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From Lylburn Downing Jr. High to the National Mall |
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“What are you lookin’ at white boy?!” This was the intimidating question hurled at me from my rubenesque black classmate Lottie Alexander. The year was 1969. The town was Lexington, Virginia. The place was Lylburn Downing Jr. High. The occasion was the first wave of integrated schools.
My family and I had just moved to Lexington from Rapid City, South Dakota. Ironically, the people that treated me with scorn were the polo shirt, penny loafer clad white guys. They taunted me as a “Yankee.” Their ignorance of history was bested only by their lack of curiosity about my background. My family is from Columbus and Amory, Mississippi. The preppy elite’s made a ritual of encircling and slugging me in the arms. If they found me in the bathroom they found glee in trying to stick my hand in the toilet bowl. Once I was pitched out of the locker room into the cold outdoors with only a jock strap on.
The black athletes saw my plight and took up my cause. My popularity with them rocketed after running a speedy leg on a school relay race which enabled the fastest guy in town to zoom to first place. In voices that had just changed the black athletes boomed, “Leave Charlie alone!”
My parents, raised in a highly racist state, and in equally racist homes taught us kids that black people were our equals. The N word was not used in our family. I got the distinct sense from Mom and Dad that black’s deserved the dignity we would accord to any person. I am forever grateful and wondrously amazed that my folks had so quickly advanced “beyond their raising.” With the precepts I had been taught at home and my seventh grade experiences, my heart went out to my black classmates and all their relations. I pledged to not only treat them well, but to befriend them in kind.
At Abilene Christian College in Texas I was blessed to have several black roommates. I was baptized in the liberation sounds of Soul music and cultural prophets like Richard Pryor. We wore out a tape of Pryor’s “Bicentennial Nigger.” In conversations now, thirty years later, we can seamlessly move into unison recitations of the entire album, inflections and all. I still keep in close contact with one of my college roomies. We go on a vacation together every fall.
Everywhere in my ministry equality of all the races has been a core teaching and practice of mine. In my current home of Austin, Texas I labored for two years on the Mayor’s Racial Reconciliation Initiative. There is a big part of me that has always wished I could wave a holy staff and end racial injustice. As I have learned about the intentional, systematic, demonic creed of racism I formed a palpable white guilt. It seemed none of my good intentions or actions could ease this shameful original white man’s sin.
I shared my pilgrimage to the National Mall on that frigid Inauguration morning with legions of good hearted souls. 1.8 million packed into the mall and beyond. I never saw one tense moment, and the police didn’t make a single arrest. Within our ten x ten standing room only area my friends and I had been absorbed into an earth town square. We were from D.C., Seattle, and Austin. To our right was a couple from Britain and Singapore. Surrounding us were African Americans from New York City, Philly, D.C., Northern/Southern California, and a man who had travelled from Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Copenhagen resident was a middle aged gay black man who had left America years ago because he no longer felt welcomed here. He indicated that Obama was the first victorious candidate he had ever voted for. With unbounded delight he told me, “I just had to be here to celebrate it in person.” The man from D.C. confessed he had lived here all his life and this was the first inauguration he had “any interest at all” in attending.
As soon as Aretha began singing “my country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” tears commenced flowing down my cheeks. When Rev. Warren prayed for God to “bless and protect” President Obama and his family I heard fervent cries behind me, “Yes, God! Please God!” The tears welled up again. As Obama prepared to take his oath of office the man from D.C. beseeched us, “I hope ya’ll don’t mind if I lose it.” I replied, “let it flow brother.” Immediately afterwards I looked around. Not a dry eye did I see.
After Rev. Lowry’s playfully prophetic benediction and the crowd began to disperse I felt a warm redemption melt through my being. An aura of serenity imbued the chilly air. I looked around at all my African American brothers and sisters. The creases of their smiles reached to the heavens. I held out my hands and we embraced one another in turn. I uttered my own blessing, “It’s a new day.”
