Posted on Saturday, February 28, 2009 - 02:22 pm:

Impact of SDA Eschatological Assumptions on Certain Issues of Social Policy

Bert Haloviak
Race Summit Workshop Presentation
October 27, 1999, pages 13-14.

Mrs Ruth Chambers, a close friend of Lucy, wrote J L McElhany after Lucy's death:

"This must be a white man's religion. I don't think God wants that. I love this message and will always keep the faith as long as God helps me to. What you do there will never make me give it up and lose my soul. I don't care where I die so I am ready for it....

"I am really thinking serious of what would become of me if I had to go to some san or hospital. I could go to the Catholic one here [Hornell in western New York State] and they treat all and every one alike....

"Get the love of Christ in your hearts and you will not be looking at a man's skin to wound him. You have got to get rid of that or you will never get to the kingdom. You cannot take it into heaven.

"We have a sister here like that and when the Sabbath School is at her house she don't want the black members there or to bring any one with them. She thinks what the neighbors will think of her. I would like to tell her what God thinks of her. But she will know some day. That is not a Christian at all....

"Just imagine being sick unto death and then going to what you think is a Christian place to get a bed to lie in and being turned away, just because God made you black. My! My! What a thing to have happen to one. Such a dear person as our Sister Byard was. All for the cause and doing all she could for the church, then having this put on her. Thank God she don't have to have it any more. I myself will never have it. I would not go to one of those places if I had to lie down and die in the barn. Christ was born in a stable. I could die in one.

"Why have the name of Adventist blackened with such doings. If there is no place for us in the buildings, why not make a place where we can go and have a place to die in and not be in the way of the lilly whites....

"Pray for me that this will not turn me bitter. It was a hard blow to Sr Byard's husband and all her friends. I am trying not to think it was done in a spirit of hatred. But it was done and it has made very hard feelings in all the Negro churches that I have heard talk about it....

"Please tell me if you will where there is any place one of us can go and get in. I am alone and I might have to have a place to go some day. I'd like to know if there is one such place provided for the black man or woman...."

(Mrs Ruth Chambers to J L McElhany, Jan 21, 1944)