Address delivered at the Sakharov Center, a human rights NGO in Moscow, Russia, June 2, 2017; Published in The Asbury Journal 74 (No. 2, 2019): 157-70: https://place/asburyseminary.edu/asburyjournal/.

NOTE: For original citations see the published article.

The most frustrating conversation I ever had on race was in the early 1960s with a high school classmate and neighbor in suburban Atlanta. “George,” whose staunch church-going parents were among the most prejudiced people I have ever known, claimed no Black had ever achieved anything of consequence in history. In response to my citing various accomplished African Americans, he argued that anything positive that could be said about Blacks derived from whatever percentage of White blood ran in their veins. I recently recalled this exasperating exchange as I read Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning study, The Hemingses of Monticello. This compelling account follows the travails of Sally Heminges, Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress, and their four surviving children. What a surprise it was for me to learn from Gordon-Reed that, centuries earlier, Jefferson had employed the very same spurious argument as “George” to discount any assertion of Black biological and intellectual equality with Whites.
That reflection came to mind in 2016 as I was pulling together my recollections of “Growing Up in America’s Segregated South” for a presentation at Moscow’s Sakharov Center, a human rights venue named in memory of Andrei Sakharov, famed Soviet nuclear physicist-turned-dissident. What follows tracks my painfully slow realization in the 1950s and 1960s of the depths of injustice and racism attendant upon my coming of age Georgia.
I was born in 1947 in the United States in Kentucky, a border state that northerners suspect is southern and southerners suspect is northern. My birthplace was Stearns, a coal mining town in the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky. My father was bookkeeper and cashier for Stearns Coal and Lumber Company, and my mother taught high school English and drama. Unlike the Deep South, Kentucky mountain folk were pro-Union in the U.S. Civil War and lived in a region that was home to few African Americans, then or now.
I was only six in 1953 when my family moved to Georgia, so my childhood memories of Kentucky are slim. But my older sister tells me a few Black families lived behind the lumber yard on the outskirts of Stearns, with their children attending a small, segregated school.
I grew up in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur where segregation was also the rule, including Medlock Elementary, where I attended the second through seventh grades, and Druid Hills High School, for grades eight through twelve. My high school was adjacent to the campus of Emory University, with which it had historic ties. The strong, academic reputation that Druid Hills rightly deserved is well represented by Robert Morgan, with whom I studied American history and American government. This truly outstanding teacher required extensive readings that were often lengthy, demanding, or both. I remember, in particular, his classroom lectures in 1964 on two of these books: Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gone with the Wind (1936) and W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941). I still vividly recall Mr. Morgan’s impassioned classroom assault on Gone with the Wind for its romanticized, sugar-coating of slavery. In counterpoint to Mitchell’s “benevolent” slave masters and the mythology of harmonious master-slave plantation life, W.J. Cash painted a very different picture of Old and New South race relations. For many years a required reading in university courses in American history, Mind of the South portrays southern Whites more than willing to employ violence to keep African Americans in their “place,” both before and after the Civil War. Cash documents a Southern elite manipulating poor Whites and Blacks alike. The goal, successful for well over a century, was to concentrate and perpetuate political and economic control of the region in a few white hands at the expense of poor Whites and Blacks alike.
Druid Hills High School demographics were quite unusual for the South. While the exclusion of Blacks was commonplace, my high school had the second highest enrollment of Jewish students of any school in Atlanta. To its credit, I do not recall any animosity at Druid Hills between Gentile and Jewish students. On this score, my strongest recollection is simply of classes a fraction of their normal size on Jewish holidays.
The real divide at Druid Hills was socio-economic. Most of the students who came from Fernbank Elementary were from upper income families, including sons and daughters of Emory professors, while most of the students from Medlock Elementary (where my mother taught fourth grade) and Laurel Ridge Elementary were middle and lower middle class. As one hailing from Medlock, I perceived slights from Fernbank students that, in hindsight, were undoubtedly trivial. What appalls me – and embarrasses me – to this day is how fixated I was in high school on the Fernbank-Medlock/Laurel Ridge divide, while being almost completely oblivious to the blatant injustice of my attending Druid Hills while Black students near my home attended a decidedly inferior, under-funded school. I often marvel at how blind I was as a teenager to this gross inequity.
In the early 1960s, when I was attending Druid Hills, racial conflict was far more apparent to me personally at church than at school. In those years Black families were moving in to neighborhoods closer and closer to my church, Pattillo Memorial Methodist. This precipitated “White flight” to Stone Mountain and other more distant suburbs east of Atlanta. In moving east, Whites came closer to the massive carving on Stone Mountain honoring Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, the largest relief sculpture in the world. Stone Mountain, cited by name in Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, was a favorite site for Ku Klux Klan rallies, one of which, out of curiosity, my teenage friends and I attempted to observe, only to be prevented by a police roadblock. Looking back, I regret having attempted to attend such a racist demonstration, spared only by police.
Black families often had more children than the White families they replaced near my church, which put pressure on local schools. The city of Decatur approached Pattillo Memorial Methodist with a request to rent the Sunday school building for temporary classroom space. With so many church families moving away, our congregation certainly could have used the rental income. I clearly recall my father coming home one evening from a church board meeting very upset. He had urged the rental of the Sunday school building but was outvoted by congregants who could not abide the thought of Black children walking the halls of our church.
Around the same time I remember attending a general congregational meeting in which a prominent church member stood to his feet and vowed never to let a Black family cross the threshold of our church. No wonder Martin Luther King, Jr., declared 11:00 a.m. Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America. What a contrast to the warm welcome my wife and I received a decade later worshipping one Sunday at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Sr., and Jr. had co-pastored. Integration never came to our church because Pattillo Memorial Methodist merged with Avondale Methodist farther east, and the Pattillo property was sold to a Black congregation, Thankful Baptist, which worships there to this day.
Still, I can say all was not complete, unrelieved prejudice in our church. My youth minister, Rev. Warren Harbert, and his wife, Jo, labored against the prevailing racism in our congregation. Just as many church families were departing the Oakhurst neighborhood of Decatur, Warren and Jo moved in. I recall visiting them in their new home, with Black neighbors all around, marveling at this concrete statement of opposition to the racial divide that was commonplace in early 1960s Atlanta.
Other memories come to mind. I remember as a child drawing and coloring a Confederate flag, many years before I understood how painful this symbol of slavery is to African Americans. Also as a child I remember a neighbor, a longtime member of Scott Boulevard Baptist Church, who could hardly carry on a conversation without a string of racial slurs. As a teenager I remember 1962 when my parents added a room onto our home, three miles distant from the immediate neighborhood of my church. The Black laborer who was digging the foundation trench asked me if there were any woods nearby. I told him he was free to use our bathroom, but he would not enter our house. Walking this grown man to a wood lot some distance from our home, I pondered how deeply the fear of violating some racial taboo must have been at work in this African American born in the image of God.
The next year, summer 1963, I recall turning 16 and my mother driving me down Confederate Avenue to the license bureau to take my driver’s test. That same summer I remember a church youth choir tour to Savannah, Georgia, and a night ride downtown with teenagers from the church hosting us. As Blacks crossed the street in front of us, these Savannah teens called out “one,” “two,” and “three.” I finally figured out they were joking about “points” they would score for hitting this or that African American. No one earned “points” that night for running over Blacks. But this flippant devaluation of human life on racial grounds, so common across the South, did translate, only months later in October, into the White racist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young Black girls attending Sunday school. Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice grew up in Birmingham, and her friend, 11-year-old Denise McNair, was one of the four children killed. Rice holds dear her photo of Denise receiving a kindergarten certificate from her father, a minister. I think back on that Savannah joy ride with shame because, while I found my fellow teens’ “point system” awful and ugly, I said not a word of objection. Their sin of verbal commission was my sin of omission.
I also recall as a teenager the daily racist diatribe that Pickrick Restaurant owner Lester Maddox paid to place in the Atlanta Journal. This implacable segregationist brandished a gun, and his supporters wielded pick handles, daring any Black to try to integrate his business. In October 1964 Maddox ended up closing his restaurant rather than allow African Americans to enter as other than cooks and waiters. Imagine my consternation in 1966 when Lester Maddox was elected governor of Georgia.
My views on race, of course, have been influenced by my mountain roots and my godly parents. Eastern Kentucky, where I was born, did not identify with the slave-owning plantation culture of the rest of the South, and in the Civil War, Appalachian Whites in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee often fought in Union, rather than Confederate, ranks.
And in Atlanta, growing up, I saw my parents treat Blacks with respect, as they believed Jesus would have. I remember my Mother’s love for the Uncle Remus Tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox penned by Joel Chandler Harris and her taking me and my sister to visit the Wren’s Nest, Harris’s home museum in Atlanta’s West End. Years later, my wife and I took our four children to hear Black readings of Uncle Remus stories at the Wren’s Nest. My mother also took me to see Walt Disney’s “Song of the South,” the film adaptation of Harris’s sympathetic rendering of Black folk culture. Some critics of Uncle Remus stories in the hands of Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney have defined them as racist stereotyping, but others have defended them as deft coping with racial oppression.
As a child and teen I never heard my father engage in racist language, which was very common in our neighborhood. And at church, as I shared, he challenged the racial animus of much of the congregation. But in his later years, Dad took a turn for the worse on matters of race, a great source of grief for me. I have long agonized, trying to comprehend how this could have happened. Mother always had a softening influence on Dad, and perhaps her passing in 1986, and Dad living another 28 years as a widower rendered him more susceptible to racial prejudice. Or maybe his being the victim at work of a Black armed robber is partly to blame. Unfortunately, as Dad lost his eyesight in his last years, he increasingly passed the time listening to Neal Boortz, a bigoted, hate-filled Atlanta radio talk show host who spewed poison into Dad’s mind on a daily basis. Undoubtedly, this WSB Radio regimen played some role in steering my father amiss.
While my father’s racial stereotyping of Blacks in his last years troubled me deeply, my one consolation is that, growing bias notwithstanding, Dad, to my knowledge, never personally treated African Americans disrespectfully. Willie Rollins was one proof of this to me. Following one of Dad’s surgeries, this Black laborer from Wright-Brown Electric Company where Dad worked, rang our doorbell, having made his way across Atlanta to pay Dad a visit during his recovery. Mr. Rollins had travelled by bus as far as he could and then had walked the last two miles to our home on a blistering, sweltering summer day. In southern parlance, it was hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk. Following his visit, I gave Willie Rollins a ride back to the bus stop and thanked him for his kindness in visiting Dad.
Besides my Kentucky roots and my parents, my Atlanta context certainly helped shape my views on race. While I saw raw racial prejudice firsthand growing up in Atlanta, I know from later reading as an adult that Georgia’s capital weathered the racial storms of America’s post-World War II decades better than most Southern cities. Progressive mayors, William B. Hartsfield (1937-61) and Ivan Allen, Jr., (1962-70), managed to steer Atlanta clear of a good deal of racial violence such that the city would choose to bill itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate.” I know otherwise; still, the positive trajectory of Atlanta’s race relations meant that its record compared favorably next to other Southern cities, especially nearby Birmingham, Alabama, mired in some of the region’s most egregious racial hostilities.
On October 12, 1958, four members of anti-Semitic hate groups used 50 sticks of dynamite to bomb Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation. The rabbi of this, Atlanta’s oldest and most prominent synagogue, was Jacob Rothschild, an outspoken proponent of integration. Upon learning of the blast, Mayor Hartsfield immediately made his way to the site and, uncharacteristic for a 1950s Southern politician, condemned the bombing in the strongest terms. Likewise, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution wrote editorials deploring this hate crime that were so eloquent they won him a Pulitzer Prize. Thus, prominent city spokesmen turned a blot on Atlanta’s record into an opportunity to champion a more tolerant future for Georgia’s capital. It worked, and the city continued its economic boom, in part because northern businesses and people migrating to it could see some modicum of truth in its mantra, “The City Too Busy to Hate.”
As an aside, I must admit I have no personal recollection of the synagogue bombing. I have often wondered, “Should I have remembered it?” I was only eleven at the time, but my family did own a television by this point, and we regularly watched the evening news. In 1990 I was moved by the Academy Award-winning film, “Driving Miss Daisy,” which recalled the synagogue bombing. But looking back, I have to confess that, growing up in Atlanta, racial injustice only occasionally crossed my mind. I wish I could say otherwise, but such is the case.
In 1965 I made my way back to Kentucky to attend Asbury College, a small Christian liberal arts institution near Lexington, where my mother, my aunt, and my sister had graduated. In my four years there, Asbury was just beginning to integrate, allowing me to get to know Solomon Lasoi from Kenya. Playing on the same soccer team, I marveled not only at his scoring ability, but at his crisp, precise British accent and his flawless grammar. Just two years ago at a soccer reunion I learned that Solomon, now deceased, had been denied service in our college days in a Lexington restaurant. To their credit, Asbury classmates, in solidarity, walked out of the restaurant with Solomon. This Kenyan roomed with Terry Shaw who, like me, hailed from Atlanta. Terry’s father was a Methodist minister who had taught his son to believe, like St. Paul, that in God’s Kingdom, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile” (Galatians 3:28).
Asbury, with both the college president and the chairman of the board of trustees from the Deep South, was far too slow to integrate. One of its prods in the right direction was board member E. Stanley Jones, a widely respected and frequently published Methodist missionary to India. He knew firsthand how damaging America’s discrimination and violence against Blacks was to the cause of missions and to the image of America abroad, not to mention their contradiction of Christ’s teachings. Before my arrival on campus, back in October 1958, in an Asbury chapel message, Jones had decried the college’s refusal to admit Blacks, and in protest resigned from the board of trustees. A decade earlier, in 1948, this same E. Stanley Jones had written a biography of his friend Mahatma Gandhi, whom Martin Luther King, Jr., credited as contributing to his adoption of non-violent civil disobedience.
I will never forget April 4, 1968, a decade after Jones’s prophetic chapel sermon, when news of King’s assassination first hit Asbury’s campus. I remember exactly where I was standing–in front of Johnson Main Dormitory, named after the school’s retired Deep South president. A student from my very hometown, Decatur, Georgia, came up to me and said, “King deserved what he got.” I was shocked no end by this callous justification of murder. But to my everlasting shame, I did not take my fellow Georgian to task. What was wrong with me that I did not object to this blatant hatred for the leader of America’s Civil Rights Movement? His was, in a verbal sense, another sin of commission. Mine was, again, a sin of omission.
In the early 1970s at least my mother and my wife were proactive in exhibiting Christian compassion as they managed desegregation in their respective fourth and fifth grade classrooms in Decatur, Georgia, and Lexington, Kentucky. As Lexington’s Breckinridge Elementary integrated in 1970, my wife, Darlene, broke up her fair share of fights between White and Black children. But once her Black, as well as her White, students realized she was going to treat them all exactly the same way, kids began to get along much better.
Darlene always made the most of Black History Month, including student reports on famous African Americans; and she did this in Birmingham, Alabama, and Anderson, South Carolina, as well as in Lexington, Kentucky, and Elgin, Illinois. One of her favorite object lessons was the book and movie about Ruby Bridges, the first grader who in 1960 helped integrate New Orleans Public Schools. Over the years Darlene’s students, White and Black, were incensed by the book’s and the film’s depiction of the vicious verbal assaults White parents hurled at Ruby as she walked into school between federal marshals serving as body guards. Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles interviewed Ruby at length, amazed at this little girl’s equanimity in the face of day-in, day-out jeers and threats. He came to conclude it was Ruby’s simple, Christ-like faith that had allowed her to survive and overcome. Perhaps the most famous Civil Rights song of deliverance, we should remember, was “We Shall Overcome.”
In 1971, I took some comfort in my home state of Georgia bidding farewell to Lester Maddox as governor. It was a pivotal moment in Georgia race relations when the state replaced the racist Maddox with Governor Jimmy Carter, who genuinely believed in equality for all and who later, as president, championed global human rights, as Soviet dissidents, among others, came to understand. (I have always been proud of the fact that during Carter’s governorship, the principal at Medlock Elementary chose my mother’s classroom for future First Lady Rosalynn Carter to observe.)
Do my personal encounters with issues of race and prejudice growing up in America’s segregated South have any bearing on Russia today? Unfortunately, I would argue they do, because racial discrimination is very nearly a universal human failing. Let me illustrate from personal experience.
In 1986, after twelve years on the faculty of Asbury College, I accepted a position at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago. Our four children, adopted from Vietnam and Colombia, had never experienced racial prejudice in small-town Kentucky, but, ironically, that was not to be the case in the North. Our oldest son, Fernando, was repeatedly the victim of racial profiling by police on the streets of Wheaton, Illinois. Fernando was never arrested, but police frequently pulled him over for a license check, while I was never pulled over when I drove the same car.
I am sorry to say that two of my children experienced similar racial profiling in Moscow. In 1990 I led a Wheaton College student exchange with Moscow State University. On one occasion, as our group made our way into the Kosmos Hotel, my daughter, adopted from Vietnam, and an African American Wheaton student, were the only ones blocked from entering. This “misunderstanding” was quickly righted, as I proved to the doorman that Heather and Chris indeed belonged with our exchange group, but it could not help leaving a bad taste in our mouths. Then in 1997 I was in Moscow with my son, Pablo. In my dozens of times in Moscow since 1974, militia have never stopped me in the city’s famed subway—except that summer of 1997 when I was with Pablo. We even, on one occasion, were momentarily escorted into the interior of militia Metro holding cells, though fortunately not behind bars. Pablo’s Hispanic features were presumably mistaken for someone from the Caucasus or Central Asia. It is common knowledge how frequent document checks are for non-Slavs in Moscow, but only those corralled by the militia on a regular basis can know how demeaning it is. And for what purpose? The question has to be asked: Does the singling out of individuals with particular “suspect” physical features improve safety? Or does such racial discrimination simply further alienate racial minorities and lead some to radicalization?
Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel made the remarkable journey from a Prague prison cell to a presidential palace in 16 months. Once in office he advised his fellow citizens that the truest test of Czechoslovakia’s devotion to democracy and human rights would be how they treated the minorities in their midst whom they liked the least. By this standard White America failed the test for centuries, including the century after the Civil War that ended slavery. Czechs and Slovaks—and many other European populations in the post-World War II era—have failed the test in their mistreatment of much-abused Roma. And for the foreseeable future, the test for Europe as a whole will be its Muslim immigrants. For Russia, the test comes in its treatment of its African and Asian exchange students and its Central Asian, Caucasus, Vietnamese, and North Korean immigrants and contract laborers.
From the perspective of Christian theology, the impetus for treating everyone with respect derives from the belief that every human being is created in the image of God. In addition, unpopular minorities—and by extension, unpopular religious minorities—deserve equal protection before the law on the basis of both Christian and Enlightenment principles. Unfortunately, these two foundations for equal justice for all run counter to the base tribalism and racially fueled nationalism that continue to raise their ugly heads on both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed, worldwide.
We should all recall the famous confession of Martin Niemoller, the German Protestant opponent of Nazism, who bemoaned his personal acquiescence in the face of evil. He did not protest Hitler’s crimes against others (socialists, trade unionists, Catholics); “Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Finally, they came for me and there was no one left to speak out.” As commendable as this admission may be, it still can be construed as pastoral pragmatism: We should defend the defenseless in case we should, in turn, require defense. A case can be made that it would be better to defend equal rights for all, regardless of personal consequences, simply because, under heaven, it is the right thing to do.
In my lifetime, like Niemoller, I, as well, have often failed to actively oppose bigotry and racial prejudice. For me, a sterling example of not retreating into a comfortable, safe shell is Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and his outspoken condemnation of Soviet anti-Semitism. In the summer of 1974 my wife and I managed to make our way to pay our respects at the site of the Nazi murder of Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine. The tiny granite marker then at the site made no reference to Jews, who were the great majority of the massacre’s victims; only generic “Soviet citizens” were commemorated. Yevtushenko’s famous 1961 poem, “Babi Yar,” accepted none of this Soviet gloss. He wrote, “I am each old man here shot dead. I am every child here shot dead.” Moving beyond censure of official silence on the Holocaust on Soviet soil, Yevtushenko figuratively donned a Jewish mantle to make a plea for a nobler Russia free of the shackles of anti-Semitism. The invitation extended to Yevtushenko to read his poetry in Red Square in July 2016, in what proved to be his last summer of life, is the Russia I hope and pray to see more of. Let me close with the oft-repeated prayer from the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, which I invoke for myself, for my fellow Americans, and for my many Russian friends who have so enriched my life: “Lord, have mercy.”