Last Friday, August 23, lifelong civil rights activist, Falls Church resident, and active member of the Falls Church Episcopal Church, the Reverend Dr. Robert L. McCan, delivered a lengthy speech and was honored at an event celebrating his 100th birthday at the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which he co-founded, in Washington, DC.
McCan was at his best during his half-hour speech, recalling his many accomplishments, including his work with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The event took place in the afternoon and was attended by dozens of friends and supporters, including a large delegation from the Falls Church Episcopal Church 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 the Falls Church area.
McCan was introduced as an “American peacemaker and peacemaker” who, during his long and eventful career as a clergyman and peacemaker, helped found what is now the US Institute of Peace.
According to McCan, it was his experiences during World War II as a post-seminary chaplain in Missouri and later during the war when he rode on a bus from Asheville, North Carolina, to St. Louis, Missouri, with a young American of Japanese descent who was being released by his church from an internment camp to study medicine. He said others on the bus jeered and taunted the student with signs that read, “Beat a Jap.”
“Although the war taught me to hate and kill the Japanese, I had a Japanese friend and wanted to work with him instead toward world peace and intercultural understanding,” McCan recalled. This was the beginning of his lifelong service.
He recalled the Southern Baptist Convention at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he shared the stage with Dr. King and so spent an hour talking with him backstage before they spoke. “Nobody remembered what I said that day,” he smiled. It was during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that Rosa Parks became famous for her role.
In Clinton, Tennessee, outside Knoxville, Dr. McCan appeared with Dr. King and Thurgood Marshall at a meeting that resulted in the detonation of two bombs nearby, and Dr. McCan subsequently chose the title “Bombs and Brotherhood, Two Ways” for his sermon.
In Danville, Virginia, where officials tried to prevent a peace and integration event by closing the public library and removing all the chairs, protests forced the reversal of that measure, but then a violent attack occurred that left 260 people hospitalized. That was in the mid-1970s, when the Southern Baptist Church denomination had, as McCan put it, “moved away from me” and he devoted all his effort to peacemaking.
While at Harvard University, he taught alongside Henry Kissinger and the famous Huston Smith, who taught philosophy of religion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Later that decade, McCan began efforts to establish what he would call the George Washington Peace Academy, modeled on George Washington’s farewell address in which he said he wanted to “banish war from the world.”
Ultimately, key to bringing this vision to fruition in the form of the US Institute of Peace were US Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana (who lived in Falls Church at the time of his death in 1984 and was a principal in the Falls Church law firm of Hartke & Hartke), whose son was present at the McCan event on Friday to give a speech, as well as Senator Mark Hatfield, Senator Charles Mathias and McCan’s colleague Brian Wedge. They met as a group of about 40 people at the Holiday Inn in Rosslyn in April 1976 and thus provided the impetus for the founding of the institute. A membership drive followed, which resulted in 25,000 members, and in 1984 Congress voted to formally establish it.
He was the original founder of the Dag Hammarskjold College, which was to be located in Columbia, Maryland, but never came to fruition due to lack of funds. There, the goal was for the majority of faculty and students to be from other countries and for all students to complete internships at the United Nations.
Dr. McCan has held four leadership positions in the federal government: the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Department of Education, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Agency for International Development.
He was an associate professor of political ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and a fellow at the Episcopal Church’s Center for Theology and Public Policy.
In his remarks on Friday, Hartke’s son quoted a quote from John F. Kennedy Jr., who said the most important praise is to be “remembered for one’s contributions to the human spirit.”
