The open wound and the dream of beloved community

I grew up in metropolitan Atlanta in the 1960s and 1970s. (I graduated from a high school in south Fulton County in 1975.) Atlanta was, of course, the hometown of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So, when I was in elementary school, news about his work, about the hopes it inspired, and about the controversies it generated was “local news.” I often heard snippets of his sermons and speeches on television; they lodged in my mind and heart alongside the songs we sang in Sunday School, songs like: “Jesus loves the little children/all the children of the world/Red and Yellow, Black and White/Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

At my church, I learned that “God so loved the world” and that Jesus came to show mercy and grace to everyone. I heard the story of the Good Samaritan over and over again; its central point made its way into my convictions: there in no one who isn’t my neighbor, and God wants us to love all our neighbors. We supported missionaries who worked in Africa. My church leaders and my parents taught me to be polite to the black children and teachers who were part of the elementary school I attended. (I saw later what I was too young and naïve to know then; our schools were integrated because the courts ordered it, not because Christians had learned from Jesus it was right.)

I lived with a lot of dissonance and confusion about race. I could feel the resonance between Dr. King’s dreams and Jesus’ words and actions, but some (not all, thank goodness) of the same people who taught me about the way of Jesus said awful things about King. We took church trips to “Funtown,” an amusement park I learned years later was closed to black people (I am embarrassed that I didn’t notice then). Racist slurs and jokes were part of the world of my childhood and youth, alongside scripture, hymns, and sermons about love.