BERTRAM GROSS MEMORIAL AWARD RECEPIENT
October 24, 2001 Rev. Carl Robert Forsberg 
Bob Forsberg has been an ordained Presbyterian minister since 1953. A restless spirit and a deep commitment to human rights have taken him to many comers of the world. Bom in New York City on September 11, 1924, his ancestral roots in the United States go back to maternal and paternal grandparents who emigrated to America from Sweden in the 1880s. As a high school student, he was a volunteer in the New York City offices of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and later with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. In the post World War II era, he focused on reconstruction work in Europe as a volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee(AFSC). A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he founded an ecumenical parish in New Haven, Connecticut in 1950 and, after his ordination, served the parish in a variety of roles. He moved his family into public housing and worked with his neighbors to end tuberculosis, alcoholism and drug addiction; to help the public schools meet the needs of inner-city students; and to create a nonprofit bonding program to release poor teens from long, pre-trial confinement in jail. He was deeply involved on ecumenical committees during the early civil rights movement, participated in the Selma to Montgomery March and did jail time in Albany, Georgia for praying silently in front of City Hall. In addition to helping start a disability rights/independent living center in New Haven, he extended his activism to poor people's movements in Vieques and Venezuela and became computer literate - using his newly-acquired skill to teach technology to public housing children and their mothers. He "retired" in 1989, moved to San Francisco in March 1990 and resumed his volunteerism - with Senior Action Network, Religious Witness with the Homeless, Interfaith Witness for Peace in the Middle East, AFSC, and as Secretary of the Board for the Northern California Interreligious Conference. The Campaign to Abolish Poverty and the Full Employment Coalition take great pleasure in recognizing this indefatigable human rights worker with a Bertram Gross Memorial Award. Bob’s letter to his grandchildren on the 100th Anniversary of Mother Jones’ Children March – written July 5, 2003 Thanks to NPRadio this morning, and Babs' invitation to Sam's big musical event next Friday, I am celebrating what I am proud about in America today — that the Bates and Forsberg ancestors so fiercely fought for nonviolently: good public schools and music as part of our education.
One hundred years ago Mother Jones joined the efforts of some 400 children aged 8 to 12, from the Kensington PA mills where they worked 60 hours per week at miserable wages, in their request for a 55 hour week, so that they could go to night school one hour each weekday evening. The kids made signs saying "we want to go to school" and "schools not hospitals" [for their accident-produced injuries to fingers and hands and other parts of their bodies].
Mother Jones helped lead them with their bandaged or damaged hands, in a march of over 100 miles from near Philadelphia to the Long Island estate where President Theodore Roosevelt and his children were gathered for the 4th of July weekend to play games on the lawns and beaches. The kids on the March were also having fun on their first time enjoying the out of doors, without the noise and dust and dangers of the "dark satanic" mills where they usually spent their waking hours,[and where little children could sneak a peek out the windows to see grown men playing golf].
As we all know by the silence about this March, crusading Trust Buster Teddy R. did not declare child labor an evil that he would end immediately back in 1904, but six years later Pennsylvania did finallly pass a little bit of legislation regulating child labor. And eventually Mother Jones, aged 73 at the time of the March, and her allies in the labor movement - including probably more Jewish leaders and participants than Christians, certainly in proportion to their numbers in the US population — did succeed in making public education compulsory for all kids [maybe not the best solution, by making schools alternative places (designed to prepare kids to work on assembly lines) to imprison kids during every weekday, and thus off the streets and the job market].
So I rejoice today in my own support of the US labor movement and my union membership for one whole year as a rubberworker, and my prize winning high school essay that won $100 and a free supper from the NJ state Labor Council back in 1942, to help pay my way to the College of Wooster.
But most of all I celebrate the Bates-Pareis-Lauterwasser and Forsberg-Sundquist-Schoenwald-Berger [and I suspect the Sugimotos also] family tradition, which Babs and Sam inherit, of spending lots of time in enjoying and suppporting our public schools with music [and dance and other arts] as well as compulsory attendance.
I can remember my mother's years teaching poor Finnish American farm kids, who were also needed and wanted at home to work on their farms to scrape out a living in the barren, cold farm land of Minnesota near Superior Wisconsin, as a young woman about 16 or so I would guess, or maybe as old as 18 in her Normal School days, which were a few years of study after finishing the 8th grade of public school I believe.
I can remember her years during the Depression working as a substitute teacher in the West Orange schools before Nancy was bom and while I was going to kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grade, and our Polish landlady took care of Dot at home, altho she also wanted to follow me uphill to the Gregory St. School.
I can imagine Eva Pareis and Raph Bates during those same years, struggling to keep the New Jersey Schools, as well as the southern Black schools Ralph taught in, going during times of tight state and local budgets.
I know that Naomi Sundquist Forsberg spent many hours exploring and researchiing public school systems before we moved from West Orange to Summit, because it had a fine school system and a commuter railroad station on the Lackawanna line to New York City for my dad. And Summit, like Chatham, had churches [Presbyterian and Congregational] that paid serious attention to public schools and their tax support and high
quality, along with serious Christian education - helped in Summit by Bob McAfee Brown's parents as Sunday School leaders, as my mother became also.
I am grateful for meeting the Bates family thanks to the public school music program of an all-state high school orchestra and chorus, in the person of Barbara B. Lauterwasser, a sister cello player. And then years later her sister, and their father as Chatham's superintendent of schools and mother, a "retired" school teacher so she would not seem to take a precious teacher's job away from someone who was not married to the Supt. I am grateful for Eva Pareis' devotion to her Manhattan Presbyterian church youth leaders, Norman Thomas and Henry Sloane Coffin and others from Union Seminary, who helped inspire her to be among the founders of the ACLU and the FOR.
And I am grateful for the New Haven heroes, like saintly principal of Winchester Schoo Isador Wexler and his buddy Arnold Lerner, both strong members of Temple Mishkan Israel, and all the other folks including the Edmonds and Sandines who worked hard to make public education work for all kids and families. And for the Teacher Center, and for the national church budgets that paid my salary for 3 years to spend time working to improve public education as a form of lay ministry.
And I am especially proud of the parental support we each received in learning to play and enjoy musical instruments and to sing as part of choruses and choirs, often by the example of the parents, including Herb's. Those were great days, before the "Good War" [which it was not, of course, and was as murderous and as destructive as any other war, and the worst of the many we fought in the deadly 20th century]. And for the church [along with many synagogues'] support of labor unions and efforts for economic justice in our nation and world.
Oh, for those good old days! says this grateful 78 year old rejoicer who learned much about our Interdependence as workers and consumers, as students and parents and teachers, as nations and a human family, along with our fellow creatures, living and animate things including the seas and skies of this fragile planet spaceship. God has been good to me and us, and may we be blessings for others.
Now back to the barbecue and ball game. with love. Grandpa Bob, waiting to hear Sam's delightful music next Friday evening, [and I am forwarding this to the New Hampshire Lauterwassers, when I find their email address]
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