HONEST ABOUT RACE AND SINKING SHIPS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.

In honor of Dr. King's dream and Attorney General Eric Holder’s admonition that we be honest about race, I submit the following thoughts.

A lot of leaks can sink a big ship. Imagine racism as a huge, unwieldy, unstable behemoth of a ship—bigger than Titanic and thought to be just as unsinkable.

I like to think that Dr. King kicked in some huge holes, but there were also a lot of little leaks that are causing it to founder, still.

There have been many unseen and un-recounted daily interactions that have sprung unnumbered leaks of hope. These leaks have occurred among Americans of all colors: red, yellow, black, and white. Some are surprising even amazing. Some begin badly, but end in a kingdom of God kind of way.

Dr. King always said it was the good people who were silent who did the most harm. I know he was speaking to white folks when he said that. I want to share some occasions that I know when good people spoke up.

When I was a kid, I saw the water hoses and the dogs on television, and heard the name Bull Connor for the first time, but that kind of hatred happened in Alabama, not where I lived. My encounters with race arose in the hinterland of race relations, not the hotbed.

Around the dinner table, my parents talked about Dr. King. They feared he was stirring up trouble. However, we were church people who were taught to love everybody and hate nobody. I never grew up believing Dr. King was a bad man.

When he died in 1968, I did not hear anything like what Pat Conroy describes that he heard in the South Carolina high school where he taught. He wrote of it in his book The Water is Wide.

Read it and weep.

I never heard anyone cheer. I was eleven, and Dr. King's death was a tragedy that I have always bundled up into my memory with President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

Now, here are my stories.

I have done some things I wish I had never done. For instance, when I was twelve years old, I spent a week at Camp Joy. It was brought to us by Highland Park Baptist and their right arm of righteousness, Tennessee Temple. They were, respectively, the most fundamentalist church and college in the world.

I was the shortstop on my camp baseball team when the only black kid in the whole camp stepped up to the plate. I shouted, “Strike that nigger out!”

One of the camp counselors, who was the umpire, called time out immediately and told me to sit on the bench. I played no more baseball that day.

My face must have turned the color of a catcher’s chest protector, which back then was ketchup red.

I have been a clown all of my life. At the time, I thought everyone would laugh. I felt no malice toward that kid, but I was embarrassed when I sat on that bench and began to think how mean it sounded to him.

Before I sat down, I had to apologize and promise to never say that to him again. I did not get angry like kids do today. I apologized gladly and sincerely because I knew I was wrong for saying it.

My point here is that these kinds of things change the way people think. I'm surprised this happened at a Highland Park Baptist camp. Until recently, interracial dating has never been allowed at their college.

My mother did not tolerate racist language. Once my father was watching a Tennessee football game, and he said, “That’s just like a nigger,” after a Tennessee player fumbled a punt.

My mother heard him from the kitchen. She yelled his name and began banging pots and pans. She fed him Gravy Train that night for supper while the rest of us dined on fish sticks.

I never heard my father say “nigger” around my mother after that, but I did hear him say it when she was not around.

My mother learned her attitudes about race from her mother. Grandmother felt no ill will towards anyone. She was too much of a saint to feel otherwise.

My mother did not learn racial attitudes from her father. My grandfather was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher from Sand Mountain, Alabama.

He once owned a black cat, whom he called Nigger, until my grandmother and my mother made him stop. After that, he called the kitty Colored.

Granddad believed in segregation. He thought miscegenation was unnatural. To his credit, however, he changed as the times around him changed.

The truth was that my grandfather was ambivalent about race. He told me that he knew some fine colored pastors whom he would be proud to let preach in his church. Like so many white people, he could never hear the condescension in his words.

Yet, here is a story about him that has always amazed me and makes me proud every time I recall it.

When my grandfather was a pastor at First Baptist Church in Dunlap, Tennessee, he was dining at one of the three restaurants in the town. It was on the corner of the two main stretches of state highway that went North-South and East-West.

Three black men wearing army uniforms came into the restaurant for lunch. The manager told them that he would send a waitress out to their car to take their order, but they could not eat inside his restaurant.

My grandfather, who had served in the Philippines during World War II, told the manager that if he did not let those men in uniform eat in his restaurant, he would tell everyone in his congregation to never eat there again.

Just about everybody in Dunlap was Baptist. A few were Church of Christ and Seventh Day Adventist. You bet an exception was allowed at least on that day.

This is my favorite story about my grandfather. I have no idea when this happened. My guess is the late 1950s or the early 1960s. Segregation was legal back then. In Dunlap, segregation did not go away until the turn of the century.

I love to tell the story about the day my grandfather sprung a leak.

Blessings…