Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. During Black History Month we’re honoring Robert Gilbert with a Classic article from March 1988. Known not only as Baylor’s first Black graduate, Gilbert was also a tireless advocate in the Waco community beyond, in spite of everything.
I’ve been ill more than I’ve been well. I don’t recall a day without pain since I was fourteen. It hurt one day to play ball, and my father took me to the doctor. From that day to this, I’ve learned that God can help you through any circumstances.”
Dr. Scott Lea [BS ’72] was listening to me closely. I was trying to explain how I became as he saw me now.
“I forget about all this pain when I’m serving God,” I said. That’s what my condition has taught me – how much God can do with me in spite of everything everything.”
Everything – as this doctor sitting with me in his office well knew even better than I – was a form of arthritis so serious it had fused every joint in my body. Mine is one of the worst forms of arthritis: psoriatic arthritis.
“There’s just nothing left for the arthritis to attack anymore,” Dr. Lea said.
He was gently trying to confirm what I already knew. . . .
“Tell me your health history,” Dr. Lea urged me. “Start at the beginning and move forward. If we keep going backwards, it’s harder to follow.”
It’s funny how the memory runs backward, I thought. That’s how I want to tell it – yesterday, and then the day before that. But I would try to start at the beginning.
“My father had arthritis,” I said. “His neck was fused, so he couldn’t turn his head. And in later years he had trouble getting around. He couldn’t whip us boys when we were young, so he’d make us get switches from the trees and whip each other when we were bad! When we were older, we’d have to ride in the car while he drove and turn our heads to tell him if anything was coming because he couldn’t turn his head to either side of him. His two brothers had it – one had the bad arthritis and the other had the psoriasis. I must have inherited it all, but I didn’t think much about it when I was growing up.
‘I found work at Baylor very difficult, and I decided I was about two years behind everyone else in academics and in cultural advantages.’
“Then one day I had this nagging pain in my hip. I complained so much my father took me to a doctor who said I had rheumatoid arthritis. Today I know that’s about the age the disease first shows up. The doctor decided to removed my tonsils to improve my general health. I remember my first trip to Providence Hospital in Waco. At that time, if you were black, you were put on the bottom floor of the hospital, no matter what your condition. I remember seeing patients in the hallways with curtains around them, it was so crowded. I think that was the first time I became aware of those differences.
“After that surgery, I went on back to school, but I never played sports. I kept score, things like that. But otherwise, My condition didn’t make me dysfunctional for several years.
“Then at about age twenty, I really went down with arthritis. There are people who say stress brings it on. I’d had plenty of that. I was married during my senior year of high school, then divorced. That disappointment led me to ‘sow some wild oats,’ and I abused my health staying up all night, playing cards, and gambling. I’d been raised in a Christian home, but I was ignoring all the things I knew to be right just then. I was going through Paul Quinn College at the time, too. My life was full of pressures.
“One night I was sitting in a restaurant with a date, and she asked me to let her get up from the table for a minute. I suddenly realized I couldn’t stand up. My left ankle was swelling up and I had to be taken home. At home we soaked it, and the next day I tried to go to work at a nursery where I’d been doing heavy outdoor work, but I suddenly realized I was unable to function at all. That was the last week I remember having reasonably good health in my life. I became bedridden for two years.
“Early twenties,” Dr. Lea reflected. “That’s about the age for the onset of the psoriatic arthritis. You seem to have followed the classic pattern.”
Gilbert followed the “classic pattern,” with a rapid deterioration of health in his early forties. He has been hospitalized more than forty times and undergone major surgery five times for the illness which has left him crippled. He has, however, maintained an active public life.”
“The fevers began in the spring of 1983,” I said, “just as I’d regained strength following a bad break in my hip. The break had kept me in bed for several months. I’d broken the artificial socket getting out of my car to pick up some medicine. I remember it was a hot September day because I lay there on the pavement in the su a long time before somebody came by and discovered me. I was getting along on crutches before then, and I felt I could go any where. But then I slipped, the fall dislodged the artificial ball and socket in my hip which had given me good mobility after hip-replacement surgery. I’ve never been able to get around as well since then.
“The doctors didn’t want to operate because of my skin lesions from the chronic psoriasis that goes with my condition. They didn’t want to open up my skin and run the risk of infection. So they just put me to bed in traction and let me heal slowly.”
Oh, so slowly. Two month in the hospital, and then weeks in bed at home, unable to do a thing but lie there and be waited on – how long it had been. It’s the helplessness that is harder than anything else. I can handle the worst kind of pain as long as I can move.
“God has taught me a lot about patience, and He hasn’t stopped teaching me yet,” I told the doctor. “It’s a good thing because today I’m so weak I can’t even think of moving around anywhere.”
The doctor nodded again, listening hard. “It’s the infection,” he said. “You’ll regain strength soon when we get the fever stopped. We’ve got to get you to Houston for heart surgery right away.” . . . .
What the doctor didn’t tell me until months after the surgery – when it became apparent I would indeed survive – was that very few patients – let along patients with my history – live through the infection I had on my heart.
Gilbert’s faith was severely tested by his illness and increasing disability. What he had learned at Baylor was some help to him at that point.
For a while [in my twenties] I was very bitter toward God. I had no feeling of commitment to Christ or any sense of salvation. At Paul Quinn College I was learning about Neanderthal man, and this raised a lot of skeptical questions in my mind about creation and the Book of Genesis – things that deeply distressed my father, a devout minister of the gospel. I wondered if God had really created me, and if so, if He had abandoned me.
I found some of the answers I sought right in the Baylor classrooms. God used several courses I was taking to reassure me.
While still at Paul Quinn, before transferring to Baylor, I’d taken a survey of the Old and New Testaments, and I began to look at Christ differently. He seemed more real and historical after my study, and I also began to understand the fall of man. We had sinned from the beginning, and that was how things had gotten so badly off the track, I saw. Somehow that explained a lot of my trouble to me. In my thinking, I began tilting things back again. In thinking of the problem of how old the earth was, I realized that time can be calculated differently. So I was more comfortable with the Bible and my difficulties with Genesis. I saw that the biblical emphasis was on saving souls and not on giving a history of the world.
In thinking of Jesus, I was impressed with a Baylor professor who talked about the “overwhelming evidence” for the historical Jesus. That thought kept me on track in terms of Jesus. Dr. Jack Flanders and Dr. Dan McGee and others in the Baylor religion department helped me to bring jelling things back together to give me a better understanding of the biblical viewpoint. My faith was never really shaken anymore after that. My mind was settled.
I found work at Baylor very difficult, and I decided I was about two years behind everyone else in academics and in cultural advantages. I think our black young people still face that lag a lot of times, though not so much as I did. I just hadn’t had all the outside experiences, travel, and other advantages of these Baylor students, and I had not grown up surrounded with books and other stimulation. Of course, I felt very isolated at Baylor, too. I was one of two black students there, and one of the first two to receive a Baylor degree. So I pretty much had to get along by myself, even though by the time I graduated there were about thirteen black students.
It was a lonely experience, but I had opened myself up again to God, and He was beginning to bless me. I saw that my bitterness had taken me to a dead end in life, and I was seeking for ways to answer my questions about faith that would allow me to go forward again. God was very gracious, as He always is.
After graduation from Baylor in 1968, Gilbert began to seek active leadership roles in the community. He was the first black teacher in previously all-white Tennyson Junior High in Waco and served on the local school board during the integration of Waco schools. He has served on many boards and agencies, often in the role of an advocate for change.
If you are called to community leadership, you have to know that God has led you into it if you are to have peace about it. So many things happen to stretch your patience that without God it is easy to give up. During the 1970s I felt that I was called to a ministry similar to the ideals left to us by Martin Luther King, Jr. I patterned my ministry after him, dealing with issues without injecting any violence, and going in the game of the Lord to raise the consciousness of people who needed to be changed. . . .
At the beginning of the 1970s, our efforts for community harmony begin with dialogue with some key leaders in Waco. Jarrell McCracken of Word, Inc., encouraged a group of black leaders to talk with white leaders. Among us were Cullen Harris, Ulysses Cosby, Willie Hobbs, and Thurman Dorsey from my community and Dan McGee, Malcolm Duncan, Jamie Anderson, Jesse Derrick, V. M. Cox, and Cullen Smith from Waco’s elite. We talked about basic issues first, and then about specifics.
As I look back over the events in Waco during the past fifteen years, I realize that I have been involved in some way in almost every push for improvement among black people. My work on the school board was only one part of that overall movement which took place during the 1970s for black people tot come into their heritage in this country. It was a slow and painful process, and I think I was involved during the time that change was most difficult for everyone. Many of the people who read the newspapers and watched television during the 1970s have the impression that I am still a bitter and angry person. When they hear my name they say, “Oh, Robert Gilbert? It’s too bad about him. He really caused so much trouble and he was so eaten up with bitterness. Is he still that way?”
I want to say to them that I am no longer bitter and angry. . . . I am known as a rather gentle person when I am acting in love toward those who are in need. I still have that side of me that refuses to compromise. I think God requires of everyone the very best that is within them. I advocate 100-percent Christianity, just as I advocated 100-percent justice during my period of community involvement.
Gilbert’s most poignant comments concern the values embedded in his childhood years and his neighborhood network of mutual support.
Some folks would say if you’re born poor, you don’t have a chance. If they’d seen where I was born, they’d have written me off. But there are blessings in having less. You can dream and believe many things are possible. God always rewards believing faith, we are always told. We knew without question He was taking care of us. . . .
My home – 2725 South Ninth Street – was a small house that leaned slightly to one side. In cold weather we stuffed rags int he cracks of the windows and covered them with cardboard to keep out the cold.
If I came out of what some people call “needy circumstances,” so did we all in that neighborhood everyone called “Butcher Pen.” Most people in Waco had electricity ad indoor plumbing in their homes. We had outdoor toilets and kerosene lamps, like everyone I grew up with. My family had chickens in the yard, which had to be fed every day, and a vegetable garden which gave us some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. . . .
I came from a praying family. Father was a minister to two country churches and we all knew without doubt what God expected of us. Every Sunday morning we would be at the breakfast table for devotions. We each read a Scripture, and we had prayer around the table. No matter how old we were, we were expected for family devotions if we lived in that house. Today when we encounter problems we remember things our father said to use from the Scriptures.
‘If I came out of what some people call “needy circumstances,” so did we all in that neighborhood everyone called the “Butcher Pen.”‘
The real preparation for life was learning to work hard. We learned the value of hard work early. It’s a lesson few children learn today in the same way that so many of us learned it. Boys my age pulled cotton in the fields to help their families. Many of the girls learned to clean, wash, and care for the sick – things their grandmothers taught them as necessary information to make it through this life. I don’t know of many young people today who can work as hard as we all learned to work.
We were aware, also, of adults in our neighborhood who were making something of themselves. Their presence with us was very important. Mr. Manning, who lived in the next block, had a son, Dr. Ruben Manning, who became president of Paul Quinn College and then of Jarvis College. Ruben’s sister Lillian was a social worker and another brother, Monroe, was a lieutenant colonel in the military. The Richardsons had two daughters who became teachers, and the Littlefield’s son, Harry, became a coach in Beaumont, Texas, and in Los Angeles. Rev. George J. Johnson became the first black to run for the school board in the 1950s. He had a vision about the leadership and our people and he was often quoted in the newspaper, which we thought was very significant. We were always told we could do what these older people had done if we were willing to work hard enough to be “twice as good” as anybody else. That’s what it would take, we were told.
Most of all, as children, we learned to dream together. We dreamed of a future different from our everyday world, a day when every one of us would a strong, successful, and good, and nothing would stand in our way.
We dreamed those dreams as we played near the ditch which ran along the front of our houses. In summer the water was low, except when it would fill up with unexpected rain.
That ditch! Ask anyone from Butcher Pan and that ditch will be the scene of their best memories. Over across town, folks were saying it was “too bad about the poor people in South Waco,” but we children were dreaming our dreams and laying our plans from our favorite and magical location. On long, hot summer nights we played “marbles for keeps” until twilight, then told each other tall tales, stories of bravery, good fortune, and winning against all odds in the game of life.
Gilbert has tempered that childhood attitude toward winning with a deep faith that it is God that provides the strength for victory in life – with “no excuses accepted.” It is the theme of his pastoral ministry.
“He can do anything,” I said. “I’m here to tell you that.”
For the rest of my life I want to give glory to God for what He has done. I believe that is why He has sustained my life. I can tell anyone, no matter how far down they feel, that God is capable of everything. He holds the key to everything we need. We should never say we can’t do something when God says we can. Whatever it is, God says we can do it.
Excerpts from No Excuses Accepted, the Autobiography of Robert Gilbert ’67 (with Nancy Barcus) reprinted with permission from Broadman Press, which published the book in January 1988.
