Hang In There Brother : Edward Victor
Hill
I drove to the edge of Watts, the black sector of Los Angeles that erupted during the civil rights disturbances of the 1960s. Arriving at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, I was soon escorted into the downstairs office of the pastor, the Reverend Edward Victor Hill.
Hill was on the phone coordinating a parade his church was sponsoring that Saturday. There were going to be at least 150 entries.
"Your participation and presence is a must. No one can fail," commanded the hulking, affable Negro pastor who is known the world over for his persuasive preaching and his conservative politics.
As I waited, I studied Hill's study. Books, papers, boxes, and magazines were piled and strewn everywhere. Only the chair I was sitting on and the one occupied by
Page 53
Hill's imposing frame were clear of clutter.
"This is being done as a standup for Jesus," Hill was saying on the phone to someone who apparently needed a little coaxing to become a wholehearted supported of the parade. "So let's stand up for Jesus!"
HANG IN THERE, BABY
Now my eyes fell on a poster on the corner wall. It was a cat, chinning himself on a bar. Underneath, it said: "Hang in there, Baby!"
That, I thought, was a good summary of E.V. Hill's struggle in life: the personal pilgrimage of a black man in twentieth-century America; a boy born and reared in southern Texas in poverty; a young student, assisted by a scholarship, gaining an education in a world where separate, though not quite equal, opportunities existed; a man, called to preach the Gospel, reconciling the two worlds, black and white, into one world which must become the Kingdom of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And because of Him, Hill has hung in there.
Hill hung up the phone and smiled. He knew I had been scrutinizing his office.
"My staff is embarrassed about this place," he said. "But I know what I'm doing. I just say, 'Come on in if you can get in!' "
Hill's easygoing manner immediately set me at ease. We chatted for a few moments about the fact that he often wears overalls to the church and likes to farm on his small place in the country.
"I like jokes and I love people," added Hill. That was already obvious.
And despite the apparent nearly total disarray and disorganization of his office, I found E. V. Hill to be one of the most organized persons I interviewed for this book.
When I asked him about the crises of his life, he me-
Page 54
thodically and chronologically checked off twelve peaks and valleys:
HIS PEAKS AND VALLEYS
(1) childhood; (2) entrance into college; (3) call to the ministry; (4) becoming president of the National Baptist Youth Convention; (5) his first full-time church; (6) involvement in civil rights and politics, (7) leaving Houston for California; (8) becoming pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church, Los Angeles; (9) conflict with the Los Angeles community — a great struggle, (10) "antiblackism," which he later defined; (11) being a conservative Republican — and Negro; and, (12) relationships with the white community.
Conflict over race has been a major thread running through much of Hill's career. But he is upbeat, not bitter, about it.
"I am still an advocator of developing a strong racial group of people," Hill has written in the Baptist Student magazine (January, 1968). "But this is no longer done to beat someone or to rule over someone. This is because I now want to lead the Negro people to the many opportunities and the great fellowship of the third world — the Christian world. I am still an avowed opponent of discrimination and segregation and despise those who try to justify its continuance, even with the Bible. But I now look upon them with pity, sympathy, and anxiousness to impart to them or to see that they receive the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ."
Except for the grace of God, Hill might have turned out to be an angry black militant.
EARLY YEARS
Born in 1933 in Columbus, Texas, to parents who separated when he was one year old, Hill was reared by his
Page 55
mother until he was age four. She made do on twelve dollars a week without welfare payments. By the time he was eleven, Edward moved to the country with the Langram family, where he lived in a two-room log cabin but enjoyed fresh milk and peanuts. Before he had graduated from the local four-teacher school in the Negro community of Sweet Home, Hill had learned how to earn his keep through hard work for Momma Langram and others. He stoked stoves, milked cows, picked cotton, harvested peanuts, processed molasses, and killed hogs.
"How did we make it?" Hill asked rhetorically. "I look back with fear and yet a great deal of rejoicing. The people feared God and we made it."
During his childhood, Hill was very active in church activities. He says he was "born again" when he was eleven. At the same time, however, he admits having "great problems with segregation . . . I doubted that white people were saved."
Because he was barred from showing his champion hogs in livestock fairs and shows against hogs entered by whites, Hill began to desire more than the black world could offer him. He rebelled at the idea that there had to be separate black and white worlds, on the excuse that blacks were on a lower level because of disease and lack of education.
"It would not have been hard for me to have become a follower of Black Muslim Elijah Mohammed," Hill confided during our interview, "or to call white people 'blue-eyed devils.' Who but lost people would have perpetrated what was put on us Negro people?"
A resolution of that crisis and the introduction of several new ones happened in 1951 when Hill, with a total of five dollars, arrived as a freshman at Prairie View College, the Negro part of the Texas A & M University system at that time.
When he learned he needed eighty dollars to enroll,
Page 56
"faith was still strong, but doubt was speaking," Hill confessed. Fortunately, he soon discovered a Jesse Jones scholarship for exceptional achievement as a high-school student would pay all his expenses for four years.
The first semester, however, ended with two great calamities: he lost the scholarship and his high-school sweetheart. There was good news, too, though. Hill said yes to God's call to become a preacher.
Twice before he had felt called of the Lord to preach; once at the time of his conversion, and again the Sunday night he received his high-school diploma. Each time, Hill had used the excuse of his need for education to put off the Lord.
If God would see to it that he was accepted into college, then he would agree to be a preacher, Hill had said. But now that he had a four-year scholarship, Hill felt he could inform the Almighty he wouldn't be a minister after all.
"GOD DROPPED ME"
"God dropped me like a hot potato!" Hill chuckled heartily. "In six weeks the bottom dropped out on me."
During that time, as a beginning freshman, Edward confessed he drank, stole, and saw his grades go down the tubes.
"I cried out to God and He heard me and picked me up and I did start preaching," Hill continued. "Negro preachers took me on as their project and as their son and I drew large crowds as a boy preacher."
He went on to preach at revivals and in country and storefront churches. For four years Hill was national president of the National Baptist Youth Convention.
Because of his involvement with the Baptist Student Union, Edward met a man used by God to change Hill's whole attitude towards association with white Christians.
Hill and another Negro youth were selected to go with three white students from Texas A & M to a national BSU
Page 57
convention. The man responsible for driving the students there was Dr. W. F. Howard, then director of student work for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
"For the first time in my life I became acquainted with a white man who was Christian enough to take a stand and to stand with a black man who was a Christian," Hill recalled nearly twenty-five years later.
"While on the trip and at the meeting, I discovered that within this Christian world were some blacks and some whites who had been regenerated to a point that the color of a man's skin really made no difference. I also discovered there were whites who were constantly in their local churches working to rid themselves and their communities of prejudice and discrimination. There was no beating of drums; they were not seen in the headlines, but they were sincere."
With Hill's change of heart and his decision to preach, his heart felt a blow of a different kind: his high-school girl friend dumped him.
"I know what it means to have a broken heart," Hill said with a touch of nostalgia. Not until after he had completed college did God fully bind up that wound. Hill married Jane Coruthers, a graduate nurse at Texas Southern University. They have two children, Norva Rose, who attended Westmont college in Santa Barbara, and Edward V. Hill, Jr., a student in a Christian elementary school in Los Angeles.
FIRST PASTORATE
Although he was ordained a Baptist minister in late December of 1954, Hill's first full-time pastorate began in 1955 when he was called to Mount Corinth Missionary Baptist Church in Houston. Edward was twenty, single, and still in college — and still in debt.
A professional church of 216 members, Mount Corinth's power structure was totally against him, Hill
Page 58
remembers. The church officers considered him a mere inexperienced boy with no college degree. For the first six weeks of Hill's pastorate, many protested by giving very little money in the offering. But, smiled Hill, he was able to raise more funds in those six weeks than had ever before been raised in the history of the church.
Although his running battle with the church pillars continued for three years, "by far the bulk of the membership was with me," Hill recalls. And during the remaining three years he served Mount Corinth, Hill assembled the largest young people's group of any church in Texas.
During those years of the late 1950s, Hill became deeply involved in the nascent civil rights movement. He won the primary man to do so. He was a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and one of seven original board members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the latter capacity he nominated the late Dr. Martin Luther King for president of the SCLC.
Hill was active in the planning and executing of integration of Houston schools, buses, and lunch counters. This aroused antagonism, however, and Hill says constant threats were made on his life and house. Once, acid was thrown on his car. He required bodyguards for a six-month period.
Just as he was overcoming these trials and was achieving increasing recognition in his church and community, Hill suddenly felt the Lord was telling him to pull up stakes and move to Southern California.
A MAJOR CRISIS
This, in itself, was one of the twelve major crises in his life, Hill said. "It was difficult leaving the South. It was not an easy decision. I had won the battles. I wanted to stay and enjoy some of the fruits. Many of the young
Page 59
people in the church felt hurt about my going. They didn't understand. And I thought there would be nothing to do out in California. I thought Los Angeles was the land of the 'good times.' "
Little did Hill know he would have mountains of problems in LA. Soon there would be conflict with the community and difficulties to overcome at the church. Actually there was a repetition of the obstacles he had faced in Houston six years later.
Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church had been embroiled in a court battle for five years. Creditors were in foreclosure proceedings when Hill arrived on the scene. Some $151,000 in lawsuits had been filed against the church. Though the sanctuary could seat 1,100 persons, there only 585 members. An average Sunday attendance was 300. Mount Zion was — and is — located in a transient community on the edge of the Watts ghetto. The church has no wealthy members, according to Hill.
Basically, he believes, the conflict stems from his not being an understood person.
"I'm never given credit for 'meaning well,' " he explained. "My critics say I'm always stubborn, egotistical, overambitious, cutting other people's throats, impatient, pushing too fast."
This, coupled with what militant blacks in the community call Hill's Uncle Tomism, have made some struggles difficult.
"The younger ones don't feel at home with me; the older ones suspect me," sized up Hill. "That is both hurting and frustrating," he added. "Now I'm fighting to keep away from the arrogance of not caring."
Success can make a person lonely, Hill feels. If this is so, he has reason to feel that he has few close friends; however, his endeavors have flourished despite opposition.
His church has grown to 1,800 members with an operating budget of $300,000 and a total program budget of
Page 60
$700,000. He is president of the California State Baptist Convention. He has preached at a host of major conventions and city-wide revivals, including the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Baptist World Alliance in Stockholm. And he has preached at services in the White House East Room when Richard Nixon was president.
CONTINUING CONFLICTS
Yet, even with all these successes, Hill speaks of the continuing conflict of his own race doubting his sincerity as it relates to their own welfare.
Hill candidly admits he doesn't trust white liberals or believe in the sincerity of the Democratic party. He is convinced that Democratic social programs don't get people off welfare.
To make matters worse from the liberals' point of view, Hill makes no bones about supporting the police. And he fears there is a communist world takeover plot and plan.
"I actually believe in it," he said, wanting me to know he wasn't being facetious.
The crowning blow to the liberal and militant elements of his race is that Hill rebels against blackism.
Blackism, he explained, means "to make an almost idolatrous emphasis on color; to get one's rights by any means necessary, to replace the present establishment power with our black power, and in reality perpetuate the same system of injustices and vengeance."
"I'm not for blackism, I'm for all colors," Hill says. "We didn't have to become black. We were winning offices in politics, colleges, corporations and so forth. As Negroes we were making more speed than we were able to adjust to. Then all of a sudden we turned black."
This, Hill feels, was counterproductive for the advancement of Negro people because it shifted the sympathy of the middle-of-the-road white man, who was agreeable to these advances, to the conservative side, be-
Page 61
cause of the raw militancy and stridence of persons like Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis.
BRANDED UNCLE TOM
When Hill articulated this philosophy, he was immediately branded an Uncle Tom by many blacks. He says he got more death threats in integrated LA than he did in Ku Klux Texas.
It hurt Hill to be accused by his own people of selling them out and not being concerned. Some young people in the community abandoned him. And some members of his church apologized to their friends about belonging to Mount Zion.
But Hill kept hammering away, though he says he saw some awful things happen.
The tide turned, he feels, about 1970 when he says he had a vision. The Lord said to him, "Edward, you've stood the test!"
Since then, Hill has devoted major emphasis on building a core team of 1,300 committed church members. Thousands of persons have come down the aisle of Mount Zion Church to confess Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord — and to walk back into the world in service to Him.
E. V. Hill is known as a strict disciplinarian. For example, women cannot wear slacks or pants in his church. He does not preach an easy Gospel with a quick way to heaven.
Bill Seitz, a white student from Wheaton College, who worked with Hill on the staff in the summer of 1977, put it this way: "They know he's pro-America, propolice, prolaw-and-order. And yet they keep coming — every age, every profession, every color."
OVERCOMING BY SPIRITUAL STRENGTH
Where, I asked Hill, do you find the spiritual strength for overcoming, for getting the victory, in all of this?
Page 62
In typical fashion, pastor Hill reeled off a list of points, enumerating each one as he went along:
1. I believe God. Note there is no preposition in. There is a distinction.
2. I do not believe in having a religion which you turn to in a crisis. I've had the experience of seeing God already there with the answer before the crisis. There's never been a time in all my crises where I have not had, in that very hour, directions as to what God wanted. I've never had to call an emergency session.
To prepare spiritual resources for crises, Hill has studied the Bible intensely. He had sifted the Psalms, picking out verses of praise, prayer, and testimony. For many years Psalms 51 and 71 have been special reservoirs of trust for him.
"When you feel life has mistreated you, praise the Lord with Psalms," he said. "If you have the faith, God has the power."
Hill has also found help going through the Epistles and copying out all the instructions to believers, as well as in studying the composite Gospel narratives of Jesus' life.
3. I have always expected to suffer. I have expected it to be rough and tough. That has freed me from illusions of grandeur. I believe I'm the hardest critic E. V. Hill has, so most of the time I seldom blame anyone else.
4. I have not expected a whole lot. Yet God has blessed me exceedingly abundantly above anything I've dreamed. My attitude is, "I don't need to have that." I have been surprised and grateful when it has come. I haven't had personal big ambitions.
Hill's income in 1977 was about thirty thousand dollars, and he was buying a new house. He and Jane began
Page 63
planning for that twenty years before, he said. Most of the furniture in their living and dining rooms and in Hill's office came out of junk yards and auctions, Hill laughed, twirling his glasses. I knew he wasn't kidding — about the church office, at least.
Hill added a word of practical advice on financial matters: "A man on one hundred dollars a week shouldn't try for Rolls Royce. My ups and downs financially and emotionally generally have centered on miscalculations. I go from zero up to as far as the Lord takes me; many people start with a hundred and then fall down."
5. I have tried to make sure what I have done is related to the ministry to which I've been called.
E. V. Hill is persuaded that what has been sound guidance from the Lord for him will also work for others. In closing our two-hour interview, he passed on three recommendations:
Believe God (not in God).
Prepare to suffer. He emphasized that people today crumble at the least little thing: "Talk about carrying a cross, it's carrying a feather that's killing them!"
Relax and live a simple life.
His closing recommendation seemed to be at odds with what he said next:
"Keep on moving, don't ever stop, don't ever stop. Maybe reduce speed, but plow right on, plow right on, don't stop."
Perhaps this contrasts to "relax and live a simple life" less than it first appears. Because E. V. Hill, like the cat on his poster, has hung in there, tough but relishing every minute.
