Of Church and Change
After 38 Years, Rev. Stanley Sees Hope for a Multicultural City

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 2, 2006

When the Rev. A. Knighton Stanley arrived in a troubled Washington in 1968, he was sure he was seeing the cusp of a new world order.

He was a 31-year-old United Church of Christ minister from North Carolina moving to a home and church in Petworth, a predominantly black neighborhood that city planners had on a list of places expected to go bust, if not up in flames, he said. The country was staggering from Martin Luther King Jr.'s killing. But the Yale Divinity School graduate was certain that the social turmoil would prompt a more equal, just society.

As Stanley, now 69, retires this week, much has changed. Now one of the deans of the city's clergy, he leaves a church -- Peoples Congregational, on 13th Street NW -- whose members are a virtual who's who of city leaders, and his prominence is such that retirement tributes, concerts, lectures, toasts and roasts have been going on across the city since January. Even houses in Petworth now sell for a half-million dollars.

The decades have changed him, his neighborhood, his city and the black church -- a place he has written about often in books and newspapers and sermonized about from the pulpit. But if he has concluded one thing, it is that the new world order he expected didn't quite show up. He sees increased chaos in the Iraq war, in the rise of the religious right and in a cold street culture that leaves him fearful to start a conversation with young people he doesn't know.

But his definition of what a new world order might look like has broadened, he says. It goes beyond black voting rights and segregation and is about peace between people. And after seeing decades of hearts change in his work as a pastor, he is oddly more optimistic in some ways.

As Stanley heads to Atlanta, where his wife's family lives and where he hopes to do philanthropic work, he leaves a city with more nuances and less obvious answers. Which is how he seems himself, too.

"This may surprise you, but this is a better city than when I came," said Stanley, who often lashed out at forces of racism he felt kept the majority-black city down. In a 1987 sermon, he defended then-Mayor Marion Barry from white federal prosecutors, calling Washington a place "where cloak-and-dagger forces lurk in dark corners to assassinate your character. . . . Our future as a city is in question."

These days, he takes the city's clergy to task for having been so cozy with Barry that they were unable to "speak prophetically against Barry's antics," as he was quoted in a Washington Post article. He says the racial climate is better, there is more prosperity and Washington is cleaner.

"We have developed one of the most wealthy and educated African American communities in the world," he said in an interview this week.

Yet he knows a minister like him could not afford his home in Petworth if he had to buy it today. He knows some black Washingtonians still believe in something called "the Plan," an alleged conspiracy to rid the city of blacks. Although he at one time might have believed in the Plan, today he characterizes racism as not deliberate, but simply endemic.

There are other complexities. Stanley, son of a nationally prominent Congregationalist minister and active in the civil rights movement in North Carolina, came to Washington with the belief that ministry was an inherently political profession and that clergy should be partisan, should take sides. His view has changed after seeing the rise of evangelical Christians in U.S. politics.

"I think it's bad for a theology to be imposed on the whole nation," he said.

Longtime Washingtonians describe his activism in city politics as subtle. He served under Mayor Walter E. Washington as director of the bicentennial in 1976 and as a member of the panel that nominates city judges. He was at the side of many candidates over the years.

"He has been a part of the fabric of Washington and its government but moved fairly quietly," said D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Inez Smith Reid, who met Stanley when both were at Yale. She is now active at Peoples.

Speakers at Stanley's last service Sunday sermonized about his quiet yet powerful demeanor.

"When he preaches, you can't hear his voice above a whisper. I used to think, what is wrong with him?" teased B. William Austin, a vice president at the University of the District of Columbia, where Stanley was once chairman of the board of trustees. "But then I realized, God speaks in a small voice."

Stanley led a church whose members were strongly influenced by the civil rights and black power movements. Peoples was a speaking stop for black civil rights icons such as Nobel Prize-winner Bishop Desmond Tutu and writer James Baldwin. In 1990, Stanley oversaw the installation of a new sanctuary marked with towering stained-glass windows showing Jesus as a black woman and as a black man.

Throughout his career, he has written about the plight of black people, once saying, "We can no longer go limping between two worlds -- one wishing to die, and one struggling to be born," Austin quoted him as writing.

Asked this week whether he continues to feel that black Americans are still limping, Stanley's answer was nuanced, and he made clear he could no longer answer only by referencing the black community.

He spoke about the importance of Americans claiming the entire kaleidoscope of cultures here as their own: Italians, Eastern Europeans, Central and South Americans like those who increasingly occupy the streets of Petworth. He spoke of his longing for that "beloved community" he thought was imminent in 1968. He spoke about his 18-year-old daughter and her "friends who look like the United Nations." She is pressing toward that new world, he said; she isn't limping.

Multiculturalism has long been a theme with Stanley, something his peers said set him apart. He pushed his very traditional, formal congregation to include gospel and jazz in their services. Under Stanley, Peoples has become more diverse, ethnically, racially and economically, Reid said.

"He's always been ahead of his time. Now everyone talks about being inclusive" to the gay and lesbian community, said the Rev. Susan Newman, but Stanley has done so since the 1960s.

"He has always broken down the wall between the sacred and the secular," said Newman, who co-officiated at Stanley's wedding to Andrea Young, daughter of former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young.

At that last service, Stanley read one of his favorite Psalms, the 27th, of which this is his favorite line: "I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."

It's an ambivalent expression, Stanley says, which is appropriate for how he feels. "I've suffered a lot," he said, "but I wouldn't have made it unless I had seen something very good and wonderful about all of this. I believe that about Washington."