"LAPC SUMMER"

 “THE LAPC SUMMER”

In her fine, National-Book-Award-winning “South to America,” author Imani Perry travels to many places in the South to seek to understand the soul of America.  Born in Birmingham, but like many other Black Southerners, she left the overt racism of the South for less rugged terrain.  In her chapter entitled “Upper Alabama,” she notes that the proximity of Black people and white people in the South did not mitigate slavery or neo-slavery, and she concludes: “We lived together. Black and White.  We traveled from Upper South to Deep South together.  We died together.  This intimate garment is a lesson.  If you think, mistakenly, that American racism can be surmounted by integration, by people knowing each other, even by loving each other, the history of the American South must teach otherwise.  There is no resolution to unjust relations without a structural and ethical change.”

While I agree with her last sentence in this quote, I am more skeptical about the earlier sentences.  In my youth, when many Black people lived all around me, I did not know any of their names or their stories.  The purpose of segregation/neo-slavery was to keep us separate, especially to keep white people from engaging the humanity of Black people.  That was the point of segregation – to keep the power of neo-slavery intact.  I believed in the power of white supremacy, but it was engaging the humanity of Black people that began to shake the foundations of my faith in white supremacy.

I remember how it started.  My long-time friend, David Billings, and I were sitting outside of segregated Nick’s Café in Helena on an early January night in 1966, at the end of Christmas break.  We were in the middle of our sophomore years in college – David at Ole Miss and me at Rhodes.  We had both done hard physical labor the summer before, and we wanted something different for the coming summer.  We also wanted to get out of small-town life in Helena.  As we talked about what to do for the coming summer, I remembered that I had heard about a church in Brooklyn, New York, that hired white Southerners to work in their summer children’s program.  I mentioned it to David, and we both were intrigued by the possibility, mainly at getting out of Helena and going to New York City!  

We both applied, and we both got into the program as staff members for the summer of 1966.  The pastor of the church was a white man named George Knight, and we had assumed that the leadership of the summer program would be white.  I remember gathering for orientation in Jarvie Hall in Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church (LAPC) with 40 or so other summer staff members, mostly white people.  The leadership of the program were two Black adults, and neither David nor I had ever worked under the supervision of Black people.  Gene Hatley and Nancy Martin told us that they would save our lives that summer.  First, we would be working in a Black neighborhood with mostly Black kids, and they told us they would help us survive in a community accustomed to seeing white folks as the enemy.  Second, they told those of us who were Southerners that they would help save our souls for the long haul – in this summer program, we would have the opportunity to see how life could be lived when some of the dividing wall of race was torn down.

It worked for David and me – our eyes were opened, and our hearts were deepened as we encountered the humanity of Black people for the first time in our lives.  It was a lesson that we never forgot, a lesson that changed our hearts and our imaginations forever.  The LAPC Summer did not end racism in our hearts, but it did open a window wide for us to escape the pounding white supremacy of the South.  I experienced the lingering power of that racism as soon as I returned home to Helena at the end of the summer.  When I encountered Black people in Helena, I did not want to see them as human beings like me – I wanted to stay in the comfortable place I had known at home.  But, I could not deny the humanity of the Black people that I had experienced in Brooklyn.  My first response to this dilemma was to decide that the Black people in Helena were not like the Black people in Brooklyn.  That response lasted only briefly, but I did notice how deeply racism was planted in my heart.

So, I’m grateful to LAPC for taking a chance on me and David and for changing our lives in ways that we could not have imagined when we got on that plane to fly to New York.  Imani Perry’s book is powerful and profound, but on this point, I have to disagree.  It was the conscious decision to step over the dividing wall of race in the form of actual human beings – human beings whose humanity I had previously dismissed – that opened the door wide for David and me to step through into a whole new world.  That was sixty years ago this summer, and I still give thanks for it.  LAPC changed and saved my life – Gene and Nancy were spot on.