Learning how to change, rather than accept, official systems was not part of Raines’s first education. In fact, he had never thought about that concept—until 1961 as a Freedom Rider. It was foreign to him. His motivation for going to the South had been to go help those poor people, but he discovered there was much more to it than that. It was a matter of “being invited into danger” in order to change powerful unjust systems. “I was exposed immediately to the power of a resisting community, people who were committed to being nonviolent, despite being treated very violently.…They were willing to expose themselves to great danger. They invited me into that danger with them while also protecting me from danger—the man who put his farm up, for instance. It was a very powerful experience for me.…I wandered in and was grasped by the movement.”
This “second education,” taught in the crucible of those summers in the South, led, Raines said, to a major shift in “my whole understanding of the law.…Judges had always been friends of the family, and we knew policemen were there to protect us, and they did. Now I began to see another face of law and order: control over powerless people, such as the black majority in the South that couldn’t vote. I began to get a different sense of how power is used in society.…I saw the law used to inflict injustice upon many people.” Until then, he had no idea that black Americans experienced profound injustice. Repeatedly, on each trip south, he saw firsthand evidence that law enforcement agencies—local, state, and federal—failed to protect African Americans, not only from having their basic rights withheld, but also from violent attacks.
Eventually, he defined his second education as an education “in how America looks from below and how it is lived from below.” That was the reverse of his first education, which he now saw as “an education that did not want you to ever experience America from below except as a situation where you might go and help once in a while.”
Raines’s new education, he said, “made me look, from then on, at the government in a different way.” He looked at the government more carefully. He inspected power—the power of individuals and the power of institutions—for whether it was causing harm. “Without that experience, without what black people taught me about resistance,” says Raines, “I would have been a very different person ten years later. I would have been a different kind of teacher, a different kind of ethicist, a different kind of theologian.” Without that experience, the Raineses both agree, it is unlikely they would have driven to Media on that March evening in 1971.
Interestingly, the two primary influences that convinced the Raineses that sometimes it is necessary to resist government injustice, even if great risk is involved, were the same influences that convinced the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most revered resistance figures in modern history, to join the German resistance to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer and Raines both worked closely with Union Seminary professor Reinhold Niebuhr and learned from his thinking—Bonhoeffer in 1930, John Raines in the early 1960s. Both Bonhoeffer and Raines also counted their firsthand experience with African Americans as a powerful influence on their becoming willing to resist official power.
When Bonhoeffer arrived at Union Seminary in 1930 for a year of study, he had a firm conviction that churches, in Germany and in the United States, should not speak out on public issues. He thought Christians should accept the conditions of the world and not try to change them. In their ongoing friendly debate, Niebuhr insisted that churches as institutions and individual Christians had a responsibility to be involved in social action. Earlier, as a young minister in Detroit, Niebuhr had spoken against the poor housing conditions of black people and the working conditions of autoworkers. After coming to Union in 1928, he spoke out on nearly every major issue, from support for the United States entering World War II to opposition to dropping bombs on Japan to opposition to the war in Vietnam. Another theologian, the late Robert McAfee Brown, wrote in 1986 that Niebuhr was “the troubler of our national conscience.” It would be learned years after the Media burglary that Niebuhr’s activism had earned him a hefty FBI file.
By the time Bonhoeffer returned to Germany from New York, he had rejected his earlier belief that Christians should be disengaged and had fully embraced Niebuhr’s belief that Christians should actively oppose injustice. As the Third Reich extended its grip on Germany, Bonhoeffer watched its control permeate most institutions, including the large state church, the Lutheran Church. Conforming to Hitler’s condemnation of Jews, the church forbade study of the Old Testament and forbade the belief that Jesus was a Jew. As Hitler’s willing handmaiden, the church undoubtedly contributed significantly to many Germans being silent as the Holocaust took place.
Bonhoeffer attributed much of the evolution in his thinking not only to Niebuhr but also to insights he gained from becoming immersed in Harlem clubs and a Harlem church. The connections between religion and injustice, especially racial injustice, often were at the center of discussions he had with Franklin Fisher, a black seminarian from Alabama who became his close friend. This subject was new to Bonhoeffer. So were the sounds of jazz and Negro spirituals, music that was exciting to the ears of this German classical pianist and theologian. The two of them visited Harlem clubs and the church that would become Bonhoeffer’s home in New York, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., the father of the future member of Congress, was then the pastor.
From members of the congregation, who warmly welcomed Bonhoeffer, he learned for the first time the legacy of American slavery and about African Americans’ ongoing struggle for freedom. He later wrote that his hatred of anti-Semitism and his courage to resist the Nazis came from lessons he learned from African Americans who befriended him in Harlem. Like Raines, Bonhoeffer received an unexpected second education from black Americans in how to how to fight injustice with courage and strength.
After he returned to Germany and later joined the resistance to Hitler, Bonhoeffer described the impact of his Harlem experiences on his commitment to resistance very much the way John Raines described the impact of his experiences in the South. Bonhoeffer wrote, “We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”
When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1931, he took with him several 78 rpm recordings of jazz and Negro spirituals. As the juggernaut of Nazism tightened, he played, again and again, that music he first heard and came to love in Harlem. At Finkenwalde—a seminary in exile that the Gestapo closed but that Bonhoeffer continued to operate in the underground—during the darkest times he played those records. He, his students, and other fellow resisters closed windows and doors, gathered close to a Victrola, and listened surreptitiously to the deep and powerful voice of Paul Robeson singing, “Go down. Go down, Moses! Way down in Egypt’s land. Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go!” The Harlem days that had been so satisfying—the music and memories of the black people who shared with him their personal stories and the history of their people—all became, during the increasingly brutal years of the Third Reich, a sustaining balm, even a source of some small hope when hope was nearly dead in Germany.
Drawing strength from his New York memories of conversations with Niebuhr and with black people in Harlem, when Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazis, he secretly wrote some of the most eloquent literature ever written about resistance to government authority. He was hanged on April 9, 1945, at Flossenbürg, a German concentration camp where the Nazis killed 73,000 people, including Bonhoeffer, shortly before the camp was liberated by the Allies on April 23, 1945.
Both Raines and Bonhoeffer, after they studied with Niebuhr at the seminary, lived the essence of Niebuhr’s central teaching: Don’t accept limits—push limits.
BONNIE RAINES’S AWAKENING to the potentially powerful impact of nonviolent resistance was fueled at first primarily by John’s experiences. Lat
er, her own experiences led to her commitment to resistance. She supported and admired what he did. At the same time, her reality was quite different from his. In the South and at the seminary, John Raines met men, including other young fathers, who were rethinking their values and considering whether they would be willing in the future to risk their freedom in order to oppose injustice. The men’s shared experiences reinforced their evolving thinking. When John Raines rejected the expectations many people had of him—for instance, the assumption that he would accept a comfortable place in the church establishment—other avenues, including life as an academic, were considered acceptable for him.
Like other men who changed as he had, his basic judgments about himself and his relation to his family were not questioned. That was not the case for Bonnie Raines. So strong were the expectations of what a woman should be that she felt she dare not speak to many people about the new and different life she hoped to have. The early 1960s was still a time when hardly anyone expected women to have choices about the direction of their lives. She felt she had to keep her dreams hidden and share them only with her husband.
She loved being a mother, but she also wanted to be able to be a serious activist. Sometimes she wondered how her dreams had become so different from what she assumed were the dreams of most women her age. Part of the answer could be found in a childhood that was peppered with experiences that encouraged her to think beyond the usual expectations of what a woman should be. Her parents, unlike many parents of girls in mid-1950s America, had not wrapped her in a cocoon and isolated her from the world. They had encouraged her to read books, to read the news, to become an informed and questioning person. At the church her family attended in Grand Rapids, the Fountain Street Church, a nondenominational liberal congregation, she started to develop an appreciation for dissent. When a local group invited Eleanor Roosevelt to speak, the announcement sparked a controversy that closed most doors in the city to her. During the subsequent debate, many hateful letters opposing her speaking in Grand Rapids were published in the local newspaper. Though Bonnie Muir was only fifteen at the time, she recalls being upset by the effort to silence Mrs. Roosevelt. In the end, the only place in town where she was welcome to speak was the Fountain Street Church. Bonnie went with her parents to hear Mrs. Roosevelt and sat near the front of the church so she could see this woman who had been the subject of so much controversy. She remembers being impressed by her comments, especially ones about peace and justice.
Two books Bonnie read shortly after hearing Mrs. Roosevelt speak encouraged her interest in justice and equality. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath introduced her to the realization that some powerless people were not protected by the government. Reading Anne Frank’s diary had the biggest impact on her then. She read it when she was about the age Anne was when she wrote the book. From it, Bonnie first learned about the tragic consequences of ethnic hatred. She remembers looking at photos of Anne and thinking that, with their dark hair and dark eyes, they looked a little like each other. Starting then, she became an avid reader, particularly of history, with a keen interest in resistance, including the important role of resistance in freeing slaves. She admired the French people who stood up to the Nazis during World War II.
After she and John married in 1962 and moved to New York, she recalls, she could almost feel her mind opening. Her ideals had been planted in Grand Rapids, but they were richly nourished to maturity in that small student apartment in Morningside Heights. In that loving environment, where John and Bonnie frequently discussed the importance of the search for justice, she challenged herself to think about how she would lead a life that mattered.
Just as John’s experience in the South had informed him about the depth of inequality that existed in the United States, Bonnie’s experiences as a young teacher in East Harlem provided her with similar lessons. That was her first close exposure to profound inequality. In one class she taught there were forty-four children, most of whom could not speak English. She continued to believe a dedicated teacher could make the difference students needed, but she realized the public school system put up barriers to successful teaching. Each new experience—as a student, as a new teacher in city schools, as a politically aware person—strengthened her resolve to become an activist. She was confronted repeatedly with evidence of injustice and inequality that made her react: “This just can’t go on. People have to stand up. I was angry at the abuse of power—in the South, in the education system, in the war policies.”
She thought carefully about how to weave together diverse roles—how to be a student, a new teacher, a new mother, and a committed political activist. Very happy personally, she found she was otherwise angry and idealistic at the same time, two qualities that continued to be demanding and constructive forces throughout a life that has been dedicated to improving the lives of children.
In the absence of choices, she concluded she would have to create them in order to invent the life she wanted. She discovered that doing so often was difficult and lonely. She was acutely aware in those early-1960s days of the warning that was repeatedly announced, including in her own head: “Women don’t do that.” She decided that before she could commit herself to taking part in acts of resistance to fight injustice, she needed to establish in her own life the foundation that would make it possible for her to be the fully engaged woman she was determined to become—personally, professionally, and politically. That meant going “against my socialization.”
“My first act of resistance,” Bonnie recalls, “was to pull it all together before there was a women’s movement, a feminist movement.” She revolted with a determination to come out on the other side “sure that I didn’t have to feel there was something wrong with me. I was stubborn, and I decided at some point in the early ’60s, I was going to advance this life.”
As part of that effort, she concluded she “could not just be involved in liberating myself and making sure that my daughters were going to have more opportunity and choice.” She wanted to have the courage to take risks “for something larger than just my own self-actualization and my daughters’ self-actualization.”
IN THOSE EARLY YEARS of their marriage in New York, the Raineses talked with each other often about how both of them could be good parents and also engage in resistance together. Contemplating how to be that kind of couple was no less difficult—perhaps even more so—than figuring out how Bonnie could be the kind of woman she wanted to be. Their goal of dual activism posed profound practical and moral questions. Most of the people they met in movements, first in civil rights and later in the antiwar movement, were single. “They were living an ascetic lifestyle and feeling free to take risks. That was so different from our situation,” she said. “We talked a lot about the tendency when you marry and have children to feel a certain level of comfort and sense that you will work your way through the rest of your life like that,” in a protective family shell. They were concerned about the fact that soon after people had children it was assumed they should exit from the parts of civic life that needed the most commitment. This meant that as far as activism was concerned, a sizable part of the population was essentially on hold until they became middle-aged or older, if not forever.
The absence of engagement by parents during the child-rearing years, they thought, had a heavy impact on society. They concluded, said Bonnie Raines, that “each generation seems to have its own version of tyranny and needs to know how to resist it. We thought that just because we had children didn’t mean that we were exempt from the responsibility of our generation to address these things.…There was a real temptation to let other people, say, religious people, take care of those things. It was a temptation to say, ‘Let them carry the banner for the rest of us. We’ll applaud them and bail them out of jail when they are arrested, but we’ll not engage in the same activities.’ We thought about that a lot. We thought it would be a cop-out.”
It was then, in those New York years, that the Raineses made the promise t
o each other that made it possible for them to say yes to William Davidon’s December 1970 question about burglarizing an FBI office. After much reflection in that New York apartment nearly a decade before his question, they promised each other that when injustice reached extreme levels, they hoped both of them, not just John, would be willing to risk their freedom to fight injustice. It was extremely difficult to make this promise, for their children were at the center of their lives. But so was their love of justice and their belief that all citizens should take responsibility for opposing injustice in times of crisis. They forced themselves to face a painful challenge that few people contemplated—joint resistance.
After John Raines completed his doctoral studies at Union Seminary in 1966, the Raineses moved to Philadelphia, where he became a tenure-track professor in the new Department of Religion at Temple University, where he still teaches part-time after retiring in December 2011. It was an exciting academic environment that suited him well, unique in the diversity of its faculty and courses: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and, a few years after he arrived, Muslim studies. Within little more than a year after he started teaching at Temple, Raines created one of the first courses offered in the United States on the Holocaust. Later he would be instrumental in the department’s adding the study of Islam. It became a favorite place for Muslim graduate students from predominantly Muslim countries to study comparative religions and then encourage universities in their home countries to offer comparative religion studies instead of only the study of Islam.
Soon after they moved to Philadelphia, the Raineses were drawn to the large antiwar community there. Before long their home in the Germantown section of the city was a gathering place for antiwar activists who, over casual dinners prepared by Bonnie, discussed how to end the war in Vietnam. Bonnie’s role as earth mother expanded. Often nearly everyone else talked strategy while she cooked big meals for them. She loved this environment, but sometimes a depressing thought gnawed at the edges of her soul: “You know you really aren’t as good as they are.”
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