples-oriented dancing usually prohibited by Mennonite communities at the time. George Rogers, an African-American student from Chicago, was there and remembers black and white students dancing together.

Goering

The late 1960s were a time of significant change in the political and social relationships between black and white Americans, and Bethel was no exception. “A lot of people considered themselves liberal,” Rogers says about the Bethel he found, “and there was never a lack of people who wanted interaction. Bethel wanted to be integrated.”

Rogers had come to Bethel at the urging of a high school friend, Mike Burnett, who came to Bethel because his family knew someone who had gone there. Rogers and Burnett fell naturally into a friendship with two other students, Earl White from Newton and Bill “Willie” Price from Bassfield, Mo.

Burnett and Rogers were from urban Chicago. White was local, older and married while Bill Price was a sharecropper’s son from the deep South. Despite major differences, the four connected and became lifelong friends, a relationship that one of them would later call a “kinship and a brotherhood.” At Bethel, none of them had much money, and they all played football. They were also black.

Since Bethel first began enrolling students in the early 1890s, a small minority of Native American, black and Hispanic students have boldly attended the predominantly white Mennonite college. The first known African-American student was recorded in 1920.

The Bethel that Rogers, Burnett, Price and White found almost 50 years later was still largely uncharted territory for non-white, non-Mennonite students. They found among students, faculty, administrators and the local community a mix of encouragement and respect as well as degradation and unfair treatment. Bethel was a place that wanted to be integrated, but failed to fulfill that, in the best sense of the word.

(For more on their story, read “Friends for Life” in the current issue of Mennonite Life.)

Of the four, it was Rogers who would stay connected to Bethel, starting first as defensive coordinator for the football team, and later working as both athletic director and dean of students in his 29-year stint there. From his experience, he believes that many African-American students may “enjoy their time at Bethel, appreciate it, but not identify with it. Black students often don’t feel Bethel is their place.”

In the last year and a half, I interviewed three of these men, all but Burnett, who died unexpectedly of complications from a chronic disease. I had to push them to talk candidly about racism and Bethel and their lives. They were careful and guarded in a way that I suspect is necessary for African-American men of their age to succeed as professionals and businessmen in a white world, as all of them did.

The Mennonite college that welcomed these students in the mid-1960s reflected the best and worst of the Mennonite world. Its desire to make a strong statement about integration by recruiting students of color into its community was admirable. Its tendency to maintain that community by drawing clear lines between insiders and outsiders drove some students to its fringes.

Building institutions that don’t just serve Mennonites has been one of the bold strengths of our church. If we want to deliver on that promise, we need to listen to what African-Americans and others have to say about their experiences.