Oral History Interview with Reverend John Mendez

INTERVIEW WITH REVEREND JOHN MENDEZ

Interviewee: Reverend John Mendez

Interviewer: Erica Ragan

Date of Interview: 10.21.21

Location of Interview: Conducted remotely via Zoom

List of Acronyms: RM=Reverend Mendez, ER=Erica Ragan

INTERVIEWER:

How are you?

JOHN MENDEZ:

I'm doing good. I'm out here, in San Francisco, with the Apache and we're getting ready to have a major prayer service as it relates to the court hearing tomorrow at the 9th district federal court over their land rights as well as their right to sacred sites and the legitimacy and authenticity of their religion. So that's why you see the trees and everything behind me.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, thank you, I know you're really busy, so I appreciate you taking the time to meet.

JOHN MENDEZ:

It's my pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, lets make the most of our time then. I'll just jump right in. We have a couple of questions for you. My partner should pop in in just a moment, she's just going to monitor the audio and everything as we go through the interview. So, first of all, I would like to know a little bit about how you were first introduced to the fact that there are civil rights issues in your community and what made you want to get involved with advocacy and with protest.

JOHN MENDEZ:

It goes way back to when I was in elementary school. My mother made me join the NAACP in second grade. But there was a major incident that happened-- I was always an energetic student in school, I loved school, I loved competing, I was in the bright classes. In New York's system 1122 and 1131. When I got promoted from 31-- I went from 31 to 49 which was the most backwards class in the fourth grade. That was not only embarrassing and humiliating but it was shameful and literally, it was my first real encounter with racial injustice.

I remember being really frustrated all summer and I had enough ego strength to realize that I did not belong in that class, and I refused to go to that particular class. So, when school started in September I ran away. I refused to go to that class, and this went on for about two weeks. Finally, they negotiated with me if I stayed a week for the paperwork to clear they would put me in a more advanced fourth grade class, which they did. I was put in 43 but it was clear that the teacher in 43 did not want somebody coming from 49 into her elitist white class. So, I stayed in the hallway more than I stayed in the class.

I remember becoming so narcissistically enraged that I cursed her out. I mean, it was like my breaking point. I cursed her out with real adult curse words. I now feel like I'm on my way out of school -- getting kicked out of school -- when across the hall a very tall beautiful African American woman came over to where I was, picked me and said, "If nobody else will take you, I'll take you," and her class was 44. I stayed there for the rest of the school year and refused to do anything to upset or agitate her, that teacher. And she promoted me to 53. I was sort of back on track, but the damage had been done as far as it affecting my self-esteem, my sense of pride, and my ability as such. It really wrecked my world in terms of the universe. At that time, I'm thinking the world is fair, life is fair, but now I was really almost destroyed as a result of that.

Being a psychotherapist, I can put it in terms -- I wanted to gangbang at that point. Which, I did, got involved with the Egyptian Crowns at the time and it was out of character for me. I didn't like it but on the one hand it kept me from being beat up. But on the other hand, I can explain it now in terms of how it was a split off, so that I'm like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and both selves existed in this one body.

My way out of it was through some really important interventions that responded primarily to my self needs at that particular time. First, I was active in church, and I happened to hear Fred Shuttlesworth, who was a close colleague of Martin Luther King, preach and he sort of created a crisis of conscience. I stopped fighting -- I didn't want to fight anymore -- I remember being in a fight and I couldn't throw another punch, and I walked away from the gangs. At that point I wanted to be a preacher and I wanted to be a civil rights leader and I wanted to be an activist. And so, Dr. King had come to the city -- this was sometime later -- and I took all my gangbanging buddies to hear him at St. John's Cathedral in New York and listening to Dr. King was both captivating and riveting. On the way home we decided that we would no longer terrorize our community but try to change it and save it by getting involved in civil rights activities. That was really the beginning, and I tried to take on the drug culture which almost got me killed at that time, but I did a lot of other things.

By getting involved in my church, it was just tremendous. I was a member of a great church that brought all kinds of good speakers and civil rights activists and the church itself was very supportive of civil rights. Once I got close to my pastor, who was a mentor, he shared a lot of information with me. He was close to the King family and was like a mentor Dr. King. Dr. Matt O'Clay Maxwell was also the president of the National Congress of Christian Education, which was the teaching arm of the National Baptist Convention, and Dr. King was elected as his associate. So, I was involved and surrounded by civil rights and the black church that really helped me to overcome the kind of vertical split I had experienced as a result of that traumatic experience in school

INTERVIEWER:

That is so interesting. I did want to ask a little bit about your career in the church and how, for you, your faith and your work with your congregation is tied to your work with civil rights.

JOHN MENDEZ:

I never forgot where I came from. By the mere fact that I was really impressed with Dr. King and Shuttlesworth, later I became friends with Wyatt T. Walker when he relocated to Harlem and many others. It just became kind of natural, as far as my spirituality and understanding of the black church, being associated with civil rights as such. So, when I went away to college, eventually, I took that mindset with me to college. I got involved, and all of this is happening during the Black Power movement.

Let me backtrack for a minute, because one of the interesting things that happened to me, there was a seminary student by the name of James Gordon who used to come home, and he introduced me to Greek philosophy. I became familiar with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates became my favorite philosopher, and I was really intrigued by his concept of the gadfly that stirred up protest and whatnot. During this period of Black Power -- once it hit -- and I listened to Malcolm X many times in Harlem, I felt like I had to do the same thing. So, James Gordon inspired me to constantly go to secondhand bookstores and get books on philosophy which I began to read and study along with reading Dr. King, whose work often inspired you to want to read philosophy and some of the other theologians, which I did.

So, I took that mindset, eventually, to college and I became freshman class president where I made a speech on Socrates and Aristotle and Shakespeare at the time, and I was elected. My whole college experience was really involved in activism. Because of my relationship to the church and my wanting to be a minister at that time, Dr. Maxwell had the church do two really important things for me. First one was, I was about sixteen or seventeen years old when the church sent me to the Baptist World Alliance Youth Conference which convened in Bern, Switzerland. While there I traveled to London, and Paris, and Rome, Italy which was a magnificent experience. At the congress I addressed thousands of youth, from around the world.

Secondly, the church paid for my tuition at Shaw University, which was one of the oldest African American schools in the south. Again, I declared a major in philosophy, but I'm studying philosophy, doing the student protests, and riots around the country at that time, and listening to Malcolm X. When I got to Shaw SNCC was born on Shaw's campus and I connected with some SNCC members like Cleve Sellers. Then there was a Malcolm X Liberation University that I became involved with, with Howard Fuller and many others. Malcom X Liberation University was a unique kind of university and it taught me everything I know about politics, movement, imperialism, capitalism, all of that I learned during those particular years.

I eventually adopted a philosophy of Black Nationalism but later then developed to Pan-Africanism as such. I began to read African philosophers like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré, I read W.E.B. DuBois and many others around that time. So, it expanded my worldview in the sense that I became a Pan-Africanist that was anti-imperialist.

Then a few years later I was invited to go to Angola - with Ben Chavis and another group and group of students from Howard University - which was a colony struggling for independence against Portugal. The US backing was on the wrong side of history. As well as South Africa. I got really involved, we protested Portuguese colonialism in terms of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe -- at the time -- and Angola, et cetera. So that moved me into that situation.

INTERVIEWER:

Okay, something else we were curious about -- it seems like a lot of the things that you've been involved with have very broad religious support from different religious groups and we were interested to hear about how interfaith support impacts these kinds of causes.

JOHN MENDEZ:

When I first started pastoring my second church, Emmanuel Baptist Church, my first church was while I was finishing up seminary, and I had become so radical I really broke away from all of that. I met Howard Therman while I was organizing the union at Duke University, who encouraged me to go back to seminary and finish. I initially started at ITS, Interdenominational Theological Seminary, and I wasn't ready for seminary I was too radical at that time. When I left, came back to Durham, North Carolina, and started organizing with a group of others the union at Duke. Howard Therman was coming to Duke as the in-house theologian. Some of the faculty thought we should get together, meet to get his support for the union, which we did. I went to hear him he was one of the most phenomenal speakers I ever heard, and he was one of the few Black mystics that I knew of. He was an advisor to people like DR. King, Jesse Jackson and so many others - a renowned religious leader. He encouraged me to go back to seminary and I did.

My experience, as you alluded to, I was interacting with different religious and faith people, whether they were Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims, et cetera. Now I haven't said that, when I first started pastoring my second church, I became involved with the National Council of Churches as well as the World Council of Churches. It certainly broadened my view even more so that I became more inclusive as it related to understanding women's rights and the fight for equality, but also, I became convinced that there's only one spirit and that one spirit unites all religions together. I believe that every other people's religious experiences, who are different, who are part of different religions, their religious experiences were as authentic as my own and that's what really opened me up to getting involved with the Apache movement and their struggle for sacred rights and sacred sites.

That was literally the beginning, and it was Howard Therman's book The Inward Journey that really -- when he talked about native people in that book -- really prepared me to receive a religious experience with the Apache and accept their beliefs and experiences as authentic as my own.

INTERVIEWER:

That's really fascinating and its really great to hear about your work with the Apache. I'd love to hear a little bit about what's going on with that right now. We've heard that there is this countdown where there is a narrow window for them to be able to reclaim the land before it starts to be developed. How is that all going right now?

JOHN MENDEZ:

That's why we're here in San Francisco. On October the 8th we left San Carlos Reservation and visited all the spiritual sites along the way, as well as meeting with other native people and visiting their religious sites. It's been a tremendous journey. We've slept in tents in some of the places where we visited, others put us up for a few nights. But the whole point is Wendsler Nosie, who is the leader of this Apache stronghold movement, has been trying to unite the different tribes together but also interfaith-wise bring all religions together because what we're saying is for one religion to be attacked directly, all religions are being attacked indirectly.

So, they've sued the United States for the right to practice their religion and to maintain sacred sites. Resolution Copper is a company out Australia and Britain who wants to create a copper mine on their sacred site. They had been through that already with Mount Graham their most holy mountain, and two telescopes were put on Mount Graham. It's the equivalent of the Vatican -- of putting two telescopes in the midst of the Vatican or any other church or temple or synagogue in the world. It certainly wounded, hurt the very spirits of the people because that's where their religious rites are practiced. Now we're fighting for Oak Flat which has been their holy place where they have all their ceremonies and special rites practiced, done there. I recently was present at one of the sunrise dance rituals where a young woman becomes a woman -- a young girl becomes a woman. Very very sacred and very powerful as well.

So, they're fighting for the right to maintain Oak Flat because if Resolution Copper has their way, that whole area will eventually become a crater a couple of miles wide and so many feet deep, so that the holy place will be destroyed. So, the purpose of this convoy that we've been on for the last week brought us to San Francisco where the 9th District Federal Court will hear the lawsuit. We came praying and other tribes praying with us and belling us on this journey. Right now, we've got a protest going, a prayer vigil, for the hearing tomorrow and we're praying that the judges will be fair and make a decision in favor of Oak Flat.

INTERVIEWER: Well, to bring us back to your career locally, because a lot of what people want to hear about is what's happened with you in Winston-Salem and the Greensboro area. We would like to hear a little bit about the Moral Monday Movement and how that all got started.

JOHN MENDEZ: Yeah, that was interesting. Dr. Barber, William Barber III, had become elected as the state President of the NAACP and we collaborated together because we were struggling against voter suppression at the time, and we decided it was time to go to jail. A group of us, a large group of us, went down to the state legislature building and occupied it. The police came and arrested us. At that point we had no idea what we were doing and where we would go from there. After we got out of jail, I had to go to Africa for two weeks and when I got back more than 8,000 people had started convening in Raleigh every Monday. That launched Dr. Barber and the Moral Monday Movement for over a year. Following that, Dr. Barber suggested to us that we start the Poor People's Campaign again, which had initially been done and organized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. just before he died in his last two years. I've worked with that as well. So, the Moral Movement began to spread literally across the country and particularly with the Poor People's Campaign. But, we had locally, our church was part of a lawsuit in Winston-Salem against the state over voter registration and we did prevail there. So, there was a lot of movement about that, around that, but when I first came to Winston-Salem, I was part of, well our church was an activist kind of church where we took spirituality not just inside the church, but outside the church as well. The first movement I got in was around Darryl Hunt, a young, African American male, about 19 years old who was allegedly framed by the police department and the District Attorney of killing a young, white, woman, editor of the newspaper, which was a horrific killing, but Darryl did not do it. It took us 19 years to prove that and eventually he was exonerated, and the real perpetrator was arrested and given a life sentence, but the police had framed him, destroyed evidence, and lied on him and we were fighting them and eventually I led a movement to get a police review board, which really minimized police violence and police brutality against the black community. So, those were some of the things I did in Winston-Salem, Greensboro and around the state of North Carolina.

INTERVIEWER:Obviously we know that being voluntarily arrested and doing these kinds of sit-ins is an old civil rights strategy, but it is such a huge personal commitment, so how are you able to do that kind of work? How are you able to convince people in the community to come in and take that personal risk for these issues?JOHN MENDEZ:I think it's important that first you do education, to raise consciousness and that was a lot of what we did, but also we were influenced by James Cone, people like James Cone, and Jackie Grant and so many of the African American liberation theologians so that, as a result of that I developed a prophetic ministry that addressed the whole person mentally, spiritually, as well as physically and everyway I preached, everyway I, all the demonstrations I was involved in was from a prophetic religious perspective. That caught on. It wasn't easy, I had to deal with a lot of criticism. I had to deal with a lot of rejection, but over time consciousness had been raised and people began to see it and support it. During that time I went back to school and became trained as a psychotherapist and a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist and I started providing counseling, not only in our church, we organized the Howard Thurman Counseling program, but taking it to the street and I organized the MindSight Counseling Services under the guise of decolonizing the minds of our community and people, particularly the African American community and Hispanics as well because of this Americanism, Euro-Americanism, Europeanism had colonized our minds and brainwashed, you know, people for over 500 years and it was important now to , number one, come back to who we are as a people, our connection with Africa and other peoples connection with their roots but also within the Native American community and working with the Apache, the question of the colonization was so important. Particularly there were other alternatives and styles of living other than capitalism, which is extremely, individualistic, greedy, selfish, and exploitative. And racial colonization turned you against yourself, makes you participate in your own oppression. So, my strategy and struggle was to move people from being against themselves to being for themselves.

INTERVIEWER:I will be interested, I know you've mentioned Malcolm X, you've mentioned Socrates, you've mentioned Dr. King, but what was really your major influences in the way that you've developed your philosophy as a religious leader and as an activist?JOHN MENDEZ:Right. I've maintained my commitment to philosophy. So, I graduated from college with philosophy and at that time before I became a Black Nationalist, Fred Hagel, Hagel had a lot of influence in terms of his dialectic. W.E.B. DuBois was very influential. As I mentioned earlier, people like Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Touré, Julius Nairez as African thinkers and philosophers. Dr. King, of course, and Alfred North Whitehead became a predominate philosopher that I've read and studied because of his perspective on change and process, everything being a process and alive. So, summing all that up I felt like it was important to raise consciousness as a way to intervene in history, to change history and make a difference in history, that we needed that level of consciousness. One of the disappointing things is that to see how much the times of right for fundamental change and we keep missing it because the level of consciousness is not there. I studied a lot of Karl Marx as well. That became a real part of my philosophical thinking, as it relates to dialectics and dialectical materialism as such. I could not get down eventually, I tried it, but it didn't work. I could not be an Atheist, you know as such, which is one of the reasons I incorporated Alfred North Whitehead work, you know, as well, but I read them together and then I started reading a lot of Black Nationalism like Marcus Garvey, going back to DuBois' Pan Africanism, etc. So, it was kind of an eclectic approach, but it worked for me in the sense that it was about raising consciousness and trying to convince people that change is not only inevitable but possible.

INTERVIEWER:So, you mentioned growing up that you were in New York, so how did you end up coming to North Carolina?JOHN MENDEZ:My church was supporting Virginia Union, you know and such, raise money. So, I learned about black churches, I mean black schools, in the South. Shaw University, I read up on it and it sounded like the place I really wanted to go. I wanted to really go to an African American school. So, I was accepted at Virginia Union. I was accepted at Bishop College in Dallas, Texas, which was too far for me to go, which would have separated me from so much of what I was involved in, so I chose to go to Shaw University. And by the way, I did not graduate from high school, but I remember having a teacher who, a Mrs. Welsh, who wrote letters for me along with my pastor, and she essentially said that my manuscript, what do you call them? Manuscript, not manuscript, but

INTERVIEWER: Like essays?JOHN MENDEZ: Huh?INTERVIEWER:Essays?JOHN MENDEZ:No, let's just say my records.

INTERVIEWER:Oh, transcripts!JOHN MENDEZ:Transcripts. Thank you. Thank you. Has to do with age, I'm sure. But my transcripts did not in any way measure what I would, what my potential was and what I was capable of doing. So I went to college on trial and I knew I had to really do well, so I was in the library every day, just about, and by the time I was moving toward the junior and senior I was awarded, given awards as being a good student, you know, etc. and I eventually graduated from Shaw University. But I wanted to go to an African American University and Shaw, I knew that SNCC had been organized on Shaw's campus. It had Ella Baker, had graduated from Shaw and by the way now I'm leading a project to build a statue of Ella Baker on Shaw's campus. That's my latest project. I'm retired after 42 years of pastoring, so it gives me time to do that.

INTERVIEWER:Well, it seems education has been really important to you and we found out that, about the fact that Wake Forest Divinity School had established a scholarship in your name and we were curious about how that felt for you?JOHN MENDEZ:I was surprised, shocked, but definitely very moved by that, happy by that to have a chair named after you that deals with what your life has been in terms of social justice as such. I'm very appreciative to Wake Forest for offering me that opportunity. So, I'm really grateful for that.

INTERVIEWER:To jump back, you mentioned trying to restart the Poor People's campaign and Dr. King's original work with that and I am not as familiar with that as with some of his other work. Could you tell us a little bit about that and how you tried to bring that back?JOHN MENDEZ:Yeah, Dr. King in the last two years of his life, particularly as it related to the system, to capitalism. He was clear that most of the suffering that people experienced, the poverty that people experienced, and the racism, and militarism that poor people experienced in this country was due to capitalism and colonization as such. So, he organized the Poor People's Movement to assault capitalism and he was planning on tying up Washington D.C. until congress developed, created an Economic Bill of Rights and guarantee every American a job with a living wage as well as develop affordable housing, etc. That was Dr. King at that point and I remember the first time I visited the Lakota Nation in South Dakota and I met with the keeper of the sacred pipe at that time. I think it was Long Horse, I can't remember exactly the name, but the first thing he said to me, "you are sitting in the same chair that Martin Luther King had sat in". He was moving across the country everywhere trying to unite all races to participate in the Poor People's Campaign. He was determined to establish social democracy in America, which in my estimation is what got him assassinated. Not Vietnam, because the whole country was almost against the war in Vietnam, but when he talked about ending greed, and ending selfishness and exploitation, the country killed him. But he was clear on the nature of capitalism.

INTERVIEWER:We have actually gone through all of the questions we had prepared, so I just want to, since we have a couple of minutes, if there is anything that we haven't covered that you want to talk about or that you think is important about your own work or about civil rights, I would like to hear about it.

JOHN MENDEZ:Probably the only other thing is what is my commitment in terms of a prophetic ministry. After I calmed down a little bit, and went back to seminary, I worked on developing a prophetic movement. One of my best friends, Tyrone Pitts, who invited me to become part of the National Council of Churches, the Racial Justice Working Group, and then later the World Council of Churches. I was able to still maintain a prophetic ministry because of my associations within those bodies that helped me, in fact, and then also let me add the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which was known as the Convention of Martin Luther King because it was established to give him a base from which to work and when I came to Winston-Salem I didn't have time to have a decent honeymoon, you know, new pastor in town, etc. I had to go right to work because of the Darryl Hunt situation and the police brutality that was there. I did because that's what ministers and the history of the Black church represented. Began fighting slavery, then segregation, and then exploitation and poverty following Dr. King. That's part of my tradition and my preaching and my church. It was a slow process and I was different from probably most pasters in the city and I had to really wrestle through that because not only was I an activist, but I wore African attire because I identified, in our church I traced our religious traditions to Ethiopia and I remembered one of the popes from Ethiopia coming and a lot of us were invited and I remember him saying that Ethiopian church is one of the oldest churches in Africa and the world was our mother church and I took that literally, so I led Emmanuel to trace our religious heritage, our faith back to Ethiopia.

INTERVIEWER:Thank you so much for making time to talk to us. This has all been so interesting and I'm really glad that it's going to be captured so that people will have this information.

JOHN MENDEZ:Thank you so much and I lost my view here, but anyway I'm so appreciative for this opportunity and please give my, share my gratitude with everybody that's responsible for this. Thank you so much.

INTERVIEWER:Thank you. Well, we don't want to hold you up, because we know you have important work to do, so good luck with everything going on with the Apache right now.

JOHN MENDEZ:Thank you so much. Thank you.

INTERVIEWER:Thank you. Have a good day.

JOHN MENDEZ:You too.