Martin Luther King Jr. Day

In Raymond Arsenault’s biography of John Lewis, he recounts Lewis’s mentors and their shared vision of “the Beloved Community.” Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis often spoke of “the Beloved Community,” which was “a philosophical theory and a call to service.”

At the successful conclusion of the yearlong boycott in December 1956, King quoted the Book of Matthew and urged the boycotters to “inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.” “Love your enemies,” he recited, “bless them that curse you, pray for them who despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven.” “We must remember,” King continued, “… that a boycott is not an end within itself; it is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority. But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

Placing the goals of nonviolent direct action on such a high moral plane could be inspiring, drawing Lewis and many people of faith into the movement. But as the historian Mills Thornton has noted, King’s frequent allusions to the “beloved community” as a reachable promised land sometimes had the opposite effect, prompting more practical listeners to “dismiss it as a pipe dream.”

“What happens to a dream deferred?” That opening line from Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes has resonated with generations of African Americans over many decades because of the legacy of racism in America, and its soul-crushing propensity to dangle the specter of opportunity while keeping it perpetually out of reach.

Ed Dwight knew this reality firsthand. In 1962, Dwight was the first black man to be selected for an American astronaut training program. He spent years preparing, training, and running experiments at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Nevertheless, because of internal resistance to his inclusion into the program, Dwight was never selected for a NASA mission.

“Just like every other Black kid, you don’t get something, and you convince yourself it wasn’t that important anyway,” said Charles Bolden Jr., one of Dwight’s friends and a former NASA administrator.

After his military career concluded, Dwight eventually put it all behind him. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Denver and eventually became an accomplished artist, with 129 memorial sculptures and over 18,000 pieces in gallery exhibits across the United States.

So, when he was invited to participate in a commercial space flight earlier this year, Dwight initially demurred. “I’m a really busy guy,” said Dwight. “It didn’t make a lot of difference to me at the time.”

But a group of current and former black astronauts intervened, and reminded him of the years he spent training to fill a role he was never allowed to consummate. Because of them, Dwight changed his mind.

And by the time Dwight achieved spaceflight on the Blue Origin vessel, he broke another historic barrier. At 90 years old, Ed Dwight became the oldest person to fly in space, surpassing the previous record holder, former Star Trek star William Shatner.

One of the men who convinced Dwight to take the flight was Victor Glover, Jr. “While he was off the planet, I was weeping. It was tears of joy and resolution,” said Glover. He’d met Dwight in 2007, after receiving one of Dwight’s sculptures at an award presentation. Only later did Glover learn Dwight’s own personal history of unfulfilled longing within NASA.

“I was in the presence of greatness and didn’t even know it,” Glover said. “Sixty years he sat with this and navigated it with dignity and grace and class, and that is impactful to me.”

Blue Origin honored Dwight by naming his seat on the mission after his NASA call sign: Justice.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God does not forget about the sacrifices that his servants make in the process of living faithfully. Do not lose heart, for God is in the business of making wrong things right again.

In his book Forgive, Tim Keller tells the story of a friend of his who was a PhD student at Yale. Keller’s friend once told him that modern people think about slavery and say, “How could people have ever accepted such a monstrosity?” Keller continues:

My friend said, “That’s not the way historians think. They ask: considering the fact it was universally believed by all societies that we had the right to attack an enslaved, weaker people, and since everybody had always done it, the real historical question is, why did it occur to anybody that it was wrong? Whoever first had that idea?”

My friend then answered his own question, pointing out that the first voices in the fourth, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries who called for the abolition of slavery were all Christians. And the Christian, who called for this justice, believed there was a God of love, who demanded that we love our neighbors—all our neighbors—as ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln biographer Jon Meacham notes, “There was no evident political gain to be had for Lincoln [to be anti-slavery]; quite the opposite. So why did he … state so clearly that slavery was unjust?”

Someone close to Lincoln pointed to the following story:

One morning in … the city [Lincoln] passed a slave auction. A vigorous and comely [young woman] was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse, to show how she moved, and in order, as the auctioneer said, that “bidders might satisfy themselves” whether the article they were offering to buy was sound or not.

The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln moved away from the scene with a deep feeling of “unconquerable hate.” Bidding his companions follow him he said, “By God, boys, let's get away from this.”

Meacham concludes, “That experience formed one element of Lincoln's reaction, if not the main one. ‘The slavery question offered bothered me as far back as 1836 to 1840’, Lincoln said in 1858. ‘I was troubled and grieved over it.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, are we today troubled and grieved by the injustice of the world?

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a pastor in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950s, was called by the historian Andrew Manis “one of the least known but most impactful figures in the civil rights movement.” He was, by his own estimate, arrested in peaceful protests some 30 to 40 times. His house was bombed with his whole family inside one Christmas Eve. His church was subjected to three different bombing attempts

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act and lawyers sought injunctive relief to force Arkansas to integrate Central High in Little Rock. On that very day, Shuttlesworth organized the integration of Phillips High School in Birmingham, driving his own two children to the school to enroll them.

He was met by a white mob that beat him with baseball bats, chains, and brass knuckles. As he was beginning to lose consciousness, Shuttlesworth recounts that “something” said to him: “You can’t die here. Get up. I have a job for you to do.” In the hospital later that day, a reporter asked Shuttlesworth what he was working for in Birmingham. He responded: “For the day when the man who beat me and my family with chains at Phillips High School can sit down with us as a friend.”

When Bernard Robins saw the three officers eyeing him from their department cruiser, it was a familiar look. He’d been stopped by police multiple times before as a teen and young adult, but previously chalked up those encounters to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was also familiar because he’d logged plenty of time in a cruiser himself, as a member of the LA Police Department.

So, he conducted himself as he always does in these scenarios – he kept things polite, kept his hands in plain view, and informed the officers that he also wore the badge. None of that mattered to these officers, who still handcuffed Robins, despite no wrongdoing on his part.

Off duty that day, Robins had been spending time in pursuit of his passion, filmmaking. Having just come from a shoot for a film he’d written, Robins was chatting with a lighting tech that he knew. Police eventually detained Robins because they suspected the tech of criminal activity, but failed to release him even after he supplied them with identification confirming his status as an officer.

Robins says that after returning to work, his supervisor and many of his colleagues were generally supportive. Nevertheless, he wondered if his fellow officers would have his back out in the field, particularly after he discovered rumors that he was gang affiliated, a charge he vehemently denies. Robins eventually sued the department, accusing members of a gang unit of racially profiling him.

Robins said the incident shook his faith in policing, causing him to reconsider whether he could still participate in the organization he’d been so excited to join just three years prior. During his mandated sessions with a police psychologist before his return, Robins had been encouraged to just put on the uniform and see how it felt. It was the same unform that he’d previously been proud to wear. Robins said, “All I did was put the uniform on, but it just felt too uncomfortable.” And after that, he told his supervisor that he was done.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes taking a stand for what is right involves relinquishing power and position. It also means telling the truth, even when it comes at a cost to one's career prospects.

African Americans have held tight to their Bibles over the years. Amid cultural shifts in beliefs and reading habits, their demographic consistently outranks other racial groups for their reliance on the Word. In 2018 the American Bible Society (ABS) once again named African Americans “the most Bible engaged in the US.”

They are more likely to own a Bible—93 percent of African Americans do, versus 82 percent of Americans overall—and more than twice as likely to say Bible reading is crucial to their daily routine, according to the society’s State of the Bible report.

Mark Croston, national director of black church partnerships for LifeWay said, “Generally, African Americans are deeply spiritual people. In my generation, many of those that were not church attendees, or even Christian, still had a great respect for the Bible. Black people love to quote and tote the Bible.”

The National Football League has been embroiled in lawsuits for nearly a decade from former players alleging that the league knew that its sport resulted in brain damage but failed to take appropriate action. In response, the NFL has pledged nearly one billion dollars as part of a class-action settlement for former players who’ve experienced brain damage playing pro football.

But there’s a wrinkle in the way individual brain injury claims have been adjudicated, and many former players and/or their families are claiming it results in unfair racial bias. When assessing players’ current capacity for cognitive function, doctors tend to apply a process that neuro­psychologists refer to as “African-American normative corrections.” This is more broadly known as “race-norming.” When these corrections are enacted, many players’ claims are denied on the basis that their lack of cognitive functioning is closer to the baseline readings of African-American players without brain damage. The unstated conclusion is that African-Americans are not as smart as White people.

In June of 2021, the NFL pledged to do away with race-norming as part of its settlement methodology, but plenty of former players and their families say they were unfairly cheated out of settlement money they deserved. Lawyers for those families claim that race-norming is “discriminatory on its face” and that it makes “it harder for Blacks to qualify for the settlement than whites.”

Chris Seeger, the lead attorney for the class of approximately 20,000 former players eligible for money under the settlement, apologized for not picking up on the practice sooner. He said:

I am sorry for the pain this has caused Black former players and their families. While we had fought back against the NFL’s efforts to mandate the use of “race norms,” we failed to appreciate the frequency in which some neuropsychologists were inappropriately applying these adjustments. Ultimately, this settlement only works if former players believe in it, and my goal is to regain their trust and ensure the NFL is fully held to account.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Every human being is made in God's image and deserves dignity and respect. When we fail to offer that, we are liable to succumb to the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Purdue University recently announced the renaming of two of its residence halls after two extraordinary alumni, Freida and Winifred Parker. In 1946, they were accepted to Purdue University, but were not allowed to live on campus. According to historian John Norberg, Purdue “had an unwritten policy that African Americans couldn’t live in the residence halls.” And it wasn’t just the university, either. Norberg said, “African American students couldn’t live in West Lafayette at all. It was a sundown city. African Americans had to be out by sundown."

This inhospitable setting made campus life difficult for the Parker sisters as they insisted on attaining a collegiate education. Norberg said, “They didn’t have a shower or a bathtub. They only had one desk for them to share … it was a long commute that involved buses and they had to leave early so they missed a lot of opportunities.”

And yet, despite such hardship, the Parker sisters did not give up. Norberg said, “(They) weren’t the first to be denied access to the residence halls. They were the first to stand up to the university and say, ‘No, you can’t do that.’”

Through a winning combination of dispassionate logic, strategic networking and unflagging endurance, the sisters engaged in a year-long campaign to reverse the unwritten policy. They wrote letters, they visited dignitaries, and they rallied support wherever they could get it.

Eventually they found support from Indiana governor Ralph Gates, whose pressure broke the stalemate. In 1947, Freida and Winifred Parker were among the first African American students to move onto campus. All of the students at Purdue today benefited from what Frieda and Winifred did in 1946.

Renee Thomas, of the Black Cultural Center at Purdue, hopes the gesture will help to send a positive message to students who might be struggling. “We hope that today’s students will use their story as inspiration.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Trusting in God gives us the power to persevere under difficult circumstances. Even though we work inside institutions to change laws and practices, ultimately our hope is not in people or institutions or laws, but in God's eternal truth and power.

For most homeowners in a hot housing market, the value of their property tends to rise dramatically. But not for Carlette Duffy. Her home seemed not to rise in value much at all, and Duffy couldn’t find a satisfactory explanation--that is, until the answer was too obvious to ignore.

Duffy was looking to borrow against its equity when she got an appraisal for her home. She was surprised when the appraised amount was $125,000, which seemed low compared to the findings she’d seen anecdotally from other friends and family. So, she had another appraisal done, and the second came out at just $110,000, just ten thousand more than when she’d bought the place four years prior.

Nagged by her suspicions that the lowball offers were because she was African-American, Duffy again got a third appraisal. But this time, she took pains not to reveal her racial identity, by corresponding via email, and asking a friend’s white husband to stand in during the appraiser’s visit to the home. That appraisal came back at $259,000--more than double the original amount.

The rep who conducted the second appraisal claimed that his work was driven by relevant data. But according to Andre Perry, a researcher who studies housing discrimination, that explanation fails to account for the history of institutional racism in real estate.

Perry said, "It's almost when people see Black neighborhoods, they see twice as much crime than there actually is. They see worse education than there actually is. I think this is what's happening when appraisers, lenders, real estate agents see Blackness. They devalue the asset. They devalue the property."

Duffy has since teamed up with the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana to file a complaint with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We dishonor the image of God when we are unwilling to treat people of other racial groups equally. We are all God's creative masterpieces, and we should be treated as such.

A legacy sometimes ends up obscuring achievements. Jackie Robinson may have been fearful of this happening to his legacy when he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. At that time, Robinson requested that his induction plaque focus exclusively on his statistics and record as a baseball player. He did not want it to make any mention of his role as a historic “first” in Major League Baseball, as the first Black player to cross the league’s color line and begin desegregating the game.

Robinson was right that his legacy is worth celebrating: career batting average of .311, in the top 20 of his era, and six championships in 10 seasons, which still stands as the National League’s record. If he had been anything other than a trailblazer, he’d still be remembered for his impressive talents.

However, in 2008, Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson announced the decision to update the plaque and include information regarding Robinson’s status as a man who helped change sports and society. He said that Robinson’s “impact is not fully defined without mention of his extreme courage in breaking baseball’s color barrier. The time is right to recognize his contribution to history, not only as a Hall of Fame player, but also as a civil rights pioneer.”

Gretchen Sorin, director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program said, “This is a country that loves to ignore its history of discrimination. People say to me, ‘I had no idea,’ about discrimination that took place, even within their lifetimes.”

Jackie Robinson’s career stands as one of the most powerful testimonials to that history, and something would be amiss if his Hall of Fame citation ignored the racism he faced. Still, the story behind the plaque reveals a more private struggle of Robinson’s: to be seen as a man and not just a message. His current plaque reads a little differently once you know that Robinson never wanted it that way.

Sarah Friedmann writes in “Trailblazers”:

In 1957, my parents moved into Levittown, Pennsylvania. It was a brand-new suburban community and these homes were finally at a price that Army veterans could afford. That August, another family moved into Levittown. The father, Bill Myers, had served in the US Army. The mom, Daisy Myers had a bachelor’s degree. And the Myers family, like my family, was growing: they had three young children, and we had two.

When my family moved in, we were greeted by a smiling member of the local Welcome Wagon. When the Myers family moved in, they got a different greeting.

The local newspaper reported: … Small groups of agitated Levittowners are already gathering in front of the Myers home. By midnight, more than 200 shouting men, women and children cluster on the Myers’ front lawn. A group of teens throw rocks through the Myers’ front picture window, and 15 police officers are dispatched to the scene. … Now, with the violence increasing, the sheriff wires the Pennsylvania State Police asking for immediate assistance. His request states, “... the citizens of Levittown are out of control.”

What do we learn from this tale of two families? We learn there are two kinds of racism. The first kind is “personal racism,” like we see in the 200 people who mobbed the Myers’ front lawn. But there is also a second kind of racism, “structural racism.” The kind of legal and financial structures that make sure whites like the Millers get a loan and a home and make sure blacks like the Myers, don’t.

The Levitt Organization had already sold over 15,000 homes in Levittown: and every single one went to a white family. Bill and Daisy Myers bought their home directly from an existing owner, so they were not screened out by the Levitt Organization. But they also had to get around the structural practices of our federal government. The FHA and VA “only subsidized post-war housing, like Levittowns, on the condition that the homes weren’t sold to African Americans.”

It's bizarre that I was raised in a planned community that was carefully designed from its beginning to be all-white, to keep out persons of color. But here’s what’s even more bizarre: We ALL live in Levittown. Every single one of us who lives in America is living in a culture that from its beginning was created for the benefit of white people and for the exclusion of non-white people.

A tattoo parlor in Kentucky is using ink to unite communities across the country by offering free appointments to anyone who wants to cover up their hate or gang symbol tattoos. Tattoo artists Jeremiah Swift and Ryun King said they decided to offer this service as a way to take a stance amid the protests calling for an end to racial injustice.

King told CNN, “It's definitely a long overdue change. Having anything hate related is completely unacceptable. A lot of people when they were younger just didn't know any better and were left with mistakes on their bodies. We just want to make sure everybody has a chance to change.”

King's first client was Jennifer Tucker, a 36-year-old mother of two who wanted to cover up a small Confederate flag she got tattooed on her ankle when she was 18 years old. Tucker said, “I went to a school where there wasn't a single black person. ... Everyone in my school flew rebel flags and had rebel flag tattoos and I bandwagoned and got the tattoo. It was a horrible thing to do.”

After high school, Tucker became involved in various solidarity movements and peaceful protests aimed at uniting the community and fighting racial injustice against black people. A friend of Tucker's sent her the tattoo shop's Facebook post offering the free coverups, and she immediately messaged the shop asking for an appointment.

On Tuesday, after nearly 20 years of “looking down at the tattoo regretting it,” King covered up the flag with a character from the cartoon Rick and Morty. “It feels so amazing, it's life changing. I knew I had to do it, to be an example for other people who were in the same position. There's not a whole lot I can do, but this is something I can do to spread love, not hate.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The fresh start that God offers not only changes our outward appearance but goes to the heart of our need by creating a new person within. We are then able to show love and respect to others instead of racism and hate.

After racial slurs were scrawled outside black students' doors at the US Air Force Academy's preparatory school, Superintendent Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria gathered all 4,000 cadets in a hall. Speaking to a crowd of some 5,500 people that included faculty, coaches, airstrip personnel, and senior officers and staff of the 10th Air Base Wing that includes the academy, Silveria urged them to share his sense of outrage. "This kind of behavior has no place at the prep school," he said, "it has no place at USAFA, and it has no place in the United States Air Force. You should be outraged not only as an airman, but as a human being."

While acknowledging that the academy isn't a perfect institution, Silveria said it would be naive and unjust not to speak about racism. Toward the end of his address, Silveria said:

Just in case you're unclear on where I stand on this topic, I'm going to leave you my most important thought today: If you can't treat someone with dignity and respect, then you need to get out. If you can't treat someone from another gender, whether that's a man or a woman, with dignity and respect, then you need to get out. If you demean someone in any way, then you need to get out. And if you can't treat someone from another race, or different color skin, with dignity and respect, then you need to get out.

To make sure his message was received, Silveria told cadets to get out their phones and record it. Citing the need for the group to have moral courage and protect their institution's values, he then repeated his message: "If you can't treat someone with dignity and respect, then get out."

Editor's Note: A follow up story in the Washington Post was headlined "A black student wrote those racist messages that shook the Air Force Academy, school says." After the additional facts came out Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria said, "Regardless of the circumstances under which those words were written, they were written, and that deserved to be addressed," Silveria told the Colorado Springs Gazette in a Tuesday email. "You can never over-emphasize the need for a culture of dignity and respect—and those who don't understand those concepts aren't welcome here."

Possible Preaching Angles: 1) In the same way, God expresses his outrage and wrath towards everything that bends or twists or distorts his good and holy creation. 2) Racism also has no place in the church where we accept each other as equals in Christ.

Charles Galbreath, a pastor of Clarendon Road Church in Brooklyn, tells the story of a black man gunned down by police in his neighborhood. Anger seethed in the neighborhood. Frustration from years of racial oppression was about to erupt in violence. Many people lined up to march down the main street while police gathered, expecting violence.

Charles and a group of pastors rushed to the gathering place and found themselves caught in the middle between the police and the people. Tensions were rising. Insults were being hurled across the divide. One side picked up rocks, the other side clutched their guns. The pastors feared for their lives; bullets could fly at any moment.

Galbreath said that some of the pastors spontaneously walked into the middle of the street between the two warring parties, bowed their heads, and started to pray. They implored God to visit this place. As Charles tells it, slowly the tension died down, the people put down the rocks, and the police took their hands off their holsters. Those who cared stayed. And without a shot fired or rock thrown, conversations began and God's presence appeared that night in that community. It was the beginning of something new God was doing to bring justice and reconciliation to a street corner.

Possible Preaching Angles: David Fitch adds, "Kingdom prayer does not remove us from the world but places us firmly in the middle of it even in the most violent, awkward, and hopeless circumstances, kingdom prayer open space for God's presence and strengthens those praying to walk faithfully in that presence."

An article in Christianity Today traces how early African American Christianity proved the power of the Resurrection against oppression.

In their book The Genesis of Liberation, scholars Emerson Powery and Rodney Sadler Jr. explore what they call the "miracle" of how many African American slaves came to faith in Christ. For most of them, Jesus was the "White Man's Savior." They used Jesus and the Bible to pacify slaves and justify their enslavement.

Miraculously, many African Americans, though not all, became Christians and attributed authority to the Bible. The question that remains is why. Why did enslaved Africans embrace the religion of their captors, who used the Bible to justify the brutal trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Here is their simple answer: "They fell in love with the God of Scripture … In Christ they found salvation from their sins and reconciliation." They write that in the Bible they found not just an otherworldly God offering spiritual blessings, but a here-and-now God who cared principally for the oppressed, acting to deliver the downtrodden from their abusers. They also found Jesus, a suffering Savior whose life and struggles paralleled their own struggles.

As they came in contact with this God, they found a different reality in him: the reality of Resurrection power. It was the reality of Jesus' death and resurrection that created a community of faith and … provided slaves with a theology of "resistance." The Resurrection had proved its power; there are Christians—even among African Americans.

In his 77 years, Frederick Douglass, America's most famous abolitionist, delivered thousands of speeches, wrote three autobiographies, started newspapers, met with President Abraham Lincoln, and championed the cause of African American civil rights. But most people downplay a crucial part of his life: his radical Christian faith.

The crucible of Douglass' prophetic Christian faith was his childhood suffering as a slave. Before his escape at age 20, Douglass witnessed and endured great cruelty, especially at the hands of Christian masters. He saw first-hand brutal whippings, cold-blooded murder, and the daily trials of physical and psychological abuse. He watched a slave master beat his aunt, a 15-year-old girl of striking beauty, nearly to death.

In 1826, Douglass was sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld. When he heard Sophia, a devout Christian, read from the Book of Job, Douglass decided he had to know more about this man Job—how he could say, despite his suffering, "blessed be the name of the Lord." He secretly taught himself to read. As a teenager, he formally converted to Christianity, shepherded by free black Methodists. Assurance of salvation came slowly, but once he cast all his cares upon God, Douglass wrote, he found faith in Christ as "Redeemer, Friend, and Savior."

In March 1833, Hugh Auld unexpectedly sent Douglass back to the Eastern Shore. For the next three years, Douglass worked as a field hand before escaping and settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts. By 1841 he was involved in the abolition movement. His task was to convince Americans to see the antislavery cause as a great moral necessity. To that end, he repeated a chastening refrain: "Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."

For Douglass, the problem was not Jesus or Christianity; it was the hypocrisy of Christians. He condemned what he called the "corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity" everywhere present in America. He blasted "the man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week, fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus." He derided the slaveholder who "covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity."

Like the Pharisees condemned by Jesus (in Matthew 23 and other places), slaveholders and their apologists "attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith." They had utterly abandoned the true Christianity of Christ and invited the wrath of a just and avenging God.

Daryl Davis tends to attract attention and vitriol whenever he's seen at political demonstrations, but he's used to it.

According to CNN, in early December, Davis traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to meet with Billy Snuffer, an Imperial Wizard of the Rebel Brigade Knights, a sect of the Ku Klux Klan. Snuffer was there with other Klansmen attending a hearing of an associate facing a gun charge during the infamous "Unite the Right" rally from last August, where a woman was killed by a driver who rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.

Davis wasn't exactly there to support Snuffer and his friends, but he did want to engage them in conversation in order to understand them. But his attempts to do that tend to elicit strong reactions from onlookers, because Daryl Davis is African-American.

As it turns out, Davis has been at this for a while. As a bluesman dabbling in country and western music, Davis has traveled across the south, east and Midwest, playing music and meeting people. Playing at a bar in 1983, he was once complimented by a patron who compared his playing to Jerry Lee Lewis. After explaining to the man that Lewis learned his craft from black blues and boogie-woogie players, they eventually became friends—despite the fact that the man revealed his membership with the KKK.

Since then, Daryl Davis has been dubbed "the Klan Whisper" as he soldiers on in a mission to challenge the beliefs of Klansmen through friendship and conversation. His closet is a testament to his success, featuring several Klan robes given by men who renounced their affiliation after having befriended him.

Racism in America is a complex problem with a myriad of systemic, interconnected causes and consequences. Nevertheless, Davis' example serves as a gentle reminder that the path toward progress requires a measure of humility and a willingness to listen.

Potential preaching angles: Non-judgmental listening can break down walls; relationships can soften hardheartedness and other obstacles to growth

A blog on The Henry Ford website remembers the brave decision made by Rosa Parks in 1955:

It's one of the most famous moments in modern American civil rights history: On a chilly December evening in 1955, on a busy street in the capital of Alabama, a 42-year-old seamstress boarded a segregated city bus to return home after a long day of work, taking a seat near the middle, just behind the front "white" section. At the next stop, more passengers got on. When every seat in the white section was taken, the bus driver ordered the black passengers in the middle row to stand so a white man could sit. The seamstress refused.

But theologian Michael Horton notes that this extraordinary act flowed from Rosa Parks' ordinary life of obeying and following Jesus. Horton writes:

Rosa Parks didn't wake up one day and decide to become the "first Lady of Civil Rights." She just boarded a bus as she did every day for work and decided that this day she wasn't going to sit in the back as a proper black person was expected to do in the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama. She knew who she was and what she wanted. She knew the cost, and she made the decision to pursue what they believed in enough to sacrifice her own security. At that point, she wasn't even joining a movement. She was just the right person at the right place and time. What made her the right person were countless influences, relationships, and experiences—most of them seemingly insignificant and forgotten. God had already shaped her into the sort of person who would do such a thing. For her at least, it was an ordinary thing to refuse to sit in the back of the bus on this particular trip. But for history it had radical repercussions.

In his book, Chase the Lion Mark Batterson shares that:

Shortly after being installed as the twentieth pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon in November of 1954 titled "Transformed Nonconformist." "The Christian is called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of his society," said King, "but he must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of his society..

"I have seen many white people who sincerely oppose segregation and [discrimination]," said King. "But they never took a [real] stand against it because of fear of standing alone." Are you willing not just to stand but to stand alone?

On December 1, 1955, a transformed nonconformist boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus just five blocks from the pulpit where King delivered that sermon. When the white section filled up with passengers, the bus driver ordered Rosa Parks to give up her seat in the colored section. Rosa politely refused. She took a moral stand by remaining seated.

"Our mistreatment was not right," Rosa said. "I was just tired of it." It wasn't a physical tiredness; it was a moral tiredness. "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Rosa Park's stand against racial segregation started a ripple effect. It led to a court battle, which led to a citywide boycott, which led to the Supreme Court ruling segregation unconstitutional.

Until the pain of staying the same becomes more acute than the pain of change, nothing happens. We simply maintain the status quo. And we convince ourselves that playing it safe is safe. But the greatest risk is taking no risks at all.