I SUPPOSE YOU DIDN’T KNOW

A funny thing happened on the way to writing about the so-called “race” problem in the US, I had a number of people write to tell me that I “know nothing of what I’m writing about.” Several told me to “shut up” and a couple said they could not stand to read anything else from me— which actually sounds like a lot of intolerant bias. Whatever happened to the critical thinking ability to read and think about things that you might disagree with?

Anyway, I wrote back to a couple of them and told them a little of my history and they said they never knew that, never had a clue. One suggested that I ought to communicate it. So here goes. A long time before I found NLP and returned to school to get my doctorate in psychology, I went off to study the Bible.

It was 1968 when I went off to Seminary. I went south to Memphis Tennessee and I just so happened to arrive there just after Martin Luther King Jr. was shoot. Talk about a city in turmoil! There were road blocks in many places and we were stopped and searched many times. I say we because my class was 25 percent black and so I frequently travel in and out of the city with my fellow students. Numerous times I rode in a car where half of us were white and half were black. Coming from the north (Indiana) I didn’t think anything about it, we were all classmates, but the police and others in Memphis treated it like it was a crime.

In my second year, I took an assignment with a church in Mississippi on Sundays. That was my first experienced of “the deep south” in those days and that’s where I encountered white prejudice against black people. Once I invited a black friend with me to Baldwyn but he had been in the deep south and he would not go. Naively I told people at the church that Sunday that my black friend was hesitant about coming with me and “I’m sure all of you would make him feel at home.” Flabbergasted doesn’t even begin to describe the shock I got. So being naive, unsophisticated, and confrontational, I began preaching on “race relationships!” I quoted the passage over and over: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ” (Galatians 3:28). After all, that was theologically— we are all equals and all of us are equally made in God’s image and likeness.

After I graduated I took a church in the Louisville Ky area and upon discovering there was a small black church of the same denomination, I began urging that we combine to create an integrated church. And that’s exactly what we did in 1972-3. I visited and broke bread in nearly every single home of our black brethren, and they in my home. A few years later I joined the NAACP and participated in a protest in Caruthersville Missouri (1977). After than I worked with an inner city black church in St. Louis, a church which was 10% white and 90% black. I worked as youth minister at that time focusing on the young black kids.