January 29, 2008
A man on a mission
University Chaplain Joe Eldridge was honored recently for his longtime commitment to human rights when he was awarded the Louis B. Sohn Award of the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area (UNA-NCA). The award was given in December at the UNA-NCA’s annual Human Rights Luncheon, at which Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Ia.) and others recounted Eldridge’s contributions to human rights. (Photo by Jeff Watts)
When the two black men walked into the dime store, the lights went out, the doors shut, and at the lunch counter where Joe Eldridge and his mother sat with their sandwiches, all the waiters disappeared.
The scene lingers in his mind today as pivotal, but at the time, he knew little of what was happening. Eldridge recalls his mother getting angry and searching for the manager, and believes his mother—a southern minister’s wife—gave the manager “a piece of her mind” for treating people with such inhumanity.
But his parents were not activists, and the moment passed. It would take some years before Eldridge reflected on all the things he’d seen while growing up in the segregated South, and became the person whose faith led him to work for social justice in Latin America, be a voice for human rights in Washington, and inspire AU students as university chaplain.
Today, students who are budding activists turn to him for advice and mentoring. He oversees the bustling Kay Spiritual Life Center, where community members of all faiths find opportunities to share their beliefs. Eldridge, SIS/MA ’80, is also an adjunct faculty member of the School of International Service and leads students on eye-opening alternative breaks to poor communities in Latin America where they make a difference for others, and find themselves changed as well.
His first inspiration was his father. Ed Eldridge was a Methodist minister who was not one to preach sermons on social justice, but lived in a way that taught his son the dignity of all people.
“I grew up in a home where implicit in everything was an affirmation that we were created in the image of God, precious in God’s sight, and children of God—whatever our race or ethnicity,” he says.
“When you peel away the theology, there is always an understanding of God as being either judgmental and full of wrath, or loving and full of mercy. For my father, the love of God trumped everything else. So inevitably, you apply that to the world.”
But not, at first, in a political way. The summer that Martin Luther King Jr. declared he had a dream, Eldridge didn’t even know of the speech. He was at a church youth camp in the Smoky Mountains, thinking about girls and cars and waiting to start as a freshman at tiny Tennessee Wesleyan College, a school of 700 students in West Tennessee.
It would be there that he would read books like Soul on Ice and Invisible Man, which affected him profoundly. But the first moment of acting on his convictions came at a local laundromat, which displayed a big sign, “Whites Only.”
A small group of students at the quiet church school decided they’d protest it. He was afraid the townspeople would get mad, and many of them did. Eldridge and his friends were jeered at and spat at, and the shop owner turned on a hose so the protesters would have to march through puddles.
In retrospect, it would be an important step in his life. But at the time, he says, “I wasn’t trying to change the world. I was just trying to get them to take down that damned sign.” It did come down, quietly, a few months later.
College was followed by a natural step for a minister’s son: seminary. Afterwards, he could have settled into a role as a young minister, working a circuit of three or four churches, but he balked at the thought and made another formative decision.
“I wasn’t ready to go back to East Tennessee. I knew East Tennessee. I had lived all my life in East Tennessee,” he says. “I wanted to see the world.” So he applied to be a missionary, and ended up in Chile just after the election of socialist president Salvador Allende.
There were thousands of people on the street, cheering an anticipated new dawn for Chile. “When I finally figured out what he was saying, I loved it, because he talked about justice. I was totally swept up by the ideal of a just society.”
Mattie Ressler, Joe Eldridge, and Erin Lapham during a 2007 alternative break trip in Colombia (Photo by Janelle Nodhturft)
But it soon became apparent, Eldridge says, that the U.S. government would do anything to destroy the controversial socialist government. The young Tennessee missionary began working with nuns and priests to organize a committee to investigate what was happening.
In 1973, a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende’s government, and a few days later, the religious workers’ office was raided. Two young Americans were arrested and taken to the stadium, where people were being executed. Eldridge and some others went to the U.S. embassy, “and their response was basically, ‘You folks brought this on yourself.’”
The office had been ransacked, and the files confiscated. Eldridge knew his name was in the files. It was dangerous to possess books or articles by pro-Allende writers, and even being caught with a record album by a leftist musician could cause a person to be “disappeared.”
So he went into hiding. “It was terrifying. I literally was burning things in the bathtub.” He carried his Bible wherever he went, to prove he was really a missionary.
Still, he wanted to stay. Once foreign journalists began to arrive on the scene, Eldridge was among those who led them to morgues and took them around to show the world what was happening. But the Chilean Methodist church, which before the coup had invited him to stay another three years, quickly withdrew the invitation. “All of my friends said I should go home anyway; that I could be of greater use in Washington,” he said.
Eldridge helped to found the Washington Office on Latin America, where he worked until the mid-1980s to investigate human rights abuses in Latin America and share information with the news media and policymakers. He also worked in Honduras and founded the Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in 1991, serving as its director for six years. He and his wife, Bolivia-born nonprofit activist Maria Otero, also raised three children; the eldest founded a nonprofit and is now, with his brother, backpacking across South America.
In 1997, Eldridge took his convictions to AU as university chaplain. “It was time,” he says. “I’d been working in the NGO sector, and it was time to let another generation take over.”
It was also a chance to make a difference in the lives of young people who felt motivated to make a difference. “The most rewarding part for me is to have these conversations with young people who want to be involved with work that edifies and changes the world, but can’t always figure out why. They might think they’re motivated by noblesse oblige, or anger. Anger is good. I affirm feeling fury at injustice or the status quo. But that’s not going to sustain you.
“The most meaningful times are when I can help them to understand that, deep in their being, what really animates them is love. Those conversations are really transformative. If they can understand that,” he says, “then that will sustain them over the years.”
