Unfinished Business

April 4th, 6:01 pm (Central Time). I was 8 years old on that Thursday evening in 1968. Too young to remember what I was doing that day. Too protected to understand the struggle. Too white to be affected by it. I grew up practically down the street from his home.

One of my fondest childhood memories was going to FunTown, which was a small amusement park on the south side of Atlanta. It was a lot like a carnival or county fair with all the usual rides you see at those events. It even had games like the ones you might find on the midway of a big fair and a small gauge train you could ride around the park. When I was in the first grade my mom took me there with all my friends for my birthday. I still remember having recurring dreams of going there and riding rides.

What I didn’t realize was, while my friends and I were playing in FunTown, Dr. King could not take his own children there to play. I didn’t learn until years later that FunTown was a “whites only” park. In King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail in 1963 he wrote:

“…when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'”

Fortunately, the park was finally desegregated shortly before it closed in 1967 thanks to pressure from King. Six Flags Over Georgia opened later that year and that pretty much put an end to FunTown.

I am fortunate to have had a mother who had a distaste for racism even if we did live in a very white world in those days. My sisters and I were taught to respect every living person and were not allowed to use any of the ugly pejoratives of those times. However, I was raised alongside many friends and parents who wore their racist beliefs quite openly. As I continued to grow up in this world it became an ever-present challenge to not get swept up in the prevailing ethos of southern white society.

Peer pressure is a damnable thing. Its gravitational pull can be nearly impossible to break at times. As I grew older, I never caved in to pressures of racism, but I ignorantly played into the “southern white boy” stereotype on plenty of occasions. I even had a large Confederate flag in the back window of my muscle car by the time I was 17 years old. I suppose it was some kind of naïve homage to the Dukes of Hazzard, but it was gone by the next year.

I never had a black classmate until I was in the 8^th grade. One of the only three African-American kids in my entire school at that time was Barney. Barney was a super friendly guy and a little hyper, kind of like me, so I liked him. About a year later I was sitting and talking to Barney when he looked down and shook his head. I asked him what was wrong as he just continued to look down and said, “I wish I had been born white.” I was devastated to hear that. I begged him to never, ever feel that way. I had no eloquent words to console him with at that age, but I will never forget hearing those words. They have been written on my heart to this very day.

As much as I would like to credit the church at that time for steering me in the right direction and keeping me from going down a darker path of racial ignorance, I can’t. Every racist friend I knew either attended my church or one of the others in my neighborhood. To be honest I probably never really got a clear look at a culture without blatant racial tension until I went to art college. It was the grace of God through my mother and through people like Barney that kept me off of that dark path, but this is far from over. I still have much to learn.

We’ve recently seen through so many unfortunate events in our society that we still have a very long way to go. We have a lot of unfinished business if we are to realize the Dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. Our complacency in the post-Civil Rights period has allowed for a darkness to fester and it is again challenging us to look closer at ourselves and admit there is still much work to be done.

So today, and this week I surely give thanks to God for all the work Dr. King did and for his legacy of peaceful rebellion which we, once again need to employ. We have surly seen positive change since his martyrdom, but we are a long way from finished. It takes more than the changing of laws to bring the Kingdom here, it takes the changing of hearts.

As today’s Prayer for Mission says:

O God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the earth, and sent your blessed Son to preach peace to those who are far off and to those who are near: Grant that people everywhere may seek after you and find you; bring the nations into your fold; pour out your Spirit upon all flesh; and hasten the coming of your kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Daily Prayer from Forward Movement

[Image: Martin Luther King. Jr. above the entrance of Westminster Abbey,
London, England, by Andrea Schaffer | Flicker]