By Keysha Drexel
Journal editor
When Douglas M. Carpenter of Mountain Brook set about to write his father’s biography, the retired minister of Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills knew a part of that book would include how his father was the first of eight clergy members addressed in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” during Holy Week in 1963.
But while the moment was important in his father’s life, Carpenter knew he wanted the biography to tell the full story of Charles C.J. Carpenter.
“That year, 1963, was a tough year for my father, but I didn’t want him to be defined by that year or by King’s letter,” Carpenter, author of “A Powerful Blessing,” said. “I wanted to write a book for the people who knew him and loved him and for people to see him as a whole person.”
Charles C.J. Carpenter became the Episcopalian bishop of the state in 1938 and was serving in that capacity in 1963 when the Civil Rights movement erupted in Birmingham.
Carpenter was one of the eight white clergymen who wrote “A Call for Unity” in April 1963 in an effort to defuse the growing tension between blacks and white in Birmingham by asking King and his followers to stop holding demonstrations during Holy Week. King responded to the clergymen’s letter with his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Carpenter said his father and other clergymen addressed in the letter experienced a backlash from the Birmingham community in the aftermath of King’s letter.
“My father was such a strong person, and he was able to weather all the criticism,” Carpenter said. “King saw the clergymen as moderate and slow and at the same time, some of them were run out of town because their congregations thought they were being too liberal.”
Carpenter said his father talked about how there was no real middle ground to stand on during the Civil Rights movement.
“I heard him say many times that if you try anything, you get hit from both sides,” he said.
Being one of the clergymen addressed in King’s letters was not the first time Carpenter had played a role in the Civil Rights movement, his son said.
“My father was already behind integration,” Carpenter said. “King’s letter didn’t change what he was doing because my father was already working in that direction.”
In 1951, Carpenter said, his father was involved with a large integrated meeting of the Interracial Division of the Community Chest, chaired by Arthur Shores, an attorney and Civil Rights pioneer who became the first black member of the Birmingham City Council.
Carpenter said his father’s office was the setting of planning meetings during the Civil Rights campaigns in Birmingham in 1963.
“When King asked Andrew Young to find a place where they could meet in Birmingham, my dad offered to let them meet in his office,” he said. “My father’s office at the headquarters of the Episcopal Church on 20th Street in Birmingham became a great meeting place.”
By holding the Civil Rights campaign meeting at his office, Carpenter said, his father put himself in a lot of danger.
“It was very dangerous and in some places illegal back in those days to hold integrated meetings like the ones they had all the time in my father’s office,” Carpenter said.
In 1963, Carpenter, who followed in his father’s footsteps and became an Episcopal priest, had just taken the helm of a new church in Huntsville.
“I remember we talked about what was going on in Birmingham and I know he received some nasty calls during that time, but he just kept on with his work and it wasn’t something he brought up too much in our conversations,” Carpenter said. “Like I said, my memories of my father include so much more.”
In “A Powerful Blessing,” Carpenter shares those memories, including thinking from a very young age that his father was most interesting person in the world.
“We always had supper together and spent about an hour together as a family in the evening, and it was something we all looked forward to so much because we had a chance to hear about my father’s trips around Alabama,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter was 5 years old when his father was elected state bishop in 1938. The job took the elder Carpenter all around the state, inspiring him to sing “from the hills of Monte Sano to the shores of Bon Secour” to the tune of a military hymn.
“He would travel to two or three churches on a Sunday, seldom less than two. He loved going around the state and meeting everyone, and his excitement about it was infectious,” Carpenter said. “He had such a presence and he was a phenomenal storyteller, and I remember thinking that he always had the most interesting things to share with us.”
Carpenter said he was enthralled by his father’s stories and those told by the frequent visitors to his home.
“The most fascinating people would visit our house, and I can remember thinking they were larger than life,” he said.
Carpenter presided as the state’s bishop during the Baby Boom years following World War II. During his tenure, several Episcopalian parishes were added in the Birmingham area and in Huntsville, Tuscaloosa and Tuskegee.
But Carpenter said he thinks one of his father’s most significant accomplishments was the founding of Camp McDowell in Nauvoo, near Jasper.
Situated on 1,140 acres of forest and fields, Camp McDowell has been a part of the lives of people of all faiths and backgrounds since it opened in 1948.
“Some of my favorite memories are of the summers spent working alongside my father to build Camp McDowell,” Carpenter said. “You really felt like you were doing something significant, and not many teenagers have that kind of opportunity,”
Carpenter continued to spend his summers working at Camp McDowell when he was home from the prep school he attended in New Jersey and later during his summer vacations as a student at Princeton University, where he majored in English.
While he was in college, Carpenter said, he began to question the faith he was brought up in and everything he was taught by his father and all those wonderful storytellers who visited his house when he was a child.
“For about three years, I was very agnostic,” Carpenter said. “I just couldn’t wrap my mind around so many things at that point, and I had so many questions, so many questions.”
So one day while he was home from Princeton for Christmas break, Carpenter said, he finally confronted his father about his questions.
“I don’t remember exactly what I asked him, but it was some deep question about how can there possibly be a God or something like that,” he said. “And I’ll never forget his answer. He said, ‘You know, I haven’t figured that one out for myself.'”
At first, Carpenter said, he was disappointed in his father’s answer to his seemingly deep and important question.
“After I got over that initial disappointment, I realized that here was a man who had invested his entire life, all that he was, into the church and a life of faith, and even he didn’t have all the answers,” he said. “It was a powerful moment for me.”
Carpenter returned to his studies at Princeton still trying to figure out the implications of the conversation he had with his father.
“It was late one night back at school and I was weary of studying all these subjects that didn’t have the answers to the questions I was asking, and I picked up Albert Schweitzer’s ‘The Quest of the Historical Jesus’ and I skipped to the last chapter,” Carpenter said.
There Carpenter said he read, “He comes to us One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to tasks which He has to fulfill in our time.”
Carpenter said the passage resonated deeply with him.
“The passage goes on to say that God will reveal himself in the toils and that as we perform tasks in His name, we come to know from our own experience the ineffable mystery of who He is,” Carpenter said. “I realized that we don’t find the answers to life’s big questions by asking but by doing.”
Carpenter knew he wanted to go to seminary after college and follow in his father’s footsteps, but he also knew he would likely be drafted after college for the Korean War.
“I knew I would be drafted but I just didn’t know when, so after college, I went to the draft board in Birmingham and asked them if I could volunteer to be drafted,” Carpenter said. “They told me no one had really asked them that before, but it was all arranged and the next thing you know, I’m an infantry rifleman, crawling around in the mud, learning the hand-to-hand combat stuff you needed to know in Korea at that time.”
But with his renewed faith, Carpenter said, even crawling around in the mud wasn’t so bad.
“My life was a joy because I found out about the real meaning of faith and knew I wanted to go to seminary,” he said. “I had found such relief from all the questions and the doubt, and I wanted to share that.”
So after his stint in the U.S. Army, Carpenter attended Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria. After graduating, he was assigned to his first churches in Brewton, Andalusia and Monroeville.
“When I first got to Brewton, we had 15 church members and by the end of the year, there were 100 regularly showing up for services,” Carpenter said. “I was also in Monroeville at the time Harper Lee’s book came out, and people were scared for what kind of reaction that was going to cause. It was an interesting time.”
After about three years of serving in the Brewton area, Carpenter said, he and his wife were ready to move to a place where there were more young couples their age and were delighted when Bishop George Murray asked Carpenter to start a new church in Huntsville in 1963.
Carpenter was serving at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Huntsville when the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham made national headlines.
“I remember being surprised about how it all happened in Birmingham because Huntsville went through integration without those major kinds of problems,” he said.
Carpenter said his father was a diabetic and had heart problems, and his health problems coupled with the intense events of the 1960s took their toll.
“He wasn’t old, but his health was going down fast,” he said. “About six months before he died, he came to Huntsville to perform a confirmation ceremony with me, and I can remember wondering if he needed my hand to steady him.”
His father retired in December 1968 and died in June 1969.
Carpenter said he hopes his book helps people who didn’t have a chance to meet his father learn more about him.
“As a nation, we can be so judgmental of a person without knowing the whole story, and that’s why it’s so important to learn where my father was coming from and to walk a mile in someone’s shoes to truly try to understand them,” he said.
For those who knew his father, Carpenter said, his memory is as strong as ever.
“People who knew my father still talk about him like he was here just yesterday,” he said. “A few years ago, I met a woman who said to me that she can still clearly remember the sound of his voice and his intensity when he blessed her in 1938. My father was known for his powerful blessings and his powerful love for people.”
Carpenter’s “A Powerful Blessing” is available at the Episcopal Book Store at 2015 Sixth Ave. North, Birmingham, or online at www.episcobooks.com. Copies can also be purchased through Carpenter by emailing [email protected].
