Angry Young Bishop

Episcopal Father C. Edward Crowther, who got his rookie training in civil rights by picketing against racial discrimination in fraternities at U.C.L.A. , is now battling in the big league: South Africa. Two years ago in Los Angeles, Crowther, an English-born U.S. citizen, was just a campus chaplain, but a fast rise in the Anglican hierarchy has made him Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman and, at 36, the church's youngest bishop. His office in Kimberley has a picture of Martin Luther King on the wall, but Crowther has not until now been belligerent about apartheid.

What drove Bishop Crowther into open battle was the lot of 1,000 Bantus from a native community called Holpan near Kimberley. Last month they were thrown out of their shanties and moved by government trucks to a barren waste in the Mamuthla Reserve, 25 miles to the north. Their offense was refusal to move into new government housing, where the rent of $5.60 a month was a third, the Bantus claimed, of what they could hope to earn. Visiting the compound, Bishop Crowther found most of the natives without food; some had not eaten in four days.

Back in Kimberley, the bishop said that he felt "ashamed to be associated by accident of race with those responsible for this disregard for humanity." He thereupon organized a relief drive to which whites and half-castes contributed. Government officials declared that the Bantus had "forfeited the right to sympathy" by their intransigence, denied that they needed any food, lifted Crowther's permit to enter the area. Afrikaans papers began hinting that the bishop had undertaken the food drive to "embarrass" the government. As the holder of a U.S. passport, Crowther is subject to expulsion any time the government wants to undertake such action.

Crowther denies that his food-raising for the Bantus had any political motivation, but now his temper is up. "The church has to oppose this government," he says, "because what the church stands for and what this government stands for are totally different concepts of the doctrine of man."

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