In July, after assuming his duties as executive director of the city`s Commission on Human Relations, Rev. B. Herbert Martin shaved off his mustache. It was, of course, a symbolic act, a way of proclaiming a fresh start, he says, ”a clean beginning.” Subconsciously, it may also have been a sign of distress, an effort to hide, to fashion a new identity, to separate himself from the person who for weeks had been attacked by the press and religious and civic leaders.
He had made himself a target during the political firestorm caused by revelations about anti-Semitic and anti-Christian speeches by Steve Cokely, an aide to Mayor Eugene Sawyer.
In tape-recorded ”lectures” at the headquarters of Rev. Louis Farrakhan`s Nation of Islam, Cokely had described the Christian cross as a
”symbol of white supremacy” and accused Jews of secretly plotting to establish a world government that would oppress blacks. Further, he said, white doctors, ”especially Jewish ones,” were injecting ”AIDS into blacks.”
The Tribune broke the story on May 1, and in his infamous ”ring-of-truth” interview with Tribune reporter Bruce Dold three days later, Rev. Martin in effect poured gasoline, unwittingly and innocently he insists, on the flames.
His views were reported in an article on the reaction to Sawyer`s indecision about what to do with Cokely, and they would surface later in other newspapers and magazines across the country.
The article stated that Martin opposed firing Cokely ”because there is a `ring of truth` to his remarks about a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”
Although Cokely`s words ”may seem inflammatory,” the article continued,
”Rev. Martin said, `Sometimes the truth is inflammatory. . . . There is a growing opinion among younger blacks, grass-root black people, that Jews are running things, that Jews are unfair, unloving. . . .` ”
A stunned Jewish community reacted in anger, as did many other Chicagoans. In one of several editorials on the matter, The Tribune declared: ”To keep from making the human relations board a mockery, Mayor Sawyer . . . must withdraw his nomination of Rev. Martin as chairman. It`s hard to imagine a worse perversion of the agency`s intent than to give the job to someone who just can`t decide whether Jews are conspiring to run the world.” Sawyer eventually would fire Cokely and install Martin in the human relations post without Martin`s having to appear before a City Council committee eager to grill him about his statements and perhaps to block his appointment.
Finally now, Martin says, the furor has subsided, and he has begun to repair the damage. Even the mustache is back, his children having demanded he grow another one.
Seated in his 6th-floor office in the Kraft Building, 500 N. Peshtigo Ct., now owned by the city, B. Herbert Martin says he welcomes a chance to talk about what happened, ”to clarify my position on these very emotional issues,” to explain who he is and what he believes.
Husky and handsome, he stands 6 feet tall and weighs 220 pounds. He will be 46 in December. He has five children, ages 5 to 22, from two marriages.
He leans forward and looks a visitor in the eye to make a point, enunciating as he was taught in his youth in Mississippi:
”It was instilled in me when I was growing up that all people are one. We were trained in Christian principles and taught that hate only makes hatred.”
In retrospect, he says, his remarks about Cokely were insensitive and ill considered. Sawyer, he says, had first told him that he hoped to ”redeem and rehabilitate” Cokely if possible, rather than to fire him. ”I said, `Okay, fine. I`ll support whatever decision you make.` ”
After Sawyer decided Cokely should leave voluntarily, Martin says he went to Cokely and asked him to resign.
When he was interviewed by The Tribune, he says, ”my focus was not on Steve Cokely. This is where I got misunderstood. Surely he should be denounced for saying the terrible things he did. But the main issue in my mind was that blacks and Jews have a serious problem of communication. If the Cokely issue did anything, it opened up possibilities for blacks and Jews to talk.”
He agrees that some people might regard the explanation of his remarks as disingenuous and interpret the vague, tentative official response to Cokely`s nonsense as political timidity.
He knew Cokely as an ”angry young man” and ”gadfly” who ”was on everybody`s case” but whom no one took seriously. ”He attacked Jesse
(Jackson) and Harold (Washington), too. He was mad at everybody. But I didn`t know he was making those lectures to the Muslims.”
Having survived, he is able to reflect. ”I`ve learned from this. I understand the hurt so many people felt. I have certainly grown in my view. It`s knocked the sleep out of a lot of us. I have more determination to speak out against anti-Semitic statements and any statements of hatred. I understand why we can`t ignore them.
”I took some unnecessary lashes, too, I think. The whole experience really knocked me for a loop. And then the constant rehashing of it, as if to really try to impugn my integrity.”
Some doubted his judgment. And some may see his presence in city government as a questionable mix of religion and politics. There are those who think that a clergyman should stay in the pulpit where he belongs and that he definitely should not attempt preaching and public service at the same time, a sort of a politico-ecclesiastic al version of double-dipping.
”It`s not unusual to find a black minister involved in politics,” he says. ”This is part of our tradition; the black church was both a secular and a sacred institution and a political center.”
He sees his work with the commission as an extension of his role as a clergyman, an opportunity, he says, to bring his religious beliefs about racial tolerance and conciliation to a congregation of 3 million people.
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He entered the civic arena in 1986 with impressive clout: He was Harold Washington`s pastor. They had met in 1975, when Washington, then 53, was a state representative and Martin, 20 years his junior, was a minister in the United Methodist Church.
A friendship had developed. After Washington became mayor, in 1983, they would regularly start the day on the phone. The routine was for the preacher to call the mayor at 6 a.m. and after a brief conversation to offer a prayer or read from Scriptures.
In 1979, feeling ”constricted by the structure” of the Methodist Church, Martin left the denomination to be executive director of the Chicago branch of the NAACP. But in 1981, he yearned to return to the ministry.
”I went to Harold and told him that I was thinking of going back into the church. `Wherever I go,` I said, `you need a pastor, and you need to be in church. You can`t give the impression that the only time you go is to make a campaign speech.”`
In late `81, Martin became pastor of the independent Progressive Community Church, 56 E. 48th St., in the shadow of the Robert Taylor Homes.
”There were 500 members on the rolls, but only about 40 came on Sundays,”
he says.
He accepted, he says, before asking what the pay was. ”It was $18,000. I was making $38,000 at the time.” Today, he says, there are more than 2,000 members, the church is full on Sundays and his salary has increased to $24,000.
In 1982 Martin brought Washington, then a U.S. congressman, into the church, and four years later Washington brought him into his administration, naming him to an unpaid position on the board of the Chicago Housing Authority. In early 1987, Washington made him chairman, replacing Renault Robinson, who had become a political liability.
Many Chicagoans probably were first aware of Rev. Martin when he delivered the eulogy at Washington`s televised funeral last Nov. 30, a stirring tribute to his friend and patron.
”We had talked on the phone the morning he died,” he says. ”Nothing in my life affected me like Harold`s death. It was so sudden and so unexpected. I didn`t have time to adjust.”
After Washington`s death, Martin became increasingly visible and controversial at the CHA. When Sawyer pressured board members to resign so he could insert his own people, he found another place for Martin.
At the human relations commission, he keeps the perks he had as CHA chairman-a car and driver, an office and secretary-and he gains a hefty salary increase, from $31,200 to $50,640 a year.
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He was born in Mound Bayou, Miss., population 3,000. ”My hometown is the largest all-black town in America,” he says. ”It was almost like a refuge from the hostility and racism of those days.”
His midwife put ”Bobby” on his birth certificate; his mother, Cassino, named him Herbert; as a child, he was called Hobby or Hub.
”I never knew my father,” he says. ”I never saw him. My mother was 19 when I was born, and he had left. When I moved to Chicago in 1967 to go to seminary, I learned he was living here, and I put out the word I was looking for him.
”One day, he came to my house. He met my wife and my children. I wasn`t home; my wife tried to get him to wait for me, but he wouldn`t. A year later I learned he`d died in St. Louis.”
When he was 5, his mother married Willie Martin, a sharecropper. Four generations lived in a ramshackle ”shotgun” house, a wood-frame affair with a hall down the middle. He had seven brothers and sisters.
”We were a little crowded. My five sisters slept in the room with my grandmother. My brothers and I slept in the room with my grandfather.” The extended family included his mother`s grandparents.
A moment from his childhood changed his life. ”All of us worked in the cotton fields until late November or early December, getting in the plantation owners` cotton. We had picked 50 bales, and my mother and father got up early in the morning to settle up with the plantation owner, to see how much we`d made.
”It was cold, we were hungry and barefooted, and we didn`t have any clothes or shoes for the winter. All us kids were gathered around the coal-oil stove in my sisters` room. When our parents came home, you could see the dejection in their faces.
”Big Mamma, my grandmother, went into the kitchen and started singing. I`ll always remember that. We knew. They didn`t have to tell us. But my daddy, Mr. Martin, said, `We came out in debt.` We`d worked so hard, and they said we owed them money. There was no crying, just sadness. My mother was very strong, very stoic. I remember making up my mind right then that I was going to high school and get enough education to get out of Mississippi and help my brothers and sisters get out.”
Because of that experience, his stepfather stopped sharecropping and became a brick mason and later a building contractor. ”He was a good man. He had a 3d-grade education, but he taught himself to read construction plans. He built many buildings in Mound Bayou. I mixed the mortar.”
Young Hubby also made good grades, was active in the church, an organizer of a local Boys Club, a member of the 4-H Club, a leader.
The community recognized his abilities. He obviously was someone who had the tools and the resolve to succeed. And so the teachers and the civic leaders nurtured him, pushed him, praised him.
His English teacher tutored him in poetry, made him read Shakespeare,
”Beowulf,” the ”Iliad” and the ”Odyssey.” He played Macbeth in the school play. A star orator, his first speech was on the Constitution.
But no matter how protected he felt in Mound Bayou, racism was impossible to avoid. ”A keen memory I have from that time is of Emmett Till,” he says. ”I was about the same age he was when it happened, and it terrified me.”
Till was a 14-year-old Chicagoan who in 1955 was visiting an uncle in Mississippi, when he was believed to have flirted with a white woman. He was beaten, shot to death and his body thrown into a river.
”The implication was that this is going to happen to all of you if you don`t stay in your place,” he says.
When he was 18, he became a victim. ”It was a summer night after choir practice. My best friend, Paul, asked me to walk part of the way home with him. He lived two miles out in the country, and so we started walking down this gravel road.
”Suddenly this pickup truck loaded with white men drove up. We knew it was trouble and started running, but they caught us. They had ax handles and clubs, and one of them said, `Niggers, we`re going to kill you.`
”They beat us and left us lying in a ditch. When I woke up, I was bleeding. I thought my jaw was broken. Paul was lifeless; he looked like he might be dead. I picked him up and put him on my shoulders, and I carried him a mile to his house. I put him on the porch, and his folks brought wet towels and he began to come around.”
The assault was not reported. ”The only police in the county were white, and it would have been dangerous to go to them.”
He doesn`t know why they were attacked. ”This was in the early `60s, when things were hot in Mississippi, and both of us were involved in the voter registration that was going on.
”But it could also be for the same kind of thing that killed Emmett Till, that fear of black sexuality. My friend was kicked in the groin and brutalized. It seemed to be an attempt to emasculate us. It left indelible scars. My friend and his family moved to Detroit a little later.
”I learned to suppress my feelings. If it hadn`t been for my religious training, I don`t think I would have survived. In the Bible you read things like `Cease from anger.`
”The beating made me deathly afraid of white women. When I was in graduate school, I was around a lot of white females. One day, this young woman said to me, `You treat me as if I don`t exist. You don`t deal with me like a human being.` It was true. In order to survive, I had made white women invisible.
”Some black men do the opposite. They go after the forbidden fruit. They want to defy the white male. But for me, I really had to work on relating to white women as people.”
After high school, he received a scholarship to Philander Smith College, a Methodist school in Little Rock, Ark. He worked as a gardener and butler for a member of the college`s board of trustees. ”He was a kind man, the first white person I had known who treated me well.”
