Z and Me

By: Rev. Dr. Oscar (Oz) Cole-Arnal
A long time peace activist reflects back on moments with his childhood friend, feeling deep conviction about early episodes of racism and the lost opportunity for forgiveness.

Image Credit: Tim Nafziger

At age 77, as I enter the final phase of a rich and meaningful life, I am reminded of two recent pre-Lenten retreats: the first in which I felt gut-punched after reading James H. Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2013) and the second, certainly viscerally related to the first, during which a half-century resurrection of the Poor People’s Campaign was announced. where poor and marginalized minorities built a tent-city in Washington, D.C. to protest their plight, barely months after its chief organizer and leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had fallen by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968.  His shed blood marked perhaps the deepest life transformation, a radical turnaround in which I vowed that I would never be silent when and wherever I encountered injustice in any form. 
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Here I was, a young twenty-seven-year-old Lutheran pastor in my first parish in western Pennsylvania who was totally upended by James Earl Ray’s lethal bullet.  From that point on, whether in the year and a half at that parish or in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 70’s, my faith radicalized sharply to the point where 80% of my congregation left the church; where my and my family’s lives were threatened; where a bunch of us formed a radical group called the Lutheran Direct Action Committee (LDAC); and where we broadened our justice concerns to include anti-Vietnam actions, support of Cesar Chavez’ United Farm Workers of California (UFWOC), and solidarity with the Black Construction Coalition.  In fact, we faced both civilian and police violence and were even arrested. In one form or another, whether in the United States or in Canada , I have sustained and hopefully deepened this Jesus Radicalism. Whether in the classroom as a seminary professor or in the streets as an organizer and activist committed to that radical life transformation prompted by the shed blood of Martin Luther King Jr.  

The above introduction becomes absolutely necessary to the underlying theme of this testimony, for this half-century journey has driven me to seek restorative justice and truth-telling between Z and me.  As best as I can, allow me to introduce you to Z, Zears Leto Miles Jr., a dear friend through our four years of high school and a year thereafter.  In so many respects Zears and I had much in common—love of astronomy, reading serious books, and an intense commitment to our faith. 

We both were zealous members in a Presbyterian youth group led by Rev. William C. Cook, my mentor and spiritual father.  Although we seemed inseparable as friends, there was a key difference—I was white and Zears was black. As is typical of those of us with paler skin, we felt that we had no racial prejudice like those “bigots” south of the Mason-Dixon Line did.  Of course, we knew some local whites who sustained racial prejudice through their choice of words, but we were certain that individual and conscious choice alone determined who was bigoted and who wasn’t. 

I stood up to my mother, who tried to persuade me not to invite Z to join me and my white friends for our routine playing of board games on summer nights on our front porch.  She insisted that she wasn’t prejudiced but rather was concerned about what neighbors might think. Proudly I stood up to her, saying that Zears was my friend, and that alone made him welcome on our porch, and to that assertion I added that if Z was not welcome, neither was I.  At that point, realizing that I was right and she was wrong (so like my dear mom), she backed off.
 
Sadly in two instances I was forced to deal with my own racism at the deeper trust levels that defined friendship then and now.  In my own teen-age naiveté I had no clue that Zears had to maneuver his life most carefully in a white-dominated society, meaning he well understood racism whereas I, as his friend, was almost clueless.  The first example involved a test whereby Z could begin to sense just how deep our friendship was. Our “guy-group” would gather outside a grocery store, sit on a nearby stoop, and guzzle pop while we shared our teenage dreams.  This bonding was “sacramentally” sealed by sharing pop from the same bottle after a standard request—“hey, how about a swig of your pop?” The answer was always affirmative via a quick swipe across a shirt sleeve over the bottle’s opening followed by a handing of the bottle to the one asking.  Well, one day when Zears was with us, he said, “Hey, Oz, how about a swig of pop?” Sadly, I hesitated for perhaps five seconds (a bloody eternity in terms of my unacknowledged racial divide) before I performed the standard wipe and passed it to him. To this day I believe I barely passed the test in Zears’ eyes.  

Yet the second example, when I call it to consciousness, wounds me deeply to this day.  After one of our Presbyterian youth meetings, Zears sought my opinion as a dear and trusted friend on dating and girls, that most vulnerable concern I and so many of us felt could be shared with only the closest friends.  Initially I felt so privileged that Zears would trust me with such a tender subject. As he opened up, he expressed that he had fallen in love and was exceedingly shy and nervous about approaching this girl of his affections.  Initially I encouraged him to take the risk of sharing his feelings with her or else he would live day by day fretting and wondering if she shared his feelings. Then he dropped the bomb: the girl of his dreams was a member of our youth group, but most shocking to me, she was white!  Here was Zears, ready to cross the racial divide, and me, totally unprepared to deal with this and shocked that Z would even consider such a “no-no”. I stammered my response which stated, in effect, that this was not a good idea, that it might cause a deep rift in the youth group, and other specious racist garbage that I can’t remember.  Especially sad for me to this day is that I suspect that his sharing said feelings with me was not a test but rather a sharing with a friend he had come to trust. My unacknowledged racism had betrayed him.
 
Though I came to abandon this particular racist barrier within the two years following, it took me about a decade longer to realize that my achieved dreams had been assisted by the social privileges of being a white, European, Protestant male (what I call a WASP-M).  After Dr. King’s death, the ensuing radicalism, and the decades upon which my liberationist model of the Gospel continued to grow and develop, I was determined to approach Z at our next high school reunion and beg his forgiveness for my earlier betrayals. I had seen him only once since high school at our twenty-fifth reunion, where I met his Japanese wife and got caught up on his achievements which were many—including sojourns in various countries as a production and engineering manager; learning fluent Japanese, German, and Spanish; and serving as a senior quality control engineer for a handful of major high-tech companies.  At that reunion it became clear to me that my brilliant friend, against a ton of odds, had reached the pinnacle of success in the so-called American dream. He had not only outdone my achievements, but I knew that he had done so in the midst of a racist society perpetrating all kinds of heinous structural evil. Since we did not have the time for a private conversation at that time, we promised to plan such a time at our next reunion.

Sadly, it was not to be.  By the time of our next reunion I found out that Zears had died from health complications two years earlier.  Although deeply saddened by this lost opportunity I did not pursue the matter until 2012 when I began to write my memoirs in earnest, whereupon suddenly I realized that I needed to pick up on the unfinished business of Z and me.  So I turned to the internet to find what information I could about his life, especially that final decade. I discovered that he had abandoned his establishment “creds” to take on the racist and colonial system that treated people of color, Hispanics, and especially those of African origin as disposables (“throw-aways,” as he said).  He criss-crossed the globe, demonstrating how the AIDS virus was used to pursue a de facto genocidal policy, especially against Black Africans.  Even the final years of his life did not deter his zeal.  Despite being on dialysis he continued to write, lecture, and teach in this crusade for racial justice.  
So overwhelmed by his death, his commitment to global justice, and my deep regret of not being able to apologize and share together about our respective journeys I decided only one option remained. I would visit his gravesite and there lay a flower, talk across life’s divide to Z, and there in the quiet ask his forgiveness.  

Even this proved difficult.  In attempting to find out where he was buried I found that the church had moved to a neighboring community and that his controversial last decade made my few local black contacts understandably hesitant to help me, a white guy, who popped out of nowhere.  Finally, with the help of a fellow black graduate from our class of 1959, I found the location of his grave. 

Having managed that, my sister Judy and I went to the cemetery and even there ran into difficulty finding the grave site.  Finally, through an examination of the cemetery’s detailed records we were able to find the actual grave where both Zears and his father were buried.  My first reaction to the sight was fury—no tombstone, just merely two metal plaques in a clearly unkempt piece of ground. Then, after my rage quelled enough, tears poured out and I shared my shame with Z, begged his forgiveness, laid a flower by his tiny plaque, and tried to assure him that I would honor his name loudly wherever and whenever I could.  

Though my health issues make visits to the United States potentially costly should I need immediate care, I plan to attend my 60th high school reunion and publicly honor Z’s cause to the point of raising money to erect a tombstone which honors his legacy.  Before my jaunt back to our common hometown I will be trying mightily to locate his writings, visiting the congregation out of which he was buried and, there, attempting to resurrect his legacy.  I cannot predict how this will all turn out, but at the very least I will be taking this restorative pilgrimage as far as I can this side of glory. And, beyond the decay of our frail flesh, my hope is biblically simple: that we will meet face to face at the sound of the last trumpet for that embrace of apology and forgiveness between Z and me.    

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Born in a Pennsylvania steel town near Pittsburgh, Oscar Cole-Arnal felt called to the Lutheran ministry at age 17.  Ordained in 1966, he served a township congregation on the Ohio River where he became radicalized by the martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr.  Plunged into faith-based militancy by the Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War actions, and union struggles (Black Construction Coalition, local hospital organizing #1199 (first arrest) and local actions with Cesar Chavez United Farm Workers, he felt drawn to join the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).  After earning a doctorate in Modern European History (1974) he took a position as a professor of Church History at the Waterloo, Ontario Lutheran Seminary until his retirement (2006).  Author of five books, including a Canadian liberation theology, he sustained his activism through protests, running for political office, marches, occupying offices and in retirement continues to militate with the local Alliance Against Poverty (AAP) which he helped found in 2008. ​

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