Neither Jew nor Gentile: Day 2 of journey to 60

   *A 10-day journey into what will soon be 60 days of living, through song and memory.*               

 Very literally, it was a different world in which I grew up. I grew up as white as Jesus' clothes on the Mount of Transfiguration. White skin. White sensibilities. White friends. White mentors. White. I remember growing up, well, white. Whites in church, whites in schools, whites in playgrounds. Hotels & motels were all reserved for white travelers. Even the laundromats were "white only."White and black fountains still existed when I turned 10.

Meridian, Miss., in the 60s wasn’t Birmingham, Ala., nor even Jackson, Miss., but it was one of the arenas of what would become known as the Civil Rights battles. It was hard for a youngster of 11 to imagine the hell of the summer of 1964. A year after hearing the Beatles on a record for the first time in a store in Laurel, Miss., I began to learn that there was such a thing as oppression. Racism was a word still to come.

In the Freedom summer of 1964, however, my hometown, Meridian, was a key figure. It was home to a Council of Federated Organizations office and several other activist organizations.

The city is known for a few things, but perhaps nothing more sinister than its role in the deaths of civil rights workers Michael Schwerener, James Chaney (a local African-American) and Andrew Goodman. Schwerener, his wife Rita, and Goodman were volunteers from the North. The trio left Meridian in June 1964 to meet with members of a black church that had been bombed and burned. They disappeared that night on their way back.

Neshoba County sheriff deputy Cecil Price arrested them outside Philadelphia late that June Sunday. Price held them for 5 hours in the Philadelphia jail as the Klan mob got organized, let them out about 10 pm, stopped them on Highway 19 as they drove back to Meridian and turned them over to the Klan. The Klansmen shot them on Rock Cut Road just west of Highway 19 in Neshoba County, buried their bodies in a dam on the Olen Burrage property Southwest of Philadelphia and burned their station wagon in a swamp. The Klan figured they would stop Freedom Summer. Their bodies were discovered buried in that earthen dam two months later.

My memories include helicopters flying over my house, located 13 miles north of Meridian (having moved to Lizelia, an unincorporated village of a few houses and a sign), as they flew to Neshoba County to help in the search. The whoop, whoop, whoop of the blades was exciting as they ferried 400 naval cadets from the Naval Air Station just three miles from my house. I also remember conversations overheard of my parents talking about how the volunteers from the north should have stayed in the north.

Eventually, seven members of the KKK were put on trial in the federal courthouse in Meridian, ironically across the street from the barber shop in which my father had his hair cut. The shop was noted for being a KKK supporter. As far as I know, my father never had any dealings with the Klan, but frankly, nothing ever surprises me.

Three men were acquitted, but four convicted, the first time a white jury had convicted a white official in a “civil rights killing.” In 2005, the case was reopened by the state, which brought charges in the case for the first time. Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

I remember a cross in flames, lighting up the sky beyond the right-field fence of a ball field in which I was playing a Babe Ruth baseball game. I remember in 1968 the talk of the bombing of the Beth Israel temple. What was once a congregation of up to 525 Jewish residents in the 1920s has dwindled to fewer than 40.

So, it was violence in the background  of my home county, but there was more to it than that. No, that violence was restricted to a few by a few, actually. The way of life was more insidious than merely being violent.

SEGREGATION RULES

Radio music in Meridian followed a script. Black artists and tunes were kept to one station. The rest were white tunes and artists.

The power structure in Meridian enforced the segregation rules — breaking them meant risking arrest. All police officers were white. One, Lee Roberts, was a brother to Alton Wayne Roberts , the Klan trigger man who assassinated Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney.

Blacks were N-word people. Period. Never heard any other term for them when I was small. I knew no better, and I certainly didn't know those words would hurt because I never really knew a black person to have the discussion with.

The area of Meridian below 29^th avenue was mostly for blacks and was called N-town. The housing projects down the hill from on top of 8th street were where Chaney came from.

Everything changed in 1970. The dual school system (separate but equal baloney) ended in the second part of the my junior year in high school. Suddenly, the world wasn’t all white. The black teens from the all-black Middleton High School came to the all-white Northeast Lauderdale. Plopped down and told to live together. And we did. We really did.

Even with the federal courts demanding integration, Southern whites still did it as they saw fit, bringing the blacks to the white facilities, thinking the coaching ranks and the teaching ranks of the black adults. White flight academies sprang up all over the state, but I refused to consider leaving my school.

I  was elected senior class president, the only senior class president, angering the African-Americans. It would be the only position that didn’t have a black and a white share the position. I told a couple of angry black teens that they were presuming I wouldn’t be impartial, and they were wrong. I’m not sure I even understood the term.

But it was athletics that saved the day. The races came together because of sports.

The black kids and the white kids first came together for football. The first integrated teams in Mississippi, at least as I knew it in Lauderdale County, played in the fall of 1970.

I remember my first test. First football game, on a hot, hot late August Friday night, I understood for the first time the silliness of hatred. Edward “Killer” Mosley, a linebacker, had just grabbed a cup of water from the cooler, drinking half. He handed it to me, who suddenly realized I was about to have to make a decision. I wondered, actually wondered, what the white half of the crowd would think if I drank after Mosley. He though for but a second, then drank deeply.

A small inconsequential step. But a step.

Years later, Mosley became principal of my school, Northeast Lauderdale.

The point of all this is that growing up racist without actually knowing it left quite the imprint on me. I stopped any use of the N-word, forced the stoppage of the N-word in my own home by anyone by threatening.

IT'S A PROCESS

White and black relations were a process. Then, now.

Has it all been solved? Not a chance. Today in Mississippi (as well as much of Louisiana and Alabama) the hour of worship on Sundays still is one of the most segregated hours in existence.

Churches exist that are still, still all black or all white. Though scripture clearly says there will be neither Jew nor Greek, woman nor male, free nor slave, (or black or white if the culture had existed then), meaning grace would be extended to all by a loving God who created ALL of us, that hasn’t seem to diminish the segregation, intentional or no.

The recent reactions from white and black communities across the country to Saturday’s verdict in the George Zimmerman trial should tell us all we have more work to do, much more. The reactions to Paula Deen's alleged use of the N-word decades earlier follow the same path.

The good news is the work will be finished one day. As the Apostle Peter wrote to early Christians, “Friends, this world is not your home, so don’t make yourselves cozy in it.”

The truth is that no person can really understand what is going on in the mind or the heart of anyone, but particular in the mind or heart of someone of a different culture or race. Years ago I found myself in an all-black basketball league. As I entered the gym, a black male asked me, “What the xxxx are you doing here?” A legitimate question, I reasoned. But for just a moment I understood my black brothers and what they must have gone through just a bit more than I ever had before.

I found out a few years back the black church less than a mile from the house I grew up in was United Methodist. I was embarrassed, shamed, that I didn’t know this earlier. I am now a United Methodist minister. But I have never set foot inside that church.

Heaven will be multi-colored, friends. We’ll finally get over ourselves.

IT ISN'T GONNA BE THAT WAY
STEVE FORBETT
You'll just have to live and see what you find
And take it from there and follow the signs
Yeah, you think you can live
and dream your own fate
You think you can wish
And walk through the gate

THIS IS NOT MY HOME
JASON TURNER BAND
As he stepped out onto the brand new earth, His faith is burning like love,
More pleasant the thought,That he could wanted to beBut he still has the same dreams at night,Gonna be somebody guided by a higher graceAnd they still call him back to where he came fromBut he can’t fall down, can’t go back to where his heart was broken,This is not my home

These two recording artists were born in Meridian, my hometown. Their work always speaks to me about the place of my birth whether they mean to or not.