Henlee Hulix Barnette: An Activist

Henlee Hulix Barnette – A Special Salute
1. Henlee Hulix Barnette – An Activist By Frank Stagg – Issue 012 p.15 
2. Henlee Barnette – Gentle Prophet By Bill Leonard – Issue 012 p. 20 
3. The Whitsitt Courage Award – A Response By Henlee Barnette – Issue 012 p. 21 
Christian Ethics Today readers will be pleased to see here presented a special salute to Dr. Henlee Barnette. The dean of Christian ethicists, for 26 years he taught Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The latest occasion for many of us to rise up and call him blessed was in Louisville on June 26 where a host of friends and admirers, former students and colleagues gathered, prior to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship`s annual convention, for the Whitsitt Society`s presentation to him of its prestigious Baptist Courage Award. The following fanfare has three parts: (1) an article about Dr. Barnette by Dr. Frank Stagg reprinted by permission of the editor, Dr. Rolin Armour, from Perspectives on Religious Studies; (2) the introduction and award presentation remarks by the Whitsitt Society`s President, Dr. Bill Leonard, who now serves as the dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School; and (3) the response given by Dr. Barnette.

Henlee Hulix Barnette: An Activist
By Frank Stagg

Henlee Barnette is, indeed, an activist! He was an activist in his high school days when he helped organize a church, and he maintains a torrid pace of activism now in years well past normal retirement. Activist though he is, his activism is not an act. For Henlee, being has priority over saying and doing. Who he is and what he is give significance to what he says and does.

In an unpublished paper, Henlee identifies his pilgrimage as a professor with Immanuel Kant`s lifelong wrestling with three basic questions: "What can I know? What ought I to do? and What can I hope. " Henlee affirms, "I have spent most of my teaching career grappling with the second question."1 He has not neglected the other questions.

The Young Activist

Henlee`s induction into politics and thus activism began when as a five-year-old he spent happy hours in the office of his father, then registrar of deeds in Alexander County, North Carolina, elected on the Republican ticket. In his father`s office, Henlee was impressed by the huge volumes containing the deeds of the county. Books of other kinds became a major factor in his life as he grew older. Impulses to activism, also, seem to have been awakened in his father`s presence.

That Henlee`s activism was to be Christian was anticipated in his role while yet in high school in organizing the West Point Baptist Church in the "Fron Holler" slum section of Kannapolis, North Carolina and becoming its first pastor. His early Christian impulse to minister thus followed a traditional pattern for Baptists-to organize a Baptist church!2

In later years, traditional patterns were not sufficient for the Christian impulse to ministry that lies deep within Henlee. Innovation became a trademark of his ministry, whether as student, pastor, or professor.

Henlee`s early impulse to Christian action was influenced by his experience of working as a thirteen-year-old boy in the cotton mills of North Carolina. He worked ten hours per day, five-and-a-half days per week, in conditions hazardous to health, at eighteen cents per hour.3 Lasting impressions were made upon Henlee, reflected through the years in his unrelenting activism for human rights and social reforms concerned with human needs and humanization.

Impulses which Henlee gained from his boyhood home and work in the cotton mills were strengthened and informed through his studies at Wake Forest College (1936-1940) and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1940-1946). He was introduced formally to the field of Christian ethics by Professor Olin T. Binkley at Wake Forest College, hearing lectures on Rauschenbusch and Mackkintosh. It was there that he was introduced to the issues of marriage and the family, war and peace, and race relations. Hearing Emil Brunner at Duke University reflected both his early quest for competent scholarship and his lifelong occupation with it.

At Southern Seminary, Henlee moved more deeply into social concerns, studying with Professors Jessie B. Weatherspoon and Olin T. Binkley, by then also at Southern. His thorough grounding in social ethics was enhanced by graduate work at Southern and subsequent teaching in Howard College (now Samford University), Stetson University, Southern Seminary, and the University of Louisville School of Medicine, where he is now (1991) Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Louisville Haymarket

One of Henlee Barnette`s most amazing ministries occurred in his student days in Louisville, when he responded to a challenge given by Clarence Jordan, then Superintendent of Missions for Long Run Baptist Association, for volunteers to meet the needs in the slum area called the "Haymarket." He served first as unpaid evangelist and later as pastor and superintendent of the Union Gospel Mission on Jefferson Street (1941-1945) and in effect "Bishop of the Haymarket" in Louisville, Kentucky.4

In the face of seemingly impossible odds, Henlee the activist plunged into a ministry to 10,000 unchurched people and built the largest mission of its kind among Southern Baptists, enlisting thirty volunteers from Southern Seminary and the Woman`s Missionary Union Training School, plus about twenty-five volunteers from the city. Included among those Henlee enlisted for revival meetings in the Haymarket were Clarence Jordan, preaching and playing “the Holy City“ on his trombone, and Carlyle Marney with his trumpet.5 Ministries included preaching, teaching, the largest day nursery in Louisville during World War II. and daily and nightly one-on-one ministries on the streets and dark alleys and in the tenement houses.

In a radius of three blocks from Union Gospel Mission were ninety whisky stores, many “honky tonks," night clubs, houses of prostitution, cheap theaters, and gambling dens. There were vagrants, crime, delinquency, poverty, broken homes, alcoholism, prostitution, fist fights within families and otherwise, and other problems. Danger of being robbed, mugged, or shot lurked everywhere. It was not unlike Skid Row. Henlee investigated to ascertain who owned the indecent joints, but he found that politics sided with the owners, some being prominent citizens. Henlee`s later political activism was due in part to precisely such involvement of power people and power structures in victimizing and exploiting people.

Not deterred, Henlee moved into this community, living in the mission building, where his first child was born. He kept the mission open from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m., averaging only five hours of sleep per night. He climbed stairs in three-storied tenement houses and entered doors wherever there was openness to his presence and ministry. Rejected and even threatened, Henlee persisted, with some dramatic salvages of human beings who otherwise could have been destroyed.

Although our overlapping student days at Southern Seminary were minimal for Henlee and us, my wife Evelyn and I knew the Haymarket sufficiently to leave us amazed at what Henlee accomplished there. When we entered Southern in September 1935, we soon volunteered to teach Sunday School classes at Union Gospel Mission on Sunday afternoons, doing this for a year. My experience was that of almost total frustration.

Evelyn fared better than I, for her skill at storytelling enabled her to get sufficient attention from the girls to induct them into something of the biblical story. With my more prosaic approach, I am not sure that I accomplished anything.

Indeed, I became an "activist," but not on Henlee`s later model. I did not have hands enough to grab boys crawling under the benches, over the benches, and around the benches; and I never seemed to get them interested in whether the Israelites entered the Promised Land or not. Evelyn and I yet remember the desperate resorts of the then Superintendent, Mrs. Abner, to achieve some measure of order in the worship service that followed our Sunday School efforts. Her refrain through the fall months was, “Children, remember that Christmas is coming!“ and through the spring, "Children, remember that Easter is coming! " Even so, the promise of Christmas candy or Easter eggs did little to bring about order, much less any apparent Christian fruition.

Against this background of seeming futility, Evelyn and I yet are amazed at what Henlee the activist accomplished in the Haymarket. To understand it. one must understand Henlee with his background of experience, his deep commitment to Christian ministry, his keen sensitivity to persons in need, his impatience with discrimination, his informed intelligence, his imagination and creativeness, his courage and daring, and his driving energy. Not to be forgotten is Asenath Brewster, that remarkable woman with whom Evelyn and I worked for four years at Highland Baptist Mission and with whom Evelyn worked at Union Gospel Mission; but that is another story.

The mayor story untold in this essay is that of partnership in marriage and ministry. There was Charlotte Ford, who first joined Henlee as a worker in the Union Gospel Mission and then as wife and mother of two sons. Then there is Helen Poarch, who in 1956 lifted Henlee from "the ashes“ left by Charlotte`s death in 1953. Helen was, in the fullest sense, a partner in their ongoing homemaking (a daughter and a son) and ministry.

Race Relations

Henlee`s major role in race relations, like his other social activism, grew out of clinical situations, not out of some "ivory tower." As a boy he witnessed white oppression of Negroes. He recalls a boyhood incident in which a playmate shot a black boy with a slingshot, while the black boy was walking down the main street of the town. The boy made no self defense, for he dared not. More grievous to Henlee was the lynching of a Negro in Lewisburg, N.C., while Henlee was pastor of the Corinth Baptist Church during his college days at Wake Forest. In the picture featured in the town paper, Henlee recognized one of his leading deacons, a participant in the lynching.6

It was in Birmingham, when in 1946-47 he became Assistant Professor of Sociology at Howard College, that racial segregation and discrimination were surfacing as dominant issues. Henlee and J.E. Rouse, pastor of the Avondale Baptist Church, were appointed to the moral concerns committee of the all-white Baptist Association. A few days before the Association was to meet, Rouse called Barnette to inform him that with only a few days to write their report, they had nothing to write, for nothing had been done. With this need as catalyst, Henlee went into action.

Henlee suggested that he and Rouse visit the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (black) and propose the organization of an interracial Baptist Pastors` Conference. Rouse was taken aback by this bold suggestion but agreed to at least attend the negro Pastors` Conference. Their presence seated on the back row, was at first suspect by the black pastors. The chairman went back to learn who they were and then proposed that they be heard. At first this was opposed, with moaning and stomping of feet. Only when one black cried out, "Brethren, this is the first time that any white people have ever come to our meeting and I think we ought to hear what they have to say," were Henlee and his colleague given a hearing.

When Henlee was given his turn to speak, he explained that they had not come to tell them anything or to help them but just to see if they could begin to understand one another and to find some way to work together as Christians.7 The outcome was the organization of the interracial Baptist Pastors` Conference in Birmingham. A black pastor was elected president and Henlee secretary . Soon a meeting was arranged for black and white Baptist pastors in the Birmingham area, with Henlee securing Dr. Benjamin Hays, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. as first speaker. For this first meeting, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was filled with white and black pastors and laymen, possibly an act of civil disobedience, the law forbidding a meeting of whites and blacks.

When the Association met next, there was something to report! One outcome of this effort was the founding of the Negro Baptist Mission Center in Birmingham where among other ministries, both white and black teachers offered extension studies through Howard College.8 It was in 1947 that Henlee engaged in further social activism, speaking on February 11 at the Jefferson County Negro Teachers Association in Birmingham, supporting them there and in other meetings in their efforts to secure equal pay for black teachers.9 This was a gain for blacks, but it cost Henlee the loss of administrative support. Henlee lasted only one year in Birmingham, but his work there yet lasts.

As early as Easter Sunday 1947, the activist Henlee Barnette attempted to desegregate public transportation. Enroute to preach at Hokes Bluff Baptist Church near Gadsden, Alabama, he hitchhiked as far as Atlanta and then boarded a bus for Gadsden. The bus was filled except for two rear seats, reserved for blacks. Henlee sat with the blacks until the driver ordered him to move. After a second threatening order from the driver, Henlee stood the rest of the way on a bus loaded with people on their way to Easter services! A similar incident occurred in New Orleans in the 1950s when Henlee represented Southern Seminary at the Louisiana Baptist Convention. Boarding a street car on St. Charles Avenue, he sat behind that "middle wall of partition" which segregated blacks from whites. Ordered by the conductor to move, Henlee remained seated. The conductor moved the board to a position behind Henlee, and the bus proceeded.10

Henlee`s next post was at Stetson University, as professor of religion and sociology (1948-1951). His activism in race relations was extended to Deland and throughout Florida, with attention also to other areas of social ministry, including involvement in the Big Brother movement and organization of a family counseling program in DeLand. In 1949 his visibility became statewide when he gave a speech on racial justice at the Florida Baptist Convention meeting in Daytona Beach. It was published in the 1950 Florida Baptist Convention Report over the protest of the recording secretary. Tensions were high already, with black homes having been burned shortly before in one town; some messengers were disturbed by Henlee`s address.

To their credit, the Florida WMU Convention meeting in Orlando, gave Henlee a hearing on racial justice, with about 2,000 women present. Its responses were mixed, with two women in Henlee`s hearing protesting, one saying that she felt like throwing her pocketbook at him. The address was reported on the front page of the Winter Haven daily, along with a story about communism. Later President Edmonds of Stetson informed Henlee that one of his biggest clients (Edmonds had a law practice in Jacksonville) had warned him that Henlee might be a communist. Edmonds never mentioned this again.

It was when Henlee returned to Louisville in 1951 as Professor of Christian Ethics in Southem Seminary that he entered upon his most visible and productive period in race relations and other areas of social concern. In this position he not only introduced a wide range of new courses at Southern, but he intensified his activism in Louisville and as far as the Soviet Union.

In the 1950s Henlee cultivated relationships with the black churches, preaching often in them. In 1961 he took one of the boldest actions of his ministry in helping to bring Martin Luther King, Jr., to Southem Seminary, where King gave the Julius B. Gay lectures, receiving a standing ovation in chapel and speaking in Henlee`s class in Christian ethics. On other occasions and in the interest of balance, Henlee invited to his classes people as far apart as Philip Berrigan and the regional director of the F.B.I.

King`s presence on campus had strong support, but it brought protests from some church leaders. There were protest letters and cutting off of some funds. Henlee`s activism also influenced 251 students, including the Alabama state group of which he was sponsor, to petition the mayor of Louisville to desegregate the restaurants and public facilities in the city.11 Along with thc Rev. W. H. Hodge, leader of the Louisville NAACP and A.D. Williams King, brother of Martin Luther King, Jr., and pastor of the Zion Baptist Church in Louisville, he drew up the constitution for the Kentucky Christian Leadership Conference, affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Henlee participated in freedom marches, like that on Frankfort, Kentucky, on 5 March 1964. He stood for four-and-one-half hours in 38 degree weather, hearing such notables as Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson, Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt T. Walker, and James Farmer. From Southern Seminary were Barnette, Nolan P. Howington, Mary Ann and Wayne F. Ward, C. Willis Bennett, and six students.

On 16 March 1965, Barnette participated in the mass meeting, "Operation Selma,“ in the Broadway Templc A.M.E., Zion Church, Louisville. He spoke along with A. D. Williams King and Fr. Loftus, Dean of Bellarmine College. Three thousand one hundred dollars was raised that night toward a goal of $10,000 to support the march on Selma.12

Directly related to race relations-and one of the most controversial aspects of it-was the question of "open housing." Henlee`s activism took him deeply into this at the heat of the controversy. At least as early as 1966, Henlee was working for open housing in Louisville, as attested by his having lunch on 19 September with President Albert Winn of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Mrs. Winn, as they went over Henlee`s statement on open occupancy.13 Barnette was the lone Baptist among about twenty clergy of different faiths (including rabbis, nuns, priests, and Protestant ministers) to meet at the Central Presbyterian Church on Sunday, 30 April, to plan a march on City Hall to press Mayor Hoblitzel and the aldermen for open housing. The march took place on Tuesday, 14 May, with Barnette a participant. Already, A. D. W. King and other blacks had been arrested and jailed for demonstrations for open housing.

One example of Henlee`s relentless crusade for civil rights is reflected in his article, “Seminaries and the National Crisis,"14 among other things calling for integration of the boards, faculties, and administrations of the six Southem Baptist seminaries, scholarships for black students, and appointment of blacks to mission fields.15

Activism International

In various ways, Barnette through the years has been active politically in the interest of social justice and reforms. On 19 June 1964, appropriately on the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Henlee issued a statement to the press on "The Civil Rights Bill." This was neither his first nor last such public statement.

On 7 June 1954, Barnette made a major statement before a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting in the Natural Science Building auditorium of the University of Louisville to discuss possible changes in thc charter of the United Nations. Although contradictory stances on the U.N. were represented, Henlee was applauded when he said,

"The U.N., despite its weaknesses and failures, is still the most effective medium by which international ethics and a relative world peace can he achieved."16

The scope of Henlee`s vision and magnitude of his influence are attested in his remarkable role in cultural exchange program between the Soviet Union and the United States, initiated by a visit with Nikita Khrushchev in July 1957.

In the summer of 1957 Barnette was traveling with a group of Americans led by Russian-speaking Dr. Jerome Davis, formerly professor of Christian ethics at Yale. The two roomed together on the ship Pobeda (Victory) on the Black Sea. Davis asked Henlee, "Whom do we want to see when we arrive in Moscow?" Henlee suggested that they start at the top, with Nikita Khrushchev. Davis asked for a sheet of paper and Henlee found one in the next cabin. Davis typed out a letter to Khrushchev, corrected it with a pen, and sent it to the Kremlin. To Henlee`s surprise, upon reaching Moscow they learned that a conference had been set up for them as requested. Khrushchev met them at his office door and answered the 24 questions asked him by the group. Henlee`s own account appears in his 1959 article, "Relations With the Russians."17

At that time there was not one American student in a Russian university. The American group asked Khrushchev under what conditions he would approve an exchange of students, proposing about 5,000. After hesitation over costs was cleared up, with the agreement that each country would host the other`s students, Khrushchev strongly approved. Dr. Davis called the State Department, informing Press Officer Lincoln White of Khrushchev`s openness to student and other exchanges. On 26 July 1957, White, in a press conference, called upon Khrushchev for a specific and formal proposal.18 The rest is history, and Henlee H. Barnette is a vital part of that history.

Any idea that Henlee Barnette is soft on Communism or toward its claims or promises is simply misinformed. Throughout, he has stood for open and honest dialogue and efforts toward harmony; but he has done so fully informed and with integrity. A case in point is his debate with Victor Karpov (who became chief negotiator in Soviet-U.S. peace talks) at West Baden College of Loyola University, West Baden .Springs, Indiana, 10 November 1963. In his response to Karpov, Henlee went to the heart of what in Communist morality, ethics, promises, and practices caused him to doubt Communist claims that they wanted peace. Informed as to the subject, Henlee called for peacemaking, always with integrity.

While in Russia in 1957, Henlee was impressed by the appearance of the word MIR ("peace") everywhere, from huge billboards to matchboxes. He wrote Congressman Brooks Hays with the proposal that Southem Baptists have a peace committee, as was already done by Methodists. A committee was appointed, seemingly with little accomplishment. Shortly after, a Baptist World Alliance Committee on Peace was formed, Henlee a member. Little seems to have come of this. Working with Duke K. McCall, Henlee prepared a "Resolution on Peace" for the Baptist World Alliance meeting in Tokyo in 1970. It is solidly based biblically and fully aware of the volatile world situation.

F.B.I. Encounters

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating Henlee in 1957, although he was unaware of this until the spring of 1969. His visit to the Soviet Union in 1957 touched it off, despite the fact that on that visit Henlee had a role in the inauguration of student and other exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States.

As seen above, Henlee participated in an American Seminar conducted by Jerome Davis, formerly professor of Christian Ethics in Yale Divinity School. Through earlier work in Russia with prisoners of World War I, Davis knew personally Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev. At the two-and-one-half hour conference with Khrushchev that opened the way for student exchanges, Henlee was photographed shaking hands with Khrushchev. This picture was exploited by fundamentalist papers in America, charging Henlee with being a communist. As seen above, the questions put to Khrushchev and his answers appear in Henlee`s 1959 article, “Relations With the Russians"19 for those who want to know the truth.

Harassment by the F.B.I. continued in various forms, because of his visit to Russia and his book An Introduction to Communism,20 and this was aggravated when one of his sons became a conscientious objector and went to Sweden instead of Vietnam. Barnette`s phone was tapped; someone stood outside his classroom at Southern Seminary to hear his lectures; and calls were made to his home. Later, Henlee instructed the agent to make an appointment with him at his office and not to come to his home.

There was further harassment in 1971 while Henlee was on sabbatical as visiting professor in the Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Florida in Gainesville. Henlee and Helen chose to live in DeLand with Henlee commuting the seventy miles to Gainesville. Within three weeks an F.B.I. agent knocked at their back door. When told that he should have come to the front door, the agent insisted that it was locked, even though there was no lock on the screen door. According to Henlee, Helen gave the agent deserved "comeuppance."

F.B.I. investigations were in response also to Henlee`s activism in race relations, especially his working with Martin Luther King, Jr., his protests against the war in Vietnam, and his contention for universal, unconditional amnesty for conscientious objectors.

Even an alleged visit to Washington, D.C. to participate in a protest gathering on the occasion of Richard Nixon`s inauguration in January 1973 brought an avalanche of criticism upon Henlee and his departmental colleague, Paul V. Simmons. The press reported both as attending the protest, when in fact neither was there. True, both wanted to be there, but they were under previous commitments making that not viable. Simply assuming that press stories were accurate, pastors and laymen wrote their protests. Barnette was called in for administrative reckoning. Simmons went in at his own initiative.

War and Peace

Henlee through the years has been solidly on the side of peacemaking. Clarence Jordan is the first person in my hearing to protest war on Christian grounds, as when I heard him in a Baptist Student Union meeting in 1932. Henlee follows in that courageous stance, as he boldly demonstrated during the war in Vietnam.

One incident occurred on campus when Rear Admiral James Kelley, chief of chaplains and alumnus of Southem Seminary, spoke in Chapel, in the understanding of some at least, implying that God willed the U.S. military in Vietnam. Some of the members of Dr. Barnette`s class in "Christianity and Revolution," met in front of the Chapel with signs protesting such involvement. Tensions and tempers ran high when following the service the student protesters were confronted by student counterprotesters, and the administration expressed its displeasure. A similar incident occurred later when a military mobile chapel was parked in front of the seminary chapel, with both protests against its presence and protests against the protesters. Barnette invited the chaplain to come inside and speak to his class, and the invitation was accepted.

Henlee reports another incident in the cafeteria at Southern Seminary. He recalls that some students asked him about his stand on the Vietnam war and that he replied by putting it in historical perspective, including the French and Japanese roles and Ho Chi Minh`s early role. One student from Florida was so upset that he threw a chair at Henlee, but he missed while hitting Harry Hollis and Larry Franklin.

Yet another violent incident occurred in Gainesville, while Henlee was a visiting professor working with ecologist Tom Odum. Barnette joined a protest against the war in Vietnam. The protest was broken up finally by the police, who first used a powerful water jet and then tear gas canisters. Henlee stepped inside a building and saw gas bombs penetrate the thick glass.21

Activism: Domestic

Henlee Barnette`s political activism from his local residence to the national scene is extensive and varied. There was his protest against the proposal of a horse racetrack in Daytona. This was in 1950 when at Stetson, where also he was one of the founders of the Family Service Agency in DeLand. On a retum to Stetson in 1972, Henlee made favorable headlines in the DeLand press because of his human ecology class, with its urgent warnings and positive stance, thoroughly grounded biblically and theologically.22 Political involvement for Henlee ranges from legislation to election of officials. He once chaired the twenty-second Legislative District.23

When Harvey Sloane, M.D., opted to work among the underprivileged in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky he won Henlee`s support. Henlee backed him for Mayor of Louisville, hosting block parties, having him lecture his class on “Christians and Politics," and otherwise campaigning for him. His political activism has ranged from supporting Creighton Mershon for alderman to Jimmy Carter for President.

Ongoing Work

Henlee continues to work, and will leave a legacy of movements and structures which will continue to work. One such is The Clarence Jordan Center, originally The Clarence Jordan Institute of Christian Ethical Concerns. This was proposed by Henlee in a memorial service for Clarence Jordan, founder in 1942 of Koinonia Farms, twenty-one days after his death. Speakers for the first meeting were Robert G. Bratcher and Mrs. Clarence Jordan.

Henlee`s deep commitment to medical missions is reflected in his persistent efforts to memorialize Dr. William Wallace, killed by Communists in Wuchow, China on 10 February 1951, utilizing this as a base for raising money for medical missions. He proposed a fund comparable to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for missions, not competitive but complementary. In relation to this, he urged the establishment of "The William Wallace Week" at Southem Seminary. Television star Greg Walcott read Henlee`s article, "The William Wallace Week" (March 1963) and flew to Kentucky to talk with Henlee about it. The week was observed for several years at Southern Seminary, with amazing results in terms of money and equipment for medical missions. One distinguished speaker was Dr. Robert Higson, inventor of the varicose jet injector, a breakthrough in immunizing whole towns and cities in a short time. From these funds, portable intramuscular vaccination guns were secured for hospitals in Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Kenya. Not surprisingly, Henlee`s present (1991) post is that of clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Medical School, University of Louisville.

Henlee Hulix Barnette an activist? There seems to be no end to it. How does he generate such energy for it? We catch glimpses of something deep within this saintly prophet and servant of Jesus Christ, but we have neither the depth of perception nor the competence in writing to do it justice. We can say, "Thank you, Henlee!"

——————————————————————————–

1Henlee H. Barnette, "My Pilgrimage as a Professor," unpublished paper, 1.

2 Carl L. Marsalis, "Henlee Hulix Barnette: Moral Conscience of Southern Seminary,“ unpublished paper, 2.

3Craig Alan Sherouse, "Groundwork to the Ethics of Henlee Barnette," unpublished paper, 1f.

4Clarice Susan Muno, "Bishop of the Haymarket," Courier-Journal Magazine, 23 March 1952, 6-7.

5 Marsalis, Barnette: Moral Conscience, 7.

6 Ronald D. Sisk, Henlee Barnette and Race: A Case Study in Biblical Ethics,"

unpublished paper, 3.

7Barnette, "My Pilgrimage as a Professor," 3-4.

8The Witness (publication of the Birmingham Baptist Association) 2:6 February 1948).

9Handwritten letter signed by Mrs. Ruby Jackson Gainer, president Jefferson County Negro Teachers Association, 23 January 1947.

10Henlee H. Barnette, "Autobiographical Reflections: Easter and Racism," unpublished paper.

11The Towers 11:16 (14 January 1985) 1, recalling the 1961 event, with picture of Barnette and King forming their "Kin(g)ship!"

12Courier-Journal, 17 March 1965 2:1

13Memo of 21 September 1966 from H. H. Barnette to Dr. Edge, members of the Southern Seminary Social Action Committee.

14Western Recorder, 15 August 1968, 10.

15Cited by Marsalis, Barnette: Moral Conscience, 12.

16The Louisville Times, 7 June 1954, m.

17Review and Expositor, 56:3 (July 1959) 250-59.

18The New York Times, 27 July 1957.

19Review and Expositor.

2 0Baker Bookhouse, 1964.

21Florida Alligator, 10 May 1972, 1.

22DeLand Sun News, 15 February 1972, Sports Page: 6.

23Sherouse, Groundwork, 14.

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