This still can be a beautiful world, if we decide together to make it so

I am a Southern white working-class woman, and I was a worried child.

For all my young life, I’d been told that it was possible that God would send me to hell when I died. The first time I embarrassed my parents was when I insisted, at age 10, on being baptized even though I had already been baptized at age 6. I wanted to do it again because I was tormented with worry that I hadn’t believed correctly the first time. After I was baptized the second time I still wasn’t sure but said nothing about it.

When I was eleven and in the sixth grade, I found a child’s biography of Harriet Tubman in my school’s library. I think that the book may have been placed in the wrong school. It was 1959 in segregated Alabama, and it may have been intended for a Black school but somehow got mis-routed. I read it and even gave a book report on it, but though the violence against the child Harriet shocked me to my core, the meaning and import of her life escaped me. I kept waiting for the writer to explain why it was wrong for Harriet Tubman to have gone against the authorities of her day. No such explanation was given, and I was left with the impossible idea that those authorities, which I intuited were the same ones still in place in my world, could not be trusted. (more…)

The most amazing night of my life

One day in 1963 that stands out for me is when Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. Ralph Abernathy, James Farmer, and Rev. Abraham Woods came through our home so that they could get back down to St. Joseph Baptist Church without being seen in the area. This was one of the nights that Attorney Arthur Shores’ home was bombed. They were in the neighborhood trying to make sure that Attorney Shores and his family were okay. The police also heard that Dr. King was in the area, and if they had caught him that night, they would have put him in jail. (more…)