Delanceyplace publishes excellent articles regularly on past and current topics. A Sanford friend a few weeks ago emailed me an interesting article from this website entitled, Mark Twain’s mother that dealt with Samuel Clemmons’s attitude toward slavery. The friend liked the article and suggested that I write a column which would include my personal growth and efforts in the area of race relations. I promised him that I would plant the idea in my column seed bed to see if it germinates.
When the tragic event in a Charleston, South Carolina church recently happened, my friend’s idea sprouted bigtime. The time for it to become a column had arrived. The abolition of slavery when Abraham signed the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred fifty years ago had as its goal the establishing of healthy relationships between people of different races. However, prejudice has not disappeared, and may never do so. Bigotry still lives. Christians should be in the forefront of helping our nation to establish a genuine spirit of brotherhood in the area of race relations. We have far too often lagged behind.
I was born in central Georgia in 1931, just sixty-six years after the last battle in our nation’s Civil War was fought. Much of the ingrained prejudice left over from the days of slavery was still very much alive as I was growing up. White students in my hometown attended a school that was first class in every way; the school attended by black students was far less adequate. Relationships between the races were generally civil – so long as established boundaries were not crossed. Those of us who had white skin went to our churches; people of color went to their churches. I became a Christian when I was eight, and knew before my sixteenth birthday that God had called me to become a minister. As I began to grow in my relationship with Christ I realized that Christian faith and bigotry cannot coexist in the life of a genuine Christian.
Throughout my high school years I had a black friend near my age whose first name (believe it or not) was Tankum. When I was a freshman in Mercer University I said one day to my grandmother, “I would love to have Tankum as my roommate in college, but knowing that he is black and from a poor family, it would not be possible for him to attend college.” My grandmother, true to the culture of the late 1940’s said, “Son, Mercer has ruined you!” That kind of camaraderie was not possible with her culture-influenced mindset.
My grandmother was a good woman in so very many ways, and I loved her. But, like the majority of people who were white, she had accepted the status quo. The culture in Georgia in the 1940’s didn’t allow for the kind of unity which the U.S. Constitution promised but had not achieved. Our country since the 1940’s has made substantial progress, of course, but there are still prejudiced individuals among us whose thoughts and actions are dominated by the kind of bigotry that led the young man in Charleston to kill nine good people.
In the 1980’s I had the opportunity to baptize the first black members of Sanford First Baptist Church – one was a teenage girl in our special ministries program, the other was one of our two church custodians. Sanford’s First Baptist Church in the 1970’s was at least a generation ahead of the churches I had previously served in recognizing that every person who accepts Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, regardless of his or her race, color or other difference, is a Christian brother or sister to be loved and appreciated.
Two things are sad to me about the continuing race problems in our country: (1) They are used far too often as a political tool by politicians who are seeking votes, and (2) Christians and churches should be doing a much better job to represent Christ in dealing with human differences. We must never forget these words of Jesus: “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
The Paper Pulpit 
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