"DAVID BILLINGS!"

 “DAVID BILLINGS!”

My longtime friend David Billings turns 80 on October 1.  He and I have known one another since the 4th grade in Helena, and thus he is my longest and dearest friend from those days.  He and his wife Margery Freeman and many friends and colleagues will be celebrating his birthday in the Bronx on October 4, and Caroline and I regret that we will not be able to attend that celebration.  So, I am going to share part of the letter that I sent to him. 

    I was always impressed David’s kind heart, by his great, mischievous sense of humor, and by his intellect and curiosity. When we were playing Pony League baseball on a field in an all-Black neighborhood, he began to raise my consciousness by musing on what the Black boys must be thinking as they watched us white boys play on a field in their neighborhood – a field on which they were forbidden to step in the neo-slavery South.

    In our high school years, we began to migrate closer together because we both knew that there was a larger and deeper world out there.  We gave one another the courage to go find that world, and I will be ever grateful to David for that alliance which changed both of our lives.  I remember sitting outside of Nick’s Restaurant (at the white end of the Cherry Street drag in Helena), at the end of Christmas break in the middle of our sophomore year in college (David at Ole Miss and me at Southwestern in Memphis).  We had both done hard work the summer before, and that night we agreed to seek something else in that coming summer of 1966, something that would stretch us and deepen us (and be less physical!).  Through a fortuitous set of circumstances, we ended up working in a summer program at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, and it changed our lives.  It was a huge jump for young guys from the neo-slavery deep South, and I don’t know that I would have done it without David going also.  Indeed, as I recall, a few nights before we left for Brooklyn, I was ready to back out because I thought I was in love with a young woman in Helena and didn’t want to leave her.  David reminded me how excited we were to go to NYC and how much we would learn there.  I finally agreed – and later learned that “my love” was also dating someone else that same summer!

    LAPC and NYC changed our lives – we learned so much there and discovered how much we loved the city.  Even more importantly, we engaged Black people as human beings for the first time, and I remember us talking during that summer in New York and saying that we could not go home again, to borrow Thomas Wolfe’s phrase.  That proved to be true, and it began painful times for both of us and our families – fortunately, the bonds of love held strong during those times.  We were allies from then on out, especially regarding the world of Helena and the deep South, and I am so grateful for his friendship on that part of the journey.  

    Towards the end of our college careers, we both encountered the Vietnam War, and both of us went to seminary to follow God’s call (and to be exempt from the draft).  Through different kinds of circumstances, we both dropped out of seminary and faced the draft once again.  We both applied to be given conscientious objector (CO) status, and I was granted it, and David was not.  I was shocked that David was denied CO status, but in one of God’s great comedy acts, his trumped-up conviction for malicious mischief in Mississippi turned out to be a felony which disqualified him for the draft.  I also learned much later in our lives from a former Helena draft board member that when they considered our applications, they had always known that I was going to be a minister, so the CO for me made sense.  But, they had perceived David as a mischievous ne’er-do-well, and they felt that he was just trying to get out of the draft and thus denied him.

    Their stupid decision led him to New Orleans, where he later became pastor at St. Mark’s Methodist Church and director of its community center.   We both helped one another through many troubled times in those decades, but we also shared a similar vision about the world and our places in it.  And, through his becoming an anti-racism trainer with the Peoples’ Institute, he taught me so much about the continuing power of white privilege and the call to seek to remake the landscape into one of justice and equity.  

    He came to Caroline’s and my wedding in Decatur in 1974 and later came to Norfolk to baptize our son David (partially his namesake) at St. Columba Church in 1980.  And, we both helped one another write our books!  His is “Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life.”  If you haven’t read it, get it – it will tell you a lot about the conditions that led to the rise of Donald Trump.

David’s only flaw is that he is an intrepid Yankees’ fan and has been for many decades.  But, I give thanks for him and for his witness and especially for our long and fruitful friendship.