Clabe Hangan - Singing from our hearts

The following is quoted from Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections During the Civil Rights Era by Phyllis Palmer with the gracious permission of the Vanderbilt University Press.

“Camp leasers set a standard of general affection that inspired and authorized displays of affection. Clabe Hangan, music director for many of the Los Angeles camp sessions from the early 1960s through the early 1970s, expressed the optimistic purpose of the adult leaders and the adventurous delight that attracted young people. Hangan grew up in a black Baptist family in Redlands, near Los Angeles, and became a folk singer in college. In his teenage years, Clabe had tried out different religions. He had been attracted by the Quakers with whom his Redlands church held interracial services. When he had worked in a Jewish summer camp, he had been struck that Jewish people “seemed so African. They’re Arabic, they’re Africans… Somehow I had an emotional tie.” He had noticed the conversion to Judaism of the black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., and had considered following that model. But then Clabe had married a woman he met at the Friends meeting and continued his spiritual search as he finished college, became a probation officer, and joined the NCCJ camp staff as a song leader. Like Chambers, Hangan wanted the young people to respond to other kids as interesting and attractive, not as “problems.” They didn’t let campers talk about “interracial and interreligious,” as if these represented a mixing of ineradicable differences, he remembers. “Those are just terms, just words for people getting together.”

Camp leaders created a set of living, playing, and debating structures that put campers on an equal level, and then encouraged them to talk about the differences in their daily lives. “We didn’t [deny] those differences. We said, ‘Those are real, they’re here. We’ve got this language situation, we’ve got education we’ve got income, we’ve got different levels of cultural things.’” But in the camp setting these and other differences were “walked about in the context of people talking to people” and learning, as Clabe Hangan explained, how to think about “what it’s like to be us.” The camp leaders’ acceptance of tampers’ affections for and attachments to each other was strikingly at odds with what most had experienced in their schools and families.”