{"id":54,"date":"2019-05-19T19:26:08","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T00:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/?p=54"},"modified":"2020-08-09T11:18:24","modified_gmt":"2020-08-09T16:18:24","slug":"brown-v-board-of-education-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/?p=54","title":{"rendered":"Brown v. Board of Education and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This was a message delivered on May 19, 2019, at Dayspring Church<\/a> in Germantown, Maryland. You can also listen to the audio version<\/a> (audio version starts a little after the beginning of the message – the first paragraph below is missing). NOTE: Dayspring Church does not have a pastor but uses a shared leadership model in which anyone can sign up to be liturgist, offer a youth message, or preach on any given Sunday.<\/em> -Bill Samuel<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

I signed up to speak on this Sunday because it comes closest to the 65th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education<\/em> decision, not out of a review of lectionary readings for coming Sundays to see which one stirred something in me. However, when I looked at today\u2019s lectionary readings, I found themes which resonate with what I felt led to share. A bit of holy synchronicity, I think.<\/p>\n

The Acts reading is all about the question of whether the fellowship of followers of Jesus was just to be Jews or was to include Gentiles as well. The Jew-Gentile distinction for them I believe has some parallels to the white-black distinction in our American context. And what came to Peter from the Lord was graphic and quite clear. Acts 11:12 says, \u201cThe Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reading from the Book of Revelation is about the coming of a new heaven and a new earth. The message from the throne in the NRSV starts with, \u201cSee, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.\u201d I wonder if there is significance that the compilers of the NRSV chose the plural \u201cpeoples\u201d here. I believe this new heaven and earth, given the evidence throughout the Christian Bible, is one in which the old hierarchical distinctions among different peoples have passed away. We will clearly all be God\u2019s beloved people, regardless of the distinctions among groupings humans have made.<\/p>\n

Jesus frequently outraged others by whom he chose to associate with. He repeatedly crossed lines of ethnicity, class, and gender in his ministry. When he tells his disciples in our Gospel reading, \u201cI give you a new commandment, that you love one another\u201d the love of which he speaks crosses those human divisions.<\/p>\n

My call to speak this week is primarily to share from my own life, and it arose from reflecting on my life in the light of the Brown<\/em> anniversary and the reality of racism in the USA. This is the story of one white boy growing up in the USA in a family committed to racial equality.<\/p>\n

I was born in 1947 in northern New Jersey, the youngest of four children including twin sisters two years older and a sister four years older. My father was a Methodist pastor at the time. The Church Bishop expelled him from the local Conference when I was still a baby due to his unhappiness about my father\u2019s participation in an interracial prayer group. Subsequently, my father pastored a church in North Dakota for a year, and then in South Dakota for a year.<\/p>\n

In 1953, my parents felt a call from God to go to the Deep South. Their response was to get an old truck, pack our belongings in it, and head South. They had no jobs lined up but had a contact point \u2013 Koinonia Farm<\/a> in Americus, Georgia, in the southwest part of the state. Koinonia had been founded in 1942 by two couples as an interracial intentional Christian community committed to racial equality, pacifism, and economic sharing. We headed in our family\u2019s truck and car to Koinonia, where we stayed until we had found and moved to a farm outside of Plains, Georgia, where we lived in a primitive house which lacked indoor toilet facilities and other modern amenities.<\/p>\n

We settled into our new home. My parents erected a sign that identified our property as \u201cBrotherhood Acres.\u201d We made friendships with local black families. We heard that one local white person said about our sign, \u201cthey mean everybody\u201d which was correct, albeit not a common understanding of the term among local whites. This realization resulted in some local whites harassing us, including the Ku Klux Klan threatening to burn us out. On the designated night, Halloween, they rode by and saw that we did not move out due to their threats and just rode on.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"
Bill, Pat, Connie & Barbara Samuel in Plains, GA<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We four children went to Plains Elementary School, the white\nelementary school for the area. I was in first grade. We found it a somewhat\ndangerous environment, as we were known as \u201cn*****-lovers\u201d and \u201cdamn Yankees\u201d\nwhich resulted in considerable hostility towards us, including sometimes being\nbeaten up. A few times we walked the four miles to school, as that seemed safer\nthan braving the school bus ride. Nationally, the most significant thing which\nhappened that school year was on May 17, 1954, when a unanimous Supreme Court\ndecision in Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>\nruled that segregated schools were \u201cinherently unequal.\u201d I saw that when our\nfamily visited a local black school in the Plains area. It had very primitive\nfacilities, and an inadequate number of very old textbooks in extremely poor\ncondition for the students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brown<\/em> decision\nwas a great shock to the local whites, who mostly believed strongly in\nsegregation of the races. In the period after the decision, our friends at\nKoinonia Farm faced greatly increased hostility from the local white community,\nwhich had never been very friendly to them. The KKK and other local whites\ntried -unsuccessfully – to force Koinonia Farm out through bullets, a bomb, and\na boycott. Koinonia had some very tough years but survived and is still going\nstrong today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the year we were in Plains, my parents were largely unemployed.\nOn rare occasions, my father was able to get day labor. He also preached a\ncouple of times at local churches when the regular pastor was away. One of\nthose churches was the first black church at which I ever worshipped. These\nrare gigs produced very little income. However, facing adversity together for\nsomething we believed in brought us closer together as a family. Because of my\nparents\u2019 inability to earn a living in that environment, we moved out after a\nyear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the next nine years, we lived in a few different\ncommunities, either on a farm or in a small town, in the rural Midwest. My\nfather and the Church parted ways, and both of my parents became high school\nteachers. My family visited around at different churches, and settled down with\nthe Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers. None of the counties\nin which we lived had any African American residents, so all the schools were\n100% white. Many of the people in those counties had never seen an African American\nin person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the era of \u201csundown towns\u201d \u2013 towns with a policy of forbidding African Americans and sometimes other minorities from being inside the town limits after sundown, coupled with other racial restrictions. The communities in which we lived in or near were not formal sundown towns with signs at the town limits, but informally some of these restrictions were imposed by residents and sometimes authorities. We found this in the community of Winterset, Iowa, where my parents taught in the local high school for five years. Ironically, one of Winterset\u2019s claims to fame is that the great African American agricultural scientist George Washington Carver lived and worked there for two years. At the time we were there, not much was said about that, but today Winterset has a park named after Carver and publicizes his connection to the town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One evening when my parents were coming back from a school\nmeeting in town to our home 12 miles outside town, they came across an African\nAmerican couple with their baby walking along the side of the road. They\nstopped to talk to them. The man of the couple was in the Air Force and\nreturning to base in Omaha after being on leave. Their car had broken down on\nthe other side of town. They walked into town and inquired whether the bus\nstopped there. Although Greyhound stopped in town, they were told it didn\u2019t\nstop there. They were told to go to the next town, which they were told was 5\nmiles away although in reality it was 25 miles. My parents took them home to\nspend the night, and then took them to the bus in the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Water<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My oldest sister Pat worked for a time as a waitress in a restaurant on the town square in Winterset.One time, a friend from college came to visit with her boyfriend, who was African American. They stopped at the restaurant to eat lunch, and my sister served them. The owner came over and kicked the couple out and fired my sister. At that time, almost all restaurants in the Midwest had signs saying, \u201cWe reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.\u201d This incident brought home the meaning of that sign. Pat went to work for another restaurant, where the owner welcomed the business of anyone. One day, a bus full of migrant farm workers came through town and stopped at the restaurant for lunch. The owner was happy for the business, but the Sheriff came and ordered them all out of town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the nine years in all-white communities, we went to\nUrbana, Illinois where my father studied at the University of Illinois. We were\nactive in the local Friends Meeting, and at some point during the year began\nalso to attend the Sunday evening service at an AME Zion Church pastored by the\nPresident of the local NAACP with whom my mother worked in a campaign against\n\u201curban renewal,\u201d known among civil rights activists as \u201cNegro removal.\u201d I went\nto the only high school in town, which did include African Americans. This was\nmy first year in an integrated school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That year I became active in the civil rights movement, and\nI was arrested at an open housing protest in Urbana\u2019s twin city of Champaign,\nsaid by some to have the most segregated housing in the country – African\nAmericans literally lived across the tracks. I was 16, and under Illinois law\nbeing arrested meant I had to be investigated to determine if I was a juvenile\ndelinquent. The case worker assigned to my case cleared me on the grounds that\nsomeone who participated in a civil rights demonstration was obviously not a\njuvenile delinquent. At a service at the AME Zion Church, the pastor singled\nout me and his own 16-year-old son who had also been arrested at the protest as\nhaving been baptized by fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the 1963-64 school year, so segregation in public\nfacilities was still common. African Americans had trouble finding hotels or\nmotels that would accept them when traveling, so they resorted to informal\nnetworks. Some friends of my parents asked them whether an African American\nfamily whom they knew could stay with us while traveling through. Of course, we\nsaid yes. They had a boy about my age and asked if I could take him to get a\nhaircut. We walked to the nearest barber shop, but they said they didn\u2019t know\nhow to cut his hair. The next barber shop said the same thing. The third barber\nshop we found did agree to cut his hair, although the barber did a poor job.\nThis was in a liberal university town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next year my father got a job teaching at a black\ncollege, now defunct, in Lawrenceville, Virginia, in the southern tier of the\nstate. Virginia responded to the Brown<\/em>\ndecision with an official campaign of massive resistance. While the courts\nrather quickly overturned these laws, it took a long time for many Virginia\nschools to begin desegregation. For this school district, 10 years after the Brown<\/em> decision, it was the first year of\ntoken desegregation \u2013 the \u201cfreedom of choice\u201d system in which students could be\nregistered in the school of their choice. Most African American families were\nafraid to register their children in formerly all-white schools because of the\nlikelihood of losing their jobs. However, a dozen registered for the formerly\nwhite high school where I registered, and a few more registered for lower\ngrades in formerly all-white schools. An all-white private academy was formed\nfor white families. Such academies were generally known as segregation\nacademies, or \u201cseg academies\u201d for short. However, a lot of white students\nstayed in the public schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The school district didn\u2019t decide until the last day how to\nhandle transportation. They informed students of their bus assignments by\nphone. Because the local phone company office refused us service on the grounds\nwe were \u201cn*****-lovers,\u201d they could not notify us. We lived on campus, so I\nwent with a neighbor boy who was one of the school\u2019s first African American\nstudents. The district decided on segregated buses, so the driver was surprised\nto see me but let me on. Our bus ran its main run for the black high school\nfirst, so we always got to school late. We also left early, so the bus would be\navailable when the black school let out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we got to school the first day, they were having an\nopening assembly. They read a list of names of students to go to a separate\nassembly. I was the only one on my bus who was not sent there. In the main\nassembly they stated, \u201cNormally it is our policy to welcome new students. This\nyear, it is our policy to ostracize new students.\u201d They didn\u2019t use racial\nterminology, but I think everyone got their drift. At lunch time, I sat down\nwith others from my bus, and that I think is when the school decided to\nclassify me as a \u201cNegro\u201d student. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was only one white student in the school who would\ntalk to me other than to insult me. One time my science class was in the lab,\nand the girl who was President of Youth for Goldwater said in a loud voice to\nsomeone, \u201cIf there\u2019s anything I hate worse than a n*****, it\u2019s a n*****-lover.\u201d\nI was scared because the teacher was not in the room, but I was not physically\nattacked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that year, I learned to gauge my safety by the color of those around me. When walking down the street in town, I viewed each white person as a potential threat, and each black person as a friend. Because it was such a small community, I expected that most people would know who I was. This was just a tiny taste of what African Americans have experienced year after year, and it followed them wherever they went while I fully benefited from white privilege whenever I was outside of the community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The county was about 60% black at the time, and blacks had used their economic power to get most white-owned businesses to serve them without overt distinction based on race. However, some white-owned businesses would not serve whites connected with the college, so we sometimes had to go to a business outside the county when we needed something for which there was no local black-owned provider. One Sunday after church, my parents decided they would like to buy a Sunday newspaper. Most businesses were closed on Sunday, but the white-owned drug store was open. My father already knew from his service on the NAACP committee which negotiated with white businesses that the owners of the drug store were among the most hard-core racists in town. When Dad walked in, those working in the store went into the back and would not come out until my Dad left. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Bill Samuel on high school graduation day<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

After graduating from that high school, I went to Wilmington\nCollege, a Quaker college in Wilmington, Ohio. I thought I was going to the\nNorth but found out that Southwest Ohio had some attributes of the South. A\nblack friend of mine at college who was from a nearby town had missed a year of\nschool because the black school had burned down. Wilmington was integrated from\nits opening in 1871, and when I was there had one of the highest percentages of\nAfrican American students among majority white colleges and universities in the\ncountry. In the 1920\u2019s, the KKK opened an office near the college, and harassed\nit for some years. This was part of the Wilmington story I learned as a\nstudent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I came, I was scared that I would be housed in a dorm\nwith a white roommate, which I thought might be dangerous. I was indeed\nassigned a white roommate, but I liked him very much and we quickly became\nfriends. I began to un-learn my habit of viewing any other white person as a\npotential threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On May 10, scholars from four universities issued a report titled \u201cHarming our Common Future: America\u2019s Segregated Schools 65 Years after<\/a> Brown<\/a><\/em>\u201c. It found that \u201cintense levels of segregation\u2026are on the rise once again.\u201d Maryland is one of four states in which the majority of African American students attend what the report classifies as intensely segregated schools, schools at least 90% non-white. A major factor is housing segregation. Today we don\u2019t have the legally enforced school segregation by race much of the country had before Brown<\/em>, but neither do most students attend very diverse schools and, in many areas, different ethnic groups largely attend different schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided to find out a little bit of what happened where I\ngraduated from high school. In my most optimistic dreams, I imagined the county\npublic schools fully integrated, and the seg academy having closed. In my most\npessimistic dreams, I imagined a totally \u2013 or almost totally – resegregated\nsituation in which blacks all were in the public schools and whites were all or\nmostly in the seg academy. The truth turned out to be somewhere in-between. The\ncounty is now 55% black, but the public schools are about 80% black. There is only\none public high school and one public middle school in the county. The seg\nacademy is still there, but only about a third of the county\u2019s white students\nattend it. A large majority of white families send their children to what are\nnow predominantly black schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dayspring is in the 3rd<\/sup> most diverse city in the\nU.S., next door to the 2nd<\/sup>, Gaithersburg. Montgomery County has 4 of\nthe Top 10 most diverse cities in the country. Our County has the most diverse\nschool system in the state and the 103rd<\/sup> most diverse in the\ncountry. Yet diversity in our schools varies widely, and several Montgomery\nCounty schools are considered segregated by the definitions in the report on\nthe situation at the 65th<\/sup> anniversary of Brown<\/em>. Both the closest public middle school and the closest public\nelementary school to Dayspring would be considered by the report as intensely\nsegregated, as they are both 94% minority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

White supremacy is deeply embedded in our culture in the\nUSA. It will take sustained effort over time involving people from all ethnic\ngroups to uproot it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are some of the things we need to do as individuals and\na community to bring about the Beloved Community in which we recognize our\nessential unity with all others?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We need to live conscious faithful lives in which we\npractice what we preach. We need to listen carefully to God\u2019s call on our lives\nas individuals and as a community, and be obedient no matter what seems to be\nthe cost. We need to measure our \u201csuccess\u201d more by the degree to which we have\nbeen faithful than by concrete outcomes we can readily measure. We need to\ntrust God to use our faithfulness in combination with the faithfulness of\nothers for good. We need to not get discouraged by the evil in the world but\npress forward to bring about the reign of God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When my parents decided to uproot our family and head into an uncertain situation without knowing how we would get the resources to support us, they did not have a list of achievements to mark success. They simply went on faith. They disregarded those who warned them against such a venture and said they would be not doing their duty to us as children by engaging in this possibly dangerous journey of faith, instead of making sure we were in quality schools and had material well-being. The education we received by seeing our parents live out their faith was something the finest schools could not have given us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a message delivered on May 19, 2019, at Dayspring Church in Germantown, Maryland. You can also listen to the audio version (audio version starts a little after the beginning of the message – the first paragraph below is missing). NOTE: Dayspring Church does not have a pastor but uses a shared leadership model […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,1],"tags":[149,148,150],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-racism","category-uncategorized","tag-brown-v-board-of-education","tag-racism","tag-segregation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108,"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/billsamuel.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}