The extent to which white supremacy is entrenched among white Christians, not just evangelicals in the South but also white mainline Protestants and white Catholics in other parts of the United States, is indeed daunting. But as I traveled the country doing research for this book, it also became clear that Americans, at both the national and local levels, are attempting to tell a more truthful story about our racist past, to understand how this past is manifesting itself in our fraught present, and to begin to shape a better future. These stories are emerging in both private moments and public monuments, particularly—but not exclusively—in the American South. Through these recent stories of transformation, we can see how white Christian Americans might begin to face our own personal and family stories and wrestle with the ways in which white supremacy has distorted our sense of reality and ourselves.
In my hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, I visited the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum just a few weeks after it opened in December 2017. Given my own experiences and the state’s track record on civil rights, I was not expecting this museum to be a sign of hope; I was highly skeptical that I would encounter anything near an honest accounting of the state’s civil rights history. The museum has the distinction of being the first, and currently the only, civil rights museum built with public funds. While such an investment might indicate a deep commitment to the topic in many other states, my assumption was that official state funding would whitewash the narrative.
I was also suspicious of the “two museums” marketing, which tied the Civil Rights Museum opening to the reopening of the Museum of Mississippi History after the original was closed due to damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Such couplings by the white power structure are familiar tactics in the South, potentially signaling to whites that there was one museum for them (covering fifteen thousand years, from the Stone Age to the present, including the state’s two hundred years of existence) and one for blacks (focused on the thirty years between World War II and the mid-1970s).
Moreover, the official opening ceremony had been marred by Governor Phil Bryant’s having invited “my friend” President Donald Trump, who just a few months before had refused to condemn white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, rallying around a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee while chanting, “White lives matter!” “Jews will not replace us!” and the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil!” Trump’s invitation caused Representative John Lewis, the Georgia congressman who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and who was arrested in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964, to threaten a boycott if Trump spoke at the opening. Ignoring the backlash, the president accepted the invitation and pushed forward with his plans to speak. The museum scrambled and struck a compromise that allowed Trump to address an invitation-only crowd inside the museum before being whisked away ahead of the official public ceremony outside.1
Despite my misgivings, I discovered that the museum had succeeded in doing the near impossible in Mississippi: telling the whole truth about our state’s shameful record on slavery, Jim Crow, massive resistance to civil rights, and our uneven progress today. It is an impressive and courageous achievement.
It was all there: murders of civil rights workers in Neshoba County, the assassination of Medgar Evers and the failure of all-white juries to convict his self-acknowledged killer, Governor Ross Barnett’s resistance to James Meredith being enrolled as the first black student at Ole Miss, the stark white robes of the KKK. In one of the first galleries, an 1858 poster advertised boldly, “One Hundred Negroes for Sale.” In addition to the slaves immediately available for purchase, the fine print assures potential customers that “additional lots” would be regularly available “during the season”—a reference to the slave trade practice of timing the arrivals of slaves to coincide with harvest, in order to ensure higher prices at peak demand times.
One panel, depicting publications of the White Citizens’ Councils and the KKK in the Jim Crow era, featured an eye-catching bright red cover to the introductory issue of White Patriot magazine, with this subtitle in bold white lettering: “Americans for the preservation of the white race / If it is not preserved—it will be destroyed.” This single magazine cover powerfully captures the seamless integration of white supremacy, nationalism, and Christianity. At the top center of the cover, with crossed staffs, are the American flag and the Confederate battle flag. Each has an inscription under the image: “Forever shall she wave for that which she was originally raised” for the former and simply “The flag of inspiration” for the latter. At the bottom center are two sketched facial profiles of a white girl and a freckled white boy beside an icon representing a school, labeled “Our Most Precious Possession.” And flanking these left and right are monthly calendars featuring the most important dates of the year. January features “New Year’s” and “Robt. E. Lee,” while December declares “Christ was born.”
To my surprise, the museum doesn’t avoid highlighting the role of white churches as sites of strong resistance to black claims to equality. One prominent exhibit features a replica of a plain, white, wood-clad church building. Inside that structure, there is an immersive “Organizing Mississippi” exhibit that allows you to sit on worn wooden pews and hear what an organizing meeting for civil rights might have sounded like inside a black Mississippi church. Outside, an exterior church wall tells a different story of organized resistance to integration by white Christian churches. It features news stories and photos of police arresting racially mixed groups of worshippers who had been blocked by church deacons on the steps of white churches during the Jackson Church Visit Campaign of 1963. While the major emphasis is rightly on the nearly unanimous white Christian resistance to desegregation, the exhibit also features smaller “Points of Light” portraits of the few Jackson ministers who spoke out—at significant personal risk and cost—for civil rights, such as Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, Reverend Edwin King, and Dr. W. B. Selah.
The most haunting parts of the museum are the black floor-to-ceiling columns throughout that inscribe in crisp white lettering the names of more than six hundred lynching victims in the state, the dates they were murdered, and their alleged crimes. There is an entire alcove devoted to fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was tortured and murdered in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white storekeeper’s wife during a short visit to a candy store. The display includes Till’s coffin and the Jet magazine photo featuring his battered body lying in the casket that his mother insisted be open to expose the brutality of his murder. And in the center of another room is a replica prison cell from Parchman Penitentiary, where many Freedom Riders were jailed; and on the wall are large mugshots of Freedom Riders who were arrested in 1961, including John Lewis.
It’s a difficult museum to visit, especially if you are a white Protestant Mississippian. But it is encouraging that my family weren’t the only whites attending that day. While the two Mississippi history museums share a common admissions desk, one could easily imagine whites taking their tickets to the left to the state history museum and African Americans taking theirs to the right to the civil rights museum. But the civil rights museum was crowded, and my fellow visitors that day were a racially diverse crowd, approximately 60 percent black and 40 percent white. And many family groups—including mine that day—included three generations exploring the exhibits together, sparking a range of conversations about how things have and haven’t changed.
The mere existence of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, with its unflinching portrayal of the terror and violence whites unleashed to protect their dominance and thwart black equality, is itself a testament of hope. It is a sign that the country is beginning—but only just beginning—to face how centrally white supremacy has shaped our communities, our culture, and our faith. When the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum was first conceived in 2001, for example, there were only two modest memorials related to the civil rights movement in the state: an eternal flame in Meridian on the grave of James Cheney, one of three American civil rights workers who were murdered in 1964, and a statue in Jackson of Medgar Evers—compared with fifty-two public monuments to the Confederacy.2 And although it took sixteen years of lobbying and legislative efforts to win state approval and financial support, the museum was finally built in the capital city—just down from the Old State Capitol, which was the seat of the Confederate state’s congress and where some of the nation’s most oppressive Jim Crow laws were passed.
I also visited Montgomery, Alabama, where the state’s articles of secession were drawn, and which served as the first seat of the Confederate government. The state capitol building is situated prominently on a hill overlooking downtown and the river. To approach the capitol from downtown, you proceed up Commerce Street to the city fountain and bear left onto Dexter Avenue, a broad, majestic cobblestone street that rises toward the capitol building, which is set off as a silhouette against the horizon. Dexter Avenue was originally named Market Street, for the bustling slave markets along the route. The cotton-slavery connection would have been vividly evident on this street and on the aptly named Commerce Street to which it connects. At the lower terminus of Commerce Street, Montgomery merchants constructed a giant “cotton slide” to allow heavy bales of cotton to slide down from city street level to awaiting boats on the river. And slaves were marched off boats, chained together, in the other direction: up Commerce Street to awaiting slave pens and warehouses until they could be auctioned off at the intersection of Commerce and Market, near the courthouse fountain and within sight of the capitol.
The old signs of the Confederacy are still there, to be sure. Walking up toward the capitol on Dexter Avenue today, as you pass the last cross street, there is a heavy, six-foot-high triangular piece of granite on the right corner, placed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with this inscription: “Along this street moved the inaugural parade of Jefferson Davis. He took the oath of office as President of the Confederate States of America, February 18, 1861. DIXIE played as a band arrangement for the first time on this occasion. Placed by Sophie Bibb Chapter, U.D.C., April 26, 1942.” As you ascend the capitol stairs, you pass a twenty-foot-high bronze statue of Davis just to the left, which was erected by the UDC in 1940. When you arrive on the top step, there is a bronze star with this inscription: “Placed by the Sophie Bibb Chapter, Daughters of the Confederacy, on the spot where JEFFERSON DAVIS stood when inaugurated president of C.S.A., Feb. 18, 1861.” And if you walk around to the left side of the capitol building, there is an enormous eighty-eight-foot-high monument to the Confederacy, the cornerstone of which was laid by Jefferson Davis himself before a crowd of five thousand in 1886.
But the Lost Cause message of the UDC is not the only witness to history in contemporary Montgomery. Also on Dexter Avenue, in the shadow of the capitol just before that last cross street, sits Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. The church was founded in 1877 as the Second Colored Baptist Church and met originally in a former slave trader’s pen before purchasing the land on its current location in 1879. The church was Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first pastoral appointment at the age of twenty-five and where he was serving when helping to organize, from the church basement, the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, a yearlong campaign that ultimately ended segregation in the city’s public transportation system.
While standing in that basement near a worn pulpit King used for outside speaking events, my tour guide, Wanda, a member of the church, clasped her hands together and described Montgomery this way: “We’ve got the Civil War and civil rights all together here in one place. All on top of one another.” My visit occurred days after a mass shooting in August 2019, in which a white man killed twenty people in an El Paso Walmart, citing as his motivation “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”3 Clearly thinking of this event and the general rise of white supremacist violence, Wanda paused. With tears in her eyes, she added, “And they’re both still with us, ya’ll.”
One of the most poignant examples of this dueling, intertwined history is the memorial standoff created by the addition of a second marker on Dexter Avenue, placed directly across the street, on the opposite corner from the long-standing 1940 UDC marker. The newer granite marker is clearly designed to mirror the UDC marker in size, shape, and placement. It reads: “THE SELMA TO MONTGOMERY VOTING RIGHTS MARCH led by Martin Luther King, Jr. ended at the foot of the capitol steps on March 25, 1965. Here Dr. King addressed 25,000 people. ‘I believe this march will go down as one of the greatest struggles for freedom and dignity in the nation’s history.’ Martin Luther King, Jr.” Today, if you stand in the middle of Dexter Avenue, these symmetrical sentries, protecting two visions of history, frame your view of the steps rising up to the state capitol.
The city also contains signs—placed mostly in the last decade—marking the sites of slave warehouses and markets, along with significant people and events related to its rich civil rights history. A brass plaque marks the spot where Rosa Parks stepped onto the bus before refusing to give up her seat to a white man. To get the fuller story, one can visit the nearby Rosa Parks Museum. And there are public tributes to lesser-known but important heroes of the movement such as Fred David Gray, the civil rights activist and lawyer who represented Parks and also won a class-action lawsuit against the federal government for the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which the US Public Health Service conducted a study of untreated syphilis among African American men without their informed consent.
If historical marker campaigns sometimes feel like an “and also” version of history, especially amid the crowds of Confederate monuments to the Lost Cause in states such as Alabama, there is one memorial in Montgomery that has powerfully changed the balance of the narrative, not just in Montgomery but also nationwide: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Opened in 2018, the National Memorial is a $15 million investment in truth telling about America’s violent, white supremacist past. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of this memorial, which is an achievement in archival research, interactive data visualization, and architectural invocation of sacred space.
The Equal Justice Initiative, the organizational force behind not only the memorial but also a related Legacy Museum downtown on Commerce Street, as well as the local civil rights markers about town, set out to document and memorialize every known lynching that occurred in the country between 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) and 1950. Their research, which counts only lynchings that can be verified by two independent sources, documented more than 4,400 cases of African American men, women, and even children who were “hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs” during this period.
While the vast majority of these lynchings happened in twelve southern states, the National Memorial also notes that approximately 10 percent of these lynchings took place outside the South, and these were no less brutal expressions of racial terrorism. In Springfield, Missouri, for example, where I lived for three years when I taught at Missouri State University, three black men were lynched in the town square by a mob of a thousand whites in the early hours of Easter Sunday in 1906. Arthur Hodge, a Springfield community leader who organized a memorial for the victims in 2018, summarized the event this way: “They hanged them. They threw kerosene on them. They burned them to a crisp. And then they went to church.”4
Contemporary newspaper accounts note that the white crowd sifted through the pile of ashes for souvenir pieces of clothing, bone, or charred flesh. Entrepreneurial businessmen took pictures of the grisly scene, which captured smoke still rising from the men strung up from a tower—originally constructed to support streetcar electrical lines and featuring a miniature Statue of Liberty at the top—to sell as postcards. A few white entrepreneurs even struck medals to commemorate the occasion. One read, “Easter offering.”5
While the National Memorial makes clear that white racial terrorism was not confined to a single region, its visual depiction of the density of violence in the South is particularly arresting. The memorial occupies a six-acre elevated site with views of downtown and the capitol. An open-air, low-slung building houses an individual monument for each of the more than eight hundred counties in the South where a lynching occurred. Each county’s monument is a six-foot metal cuboid box, suspended from the ceiling by a single metal pole. The boxes are arranged in neat rows, each engraved on one side with the names and dates of each victim from that county, listed in a vertical column. Constructed of Corten steel, they age naturally over time, each acquiring its own unique patina, reflecting the uniqueness of each locale and victim.
The memorial is designed for visitors to proceed through the display by walking in a square that descends into the side of a hill and back out again. At the deepest end, as the monuments rise overhead evoking in abstract form the violence of lynching, are these powerful words in bronze letters on the wall:
In addition to moving sculptures and a meditation garden dedicated to Ida B. Wells, who risked her life to become one of the earliest voices drawing attention to lynchings, the site contains a breathtaking set of more than eight hundred duplicate steel monuments, arranged in rows and organized by state and county in an adjacent field. These duplicate monuments, lying in state next to the memorial, are part of the memorial’s ongoing project to create change across the country. As the memorial summarizes it, these monuments “are waiting to be claimed, transported, and publicly installed in the counties they represent as a public recognition of that past and step toward a different future.”6
Although the National Memorial for Peace and Justice has not, as of this writing, fully worked out the criteria, the idea is that local community groups will commit not just to sponsor the installation of the monument but also to foster an ongoing program of racial justice in their local communities. Once placed, the memorials will function as an acknowledgment of the past as well as a commitment to a new future. And the National Memorial will serve as a central site of accountability. It will report on which counties have “confronted the truth of racial terror” and which have not, and visitors can see whether their own counties have unclaimed memorials still resting in the field.
In the early morning of October 20, 2018, a bus pulled out of Macon, Georgia, en route to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, on a trip that had been more than four years in the making. Of the twenty-one people aboard roughly half were white and half were African American, representing two different First Baptist Churches in Macon: First Baptist Church of Christ, which is historically and predominantly white, and First Baptist Church (often called First Baptist Church “on New Street” to distinguish it from the other), which is historically and predominantly black. The two churches sit just around the corner from each other, at right angles, with their rear parking lots forming vectors that, if extended just a hundred yards or so, would intersect in a nearby park. If you stand at the corner of High Place and High Street near the park, you can see both steeples: FBC New Street to the right, and FBC of Christ up the hill straight ahead.
My family’s personal connection to FBC of Christ, the white congregation, is indirect. As residents of blue-collar East Macon, my parents and relatives didn’t attend FBC of Christ, but they were the beneficiaries of its work. FBC of Christ was one of the earliest churches to sponsor a mission church in East Macon. Established in 1881 as the Warren Chapel, after the name of the FBC of Christ pastor who spearheaded the effort, the church served the residents of the rows of modest, wood-clad houses in the textile “mill village” and a small surrounding neighborhood that had grown up across the Ocmulgee River from downtown after the Civil War.7 Nestled between the city and the Ocmulgee Indian burial mounds, lingering witnesses to the displaced original inhabitants, this narrow strip of land was home to both of my parents.
The church grew and eventually became independently established as East Side Baptist Church.8 Growing up, my parents walked a grid of rough blacktop and red clay streets to services, and when my mom was nineteen and my dad was twenty, they were married there. A familiar image from my childhood is a black-and-white wedding photo that hung near the piano in our living room and shows them standing arm in arm on the church steps. Although many in my generation have scattered to other parts of the country, “our people” are still there, and Macon is still a modest enough place to allow for small-town serendipity: when I drove down to visit the location of the two First Baptist Churches, I realized that my cousin’s law offices are directly across the street from FBC of Christ.
The unlikely and somewhat confusing configuration of the two First Baptist Churches is not the result of some out-of-control church marketing competition but of an intimate, shared history: they began as one church. In 1826 Macon was a town of only a few thousand people, and First Baptist Church was incorporated and built by Bibb County’s merchant, banker, and planter class, many of whom built large houses for their families in town, with its conveniences and services, commuting out to their plantation homes periodically. Each of the white charter members of FBC Macon were slave owners, owning between eight and twenty slaves each. For the first two decades of its existence, as was common in the South, whites and blacks worshipped together, with white slave owners sitting toward the front and enslaved people sitting separately in the back.
But by the 1840s, tensions were heating up over secession and the issue of slavery. With black members then significantly outnumbering white members, church records show that the white congregation thought it time for a new arrangement. In 1845—the same year Baptists in the South met in nearby Augusta and broke ties with their northern brethren over the issue of slavery—they issued a deed for land and a building to the black congregation to be used “for religious services and moral cultivation forever.”9 Despite the independent location, the black congregation remained under the authority and supervision of the white board of deacons, and FBC Macon continued to count them as members of the white church in official reports to the regional Baptist association; FBC New Street also had a white pastor appointed by the white church until after the Civil War.10 Never far away from each other, both churches changed locations several times, settling into their current adjacent configuration by 1887.11
These two congregations sat virtually back to back for 128 years, during the reassertion of white supremacy through Jim Crow laws following the overturn of the Reconstruction government, seven documented lynchings in Bibb County, the federally mandated desegregation of Macon’s public schools and the establishment of private white Christian academies, the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement, white flight from Macon’s city core, and the tense silences in the decades following these changes. There was a tacit acknowledgment of their shared history but no meaningful contact between the two congregations.
That began to change only in 2014, when some mutual acquaintances encouraged the two current pastors to meet. At the time, Reverend Scott Dickison had been pastor of FBC of Christ for just two years, while Reverend James Goolsby was a decade into his tenure at FBC on New Street. As it turned out, this differential experience may have been calibrated just right. In hindsight, Dickison sees that some naiveté may have been beneficial on the white side of the relationship. “I must admit, I had no clue about what I was getting myself into,” he told me in an interview. And Goolsby noted that his longer experience was critical for leading his congregation, some of whom were initially wary of the white congregation’s motives: “There was a trust that I’m not a novice, and there’s a trust that I’m not easily fooled, and so they trusted my decision.”12
Their initial conversations led Dickison and Goolsby to connect with the New Baptist Covenant, a group started in 2006 by former president Jimmy Carter to help black and white Baptists begin to heal divisions and work together for social justice. To bring the congregations together and break the ice formed from more than a century of silence, they began with simple social events such as a joint Easter egg roll for the kids in the adjoining park and potluck dinners. Most of these events went smoothly, but they soon found that even seemingly low-risk joint ventures could be more fraught than anticipated.
In 2014 FBC of Christ invited the youth from FBC on New Street to join them on an annual youth group retreat, that year to Universal Studios in Florida. Having had good attendance at other joint church events, Dickison was surprised to see no African American teens signed up for the trip as the deadline approached. Puzzled, he asked Reverend Goolsby if he knew what was going on. Reverend Goolsby explained that for him and many in his congregation who were parents of teenage boys, Florida had become synonymous with the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, and the state’s so-called Stand Your Ground law. In 2013 this law had permitted the acquittal of Trayvon’s killer, who said he had feared for his life when he saw Trayvon walking home from a convenience store in a hoodie. Goolsby straightforwardly told Dickison: “You put a hoodie on my son, and it’s just Trayvon, and there’s no way in the world I [am] going to let my son go to Florida without me.”13 These concerns about the racial climate in Florida, combined with the lack of confidence that the white chaperones understood these risks, had prevented the black parents from allowing their kids to participate.
But even at this early stage in the churches’ partnership, enough trust had been established to foster an honest conversation. When Dickison brought these concerns back to the white adults signed up as chaperones, David Cooke Jr., a longtime member of FBC of Christ and also the local district attorney for Bibb County, was deeply moved by this story, which intersected with his professional work around race and the law. Cooke told Goolsby and the other black parents that he understood their concerns and promised that he personally would commit himself to carefully looking after the African American teenage boys on the trip. To his own surprise, Goolsby noted, “I felt comfortable with that, amazingly. That never would have happened had we not begun to develop that relationship.” For his part, Dickison noted that the event had broken through the racial naiveté, while opening up a new path of empathy among many white parents: “Hearing that, the fear from a black father about his son and sharing that with him, I think really gave [the white parents] kind of a personal opening to some of these larger questions that, unfortunately, white America is only now confronting.” Goolsby signed up his son for the trip, and others from FBC on New Street followed suit.
The most immediate result of these difficult conversations was that the youths went on their first ever racially integrated trip. But beyond that, it was a sign that the churches’ initial interactions were paying dividends. Dickison noted that their modest efforts were bridging divides in contemporary Macon: “Our covenant opened up that interaction, not just between a black father and a white father, but between a black father and the DA of the city.” And Goolsby saw it as a confirming milestone that allowed him to say to himself, “Okay, we’re moving in the right direction.”14
Five months after the youth trip, the two churches formalized their commitment by holding a joint service and signing a covenant to work together toward racial justice and healing. Goolsby and Dickison chose Pentecost Sunday (May 24, 2015), which celebrates the Holy Spirit coming among the fearful disciples after Jesus’s death and resurrection, to empower them for a new phase of ministry. One of the most moving moments of that service was the observance of Communion, the consumption of the bread and wine representing the body and blood of Jesus. In a city where public swimming pools had been closed to prevent black children from swimming with white children after public facilities were legally desegregated, the practice of becoming united in the same spiritual fellowship, through the intimate symbols of shared bread and wine, is nothing short of radical.
While both churches are Baptist and broadly hold a shared theological understanding of Communion, each nonetheless had to adjust to cultural differences in the rituals. FBC of Christ has women deacons who assist with serving the congregation, while FBC on New Street does not. FBC on New Street approaches the ritual with a higher degree of formality, with deacons donning white gloves, while FBC of Christ does not. Even these small differences rang with broader significance in the racially charged Deep South.
For many older white deacons in an upper-middle- to upper-class church, holding a tray and serving their African American neighbors would be an image devastating to the hierarchical ethos of their childhood. And for many African American deacons, serving Communion in white gloves to well-off white folks may have evoked memories of the not-too-distant past when African Americans were confined largely to menial labor and service jobs and kept out of the white-collar economy. But Dickison and Goolsby both described the act of observing and making space for these ritual differences as powerful expressions of mutual respect and desire for community.
Just three weeks after this service launching their formal work together, white Christian supremacist Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans who were attending a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, testing the mettle of the Macon churches’ new covenant. “Charleston was so clear and blatant,” Dickison said. “Like the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the four little girls,” a reference to a 1963 incident in Birmingham, “Charleston was a turning point. It changed our conversation.”15
The Sunday after the Charleston massacre, Dickison and his worship team arranged the entire service to address the issue of white racism and violence. Reflecting back on that day, Dickison noted that while he would like to think that their services would have focused on that tragic event anyway, he knew that because of their covenant with FBC on New Street, the events “weighed more heavily on our congregation.”16 No one, he recalled, questioned why the service was focused on racism and racial violence, nor did they question his participation, along with Goolsby, at a rally decrying white supremacy later in the week. After Charleston, Dickison said, “A lot of white people are seeing that this doesn’t have to do with ‘people over there’; it has to do with us.”17
In his mostly white congregation, Dickison has been working to build up a tolerance for the discomfort that comes from honestly confronting a past that differs from the stories told in the official church histories. This tolerance faced a serious challenge when historian Doug Thompson, director of the Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies at Macon’s Mercer University and a member of the congregation, discovered historical financial transactions with horrifying implications. In a single week in 1855, the church accounts-receivable ledger detailed income from the sale of two teenage boy slaves for $950 each, equivalent to a total of about $56,000 today. That same week, the accounts-payable ledger reflected a payment toward the pastor’s salary and the church building fund. The inescapable conclusion was that at least some of the funds from the sale of church members’ slaves went to pay the church’s bills. When Thompson brought these transactions to the attention of Dickison and the church leadership, Dickison decided to preach about it. According to Thompson, who attended the Sunday service, when Dickison disclosed the transactions, “there was an audible gasp in the congregation.”18
As Thompson and Dickison kept digging, they found more evidence of just how complicit the church and its most respected members had been in both slavery and the defense of white supremacy. Beyond the slave sales identified above, they discovered that the congregation’s flagship 1855 church building on Second Street, constructed to impress, was likely funded by the sale of approximately twenty slaves owned by one of its prominent founding families.19 The official history of First Baptist Church of Christ proudly described the public reception of the building in detail:
“Praise for the new building was unlimited. The editor of the Georgia Citizen declared it ‘an ornament to the city… the finest church edifice in Macon… second to none in the State, point of architectural design and beauty.’ It was also described as a “handsome and tasteful Gothic edifice, the most attractive building in the city.”20
The land and building alone cost approximately $20,500 in 1855, equivalent to more than $600,000 in today’s currency—a considerable commitment for a church with an enrollment of just 287 whites and 400 enslaved black members. On the morning of March 18, 1855, Pastor Sylvanus Landrum preached the dedication sermon based on the text “The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.”21
In a 2017 sermon entitled “Learning How to Remember,” Dickison drove home the painful revelation of their research to the congregation: “Given what we know about our congregation at the time, that it included both slave owners and their slaves, [this means] that the church building may have been financed through the sale of some of its own members.”22 Pausing over this transaction reveals just how brutal an act this would have been. The sale of slaves at this scale would have almost certainly meant large-scale family separations: husbands from wives, parents from children, siblings from one another, not to mention extended family connections. It’s not hard to imagine the soul-crushing experience of an African American slave member whose family members were sold to purchase the land and materials for the church; who was forced to work on its construction and then later required to attend worship services, listening to paternalistic admonishments from a white preacher while sitting in one of the rear pews his own hands had built.
In addition to selling slaves to finance church business, church leaders were strongly committed to the cause of the Confederacy. On January 25, 1861, the Sunday following Georgia’s act of secession, Pastor E. W. Warren—the same minister who launched what eventually became my parents’ home church—delivered a sermon, printed in full in the Macon Daily Telegraph, that was described as “a thoroughgoing defense of slaveholding supported entirely by the pastor’s interpretation of references to the Scriptures, including both Testaments.”23 This sermon proved so popular that Warren expanded on these ideas in serial publications in the Christian Index, and later published them in a widely read book, Nellie Norton: Or, Southern Slavery and the Bible, A Scriptural Refutation.24
When the Confederate Congress adopted the Stars and Bars as the first official flag of the Confederacy and telegraphed the design specifications out to the states in March 1861, the church minutes recorded with pride the fervent activity of Mrs. Thomas Hardeman Jr., the wife of the US congressman who had recently resigned his post to serve in the Confederate army. The minutes note that Mrs. Hardeman, “with her accustomed patriotism and energy devoted her labor the whole of that night to the making of the first flag of the Confederacy which waved upon Georgia soil.”25 In April 1862 the congregation voted to offer its massive nine-hundred-pound bronze bell to be melted down to create Confederate cannons.26 Finally, because of its grandeur, the church building also had the distinction of being the site of the last address Confederate president Jefferson Davis gave to the people of Macon just before the end of the Civil War. There is no record that any of this activity raised a white Christian eyebrow.
Since 2015, Goolsby and Dickison, and key leaders in their churches, have continued to slowly build trust between the congregations. Dickison’s white congregation has seen a few families leave, and some who have stayed still argue defensively that these uncomfortable conversations are pointless, since no whites currently attending the church were responsible for enslaving anyone. But for the most part, the congregation remains behind the efforts, which have focused less on joint worship and more on holiday potlucks, shared programs for children and youth, and service projects. As Dickison put it, “If there’s any secret to what we’ve done, it’s that we’ve shared far more potato salad than pulpit swaps. It’s tastier and, in the end, probably better for you.”27 And Goolsby’s congregation continues mostly to trust his wisdom even if some still have concerns about the motives of the whites up on the hill.
Notably, Goolsby and Dickison recounted similar reactions to the initial stages of their covenant work, both from older members of their congregations. After a Thanksgiving potluck gathering, an older white female congregant pulled Dickison aside and said, “I didn’t know how much we needed this.” And after the Pentecost service, an older black male congregant told Goolsby matter-of-factly, “We’ve been waiting for this to happen.”28
After four years of community building, the two churches concluded that they were ready to take a new step, to more directly confront the history of racial violence in the country through a visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. The night before the trip, the twenty-one members from both churches, ranging in age from their twenties to their seventies, held a meeting to discuss their hopes and worries about the trip. While there were some shared anxieties about the emotional impact of the experience, especially within a racially mixed group, there were also some that were distinctive to white and black experiences.
More than one African American member said that anticipating the trip had recalled old stories, which they had somewhat suppressed, about family members disappearing. One recalled cautionary lessons he had received as a child about “how you carry yourself in public and around white people” to avoid potentially life-threatening confrontations. Another worried, “Am I gonna see names I recognize? What will I feel when I see these things, and do I want to go there?” A white member from a prominent family with a “proud Confederate history,” who said only half-jokingly that his wife had signed him up for the trip, shared emotionally that he was just at this pretrip meeting realizing that his hopes and fears were the same: “That I’ll feel responsible.”29
During the visit, one particularly moving moment happened between Tim, an African American man, and Cathy, a white woman. As Cathy descended to the building’s deepest point, where the rectangular steel county memorial columns to lynching victims become suspended overhead, she felt emotionally overwhelmed and sat down on a bench to collect her thoughts. Tim, who had just encountered the list of names inscribed on the column representing the county in which he grew up, caught her eye. He sat down next to Cathy without a word, and the tears came for both of them.
At a reflection service after the trip, Cathy summed up this simple but powerful moment: “We sat and shed tears together, neither of us completely knowing or understanding the source of those tears, but we were there for each other.”30 The racial complexity of this moment, however, was thick for Tim. He later confessed to Cathy that he couldn’t help but think about what the evidence all around them demonstrated: that the simple physical proximity of a white woman and a black man was precisely the catalyst for the torture and murder of many a black man remembered on the columns suspended above them.
“We had some pretty holy moments come out of that trip,” noted Dickison. Importantly, the two churches have done enough hard work together to realize that the goal “wasn’t about making it okay; it was just about the power of mourning together these things.”31 And especially for the white church members, this kind of mourning together challenges the racial naiveté that whites have cultivated over centuries. Neither a trip to Florida nor two people grieving side by side is a simple thing when not all parties are white. And the massacre of African American worshippers by a Lutheran white supremacist is not an isolated incident perpetrated randomly by a madman; it is, rather, the harvest from the seeds of racism that white Christians allowed to flourish within a culture that saw itself as God’s ideal civilization, even while condoning and theologically underwriting white Christian terrorism.
Looking ahead, the two First Baptist Churches are exploring some concrete next steps in their journey together. In addition to continuing their ongoing work with the New Baptist Covenant, they have engaged in a conversation with the Equal Justice Initiative to become sponsoring organizations that would “claim” the Bibb County steel column at the National Memorial. While talks are still under way and criteria still being worked out with EJI at the time of this writing, this work would entail bringing the memorial back to Macon, placing it somewhere prominent in the city, and committing to an ongoing slate of joint programming and racial justice work. Asked how far along in the journey he thought the churches are, Dickison replied, “I think everybody feels like we are still scratching the surface.… I think we’re just getting started. I think people in both churches feel that way.”32
The cultural distance between Macon and Minnesota is immense, but the specter of lynching found its way even here. Slavery was prohibited in Minnesota from the time it was admitted to the Union as a state in 1858. Settled initially by Scandinavian, German, and Irish immigrants after Native Americans were pushed westward, the state continues to be dominated by this cultural and religious heritage. Religiously speaking, white mainline Protestants and white Catholics account for four in ten residents. On the Protestant side, Minnesota is home to the greatest number of Lutherans of any state; in 2016, adherents to Lutheranism alone comprised 23 percent of Minnesotans.33 The state is also one of the whitest states in the country. At the turn of the century, Minnesota’s two million residents were 99 percent white; even today, about eight in ten Minnesotans are non-Hispanic whites.34
The city of Duluth is nestled on the tip of Lake Superior, less than two hundred miles from the Canadian border. It is also the site of one of the most widely attended and documented lynchings in the country. The three black victims—Elmer Jackson, Elias Clayton, and Isaac McGhie—were not residents of Duluth but were working as roustabouts for a traveling circus that was in town for a single day in June 1920. A young white couple accused them, without witnesses or evidence, of attacking the man and raping the woman. Although there was no evidence and no trial, the men were arrested and placed in the local jail.
That night, a white mob of more than ten thousand people—representing about 10 percent of the town’s population of ninety-nine thousand—swarmed the jail, marched the men to the town square, and hung them one at a time from a lamppost. After the hangings, the crowd parted to allow a car to come through so they could use the headlights to illuminate the scene. After adjusting the rope length of one of the victims to better fit in the frame, photographs were taken, which were later sold as postcards.35 The white police officers on duty did little to interfere.
In 2003, residents of Duluth unveiled a large memorial for the three men who were lynched. What started as a campaign to add a plaque to the site of the violence ended with the creation of a large, fifty-three-by-seventy-foot sculpture paid for by $267,000 in donations that poured in from the community. One anonymous $10,000 donation came from a female relative of a man who had been working at the jail that fateful night, charged with ensuring the inmates’ safety; she said the events of that night had haunted him the rest of his life.
The idea for creating the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial came from Heidi Bakk-Hansen, a white Duluth resident. After reading The Lynchings in Duluth—a book by a local relative of the former mayor that was originally published under the title They Was Just Niggers—Bakk-Hansen couldn’t stop thinking about these crimes when she drove past the intersection on her way to work downtown.36 In 2000, just ahead of the eightieth anniversary of the event, she wrote an article about it in the local alternative weekly publication the Ripsaw News, entitled “Duluth’s Lingering Shame.”37 The article sparked broader interest in the anniversary vigil and in ongoing conversations about what might be done to help the community come to terms with this part of its history.
Bakk-Hansen soon gathered a small group of people who shared her concerns, including fellow Duluth residents Henry L. Banks, who is black, and Catherine Ostos, who is Latina. Together the three of them spearheaded a campaign to create a public memorial that would tell the truth about this terrible event in the city’s history that whites had largely repressed and tried to forget, and that the tiny minority of black residents talked about only among themselves.
Three years later, in October 2003, that vision came to fruition. More than three thousand people turned out for the memorial’s unveiling. A processional, featuring New Orleans–style jazz music, followed the route the men had been forced to walk from the jail to the intersection and featured the mayor, local clergy, and schoolchildren. Most of the attendees and speakers at the event were local, but there were also others who flew in from across the country, such as Warren Read, a fourth-grade teacher from Kingston, Washington. While doing genealogical research on his family, Read was horrified to discover that his great-grandfather, Louis Dondino, had been convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for being one of the ringleaders of the lynching mob, although he only served about one year in prison. When he received the news about the monument unveiling, Read asked if he could come to symbolically apologize to Elmer, Elias, and Isaac, and to their families and descendants.
In his remarks at the unveiling, Read noted how the postcard image of that night had frozen that awful racial violence in time, and he expressed his hopes that the day’s event would provide an alternative image of accountability and reconciliation: “I stand here today as a representative of [my great-grandfather’s] legacy, and I willingly place that responsibility on my shoulders.”38 Read continued, “As a family, we have used the discovery of this as a tool for continued discovery of ourselves. This means our past, present, and future selves, and a lesson that true shame is not in the discovery of a terrible event such as this, but in the refusal to acknowledge and learn from that event.”39
To be sure, the placing of a public monument hasn’t solved all of Duluth’s racial problems or prevented ongoing expressions of white supremacy. But the commitment to tell this truth has given the community a moral anchor point that has demanded a different kind of accountability and response in the face of continued challenges. For example, on Election Day in 2012, an effigy of President Barack Obama was found hanging from a billboard in Duluth. In response, the mayor’s office, along with the board of trustees from the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, declared that as stewards of that memorial, they were required to speak out. Their response looked to the memorial as a public commitment “to build a more just and inclusive community.” Based on that down payment on a different future for the city in race relations, they declared:
“As a community, we cannot tolerate bigotry and hate. We cannot ignore or remain indifferent to the heinous nature of this act. We can speak out and defy such behavior in our community. We can commit to actively eradicate racism and hatred in our midst.”40
Years after the unveiling of the Duluth memorial, these initial efforts have continued to pay dividends. After the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018, a group of thirty-five Duluth residents gathered to make the 1,223-mile trip to Montgomery. The group included many who had been present from the beginning of this journey, including Bakk-Hansen, who was checking people onto the bus with a clipboard. But it also included some new faces, such as Mike Tusken, Duluth’s chief of police, who is also the grandnephew of Irene Tusken, the white woman who falsely accused the African American men of raping her. Tusken didn’t know about his own family’s connection to the lynchings until the unveiling of the memorial in 2003. “This has been a journey for me, being that I didn’t find out for years my family’s history,” Tusken noted in an interview ahead of the trip. “I can’t miss this. It’s too big for our nation, too big for our city.”41
Between the 2003 Duluth memorial and the 2018 National Memorial for Peace and Justice opening, Warren Read, now fifty-one, continued his genealogical research and located the family of Elmer Jackson. He connected with Virginia Huston—Jackson’s cousin, who is in her seventies and still living in Jackson’s hometown of Pennytown, Missouri—and told her what he had discovered about that terrible night and his own family’s connection to it.
After some email exchanges, the two agreed to meet in Montgomery during the Duluth delegation’s visit and to tour the National Memorial together. Standing outside the EJI Legacy Museum on Commerce Street, the companion museum to the National Memorial, Huston introduced Read to others who didn’t know the connection, saying:
Warren is my baby brother now. He brought the research to us to let us know what happened. We didn’t know what happened to Elmer, but with his research, we now know. We have closure. Warren’s great-grandfather, he was instrumental in getting the lynch mob. But that’s not Warren. He shouldn’t have any guilt feelings or anything. We’re going to look forward, we’re not looking back. We’re going to build ourselves up, and live for today and live for tomorrow. He will always be my brother, and I love him very much.42
Following the tour of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Chief Tusken was visibly moved, and noted that the experience had convinced him that feelings of grief or shame had to give way to commitments to action. “Leaving this memorial, I think everyone has to ask themselves, ‘What are you personally going to do to confront racism? To make sure that people have access and equality?’ And that really is the takeaway everyone should leave with: What are you going to do?”43
Each of these contemporary stories of hope is, against the historical backdrop of racial injustice, modest. But they are concrete and meaningful efforts at confession coupled with steps toward, or at least a strong conviction about the necessity of, repair. And they serve as examples of contemporary wakefulness in the face of centuries of white apathy and slumber. Looking ahead, the large Edmund Burke inscription on the walls behind the life-size bronze statues of the three Duluth lynching victims is a good description of where we are, at the very beginning of this journey: “An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent.”
In addition to telling more honest public stories, those of us who have grown up under the protective canopy of white Christian America need to tell a more truthful story about our own lives, both in the present and the past. My own experience has been that it has taken first an openness to the possible existence of a different story and only a modest amount of initial effort—a week of daily journaling, for example—before the light shifts, the forgotten or repressed stories begin to emerge, and the scenery transforms slowly. Then it takes some digging with enough conviction and curiosity to overcome the inevitable defensiveness that rears its head as the veneer of innocence encasing treasured family lore begins to chip away. But while there is anxiety, and even some shame and terror, in recovering a truer narrative about ourselves, there is also something far more valuable: the possibility of a return to health, with these painful revelations serving as the first signposts marking the path out of what can only be called a kind of self-induced insanity.
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote that one of the reasons African Americans, on the whole, had felt so little hatred toward white Americans, compared with what history might suggest was due, was that they perceived white Americans to be stuck in a form of madness that prevented them from coming into full human maturity. Baldwin described this insight this way:
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors.… The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing. One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro’s door that he came. And one felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he.44
This journey toward self-realization and sanity isn’t a simple one, but it begins with the act of telling a more complete, and truer, story. Here’s what the beginning of mine looks like.
On a top shelf in my house is a family Bible that belonged to my fifth great-grandfather on my mother’s side. Printed in 1815, it is inscribed on the front inside cover with the following words: “Presented by Nathaniel Ellis to his friend Pleasant Moon, July 17th, 1825.” Pleasant Moon (1800–1843) was among the first generation of my mother’s family to be born in Georgia, where five generations of my family have lived in either Twiggs County or Bibb County, the adjacent county on the north that is the home of Macon. Both of my parents grew up in East Macon, and our family was one of the few that had moved away; I have warm memories of visiting a host of aunts, uncles, and cousins on both sides during our yearly pilgrimage back “home.” Pleasant’s father, William H. Moon, my sixth great-grandfather, had been born in 1740 in Albemarle County, Virginia, and served in the Revolutionary army. Sometime after 1790, he moved his family to the Georgia frontier, on land that was being seized by the Georgia government from the indigenous inhabitants of the land, the Creek and Cherokee Indians, and distributed via rolling lotteries to white settlers.45
Although I have not been able to locate a will for my fifth great-grandfather, I have been able to locate one for his uncle (his father’s brother) and namesake, Pleasant Moon Sr. (1742–1818), who also made the journey from Virginia to Georgia with the extended family at the close of the eighteenth century. The will of my sixth great-uncle is an illuminating window into the role slavery played in my family’s modest fortunes, and more generally its role among what we’d think of today as white lower-middle-class families. While they had means to relocate from Virginia, my Baptist Georgia ancestors weren’t in the wealthy planter class of Gone with the Wind. Typical land lots dispensed by the state of Georgia during this period, for example, were between 160 and 200 acres—large enough to farm beyond mere subsistence but nowhere near the size of the major cotton plantations in the area.46
At his death in 1818, the county recorded both his will and an “Inventory of the Goods and Chattles [sic] of Pleasant Moon, Deceased.” The inventory was thorough, including items like “1 young bay mare @ $60. And 1 bay horse cart @ $35”; “1 cow at $15 and 7 head of sheep at $11”; “1 feather bed and furniture @ $90”; and “1 shot gun @ $11.” Not counting the land, my sixth great-uncle’s estate was fairly modest, totally $2,293.22, or approximately $46,000 in 2019 dollars.
Most surprising, though, were two listings near the top of the household inventory: “1 negro woman named Naomi @ $800, & 1 named Susan @ $450,” totaling $1,250; and on the line below that, “1 named Eliza at $275, & 1 named Bird, a boy @ $150,” totaling $425. To put this into perspective, there is no other single line in the entire page-long household inventory that registers more than $100. Taken together, these two lines of human slave property totaled $1,675, accounting for an astonishing 73 percent of the assets of the estate. In other words, even among my barely-above-subsistence-farming ancestors, their way of life and economic well-being were thoroughly dependent on owning slaves.
On September 20, 1920, Isham Andrews, my great-grandfather and the husband of Pleasant Moon’s great-granddaughter, was killed. He was supervising the pulling of a post at the John Sant & Sons clay mines near Dry Branch, Georgia, when a steel cable snapped and struck him, breaking his arm and crushing his skull. This event sent shock waves through my mother’s side of the family, leaving my great-grandmother Beulah with little money and four small children. It was ultimately too much for her to cope with. She essentially left the four kids to fend for themselves—leaving the two older ones who were in their early teens at the time to care for the two younger ones—while she pursued two subsequent husbands and started another family with one of them. This family disarray righted itself only two generations later with my mother, Beulah’s granddaughter through her second marriage, who was adopted and raised in a stable household by Beulah’s daughter from the first marriage and her husband.
I grew up vaguely knowing this story of the tragic, premature death of my great-grandfather at the age of thirty-six. But when I was in high school, my great-uncle (Isham’s son) told me a more sinister side of the story that reflected the racial dynamics of the time. Although the Atlanta Constitution reported that my great-grandfather’s death was an accident, and no evidence was ever publicly presented otherwise, according to my great-uncle, Isham’s coworkers blamed his death on an African American working that day.47 The next week, as my great-uncle told the story, the black man they singled out was “accidentally” crushed by a heavy cart of clay at the mine.48
I know what havoc my great-grandfather’s death wreaked in my mother’s family. But I have no way of knowing what demons this retributive white racial violence unleashed in that African American man’s family. I certainly know that he was a black man living in Jim Crow–era Georgia in the 1920s, one of the most brutal periods of white racial terrorism in the country. And I know that my white great-grandfather was a supervisor, while the African American man was a line worker, most likely living near poverty in a highly segregated society with few resources. He probably lived with some sense of vulnerability and the fragility of life on a daily basis. Given the dangers of clay mining, I’m sure he worried that a mistake with the heavy machinery in the open-pit mines could lead to serious injury or death. And given the ferocity of white supremacy in 1920s middle Georgia, I can only assume that both he and his family wondered, as he left for work each day, whether a misstep with his white coworkers or the wrong encounter on the road might be more perilous than the mine.
When my great-uncle first told me this story, I simply accepted it. I don’t remember asking any questions. But I was also puzzled about the significance of it and why he would take pains to pass it along to me. Over the years, it has stayed with me. As I reflect on it now, the word that comes to me to describe my great-uncle’s disposition as he told the story is satisfaction. While he never spelled out its full meaning, the story seemed designed to convey a reassurance about our place in the social pecking order—that even if accidental, the death of a white man would demand retribution. When a white man was killed, in other words, the universe lurched sideways. Retaliatory racial violence promised to balance the scales, reinscribing white dominance particularly through its arbitrariness.
With the exception of the few preschool years I lived in Wichita Falls, Texas, I have never lived in a county that is free from a history of lynching. In reverse chronological order, here are the counties in which I’ve lived and the number of documented cases of white racial terrorism: Montgomery County, Maryland (2); Greene County, Missouri (4); DeKalb County, Georgia (4); Tarrant County, Texas (1); Hinds County, Mississippi (22); Bexar County, Texas (6). The place in which I spent most of my formative years, from the time I was seven to twenty-one, particularly stands out. At twenty-two lynchings, it is the county with the fourth-highest number of lynchings in Mississippi and is tied for fifteenth place as the county with the most lynchings nationwide. At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the engravers had to use a smaller font to fit all the names and dates on the six-foot steel memorial for the county. Even this awful tally understates the case. My home state, which lauds itself as “the hospitality state,” contains such a density of counties with legacies of lynching that they drive up the total to 654, giving Mississippi the dishonor of having the highest number of recorded lynchings of any state.
My experience through the lens of the nicknames of my high school and college reenacted the history of white oppression in reverse order. As I noted earlier, my high school’s nickname was the Rebels, the mascot was Colonel Reb, and the band played “Dixie” as a cheerleader ran down the sidelines with a large Confederate battle flag each time the football team scored a touchdown. My college experience wasn’t much better. My Southern Baptist–affiliated college, Mississippi College, were the Choctaws, and the mascot was an Indian figure with a cartoonish oversized head in full headdress. Women’s social clubs (Greek sororities weren’t allowed on campus) were “tribes” named after Indian-sounding or Indian-derived names such as Nenamoosha, Swannanoa, and Kissimee. To rouse the crowd at sporting events, the band played stereotyped, minor-key music (think bad early westerns) while the crowds—which included me at the time—made an up-and-down tomahawk motion in unison with our right arms bent at the elbow, chanting, “Scalp ’em, Choctaws, scalp ’em!”
I’m thoroughly convinced that my story is unremarkable. My ancestors weren’t large plantation owners, Confederate generals, or, as far as I know, active members of the KKK. My parents were the first in each of their families to go to college. My ancestors were more carried along by than shapers of the great currents of history. Somehow I had a sense that this more modest history provided some inoculation against white supremacy’s potency. As I’ve moved through the process of writing this book, of retelling my own story, however, I’ve been astonished at how ubiquitous the claims of white supremacy have been on my life. I grew up knowing that my parents had made a conscious decision to shield me and my siblings from the worst of the racism that was ubiquitous in our grandparents’ generation and before. But even with that protection, the ways in which white supremacy crept into my worldview, my faith, and even my body are overwhelming.
I’d wager that many—maybe even most—white people, with little effort, could uncover a very similar narrative about their own family and experience, and the ways in which white supremacy, like kudzu, has crept its way forward through the family tree. If we’re going to save ourselves, and our country, from being strangled by this invasive parasite, we will first need to develop the discernment to distinguish between it and the healthy branches straining under its weight. And even then, we will need to find the resolve not just to prune the parasite back for a season but also to kill it, root to stem.