MAY 2 71970
WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA CONFERENCE
Troqram Council *A
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Program Council Director
J. CLAY MADISON
307-A Cole Building, 207 Hawthorne
Area Code 704 372-2081
OF THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH Charlotte, North Carolina 28204
May 25, 1970
Dr. James £. Ferguson
President7
University of North Carolina
Greensboro, North Carolina
Dear Dr. Ferguson:
Confirming our conversation by telephone a few days ago, I
am requesting the persons whose names appear below to serve with
you on a white task force in preparing a position paper to be
presented to the Coaching Conference to be held at A & T University
beginning Thursday, July 23, and continuing through to Saturday,
July 25. I deeply appreciate your willingness to serve as
chairman of this task force.
As I stated in our telephone conversation, the Program Council
is recommending to our Annual Conference that we adopt as one of
our priorities for the coming year an "indepth study of racism and
social revolution." Anticipating the adoption of this recommendation
we are launching a study at a Coaching Conference to be held at
A & T University for all members of District Program Councils
across the Conference. There should be between two hundred and
fifty and three hundred in attendance, including several representatives from general boards and agencies who will be the re to help
.with other phases of this Conference.
In this study it is our purpose to help the people of our
church, both black and white, to face honestly the problem of white
racism and of black reaction to it. In your position paper, we
would like for you to state very frankly but sympathetically the
status of race relations within Western North Carolina and within
the United Methodist Church particulary. Somewhere in your paper
/a feel that you should indicate some of the more conservative and
llreactionary attitudes, though you need not suggest that they rep-
I Present your attitudes, but that they are a factor in the total
Situation. Another position paper will be presented by a black
task force and we are asking both of you to be sympathetically
frank; that is we would like for you to "tell it like it is" as
you understand the problems and implications thereof.
