I was born on the San Andreas Fault. More specifically, I was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 11, 1969. This was the end of the Great Migration between 1915 and 1970 that saw somewhere between five and ten million blacks leave the South in search of a better life. This migration took place along very specific routes to the North and West and landed large swaths of the black population in cities like New York, Boston, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, and other major urban areas.
“It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country,” writes Isabel Wilkerson in her compelling and eye-opening book The Warmth of Other Suns. I can see the expressions on the faces of my grandparents as she describes the organic, almost unnoticed nature of the movement: “The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out.”1
My family was among those who trod those well-worn paths. My third-great paternal grandfather, Nazarin, was born a slave in North Carolina in 1835. On my mother’s side, I have been able to trace my third- and fourth-great-grandparents back to slavery in Alabama, Virginia, and Texas between the 1830s and 1860s. Both my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather came from Texas, while my maternal grandmother made her way up I-10 from Louisiana. They all eventually found their way to the City of Angels, where they, along with scores of other immigrants, made a life for themselves and their loved ones that offered more promise than they ever could have hoped for in the land they left.
My father was born in Los Angeles. My mother didn’t arrive there until 1961 at the age of ten; she grew up in Midland, Texas—one of seven children from four different men. She spent most of 1960 living with her father in Odessa while my grandmother—who was unmarried at the time—went to Los Angeles to get established before sending for my mother, her older brother, and her younger sister. Three older siblings had already left home and started families of their own, and a seventh, the youngest of the bunch, was living with her father in Tyler. (My grandmother would marry the man I called my grandfather the year I was born. He was twenty years her senior—and white.)
Mom and her siblings spent two days on a bus from Midland to Los Angeles. Like many who undertook similar journeys, they had only a loaf of bread and some fried chicken. “We had enough chicken for two days, but we ate it all the first day,” my mother recounted as she told me her story again not long ago. “We didn’t have any money, so the second day we just went hungry.” They arrived in Los Angeles and went from a temporary apartment to a permanent home in the Imperial Courts projects in Watts. “We didn’t go outside to play,” my mother told me. “There was so much asphalt. We were used to playing in fields and trees.” She was also shocked by the regular fights in the projects where she lived.
My mother met my father a few years later when they both attended Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles. My dad was a handsome multi-sport athlete. He stood six and a half feet tall with broad shoulders, a booming voice, and a personality that was more imposing than his stature. My mom stood five foot four and more than held her own. She had a keen mind, a sharp wit, and an infectious smile. She was a stellar student destined for great things. Their high school romance turned into a teenage pregnancy, a shotgun wedding, and a brief marriage that could not withstand their personal differences or my father’s departure for university and eventual pursuit of a career in professional football.
I have seen pictures of the three of us together when I was a toddler, but my parents were not a couple long enough for me to have any memories of our time as an intact family. I would be haunted by this reality for decades to come.
I remember the day when I was in third grade that my school sent me home with a special letter to give to my mother—one that would have a much greater impact than I could have imagined. It informed her that I would be bussed across town to an elementary school in Pacific Palisades.2
I don’t particularly remember my mother’s reaction to it other than her relief that at least this time it didn’t have anything to do with my misbehavior. (Yes, I was that much of a troublemaker. In fact, I was such a troublemaker that the principal made a deal with me: if I stayed out of his office for the last three weeks of the term, he would take me out to eat anywhere I wanted to go.) What I do remember is the discussion we had the night before I got on that bus for the first time. My mother reminded me that, though we did not have much, we did have our good name, and whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to uphold that name.
She also reminded me that I was a black boy about to walk into an all-white school, and this meant that our family name was not my only concern. As she spoke, I did not have the sense that I was a child being instructed, but a soldier being commissioned. I remember feeling like I was about to step onto a stage and assume a role in a drama that, up until then, I had only witnessed from a distance and would rather not participate in.
But my participation was not optional. I had to get on that bus.
My time in the Palisades is a blur. My few memories of the semester I spent there are not pleasant. I don’t think I had a particularly bad time, but the incidents that stand out to me shaped the way I thought about the world. Two of them demonstrate how my racial identity developed.
The first was the fact that my fellow bussees and I weren’t wanted there. At least that’s the way I saw it. Looking back on it, I realize there were several issues, both political and historical, that I could not possibly have understood. To the adults, bussing was an issue involving the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Los Angeles Unified School District, the State of California, the federal courts, and the history of segregation in the United States. But for us kids, it just felt like we were being forced to go someplace where people didn’t want us around.
That semester had a tremendous impact on my understanding of what it meant to be black in America. I may have been too young to understand the complex, multi-layered drama going on around me, but I could definitely understand what it meant to feel unwelcome. I could also understand, perhaps for the first time, what it meant to be poor and disadvantaged. By the time we got off the bus in Pacific Palisades, we were keenly aware that 1) we weren’t in South Central anymore, and 2) these people had a lot more money than we did.
The second thing that always stands out in my mind when I think about my time in the Palisades is the day I didn’t get expelled. The talk my mother had with me was very effective. I was on the straight and narrow when I got off that bus. We all were—partly because we were in a strange environment, but also because we all felt like we were under a microscope. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for trouble to find me.
I have heard it said that you “never forget the first time a white person calls you a nigger.” That was certainly the case for me, but not because I’d never heard it before. I’d actually heard it all my life. People had used it to refer to me, and I had used it to refer to others. When black people used the word, it was a rather benign moniker, even a term of endearment. But from a white person’s mouth, it was a weapon being used to demean and dehumanize me.
The little boy who said it probably had no idea what he was doing. He used the word like it was a new toy with which he was learning to play. However, when he saw my reaction to it, he used it with greater fervor. He had struck a nerve, and like any kid on the playground who feels like he has figured out how to get the upper hand, he continued to strike at that nerve.
The boy would say the word, then run and stand by our teacher. At first I stopped short, not wanting to get the teacher involved. But after a few rounds of this, I had had enough. That time, as the boy stood next to the teacher, looking smug and satisfied, I calmly walked up to him and punched him in the chest as hard as I could. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. The teacher began yelling, “What is wrong with you?!” I looked at her and said, “He kept calling me nigger.”
The teacher took us both to the principal’s office, where both of our parents were called. What happened next is a bit of a blur. My mother came to the school. She did not tell me that what I did was right, or even justified. She didn’t say that someone calling me a name, even that name, gave me the right to resort to violence. However, she did say that we were little boys playing a grown-up game and that there was teaching to be done. That boy needed to learn something, and so did I. That boy needed to be disciplined, and so did I. And we both were. (We also ended up sitting together at lunch most days after that.)
My mother shaped my thinking about who I was and what I was capable of. She never said or did anything to cause me to believe that my blackness was a curse or a limitation. She gave me a sense of agency and accountability that remains with me to this day. She did this by advocating for me, protecting me, disciplining me, and sacrificing for me. There are myriad examples of this, but four stories in particular have always stood out in my mind.
The life of a single mother raising a son in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s was tough. There were drugs, gangs, crime, poverty, and a host of other traps to which a young man could fall prey. People often ask how I came out of all that unscathed. My answer is always the same: Frances Baucham. My mother was a tough, smart, hard-working, no-nonsense woman who did not suffer fools. Growing up, there were two things I never doubted: 1) my mother loved me, and 2) if I got out of line, she’d kill me!
One day, as a friend and I were walking home from the store, we took a routine shortcut through the back of a nearby housing project. As we walked and talked, we didn’t notice two young men following us. Suddenly, out of nowhere, they rushed us. One of them shoved a gun in my face while the other searched me and my friend for money and/or drugs. We had neither, so they took the bag of groceries we had just bought and ran off.
Not long after that incident, my mother decided it was time for a change of scenery. So we packed our things, got on a Greyhound bus, and for the next three days we crossed the United States to end up in Buford, South Carolina, where we would spend the next year and a half living with my mother’s oldest brother, Luther Sanders, and his wife before moving to Texas, the place I still call home. Not only would I go to high school, college, and seminary in Texas, but it is also where I met and married my wife, welcomed all nine of my children, and started my ministry. I often say, “I am a Californian by birth, but a Texan by the grace of God!”
Luther (or Uncle Kid, as we called him) was and is a hero. He is a laid-back, soft-spoken, slow-talkin’ Southerner. If you were to meet him, you might mistake him for a simple country boy. You would be wrong. Uncle Kid served for twenty-two years in the United States Marine Corps and survived two tours in Vietnam. He spent part of his time in the Marines as a drill instructor, some in K9 training and handling, and later became a certified scuba diver. Uncle Kid was so committed to the Corps that after 9/11, he walked onto the closest base and tried to reenlist. He was in his fifties at the time.
I could write an entire book about Uncle Kid. Perhaps someday I will. But for now, you just need to know that when my mother saw I needed something she felt she couldn’t provide for me by herself in Los Angeles, she knew where to go. It was the best thing that could have happened to me, and words are inadequate to express my gratitude.
My mother graduated from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, in 2000. She was forty-nine years old. I remember sitting in the audience and crying like a baby. My wife was rubbing my back and hugging my neck, and our children were asking, “What’s wrong with Daddy?” I couldn’t explain it at the time, but I would go on to use that moment to impress upon my children the value of sacrifice.
My mother graduated from college at forty-nine because she got pregnant at seventeen. Yes, she made a moral choice that cost her. However, not everyone faced with the consequences of that same moral dilemma decided to do what my mother did. Some chose abortion. (It wasn’t legal in the 1960s, but it was available.) Others chose to leave the child with a relative, while still others put their child in the system.
I do not presume to understand the circumstances that led other women to make different choices. This is not about them. My point is simply this: When they called my mother’s name and she walked across that stage to receive her diploma, her classmates and teachers applauded her because of the tenacity and determination she showed in working and going back to school in her forties. I, on the other hand, applauded her for the sacrifices she made earlier in life by working and raising a son by herself in her twenties and thirties. By the time my mother graduated from college, I had two bachelor’s degrees, a Master of Divinity, and was finishing a doctorate.
Some people see their parents’ diplomas on the wall as motivation for them to follow in Mom’s or Dad’s footsteps and get a degree. I had already done that. What I hadn’t done yet was raise my children and launch them into adulthood. My mother’s diploma said, “This is what sacrifice, determination, and redemption looks like.” My mother was neither a perfect woman nor a perfect parent. But in her imperfection, she showed me what it looks like to sacrifice for your kids.
My wife, Bridget, is often amazed by the stories my mother has told her about my days in elementary school. She finds it hard to fathom how much of a troublemaker I was. One of the stories my mother often tells is of the day she came to visit my class (probably for a parent/teacher conference about my behavior). My mother always had a job or two, so she would drop by the school whenever she could. That day she dropped by during reading time.
As she met with the teacher, she noticed that the books on my group’s table were different than those the other groups were reading. She asked about it and was told that my group was at a lower reading level. At that point, my mother called me to the teacher’s desk, gave me a look that shook me to my core, then turned to the teacher and said, “Give me a book.”
The teacher reached for one of the readers on her desk. “No,” my mother corrected her, “give me your book.” The teacher protested, assuring my mother that her book was far beyond my reading level, at which point my mother simply pointed to the book and held out her hand; the teacher handed her the book. My mother opened it to a random page, handed it to me, then folded her arms and said, “Read this, son.”
I knew I was in trouble. There was no way out. If I fumbled through the book, my mother would know I was playing dumb at school. However, if I read it, my teacher would know I had been, well, playing dumb at school. Either way, I knew I would be toast when I got home. So I did the only thing I could; I began to read the book. The teacher, a rather pale white woman, began to grow increasingly red. Her jaw dropped and her eyes doubled in circumference. She tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. I finished the passage, handed the book to my mother, then turned and walked back to my group.
But it wasn’t over. Before I could get back to the table, my mother said, “Oh, no… that’s not your group anymore.” She then told the teacher, “I see that all his little buddies are at that table. Voddie doesn’t care about reading as much as he cares about being with his homeboys.” And she was right. I was a little black boy growing up in South Central Los Angeles during the heyday of the Crips and Bloods. It wasn’t “cool” to hit the books, so I underperformed so as not to stand out.
But not that day. That day, Frances Baucham had come to class. That day, she reminded me (and my teacher) that she, not the streets, had the last word.
Several years after that incident, my mother would remind me once again that when it came to academics, Frances Baucham did not play!
It all started with a progress report. These were report cards sent home midway through the semester to give parents an idea how their children were doing; mine contained a C in one subject. When my mother saw that, she went ballistic! Space doesn’t allow for the long story, but the short version is she told me I couldn’t play football. Not that I couldn’t play in the next game; she told me I couldn’t even go to practice.
The next day I told our head coach, Diz Reeves, what had happened. (Coach Reeves was a living legend in Texas football, and in Texas, that’s saying a lot.) He immediately brought me into his office, sat down behind his desk, and called my mother to “straighten things out.” What happened next was epic!
Coach started out trying to reason with my mother. The conversation went something like this:
Coach Reeves: Ms. Baucham, remember, this was only a progress report.
Mom: I am aware of that, Coach.
Coach Reeves: I assure you, Voddie will bring the grade up by the end of the semester.
Mom: Oh, trust me, I know he will. At least, he’d better.
Coach Reeves: Your son is one of the smartest players I have ever coached.
Mom: This is not about how dumb your other players are, this is about what I expect from my son.
I can’t recall exactly what my mother said after that. What I can tell you is that Coach Reeves’s side of the conversation suddenly turned into a series of “Yes ma’ams,” “No ma’ams,” and then, “I understand.” Finally, he hung up the phone, looked at me, and said, “Son, you better get that grade up, and I hope your momma lets you come back next week.”
My mother and Coach Reeves would go on to become the best of friends. Years later, he would say, “I wish every one of my players had a mother like Frances Baucham.” And he would tell the story often of the time he lost his best player for a week, not because he was flunking a class, but because his mother would not tolerate a C on a progress report. I was performing below my ability and below my mother’s expectations. And in my house, that was simply unacceptable.
I would go on to excel academically for the rest of my life. In high school, I was not only a captain on the football and track teams; I was also a leader of our student government, a peer counselor, an officer in the Spanish Club and the Math Club, a member of the Honor Society, listed in Who’s Who Among American High School Students, a member of Mu Alpha Theta (a national high school and junior college honor society for mathematics), a Merit Scholar, and graduated near the top of my graduating class of over four hundred students. I would eventually attend college on a football scholarship, but I saw that as a means to an end—and that end was not football. My first three recruiting visits were to Rice University (the Harvard of the South), West Point, and the United States Air Force Academy.
You may be asking, “This book is about Critical Race Theory and the Church. What does all of this have to do with that, social justice, and the current conversation about race in America?”
The answer is: EVERYTHING!
I grew up poor, without a father, and surrounded by drugs, gangs, violence, and disfunction in one of the toughest urban environments imaginable. Yet through all of that, I didn’t just survive; I thrived! Not because of government programs or white people “doing the work of anti-racism”; I thrived in large part because, by God’s grace, my mother protected me, sacrificed for me, advocated for me, and disciplined me.
Black people often take offense when they hear me speak about the importance of family and personal responsibility. The attitude Jesse Jackson expressed when he was caught on a hot mic saying he wanted to “cut [President Barack Obama’s] nuts off” when he heard him “talking down to black people” is both real and common. There are those to whom any response to the plight of black people in America that emphasizes something other than systemic racism, white supremacy, or white privilege is seen as “blaming the victim.”
Advocates of this victim mentality think the only thing that can cause a man like me to focus on the centrality of family and personal responsibility is internalized racism, a lack of sensitivity, catering to white folk, being out of touch with blackness and/or the black experience, or all of the above. Well, those people don’t know me. They don’t know my story. And, in fact, until you hear everything else I have to say, you don’t know my story either. It took more than a strong mother and a bus ride to South Carolina to save me.
1. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (New York, New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, 2010), 19–20.
2. Robert Lindsey, “Los Angeles Busing Ends after Three Years,” New York Times, April 21, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/21/us/los-angeles-busing-ends-after-3-years.html.