Last Friday, Aug. 23, lifelong civil rights activist, Falls Church resident and active Falls Church Episcopal member the Rev. Dr. Robert L. McCan spoke at length and was honored at an event celebrating his 100th birthday at the D.C.-based headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace that he helped to found.
McCan was at the top of his game in his half-hour lecture, a recollection of his many achievements that included working with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at the mid-afternoon event, attended by dozens of friends and supporters, including a large contingent from the Falls Church Episcopal led by its rector, the Rev. Burl Salmon and communications director Joel Wood, the Jefferson Senior Living facility in Arlington and the Goodwin House in greater Falls Church.
McCan was introduced as “an American peacemaker and peace builder” who helped create what became the U.S. Institute of Peace over the course of a long and storied career in the ministry and peacemaking efforts.
According to McCan, it was his experiences during World War II as a chaplain coming out of seminary in Missouri, and later in the war when he rode a bus from Asheville, North Carolina, to St. Louis, Missouri, with a young Japanese American whom his church was sponsoring to be released from an internment camp in order to attend medical school. He said that others on the bus jeered and taunted the student with signs that read, “Slap a Jap.”
“While the war taught me to hate and kill Japanese people, I had a Japanese friend and wanted instead to work with him toward world peace and a cross-cultural understanding,” McCan recalled. That marked the beginning of his lifelong ministry.
He recalled the Southern Baptist convention at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he shared the stage with Dr. King, and as a result had spent an hour talking with him backstage before theyspoke. “Nobody remembered what I said that day,” he smiled. It was during the time of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott where Rosa Parks became famous for her role.
In Clinton, Tennessee, outside of Knoxville, Dr. McCan appeared with Dr. King and Thurgood Marshall at an event that prompted the detonation of two bombs nearby, and Dr. McCan then chose the title of “Bombs and Brotherhood, Two Paths” for his sermon.
In Danville, Virginia, where officials tried to deter a pro-peace and integration event by closing the public library and removing all the chairs, protests forced a repeal of that action, but then a violent attack occurred where 260 people were hospitalized. That was the mid-1970s era when the Southern Baptist Church denomination “had grown away from me,” in McCan’s words, and he dedicated his entire effort to peacemaking.
In a stint at Harvard University, he taught with Henry Kissinger and the famous Huston Smith, who taught the Philosophy of Religions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Later that decade McCan launched the effort to found what he wanted to call the George Washington Peace Academy, based on the remarks of George Washington in his farewell address that he “wanted to see war banished from the world.”
Eventually instrumental in seeing to the realization of that effort as the U.S. Institute of Peace were U.S. Sen. Vance Hartke of Indiana (who resided in Falls Church at the time of his death in 1984, and was the principal in the Falls Church law firm of Hartke and Hartke), whose son was present at the McCan event Friday to deliver remarks, Sen. Mark Hatfield, Sen. Charles Mathias, along with McCan’s colleague, Brian Wedge. They met as a group of about 40 at the Holiday Inn in Rosslyn in April 1976, and the impetus for the establishment of the institute occurred. A membership drive ensued that wound up with 25,000 signed up, and by 1984, the Congress voted its formal creation.
He was the original founder of the Dag Hammarskjold College that was to be based in Columbia, Maryland, but never materialized for lack of funds. There the goal was to have a majority of faculty and students from other countries with all students holding internships at the United Nations.
Dr. McCan held four executive appointments in the federal government, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Office of Education, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Agency for International Development.
He was the associate professor for political ethics at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. and as an associate at the Episcopal Church’s Center for Theology and Public Policy.
In his remarks Friday, Hartke’s son cited the quote of John F. Kennedy Jr. who said the most important praise is “to be remembered for one’s contributions to the human spirit.”