"COFFEE COUNTY, GEORGIA"

 “COFFEE COUNTY, GEORGIA”

There are many smoking guns in the massive indictment issued by Fulton County, Georgia over Donald Trump and others attempting to interfere in the 2020 election results.  Nineteen people, including Trump, were indicted in the news conference announced by DA Fani Willis on August 16.  Not only were there many smoking guns seen in those indictments – there were also at least two blazing guns seen.  One was the infamous phone call that Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, “asking” him to find 11,870 more votes for Trump.  When Raffensberger told him that the votes were not there, Trump began to make all kinds of veiled threats to Raffensberger.  Trump later described it as a “perfect phone call.”

The other blazing gun was seen in a video from the elections office of Coffee County, Georgia, which is in rural south Georgia, about 200 miles south of Atlanta.  On January 7, 2021, the day after the violent and murderous insurrection of January 6, a team from Sullivan/Strickler showed up in broad daylight at the Coffee County elections office in Douglas, Georgia.  Their mission was to commit the obvious crime of copying all election data and the inner workings of the voting machine systems used by Coffee County and the state of Georgia.  Sullivan/Strickler had been hired by attorney Sidney Powell’s company to do this work.  I’d like to say that the elections supervisor blocked them at the door, telling them that their request for such information was not only irregular but also illegal under Georgia law.  

The video shows something different, however.  It shows Republican Party county chair Cathy Latham waving them in, and elections supervisor Missy Hampton welcoming them in and assisting them in their efforts to commit an elections crime in Georgia.  All of the participants in this process were white, and the information taken on January 7 was shared all around the country.  None of this was known until the video was released as part of the evidence in another case.  This happened in a county that voted 70% in favor of Trump in the 2020 election, so it was not a case of seeking to discover voter fraud in the county.  It came technically on the same day that the US House of Representatives had voted to certify the 2020 election results, a vote that had been delayed until 3 AM because of the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, seeking to overturn the election results at Trump’s urging.

I’d like to say that Coffee County was a very isolated case, but as we are coming to learn, Trump and his team of Powell, Eastman, Giuliani, and others were pressuring several states in the same way.  Coffee County also has a long history of voter intimidation and suppression, and that 70% vote for Trump mirrors the white population of Coffee County. The county was named for Maj. John Coffee, known as a famous fighter in the “Indian Wars” of 1833-36, which led to the removal of Muskogee and Cherokee tribes, who lived on the land prior to the European invasion.  This removal came to be known as “The Trail of Tears.”

Coffee County was part of the voter suppression in post-Reconstruction days and maintained that stance throughout the days of neo-slavery, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to end that era.  It is the county where segregationist governor Lester Maddox gave many speeches in the neo-slavery days, because he thought that it was safe territory.  Progress was made late in the 20th century because of courageous Black leaders like Gladys Coley, but the election of Barack Obama as president brought out the neo-slavery voices and efforts.  Olivia Coley-Pearson, a Black Douglas city commissioner and daughter of Glady Coley, knows that oppression first hand.  She was arrested in 2011 on elections interference charges because she assisted people at the polls, but the state of Georgia declined to prosecute her.  Coffee County brought the charges forward and tried her twice in 2012, one trial ending in a hung jury and the second in an acquittal.

Coley-Pearson had these comments about the current situation in Coffee County (and throughout the rural South, for that matter):  “In terms of voting rights, I’ve definitely seen regress,” Coley-Pearson said. “Back in the 1960s, we had to  count the jelly beans; this, that and the other. We aren’t still there, but where we are is a more sophisticated means of voter suppression. We might have progressed some at one point in time, but we are currently moving backwards.”

We are definitely at a crucial point in our democracy, and the events of 2023 and 2024 will determine our future.  Keep your eyes and ears open – the forces of white supremacy have given us notice that they intend to take us back to neo-slavery.  It will be up to us to prevent that.  

"BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY"

 “BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY”

Sixty years ago, I was a senior in high school in the fall of 1963, and I had listened to MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on August 28.  That speech and that March had moved the dial a little bit for me.  I was not converted yet from my captivity to white supremacy and its interpretation of life, but that day had opened the window just a tad.  I was beginning to think that there was more to the story of race and white superiority, which I had been taught from infancy, and which I believed.

Almost 3 weeks later came the white supremacist answer to the March on Washington, to the Birmingham campaign in the spring, and to the growing calls from the civil rights movement to put the idea of equality back on to the map of American history and landscape.  On Sunday, September 15, 1963, many Black families in Birmingham headed to church, including Pastor John Cross and his family at Sixteenth Avenue Baptist.  They were not aware that a splinter group of the KKK had planted 19 sticks of dynamite underneath the stairs on the east side of the church, wired to a timer set to go off on Sunday morning.  

At 10:22 AM on Sunday, September 15, the dynamite went off, injuring over 20 people and killing 4 young Black girls getting ready for worship:  Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.  It was a heinous act, designed to terrorize the Black people who led the civil rights movement in Birmingham.  Sixteenth Street Church was a hub of that movement, and later I would meet Reverend Cross in our work at Oakhurst Presbyterian.  He was a member of nearby Oakhurst Baptist, and his wife, Mrs. Cross, was a leader at the Girls Club, housed at our church.  He had many stories to tell of that fateful day and of the cost that the bombing extracted in his heart and in the hearts of many others.  Filled with grief and anger, they remained determined to be witnesses to the necessity of moving towards the great uncashed check of equality in American history.  Rhiannon Giddens recorded  a very moving song about this time – a song called “Birmingham Sunday,” written by Richard Farina.  Here’s a link to it: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_T5KlTpvoM

The four cowards were white men named  Thomas Edwin Blanton, Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry.  The FBI investigated the bombing, and they determined the identities of the men who did the bombing.  But FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would never allow them to be prosecuted, and the case was closed.  The first one prosecuted was Chambliss in 1977.  Alabama Attorney General William Baxley had reopened the case in 1971 and led the prosecution.  Chambliss was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1985.  Blanton and Cherry were later convicted in 2001 and 2002 and died in prison.  In his closing argument, prosecuting attorney and future U.S. Senator Doug Jones said that although the trial was conducted 38 years after the bombing, it was no less important, adding: "It's never too late for the truth to be told ... It's never too late for a man to be held accountable for his crimes." The fourth coward, Herman Cash died before the cases were ever reopened.  

I remember hearing about the Birmingham Sunday bombing soon after it happened in 1963, and I had a split reaction to it.  I was horrified at the violence, at the violation of a church itself, and by the cowards who did it.  Yet, I also felt that if Black people would only leave things alone and let equality come gradually to the South, then heinous acts like this would not happen.  I could understand the horrible loss of life, but I was still held in deep captivity to the power of white supremacy.  Since the people who died were children in church, I could not say that they deserved it, but I did feel like Black people had brought this upon themselves.  I had a long way to go until I could find my true center, not as a racist, white supremacist but as a child of God, called to live and fight for equality and equal dignity for all, no matter one’s racial or gender or economic classification.

We are now in a time when white supremacy is regaining strength – in some states, this history about Birmingham Sunday would not be allowed to be taught in schools.  Racial violence is growing, and Trumpism is calling forth the spirits of the cowards who slinked into Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to plant the explosives.  Don’t recall their names – recall Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair.  Don’t be of a split mind like I was in 1963.  Find your place to work for justice and equality.  Pray about the craziness in which we now find ourselves – and practice what you pray.

"SUSAN STROUPE!"

 “SUSAN STROUPE!”

This Tuesday is our daughter Susan Stroupe’s birthday – we give thanks for her!  She has been such a gift to us over these many years, from her quick delivery at birth to her recent navigation of our summer trip to New York state to see human rights sites.  She traveled in David’s shadow for awhile, being almost 3 years younger than him.  Having different gender identities cut down some of the rivalry between them also, but soon Susan began to develop her own identity and path.  She was born in Nashville, but we moved to Decatur when she was 6 months old, and she found her place here.

When she was in the first grade, she had the magnificent Debbie Miller as her teacher, and they quickly bonded.  Ms. Miller contacted us to see if we would allow Susan to star in the school play (grades 1-5 at that time).  We were flattered, but we replied, “Are you sure Susan can do this?  She’s so shy, and she would have so many lines to memorize.”  Ms. Miller answered:  “I don’t think that you have to worry about that – she comes alive on the stage, and she not only has all her lines already memorized;  she has memorized everybody else’s lines as well.  She is already acting like an assistant director.”  We agreed, and of course, Susan was wonderful in the play.  Her love for all things theater was born and nurtured there.  

She surprised us many times, including her driving test, which she took as soon as she was eligible.  I had taught her to drive, using the lower parking lot at the church to teach her parallel parking with two plastic garbage cans as the markers.  When we went for the test, she aced the parallel parking, and indeed the tester told her to go ahead and finish up after that.  I was fearful at the rapid conclusion, thinking that she had somehow failed, but the instructor was so impressed (and so hot – the ac in our car was not working), that she gave her a 93 on the test.  She has shared her skills of parallel parking with many friends in Baltimore, where it is a necessity. 

At her high school graduation, she earned salutatorian, and she won the Atlanta Journal Constitution Cup as the Outstanding Senior of Decatur High, considered the crowning achievement of the class.  She wanted to get out of the South for weather reasons (too hot) and for spiritual reasons – she was tired of the blatant white supremacy, the acceptance of patriarchy, and the lack of sensitivity to gender identity, so she went off to cold Minnesota to attend Macalester College in St. Paul/Minneapolis.  It would be one of several places where she would move which gave us opportunities to visit and experience new locales – later there would be Albuquerque, Westfield New York, and Baltimore, with internships in Los Angeles and Vermont in between.   During one of our visits to Minnesota, we went up to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, which began with a little overflowing from Lake Itasca to become the mighty River in American history.  I was amazed to walk across the beginnings of the Mississippi, since it is a mile wide in my hometown of Helena, Arkansas.  

She has been in Baltimore for 14 years now – wow, I had not counted those up before.  She has acted and directed in many plays there, has helped to form a cooperative for an immersive theater company (Submersive Productions), and she has been blessed so far to find day jobs that are related to the theater.  She joined Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, sings in the great choir there (along with Taylor Branch, among others), taught several confirmation classes for the youth, was elected to be an elder on the Session and now serves as co-clerk of the Session. She teaches part-time at University of Maryland in Baltimore County, and she is working on expanding the theater canon from an all-white men’s club to include many other varieties of playwrights.

She has blessed our lives in so many ways, including our trip this summer to central and upstate New York to see human rights sites that included Harriet Tubman’s home, Susan B. Anthony’s home, Gerritt Smith’s home in tiny Peterboro, the Shaker Heritage Society, and John Brown’s Farm in the Adirondack Mountains.  We also took a side jaunt to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown – quite a trip.

    So, in this week, we give thanks for the great Mary Susan Stroupe!  She is a powerful gift to us and to many others – Happy Birthday, Susan!

"WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM"

 “WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM”

“We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes…” those are words spoken by Ella Baker in the 1960’s as part of the struggle for human rights for African-Americans.  I first encountered them in a song called “Ella’s Song,” written by Bernice Johnson Reagon for Sweet Honey in the Rock.  If you haven’t heard that song or heard of Ella Baker either, please take time on this Labor Day to engage them.

And, yes, Labor Day is a time of rest to honor the workers of America.  It has been a national holiday for almost 130 years, being signed into law by President Grover Cleveland in 1894.  Workers had been agitating for unions and rights in the mid to late 1800’s in response to the rapid industrialization, the growing exploitations of workers (see my blog last year on the Atlanta Washerwoman’s Strike of 1881 https://nibsnotes.blogspot.com/2022/09/washerwomans-strike-1881.html), 

and the yawning pay gap between the super-wealthy and the workers. The first celebration of Labor Day was in New York City in September, 1882, but the crux came in 1894 when Eugene V. Debs led the Pullman Railroad Strike, which paralyzed much of the railroad traffic.  President Cleveland sent in US Army troops to stop the strike, and there were violent confrontations, resulting in the deaths of dozens of workers.  Debs ended up being prosecuted for his leadership in the strike, and he served time in federal prison, despite being represented by Clarence Darrow and others.  

In order to placate the workers’ anger and movement, Cleveland persuaded Congress to pass a law establishing a national holiday for workers, known as Labor Day.   They chose the first Monday in September rather than May 1 because they did not want it to be associated with the International Workers Day.   Their desire to tame it seemed to work well.  Labor Day is largely seen as the day to mark the end of summer and to have the last of the sales before the Christmas rush of sales begins.  And, membership in labor unions has been diminishing over the last 50 years, down from 35% of workers to 6% of workers today.  Indeed, the marking of Labor Day did not establish the foundation for unions – that would not come until 1935 with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.

Yet this year there seem to be some parallels between the roots of Labor Day and the current atmosphere.  Writers and actors are on a national strike, UPS just concluded tough negotiations with the Teamsters Union drivers and workers, and airline and auto workers have given signals that they expect to call for strikes if working conditions and pay are not upgraded.  The early roots of the labor movement had its Carnegies and Rockefellers to contend with, and now it’s the Musks and the Bezoses who are the bosses in another period of rapid change and exploitation and resistance.  Plus, we’ve had a recent president who wanted to send out the Army for many domestic situations, so Grover Cleveland is being channeled by the Trumpster.

So, on this Labor Day, as you relax or shop or meditate, take time to give thanks to the workers and organizers, who over the decades have labored and fought to develop rights for those who labor.  Though union membership has dropped considerably and is especially low in the ironically named “right to work” states of the South, let us renew our commitment to justice for the workers.  The success of the union movement has been so great that they have almost put themselves out of business, but the need for them remains deep and great.  Let us acknowledge their legacy but also the need for continuing work.  We who believe in freedom cannot rest, except for perhaps on Labor Day.

'THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON"

 “THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON”

Sixty years ago today, over 250,000 people gathered in Washington, DC, for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  It was the brainchild of A. Philip Randolph, the great union organizer, and his assistant Bayard Rustin, the conscientious objector and civil rights leader.  There were many moving parts to organize in order to get this many people from all over the country to DC.  Randolph had wanted to do this kind of march in the 1940’s, but President Roosevelt talked him out of it.  A smaller version was held in 1957, but this one in 1963 was the send-off for many people in the movement.  

President Kennedy tried to talk Randolph out of doing the march in 1963, fearing that bringing 100,000 Black people to DC would lead to violence and maybe even rioting.  Randolph and Rustin cited their lifelong commitment to nonviolence and virtually guaranteed that it would be a peaceful march.  Other civil rights leaders wanted to ban Rustin from the March because he was gay, but Randolph said “no Rustin, no Randolph.”  Rustin stayed on as the principal organizer, and while Randolph worked on the political aspects of the March, Rustin worked on the logistics of getting people into DC and getting them back out again.  

He contacted labor unions, churches and synagogues and other places of worship, and civil rights groups, hoping to draw the 100,000 people to DC for the day and the March.  The time was right – in June, Medgar Evers had been assassinated in Mississippi the day after Governor George Wallace had stood in the door at the University of Alabama to prevent the entry of Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood.  The Children’s Crusade at Birmingham in the spring of 1963 had showed the nation the depth of hatred and racism in us, and MLK’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” had called out white moderates and liberals who thought things were moving too fast.  People all over the country began to organize to come to the March.  We found out at the funeral of Azzie Preston that as a teenager she organized a busload of people to ride to DC from Dekalb County.  

This work of Azzie’s was repeated all over the nation, and the turnout was astonishing.  Thousands traveled by road, rail, and air to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, August 28. Marchers from Boston traveled overnight and arrived in Washington at 7am after an eight-hour trip, but others took much longer bus rides from cities such as Milwaukee, Little Rock, and St. Louis.  A total of 450 buses left New York City from Harlem. Maryland police reported that by 8:00 a.m., 100 buses an hour were streaming through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel.  Organizers had hoped for 100,000 participants – they were stunned but gratified to see 250,000 line the mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.  There were many struggles over who would be speaking at the March – one obvious glaring omission were women speakers.  None were allowed, though Daisy Bates was allowed to say 200 words in replacing Myrlie Evers, whose plane was delayed.  John Lewis, who was head of SNCC at the time, wrote a fiery speech condemning the federal government for its lack of interest in the suffering of Black people.  The organizers did not want to offend President Kennedy or Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but Lewis would not back down.  Finally, A. Philip Randolph, for whom Lewis had great respect, talked Lewis into modifying his speech just enough to make it palatable.

The main event (other than the 250,000 people) was Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to conclude the March.  I have written previously in this blog that I listened to King’s speech in my home in Arkansas by myself, because I did not want my friends to know that I was listening to this speech in the week before I entered into my senior year in high school.  King’s speech had a profound effect on me and on many in our nation.  He framed the American vision of equality in a way that I had never heard before, and I was not alone in thinking this.  King opened a window into my head and heart, so that my imagination could begin to see the world and myself differently from the white supremacy that I had been taught and which I believed.  

Our friend John Blake wrote a fine column on King’s speech earlier this year in his work for CNN.  Here is part of what he wrote:  

“The speech King gave 60 years ago in Washington has been endlessly replayed, dissected and misquoted. It’s his most famous speech. But here’s another way to look at it: It is also the most radical speech King ever delivered.  That declaration might sound like sacrilege to those who will point to King’s thunderous takedowns of war, poverty and capitalism in other sermons. But “I Have a Dream” has arguably become his most radical speech — not because of what he said but because of how America has changed since that day.  Forget the nonthreatening version of the speech you’ve been taught that emphasizes King’s benign vision of Black, White and brown Americans living in blissful racial harmony.  The core concept in King’s dream is racial integration – and it still terrifies many people 60 years later.”  For the rest of John’s fine article, here is the link:  

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/15/us/mlk-i-have-a-dream-speech-blake-cec/index.html

    John is correct – many of us classified as “white” do not accept the idea of equality and integration that is at the heart of March on Washington and at the heart of our lives today.  As we celebrate this powerful March, let us rededicate ourselves to continue to develop that dream of equality, lest the Trumpsters take us back to the 1850’s.

"AN ACTIVIST BEFORE HE WAS AN ARTIST"

 “AN ACTIVIST BEFORE HE WAS AN ARTIST” 

Harry Belafonte (HB) died in April at age 96 after a long and prolific career as an artist and an activist.  I knew that he had been involved in the human rights movement, but I had no idea how deeply he had been involved nor how long he had been involved – he was active right up until he died.  He broke into my consciousness in 1956 when I was 10 – not as an activist, but as an artist.  His “Banana Boat Song” with its “Day-o, Day-o/Daylight come an’ me wan’ go home” burst on the American consciousness, and for a while he battled Elvis to be the #1 artist in the country.  His album “Calypso” became the first one in history to sell over a million copies. From this point on he was a giant on the American artist scene.  If you have not read his remarkable memoir, “My Song,” published in 2011, go find it in your library.

Harry Belafonte was born in poverty in Harlem in 1927 to illegal immigrant parents from Jamaica, who had moved to NYC.  Harry’s father left the family before he was born, and Belafonte was raised by his single mom Melvine Love.  They went back and forth to Jamaica where Harry spent much of his childhood with relatives.  He went to high school in New York but dropped out to join the Navy in 1944 in the middle of WW II.  In his segregated barracks, his mates began to share with him pamphlets written by WEB Dubois, and he became hooked on the human rights movement.  His mother, however, had planted the seed long before this when she told him as a boy:  “When you grow up, son, never ever go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could have done during the day to strike a blow against injustice, and you didn’t do it.”

When his Navy term was up, he chose not to re-enlist, and went home to live with his mother and work as a janitor.  He was afraid that he would be stuck there for the rest of his life, but there was intervention coming.  He did a favor for one of the tenants, and as a tip, she gave him tickets to a play at the American Negro Theater (ANT).  He had never been to a professional play before, and he was mesmerized and transformed by it.  He put it like this:  “When the curtain rose and the actors appeared….they radiated a power that felt spiritual to me.  The play, titled “Home is the Hunter,” by Samuel Kootz, was freshly written, about Black servicemen trying to establish postwar lives in Harlem.  I knew these characters…..This was a whole new world – an exhilarating world.”  

    It changed Belafonte’s life – he began to volunteer at the ANT, and he met Sidney Poitier there.  The leaders noticed his magnetism and presence, and he began to act in plays.  On one such occasion, Paul Robeson came to see the play, and afterwards, Robeson came backstage to praise the cast, and he and Belafonte met.  It began a lifelong friendship between them, and Robeson had a huge effect on Harry Belafonte:  “Paul Robeson had been my first great formative influence; you might say that he gave me my backbone.  Martin Luther King was the second.  He nourished my soul.”

    Belafonte’s artistic career had begun, and he went back and forth between singing and acting, but eventually he became a star and made a comfortable living.  He never forgot his roots, however, and he never forgot the call to justice, instilled by his mother at an early age.  All during his early career in show business, he worked for human rights, supporting the labor union movement, refusing to perform in the segregated South, constantly raising money to support many human rights causes.  In the spring of 1956, in the early months of the Montgomery bus boycott, Belafonte received a call from someone who said: “You don’t know me, Mr. Belafonte, but my name is Martin Luther King, Jr. “  Belafonte replied:  Oh, I know you – everybody knows you.”  

    King asked to meet him at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where King would be preaching soon.  They met and began another lifelong friendship.  He supplemented MLK’s salary during the civil rights years.  The reconciliation meeting between King’s SCLC and SNCC in 1962 took place in Harry Belafonte’s apartment in New York.  Belafonte took out a life insurance policy on MLK, with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary.  Belafonte helped to fund the Montgomery Improvement Association, SCLC, SNCC, and the Freedom Riders. He provided the entertainment for the Selma March.  MLK would write his famous anti-Vietnam speech in Belafonte’s apartment in New York.  Belafonte would also assist Coretta in picking out the suit for MLK to be buried in after King’s assassination.  

    Like many others in the human rights movement, Belafonte received his share of threats and harassment.  One such threat came in Baltimore, when he found a Maryland state trooper standing in his dressing room, glowering at him.  The trooper was there to provide security for Belafonte, but he seemed like a menacing presence to HB. When HB got back to his hotel room, he found an envelope with these words:  “Dear Mr. Belafonte, I give you these six bullets because they will never be used.  None of them will take a human life, because my experience listening to you and Dr. King made me realize I have been serving the wrong forces. I should be in your ranks.  Tonight was transforming for me.”  It was signed by the state trooper who had been with him that night.

    Belafonte also felt his heart turning towards Africa, and he got deeply involved in the African freedom movements, especially in South Africa, when it was still controlled by European powers.  He co-founded TransAfrica, which created the economic sanctions against South Africa.  He became a leading spokesperson for seeking an end to apartheid. He had become friends with Nelson Mandela while Mandela was still in prison.  After Mandela’s release from prison, he asked HB to coordinate a tour of America. Belafonte agreed to share the duties with Roger Wilkins, and in 1990 Nelson Mandela came to America.  The tour was an astonishing success.

.      Here's how he humbly described his work:  “All of us see the world as it exists; fewer envision what it might look like if made to change; and fewer still try to put together the people and ideas that make change happen.  Paul Robeson was one; Martin Luther King, Jr. was one;  Bobby Kennedy became one.  And, of course, Nelson Mandela.  I had just enough vision to see that they were visionaries, and to do what I could to help.”  Harry Belafonte had eyes to see and ears to hear – as Jesus once put it, “If you have ears, then listen!”  Belafonte listened and acted, and we are all so grateful that he did.

"MORE THAN I IMAGINED"

 “MORE THAN I IMAGINED”

Today’s title phrase is the title of my friend John Blake’s newest book, whose full title is “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.” It was released in May by Random House, and it is a memoir about his growing up as an interracial child in the rough streets of Baltimore.  His previous book “Children of the Movement” was also a fine book.

I first met John when he came to Oakhurst in 1996 to do a story on us for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, for whom he was a reporter.  The AJC gave us a full page story by John, and he became interested in us and in the church’s story.  He started worshipping with us and became a member.  Later her became an elder on the Session.  I officiated at he and Rev. Terrylyn Pons’ wedding at her church on the other side of Atlanta.  In his new book, John credits Oakhurst with helping him to recover his faith.

John describes his journey in “More Than I Imagined,” and he begins it in his upbringing on the tough streets of Baltimore, streets that were depicted in “The Wire.”  John and his brother Patrick lived with his father in Baltimore – he did not know who his mother was.  Learning her identity and her story is part of the “more than I imagined” of this book, as well as John’s reconciliation with his mother (and his father) and parts of his mother’s white family who had previously rejected him.  John’s father was a merchant marine, and so he traveled a lot.  When he traveled, John and Patrick would be farmed out to various relatives and the underground foster care system.  One of those foster care givers, Aunt Fannie, was a person who terrorized John and Patrick and caused them to be filled with resentment and anger. But another Aunt (this aunt, a biological aunt), Aunt Sylvia, treated them with love and respect – she was tough but fair, demanding but compassionate.  She knew that she was raising Black boys in a white world, and she wanted them to be tough but to also have love at the center of their hearts.

John grew up amidst violence, despair, and struggle, but people like his brother Patrick,  Aunt Sylvia and even his father helped him to find his center as a child of God – a child who was illegal when he was born, a child whom the institution of white supremacy told was worthless, a child abandoned by his mother.  Yet he heard that he was a child of God.  Reading and books were also a prime way that he escaped the pain and his seeming destiny of street life.  Many people threw seeds of love and vision along his path, and he was fortunate enough to find some of those seeds and nourish them in his heart.

He eventually found his mother, but I will leave it to you to read the book to see how her love prevailed in his heart, even under the worst of circumstances.  He also had encounters with his racist maternal grandfather in ghostly, eerie encounters, which forms one of the big mysteries of his book.  He also met his mother’s racist sister, and their developing relationship is one of the powerful stories in the book, giving us hope in a hopeless world.  John discovered in his journey a truth that becomes one of the mantras of his book:  “Facts don’t change people; relationships do.”

John’s story speaks to our system of race which targets those classified as Black - especially black males – to be put on the road to the prison/industrial complex.  His story is an inspiring one, but those of us classified as “white” must take care not to judge the system by John’s (and Patrick’s) remarkable escape from it.  We are so invested in denying that the system of race exists, and John’s story can be used as an antidote to that.  John puts it like this towards the end of his book:  “A choice is unavoidable.  I once wrote that America is in the middle of another “irrepressible conflict” where white Americans will eventually be forced to choose between becoming a vibrant, multireligious, multiracial democracy, or a “hollowed out” democracy where one racial group rules the rest.  The status quo will no longer be sustainable.”

I highly recommend John’s book, and I hope that you’ll get it and get taken into its narrative – as Caroline put it, it is a page turner!  It will anger you, make you wonder, and inspire you.  Most of all, it will call you to give thanks for the vision and possibility of America that John calls us to see in this fine memoir.