How I Learned to Love White People

My father insisted that faith meant loving others—even those who beat and bloodied him.

A black child growing up during the sixties, I was shaped by two powerful influences: first, two strong Christian parents who daily demonstrated their faith to me and everyone around them; second, the issue of race. Next to Christianity, issues of integration, voting, segregation, and “white folks” were the things most talked about in my house and my neighborhood.

This is the case for most black people of my generation. Racial consciousness has shaped who we are and is never absent from any situation. Yet it was precisely because of our strong Christian beliefs that my family took the point position in the battle for racial justice in our town.

As a child, I did not understand everything that was going on. Yet I was sure of one thing: I knew down to the core of my being that what we were doing was right in the sight of God.

Until my school years, most of us didn’t give much thought to hopes for racial justice. For years we had heard the grownups talking “hush talk” under their breath. We all cheered aloud as we listened to Martin Luther King, Jr., make his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but his marches seemed far away. Though most people watching the evening news were shocked to see the Alabama police turn their dogs and water hoses on school-age children, we were not. We understood Southern justice. We had seen the news reports and could almost smell the smoke from Watts and Chicago. But we lived in Mississippi, “the Closed Society.” Things would never change here.

Still, something was in the air. All the teachers were talking about it, and I could see the fear and anger in their faces. Harper Vocational High School had an enrollment of 750 students in grades 1 through 12. It lay just across the railroad tracks in the “colored” section of Mendenhall, Mississippi. The entire student body and all of the faculty were black. This was small-town Mississippi in 1966.

“Who do they think wants to go to school with them ol’ peckerwoods anyway?” barked Mr. Jackson angrily, using one of our most derogatory terms for white folks. Some of the children in my seventh-grade homeroom cheered aloud as Mr. Jackson voiced the sentiments of the teachers, who found talk of school desegregation frightening. “I know I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” A couple of the more vocal kids added their “me neithers,” summing up the attitude of most black people in Mississippi’s school system.

For most of the kids, nodding in agreement with Mr. Jackson came easily. But not for me. I knew my father. He took his Christianity more seriously than most. He had left Mississippi in the late 1940s after his brother was killed by a white law-enforcement officer. But he had returned with his family 13 years later as a missionary, determined to make a difference in the lives of his people who, he said, “were trapped by sin, poverty, and racism.”

Instead of making him content, his Bible taught him (and he taught us) to be concerned not only about people’s souls but also about justice for them. He had already been kicked out of a local black church for trying to motivate the people to do something about their situation. Now he was the pastor of a small church that he had founded, and he and my mother worked tirelessly with the youth in the area through nightly Bible classes. They called it Voice of Calvary Bible Institute.

As I sat in Mr. Jackson’s classroom, I realized that if something radical was going to happen, my family would surely be squarely in the middle of it.

Until that point, the racial battle had consisted of talk of what was going on in other parts of the country. It had not really affected my life. But as I look back now and remember that day in Mr. Jackson’s room, I am aware that it was the beginning of a personal journey of trying to make sense out of the separation that existed between blacks and whites. For the next several years, I would try to reconcile this separation with what my parents had taught me about Christianity.

In the spring of 1966, Mississippi began to yield to the pressure to comply with the nation’s 12-year-old desegregation laws. But wholesale school integration would not come for another four years. Instead, Mississippi opted for an ingenious plan called Freedom of Choice, which made it legal for school-age children to enroll in the school of their choice in their town or city. We knew “Freedom of Choice” was an attempt, not to integrate the school, but to alleviate pressure from the outside world to do something about the state’s separate-and-unequal school systems.

As I said, I had given this racial mess little thought. I was content to live in the “colored quarters” and, like most of my 13-year-old peers, to attend an all-black school. Sure, I was aware of the separation of the races, but I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

But now, with the civil-rights movement in full swing, I understood that we were actually second-class citizens and that God did not intend for it to be this way. And now—with my father’s bold response to Mississippi’s “Freedom of Choice”—I was going to be one of the people to do something about it. But why? Why did we five school-age Perkinses have to take the brunt of white anger and black resentment?

My father always summed it up in one word: leadership. My father’s response to “Freedom of Choice” was to send his children to Mendenhall’s all-white school. This decision resulted in a nightmare of physical and emotional cruelty, a nightmare that scarred my whole family and left some of us cold and unforgiving. Only after ten years did I talk about the experience with my closest friends.

I would love to say that all five of us were unafraid on the first day of the new school year of 1966. I would love to say that we were poised and ready for battle. The makeshift Freedom School we attended that summer had tried to equip us for what we were about to experience, but there was no way it could totally prepare us.

Given that bravery is not the absence of fear but acting in the face of fear, I will have to settle for saying that we were very brave soldiers. It was the most fearful first day of school I’ve ever had. And this fear was not a one-time thing. It went on for most of the first year and even into the second. This would be my first up-close-and-personal look at white people; and first impressions tend to stay with you.

Each day after school, I would compare the day’s experiences with my brothers and sisters. We concluded that the severity of the cruelty varied according to our age groups, but overall our experiences were very similar. On one level, we felt sorry for the white kids, because we were pretty sure they were all going to hell for the way they treated us. But on the other hand, we hated them and would probably have felt little remorse if the earth had opened up and swallowed them all.

I’m not saying that all the white kids participated in our constant harassment, but it might as well have been all of them. No one, not even the teachers, lifted a finger to make our existence at that school any easier.

One day while the teacher was out of the room, my desk once again become the target of innumerable wet paper bullets from rubber-band pistols. In my own opinion, I had become a model of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent restraint, never striking back even when the paper bullets found their mark and the entire class cheered with delight. I had learned to ignore or sometimes even make fun of such harassment: “Hope y’all are having fun.” Most of the time, though, I would keep a straight face and my mouth shut.

This day was different—not because the children did anything new, but because the teacher did not ignore their behavior. When he returned to the classroom, the evidence was irrefutable: dozens of paper bullets and rubber bands were strewn across the floor, all near my desk. For some reason, this time it made the teacher angry. He had me point out all the boys who were involved. This I did with the naive notion that finally justice would be forthcoming. For me, this was to be a major victory; finally my existence in this hellhole would be a little more bearable. My fellow students could no longer torture me without consequences.

Before we reached the principal’s office, I could see I was taking this a little more seriously than my seven tormentors were. The principal, who was also a pastor, was one of the few people in the school I had considered sympathetic to me. I could tell he wanted to correct the situation. His first question to the boys was, “Why?”

I will never forget the puzzled look on the boys’ faces as they marveled that he, a white man, had asked such a stupid question. One boy’s response to the principal’s question etched a wound in my soul that today, sometimes, still bleeds. His blue eyes twinkling with impatience, he pushed his blond hair out of his eyes and said in his immature Southern drawl, “He’s just a nigger!”

The principal was stunned. He didn’t know how to respond. I had lost another round.

Why did this cut me so deeply? I was used to being called “nigger” several dozen times every day. It was years before I understood what had happened to me that day. This was racism at its worst. For a 13-year-old black boy to realize that the highest authority in his daily world would not give him justice—even in the face of overwhelming evidence, including proud confessions from the perpetrators—was a devastating blow to his fragile sense of self-worth. The principal’s failure to convince the boys that they had committed any crime at all, along with his unwillingness to discipline them, painfully dashed my hopes of ever finding justice within a racist institution.

Although the civil-rights movement was under way in Mississippi, things were changing very slowly—at least from our perspective. A handful of blacks were now in the white schools and hating every minute of it, and blacks were being registered to vote all over the state.

Still, much was the same. The whites hated us, and we hated them. The police were just as mean as ever—and even more so to us because we were “stirring up trouble with all this civil-rights mess.” Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Kennedy brothers were all killed. Every time one of them died, the white kids at our school cheered.

On a chilly December night in 1969, the wind seemed to change direction, and the tiny spark of Mendenhall’s civil-rights movement started billowing up into flame. Garland Wilks, a neighbor, had been arrested. He was pretty juiced, and my father was taking him home when the police stopped them, pulled Garland out of the car, and took him to jail for drunkenness.

Our reason for concern was that we knew what had happened in a store 15 minutes earlier. It is said that often a person’s real feelings come out after a few drinks. Maybe this was the case with Garland. Sober, he was not one to step out of line. But this night, after having too much to drink, he had crossed the invisible line—he had talked smart to a white woman, and we knew that would not be tolerated.

A group of about 15 of us—children who had been practicing for a Christmas program along with three or four adults—made our way to the jailhouse to protest Garland’s arrest and to keep him from getting beaten. An hour later, all of us were peering out through those ice-cold steel bars.

This event captured the attention of the black community and tugged at its pride enough to catapult us into a battle of wills with the white community. They had now crossed our line. They had locked up children—girls as well as boys. And they would do that, of course, only to someone who could not or would not fight back.

That night my father gave his most unforgettable speech. “We ain’t asking for some kind of special treatment,” he said in a soft but determined voice. “We just want to be treated like every other American citizen. We want a fair share of the decent jobs so that we can afford decent homes for our families. We want paved streets in our neighborhoods, just like they already have in the white neighborhoods. We want good education for our children. We want police protection instead of the police brutality that we always get. But most of all, we want to be treated with respect.”

I’ll never know if it was what he said, how he said it, or the fact that he was saying it through the bars of a second-story window to a jailyard full of people. But I know I will never forget it. Even though I was shaking in my boots, I was proud to be standing there beside him in the jail. We had not bowed down but had stood up.

One of the statements my father made over and over during the course of this speech was, “If somebody’s got to die, then I’m ready.” This frightened me. I had heard how other people had been killed for standing up to white folks—one being my daddy’s brother, Clyde—but I had never entertained the thought of my father dying. The notion that my dad might not be there to stand between us and this cruel system prompted new fears in me—fears that, in the months that followed, I would learn to live with.

If the true test of a good speech is whether it stirs the listeners to action, then this was a great speech. The next morning when the stores opened on Main Street, several unwelcome visitors were patrolling the sidewalks, carrying signs made during the long night. The store owners, police, and authorities were caught totally by surprise. In response to my father’s passionate plea, a full-scale boycott, complete with demonstration marches and picketers, had begun in, of all places, Mendenhall, Mississippi.

During the previous night, the police realized it was a mistake to have children locked up in the city jail and invited us to leave. But we vowed not to leave unless everyone was released. Eventually the officers literally carried all the children out of the jail, beginning with the oldest male, me. They kept my father and his sidekick, a young, white hippie named Doug Huemer, locked up for several days.

But that only fanned the fire. The Reverend Curry Brown, a friend of my father’s from California, and Mr. Ruben, an elderly black man who had already had a cross burned in his yard, joined my mother in leading the daily marches and directing the picketers. Curry was our courage, and my mother was our symbol. She was a hometown girl who knew everybody, and everybody knew her, and she was well respected for her work with children. When the people saw her standing on the corner and heard her passionate appeal, most of them heeded. “They got my husband locked up in that jailhouse for no reason,” she would yell. “Go spend your money somewhere else. We gon’ hit them where it hurts!” Even some of the people who had put Christmas items on layaway sacrificed them in order to make the boycott work.

My father was released from jail on Christmas Eve. There weren’t many gifts that Christmas, but if Christmas is the season of hope, there was plenty of that to go around. We had discovered that there was something we could do about the situation we lived under. We had stood up to “them,” and so far nobody had been hurt.

School resumed after Christmas vacation, and the daily marches became weekly but more intense. People were beginning to come from all over the state to help our cause. February 7 witnessed our biggest march ever, with more than 500 people. To us, it seemed like 5,000. We had grown used to the rumors of white retaliation and the daily telephone threats. But so far nothing had happened.

The Saturday after our triumphant march, Doug Huemer and Louise Fox, a white Brethren church volunteer, were driving two vans full of Tougaloo College students from Mendenhall to Jackson. Their caravan was pulled over by Mississippi state troopers for “reckless driving,” and everyone in Doug’s van was taken to the Rankin County Jail in Brandon. Suspiciously, the van driven by Louise was let go. Curry Brown, Joe Paul Buckley (my best friend’s dad), and my father rushed the 30 miles to the jail to make bail. It was an ambush. That night Curry and my father were beaten to within an inch of their lives in the Brandon jail (Joe Paul, who was older and suffered from heart trouble, was only roughed up a little).

By morning, our only clue to the events of the previous night had come over the phone in a question posed anonymously to my mother in the wee hours of the morning: “Have they hung ’em yet?” All we knew was that Daddy and the other men were somewhere between Mendenhall and Brandon, and we had to find them. So early that Sunday morning we set out for Brandon, not knowing what we would find.

There must have been at least 20 people in the nervous group that approached the jailhouse that morning. Before we could even reach the front door, we could hear Joe Paul shouting as he waved frantically through his cell bars, “Y’all go back, y’all go back!

“Don’t let them boys come up here,” he pleaded. “They’ll kill all y’all. Go back.” But my mother and I went in anyway. When we reached the front desk, the sheriff would allow only the immediate families into the jailhouse.

There was no visiting room, so we went up the stairs to the cell area. Every step of the way we were shadowed by a quiet police officer. He never spoke and neither did we. We could hear the women before we reached the room. (My father later explained that those Tougaloo women had cared for him during the night, keeping him alive.) They were trying to tell us what had happened the night before. But when we saw my father—well, nothing more needed to be said.

I can still picture what my father looked like in that jailhouse; I suppose a 16-year-old boy could never erase such a memory. His clothes were torn and bloody. His shirttail was half in, half out, as if he had tried to tuck it in when he heard we were coming. His eyes bulged as if they were going to pop out of his head. They were as big as silver dollars. He had a lump on his head about the size of a fist (a few days later, a doctor drained a cup of blood out of it). His face was full of fear—but there was more there. My sister Joanie figured it out as soon as she saw him. It was humiliation.

This is my toughest memory—the humiliation my father suffered. Although it was he who had been physically tortured, it might as well have been our whole family. We all felt the pain. An old biblical proverb sums up the situation well: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezek. 18:2).

My mother tried to be brave. She held back her emotion until we were outside of the jail and out of sight of the policemen. Then she let it all out. “I didn’t want them to see me cry,” she sobbed. “I couldn’t let them think they were beating us.”

Sometimes I still resent what we had to go through just to get our “freedom.” I would have done anything to keep my mother from having to cry like that.

In the months after, I watched with interest as my father struggled through a crisis in his faith. Frankly, I hoped he would conclude that the gospel was for white folks. I hoped he would finally see the light and agree with Malcolm X that black people could not afford to be Christians because it cost them their dignity. I hoped he would decide that we should have nothing more to do with white people.

Over the next two years, I struggled with these issues. I went off to college with many questions unsettled. If Jesus says that the essence of Christianity is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself, then is it possible to love God without loving your neighbor? As far as we could tell, no one in the white community loved us, but most claimed to be Christians. Was it fair to say that they were not followers of Jesus? Did they read the same Bible as we did?

These were not hollow questions to me. If these people who had made our lives so miserable were included in the body of Christ, I needed to know so I could get out of it.

When I was younger, sometimes disputes would break out among the children in my parents’ Bible classes when they learned that we are to love everybody. “That don’t mean white folks,” one child would say. “Yes it do,” another would rebut. Periodically I had asked my parents if loving my neighbor meant loving white people, too. Their answer was always the same. Loving my neighbor meant especially loving white folks. But now that white people had nearly killed my father, would my parents answer differently?

I heard that my father was coming to California to speak at a black church pastored by a good friend, the Reverend George Moore. It was not too far from the private Christian college I was attending on a basketball scholarship. So I made it my business to go to hear Daddy. I had not heard him speak in over a year, and I was anxious to know whether he had settled any of the questions I knew he had struggled with after his jail experience.

As I sat in that church listening to him speak to an all-black audience, I felt disappointed. One side of me wanted some new insight that would justify my anger and bitterness. I got plenty of insight, but it was not what I wanted to hear. What I got was almost too simple. I listened as Daddy acknowledged that he had not been preaching the whole gospel, but that now he was determined more than ever to live the rest of his life preaching and living a gospel that would burn through all the racial, social, and economic walls erected to keep people separated—some even in the name of God. He went on to say that a gospel that reconciles people only to God and not to each other cannot be the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

“Before my Brandon jail experience,” he said, “I thought blacks were the only victims of racism. But when I saw the faces of those men in the jail, twisted by the hate of racism, I knew that they were victims, too—I just couldn’t hate back.”

I can’t possibly explain to you how much I hated to hear those words. After all we had suffered at the hands of white people, now we were supposed to forgive them? But I suppose it is what I knew I would hear. And deep down inside, I knew it was the truth.

It would be an understatement to say that the events of that night in Brandon had changed our lives. It was more than that. They had changed our Christianity. For my father, there would no longer be a salvation gospel and a social gospel. There would be one gospel—a gospel that reconciled people to God but at the same time reconciled people to each other. To separate the two could allow the state troopers to beat Daddy almost to death and still be Christians. A gospel that taught no responsibility for your neighbor could not be accepted as the true gospel.

As I sat in that church with tears in my eyes, unhappy that I had come, I knew what I had to do. If I intended to follow Jesus, I could not allow my anger and bitterness to defeat me. If I was to be a follower of Christ, I would have to try to be like him—to keep on forgiving. This was hard for me to swallow, but I knew it was right.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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