Potent Antidote For Trendy Cynicism

It started, Harold Confer recalls, with a Washington Post account of three church burnings - the 100-year-old Mount Zion in Boligee, Ala., and two other blacks’ churches in surrounding Greene County.

Confer still can’t say why he took it so personally, but within a week and a half of that Jan. 23, 1996, story, he and two others from a Washington-area Quaker group were on their way to Boligee in a donated Dodge Caravan to help rebuild the destroyed churches.

Save for a week here and there, he’s spent virtually the entire last year and a half rebuilding churches - rebuilding, too, his faith in his God and his fellowman.

It was, in many ways, a natural for the 56-year-old Confer, a 1960s-style liberal who had put both his ministerial ambitions and his teaching degree on hold to become in turn, a teacher in Tanzania, a neighborhood Mr. Fixit and, more relevantly, a leader of the Washington Quaker Workcamps.

“It’s been such a beautiful thing on so many levels,” he said in a recent interview in his Northwest Washington home. “First, I had come from California, and I had my own conceptions about the South. I thought we would run into hecklers, obscene gestures - and worse. In fact, we found an almost totally supportive local community, black and white, young and old, politicians and nonpoliticians. Over the months we had some 700 volunteers, and not one racial incident. That’s the first thing that was so reassuring. “Second, the volunteers came from all over the country - much as happened during the civil rights movement. They were Jews, Presbyterians, Catholics, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Mennonites …

“Then there was the active involvement of the local people, including the members of the burned-out churches, coming to our work camp and sweating with the rest of us. Some were professionals, some skilled amateurs, and some didn’t know which end of the hammer to put in the paint bucket.”

There was, too, what Confer calls “one of the miracles of the 20th century” - the decision of International Paper Corp. to supply the lumber, plywood, insulation and drywall needed to rebuild all the burned churches - perhaps some $16 million worth of supplies, according to Confer.

And there was the rebuilding work itself. “I remember when this Mennonite disaster team rolled into Boligee like a convoy of covered wagons. I mean, here was this burned-out church surrounded by an 18-wheeler filled with tools, two 70-foot house trailers to feed and house their volunteers, three or four RVs in which they had their administrative offices and bedrooms, and a big Scenic Cruiser that rolled in every week with a new group of kids from Mennonite land. It was just marvelous to see.”

At one point, the rebuilders found themselves with more volunteers than they could use at the moment and wound up rehabilitating the ruined gymnasium floor and painting classrooms at nearby Paramount High School.

The most encouraging thing for Confer, he says, was discovering how many people are ready to do healing work if only they are given the opportunity. “It’s as though they’d just been waiting for a chance to make their witness,” he said of the hundreds of volunteers. “As bad as the church burnings were, the response leaves you with a good feeling about America.”

What does he think of the charge that the burnings constituted less of an “epidemic” than early reports had it?

“Well, 126 churches in two years seems like a pretty serious epidemic to me,” he says. “But the point is, every one of those 126 churches has either been rebuilt or is being rebuilt. If there is an alternative to the cynicism that is sweeping America, this is it.”

He’s right about that. Sometimes it seems that half of us are complaining about the increase in racial hostility, while the other half are trekking from one living room to another to talk about racial healing. Maybe what we have needed all along are more useful things to do that we can do together. I suspect the church-rebuilding efforts have produced more racial healing than any amount of earnest discussion has.

Confer thinks they may have produced something else as well. “I keep thinking of something Rabbi Nancy Wiener of Hebrew Union College said,” he told me. “She said that if there had been this kind of outpouring when Hitler burned 160 synagogues in one night, World War II might never have happened.”

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = William Raspberry Washington Post