Faith Works 4-7-18

Faith Works 4-7-18

Jeff Gill

 

A solemn anniversary with long shadows

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50 years ago, I was six years old. I'm not quite old enough to recall where I was or what was going on when President Kennedy was shot, though I have a dim recollection of JFK's funeral procession rolling past on a black and white TV, the horse with backwards boots in the stirrups riding alone after the caisson carrying the casket.

What I do recall is the spring of 1968, and how that second half of my second grade year was shadowed by violence: first, the killing of Rev. Dr. King on April 4th, then the death of Bobby Kennedy on June 6th. I remember my parents were very upset about King's assassination, and seeing news coverage of riots not far from where I lived in northwest Indiana; I recall more specifically having just started summer break and waking up to say to my mother "it's a beautiful morning!" on June 5th and her responding "no, it's not, they've shot Bobby Kennedy" (he died the next day after being attacked just after midnight in California). Clearly, these deaths meant something to me even in a modest town in the Midwest.

There was an unease at school and at home, a sense of things coming unstuck, of bombings and shootings and killings against a backdrop of Vietnam, and with the earlier echo of Nov. 22, 1963 still ringing in everyone's ears.

And in truth, the anxieties I saw on the faces of the adults around me only grew as bombings in post offices and government buildings increased in frequency (the next year and a half saw over four thousand incendiary and explosive devices set off in the United States, with a crescendo reached in May of 1970 at Kent State). The violent official response to protests in Chicago the summer of 1968, around the political convention there, were bookended by riots in cities seemingly all around me as a child the year before and the year after.

So I have to admit, as a white male raised in an overwhelmingly white town in a very white state, I grew up unconsciously associating civil rights and racial justice with violence and fear. I did not start to see or understand the history behind Dr. King's work until I was much older, and honestly I don't think I got a broader sense of what the civil rights movement was about until, in 1991, I got ahold of a copy of "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63" by Taylor Branch.

The double blessing was, in a series of coincidences that those of us who believe call "the work of the Holy Spirit," I got to spend the better part of an hour talking to Rev. Gardner C. Taylor just after finishing the book. He was a friend and close ally of Martin Luther King's, and his reactions to the book (mostly favorable) and his questions about how I understood what it was about (which was minimal) opened up my heart and my awareness about the struggle for civil rights in America. It was sealed by an unexpected realization that we'd both been through church fires as ministers, and swapping stories about how to preach and pastor a church without a home.

The longer title of "Parting the Waters" is because the subtitle is the actual name of the three part social history Taylor Branch was writing, "America in the King Years," continuing with "Pillar of Fire" covering 1963 – 1965 & "At Canaan's Edge" from 1965 to King's assassination in 1968 and its immediate aftermath.

Three volumes is a great deal of reading, but I would strongly encourage any readers here to at least consider taking on "Parting the Waters." To learn of the depth and breadth and complexity of the civil rights movement both saddened my understandings, but also lifted my heart. The young King in his first congregation faced the same sorts of challenges a new pastor has to overcome, even before he walks out the doors of his church and confronts the racism of his new hometown. And the many allies and co-workers, most of whom I'd never heard of, without whom we might never have heard of Dr. King . . . it's truly an epic tale of America.

King was killed 50 years ago last Wednesday. It marked a number of roads not taken, and his death along with those of Kennedys before and after him did cause a certain hardening of hearts, which we are still trying to soften. The story melted mine, and I pray you might feel it warming yours.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him your spring reading at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.