Warner Traynham

WHILE many militant blacks responded to the death of Martin Luther King Jr. primarily with fury, the Rev. Warner Traynham remained composed, preparing sorrowfully to turn the event into a springboard for serious civil rights action.

While Harvard's blacks stressed their estrangement from the rest of the University by boycotting the official memorial service for King, the rector of Roxbury's St. Cyprians Church made a deeper impression on the 1200 whites inside Memorial Church with a harshly-worded eulogy.

"When on Wednesday, the flags go all the way up and the stores are open--won't we have business as usual?" he asked. "Won't all the mourning be no more than a handling of our shock? St. Paul spoke of two kinds of sorrow--the godly kind which leads to change and the sorrow of the world which leads only to tears and once the tears are dry, passes away. Which kind is ours?"

TRAYNHAM seems to have chosen a middle course for his civil rights activities. Rather than ignore the white community, he would enlist its sympathy, its money and the support of its large, wealthy corporations. Especially the corporations.

"Three Civil Rights bills have been passed, so things ought to be better," he observed recently, "but, if anything, the problem has become larger and more intractable. It's too big now for individuals to have any short run effect."

Using John Monro's switch to Miles College as an example of a noble but minor gesture. Traynham, for two years Assistant Episcopalian Chaplain at Harvard, denounced the University's investment policy, in his eulogy. "Harvard stands behind its individuals--like Monro," he said. "but is willing to risk anything in terms of the institution. Harvard," he continued, "is a pacesetter. It's not the richest segment of the corporate community, but it has tremendous influence academically."

Like most corporations, he said. Harvard "claims to be paralyzed." Calling this a fatalistic attitude, Traynham warned that "those with power had better learn how to use that power" or else suffer the consequences of "the inevitable explosion."

Although unsure of Harvard's exact financial position ("I have no knowledge of the University fiscal assets"), Traynham thinks Harvard might be able to join with other large stockholders in major companies to help set the company's path. He mentioned last spring's controversy between Kodak and Saul Alinsky as an example of a situation where socially-conscious stockholders could play a socially constructive role.

THE REVEREND believes the "Civil Rights Movement" per se is over in the sense that the demonstrations of the early 60's are no longer a viable tactic. "Sit-ins and boycotts were versatile within a limited area," he says, but now blacks must realize this is not the best way to bring pressure on the white policy-makers. The problems, he repeats, have changed, and are larger than a discriminating restaurateur or busline.

Traynham has conflicting views about his personal role in the struggle. Although he left Harvard, "because I preferred to work in a community where there was a possibility of effecting change," he shied away from a leadership role in Roxbury's self-policing activities in the tense days following King's death. "I was just interested in finding out what was going on," he said, "so I wandered the streets. I was on the outside."

HE has no dreams of attaining King-like status: "You can't plot your rise in a movement. There are lots of leaders who can arouse the people with their words. Most of the great ones arose from nowhere--they had prominence thrust upon them. It's all a matter of being in the right place at the right time." For the present, he has no intentions of leaving Roxbury to seek that right place.

Traynham's views are very much a metamorphosis of Martin Luther King's own philosophy of non-violent social change. King was trying at the time of his death to expand the scope of his demonstrations. Traynham too would urge both whites and blacks to focus their attention away from individual acts of courage and sacrifice to the soliciting, instead, of corporate contributions of resources and social consciousness.

Perhaps this closeness between the two men accounts for the eloquence of Traynham's final tribute to Dr. King,

"When the Lord writes judgement on a land He writes it with a large hand--not in the deaths of the guilty for that is merely justice--but in the deaths of the innocent, for when the innocent are slain, in that land, justice herself is judged."