Daily Lesson for July 6, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Matthew chapter 23 verses 29 and 30:

29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous,30 saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

Let me tell you about one of my heroes, Homer Price Rainey, a distant cousin of mine on the Price side of the family. His mother was a Price from which he received his middle name. 

Homer Price was born in 1896 and grew up in Young County, Texas. He attended Austin College in Sherman, played professional baseball, and was ordained as a Baptist minister before going on to get both a master's and PhD at the University of Chicago. After serving as the youngest college president in the country at Franklin College, he then served as president of Bucknell University in Ohio.  In 1939 he became 12th president the University of Texas at Austin.

Cousin Rainey's tenure at UT was swept up in a long controversy with the University of Texas regents over issues of academic freedom in the public university classroom. This was the beginning of the Red Scare hysteria in America, and the regents did not like the fact that Rainey had refused to fire a number of economics and English professors whose curricula was accused of being Anti-American or having communistic ideas.  

But that was just the pitched battle. The real war was between the regents and Cousin Rainey, whose ideas academic freedom, race relations, and other social issues were seen by the regents to be too radical and threatening to the social order.  By refusing to back down his support of the university professors Rainey knew he was sealing his own fate. On November 1, 1944 (All Saints Day) the regents met in special session in Houston and voted to fire Rainey.  

Days later, 2,000 UT students marched from the university to the state Capitol in a mock funeral, protesting Cousin Rainey's firing. When they got there they demanded that the legislature act to reappoint Cousin Rainey. Beneath the shadow of the Capitol dome the students then sang "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You".  But neither the regents nor the legislature would be moved.  Cousin Rainey was seen as "a friend to the negro" and even "sympathetic to homosexuals".  Those were seen as indictable offenses in 1944 Texas.

Cousin Rainey went on to run for governor and then serve as president of Stephens College, an all-Womens school in Missouri, and then teach at the University of Colorado until his death in 1985.

Fifty years later, a campaign was begun amongst the class of 1944 to have one of the buildings on the UT campus renamed in Cousin Rainey's honor.  In 1994, at the 50th anniversary of that class's commencement, the old Music building was renamed Homer Rainey Hall.

In today's lesson Jesus says, one generation kills the prophets and the next generation builds their monuments.  Go down to the university campus in Austin and visit Cousin Rainey's building, and you'll see it's true.