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Kenneth G. Neigh interviewed by Susan Miller, 1989-1990, tape 3, side 1.
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- speaker[Kenneth Neigh speaking] Was largely because of Art's [Flemming, Arthur] skill
- speakerin handling the thing. And,
- speakeras I say, because the denominations were doing the things
- speakeron their own, you know. Our own Religion and Race
- speakerpeople, and Oh. the United Church of Christ.
- speakerThe Roman Catholics and the Jews were involved in this.
- speakerwho you may or may not see in the news from time to time was
- speakerthe spokesman for the American Jewish Committee and all that kind of stuff. Marc
- speakerMarc Tanenbaum [Tanenbaum, Rabbi Marc H.] for a for a time was the chairman of IFCO
- speaker[Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization] He
- speakerresigned after The Black Manifesto,
- speakerbut this was only part, it appears to me, of
- speakeryou know the.
- speakersymptomatic of what, of what later happened between the
- speakerblack and Jewish communities. So it was at that
- speakerAs I say, it was symptomatic., it was. There are there many things in the
- speakerManifesto that Marc and I agreed about.
- speakerBut, as I say,
- speakerit, it was symptomatic of what was going to
- speakerhappen in the black and Jewish communities later on. What.
- speakerwhat didn't you like about the way that it was presented?
- speakerWell.
- speakerYou don't sit in offices like mine, for example.
- speakerYou don't take over the pulpit at Riverside Church.
- speakerAnd
- speakerIt was, it was. The thing, the thing that happened was that it became
- speakerentirely personal, not only to Jim [Forman, James], but
- speakerit became personal to the people who were watching Jim.
- speakerYou would. He was a very sharp guy.
- speakerHe was married to a white gal, whose mother wrote that early book
- speakeron the high cost of dying, in which she exposes the
- speakerfuneral director. he was
- speakerAnd, we became, we came very close friends.
- speakerI was. I got set up with the National
- speakerCouncil but I was still. I was still vice president
- speakerin one of those divisions. I
- speakercould always tell when Jim was in the office because when I would
- speakercome in, the girls would all sit there with their knuckle white and
- speakerbecause they had been there when he sat in on the office. So he
- speakercame in one day, and he. And,
- speakerI knew he [Forman, James] was there. And, I'd been to a committee meeting downstairs at the National
- speakerCouncil. And I'd just had it. I said, "Jim. I'm going to
- speakergive the whole bit up." And, he said to me,
- speaker"Ken. Sit down." He said,
- speaker"You can't. You can't give it up." He said, "The church
- speakeris our last,
- speakerprobably our only hope, and especially the Presbyterian
- speakerChurch." And, you know,
- speakerAnd, he was right about it. He was right about it.
- speakerWell, just to, to back up a little bit,
- speakeryou got involved in the N.C.C. [National Council of Churches] in nineteen seventy?
- speakerThat's what I have anyway. Is that about right? I mean
- speakerofficially as the vice-president that you took office, or was it earlier than that?
- speakerOh! I had been a whole bunch of things before that. Okay. But
- speakeryou became the vice-president. Yeah. How how did you originally
- speakerget into the N.C.C.? Well, I was the.
- speakerI had been the president of the
- speakerMichigan Council of Churches for two terms out there. Oh, okay.
- speakerI had brought off a combination of the
- speakerMichigan Council and the Detroit Council and
- speakergot a foundation to give them headquarters and stuff like that, so that
- speakerwhen I came to New York, the National Council was looking for people like me.
- speakerI don't I don't know I went through the chairs. I was.
- speakerYou see, I don't know, I guess I was chairman of the Communications Committee, one time and a whole bunch of stuff like that.
- speakerYou pretty much moved around in it your whole career.
- speakerIn the seventies there was a move of responsibility for the
- speakerindividual. And, I think you mentioned this, from
- speakerthe individual for the individual institutions from the actual
- speakerBoard to the judicatories?
- speakerHow did this come about? Was it just kind of an
- speakerevolution that took place?
- speakerIt was evolutionary.
- speakerBut, it came about with the Board with National
- speakerMissions because of
- speakerthree
- speakerbasic administrative philosophies. I felt
- speakerthat
- speakermission could
- speakerbest be administered at the place
- speakerwhere it was performing. That was one.
- speakerThe second was that
- speakerI believed in a collegiate-
- speakertype administration. One of the first things I did in New York
- speakerwas to break down the differences
- speakerbetween various levels, assistant secretaries, and secretaries, and
- speakerall that nonsense. And, the third was the
- speakermaximum participation on the part of the
- speakerpeople who were involved both
- speakerThe ones for whom the mission would be performed and those who were performing it.
- speakerYou never heard it of Bryant George, but he is now the head of the
- speakercivilian part of the A.I.D. program in the Philippines.
- speakerprobably is the sharpest black guy
- speakeras I ever knew. He was on our staff in New York.
- speakerand he also said that my administrative philosophy was one
- speakerof the administration by countervailing forces
- speakerwhich is which is to say that
- speakerI got people on the staff and
- speakerin the field who were creative
- speakerand
- speakerdidn't always agree with each other. It was that kind of thing that
- speakerthe dispersion of the administration took place.
- speakerYou were also involved with Consultation on Church Union? [COCU]
- speakerWhat does you think of that? I have you started getting
- speakerinvolved in sixty-eight and by then there were nine denominations
- speakerparticipating.
- speakerI helped set up the meeting. You did?
- speakerIt was held in the
- speakerWashington Cathedral over at the
- speakerEpiscopal Church.
- speakerJim McCord [McCord, James I.]
- speakerand the canon of the downtown Episcopal church. I've forgotten his name.
- speakerand the President of the American University [Williams, George H.], which at that time was Methodist,
- speakerand I set up the first meeting.
- speakerBlake [Blake, Eugene Carson] [General Secretary, World Council of Churches]
- speakerchose the
- speakerthe
- speakerUnited Presbyterian delegation, and rightly so.
- speakerHe may have gotten the moderator involved, I'm not sure of that.
- speakerBut, anyway, I was one with eight people, who were in our delegation.
- speakereight people. I was one of the eight.
- speakerand,
- speakerI had a hard time with COCU.
- speakerThe
- speakermajority of the people in COCU, apart from Truman
- speakerDouglass [Douglass, Truman Bartlett]
- speakerand me
- speakerThey were faith and order people.
- speakerOf course, I was on the missions side of the thing.
- speakerFaith and Order people believed that you could
- speakerhave church
- speakerunion de jure
- speakerAnd I believed that you had to have
- speakerchurch union de facto before you could have it de jure. And I didn't exactly wear out my
- speakerwelcome. But I remember
- speakerJim Mathews [Mathews, James K. [James Kenneth]], bishop of Washington, in the Methodist Church now
- speakerwas president of COCU
- speakerand I asked for the floor
- speakerand he said,
- speaker"Ken, you're not going to do that same tired old speech again, are you?"
- speakerI was sitting between Blake [Blake, Eugene Carson] and Jim.
- speakerI picked up my books and went home.
- speakerBut, we had, you
- speakerknow. Well, one of the good things about COCU was that
- speakerI didn't have to worry about planning anything.
- speakerSomebody else did that?
- speakerYeah, COCU had a staff.
- speakerStill does, as a matter of fact.
- speakerYou know it is like lots of things in the church.
- speakerThey get established
- speakerand then there are the little group of
- speakerpeople, that that is the way they express their ego in.
- speakerAnd, it is difficult to kill them off. But COCU should have been killed off
- speakertwenty years ago.
- speakerThe last thing I have is your retirement.
- speakerWhen did you retire?
- speakerOh, nineteen seventy-three.
- speakerI came down here to, well mainly because I had
- speakerso many friends down here in Princeton.
- speakerI was sort of the will o the wisp at the
- speakerkind of reason because.
- speakerNow most of those people are either
- speakerdeceased, departed, or divorced.
- speakerAnd the other reason was
- speakerAnd I wanted to write some books.
- speakerI have a twenty-five thousand dollar grant over here that I
- speakernever used to write these books.
- speakerI have a. Jim probably told you. Well, you know, about
- speakerany thing is in these files at Princeton Seminary. So I was
- speakergoing to write some books. You know,
- speakerone of the things that make me a Calvinist
- speakeryou know. I
- speakerwas really ticked off when I came down here because
- speakerI had been in my mind a scape goat
- speakerthat was used as an argument in the reoganization
- speakerIndiscriminate use of power. The chairman of
- speakerone of the committees as he went off the stage at a
- speakerGeneral Assembly. Did I tell you this?
- speakerWell, it was maybe sixty, seventy
- speakerThere was a proposal that came from the
- speakerblacks who lived in the south, a whole bunch of stuff and
- speakerone was a fund for the self-development of people.
- speakerWell, it was. Things were hot and heavy at that time.
- speakerIt was the time of the youth movement. And
- speakerthe business of
- speakerthe voting of stocks, and things like that. In addition
- speakerto the racial thing. So John
- speakerSmith [Smith, John Coventry] [General Secretary of the Commission on Ecumenical Missions and Relations], and I had too many balls in the air, and we
- speakerdidn't get to General Council meeting. So
- speakerwhen we got to the platform there were not seats at the General Council.
- speakerSo John and I went and sat over on the other side of the platform
- speakerAnd, we were astonished to hear the General Council report
- speakerrecommending the establishment of a committee
- speakerto
- speakerstudy a fund for the self development of people.
- speakerSo, John and I got our pencils out.
- speakerWe decided that we would each put a million and a half in, into the fund for self-development.
- speakerSo John [Smith, John Coventry] was then one of the
- speakerpresidents of the World Council of Churches and was in his last year.
- speakerRetiring from C.O.E.M.A.R. And he got up and made the announcement. There was applause.
- speakerAnyway, as Orly Mason, who was the chairman
- speakerof the reorganizing committee in the office stage, he
- speakersaid to Angie Gebhart, who happened to be a member of our Board.
- speakerWe
- speakerhave to have a structure that will
- speakernever again produce a Ken Neigh.
- speakerSo, as I say, when I came down here, I
- speakerwas, was tired of the scapegoat
- speakerbit where the Angela Davis thing
- speakerA long time ago I said this is one of the things that makes me a
- speakerCalvinist. Shortly
- speakerafter that my Parkinson's got diagnosed.
- speakerand it took me. Well not as long as most,
- speakerbut shortly, eighteen months to get adjusted to medication.
- speakerAnd, by
- speakerthat time I had become mellow.
- speakerAnd, had never been really interested in dashing into print.
- speakerThey wanted you to write about what you
- speakerhad done and that?
- speakerThe Presbyterian Church or? No, they wanted me to write about the Board of National Missions. Specifically?
- speakerThere had been one
- speakerthat had been done in the
- speakerearly fifties.
- speakerWho did the grant come from? Well, this is one of the things that the Board did, its
- speakerlast meeting, was to
- speakerprovide this twenty-five thousand dollars.
- speakerSo, it was never started or just?
- speakerOh, I got a whole bunch of stuff around.
- speakerAnd, I suspect
- speakerafter this thing that happened in Philadelphia
- speakerfeel.
- speakerthe pressure has been on me from all sorts of places.
- speakerIncluding this neighborhood. There are a bunch of
- speakermanipulators down here, Mormons on this side, Roman Catholics on the other side.
- speakerWe're all down in Philadelphia. They
- speakerdidn't endanger what I was up to, you see.
- speakerSo, one of those people, they were Methodist.
- speakerAnd Debbie, the Mormon over here.
- speakerThey were really on my back.
- speakerDave dug up a secretary. Read tapes and things like that
- speakerSo anyway.
- speakerIs it still a possibility, do you think?
- speakerUm
- speakerI sort of like to do this kind of thing. Because you just talk about it?
- speakerOn of the problems that I have is that
- speakerI'm a grammarian, very
- speakercareful and worry about
- speakerthe use of the right words.
- speakerSo, I don't know what I'll do.
- speakerwith anything.
- speakerBut I I think that's all I have, unless there is anything else that you want to have?
- speakerBut, I may have left out? I've been known to do that. I really doubt that.
- speakerWell, you know.
- speakerwell you
- speakerfeel
- speakerI don't think that I hang
- speakersuspended between the past and the present.
- speakerAnd, one of the problems that I think that I might have is
- speakerthat I get absorbed in the past again.
- speakerit
- speakerIt's a this is a strange environment
- speakerthat I lived in.
- speakerThere is a continuing assault on my waist line
- speakerOne of the neighbors, the
- speakermissionaries, the Mormon missionaries, the gal next door apparently
- speakeris the Mother Superior of these moves, and
- speakerI take them to lunch. And, they do stuff around the house here and that kind of thing.
- speakerAnd, the people across the street, he's a
- speakerI think, a nephew of James Joyce. Very interesting.
- speakerSo that's. As I say, I don't want to get hung up on the past.
- speakerRight. That's good.
