Tag: Civil Rights
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To Speak the Truth in Bombingham
John Archibald is almost my exact contemporary. Same age. White cis male. Southern. Methodist. A man who deals in words, though he’s an Alabama newspaperman who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his work in The Birmingham News while my main public output are sermons these days. What Archibald has done in his […]
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Long Arcs and Stumbling Blocks: A Break Down (Because) of General Conference 2019
It took two weeks of explaining before I broke down trying to get through one more rundown of what happened in St. Louis.* Of course, I felt the pain of it even while I was at the General Conference. The Tuesday night it ended I stayed up late writing notes to former seminary classmates and […]
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Love, Character, and Ordinary People: A Visit with the World’s Greatest Tour Guide
“That’s where the bomb hit,” Shirley Cherry says, pointing to a nondescript spot on the porch of the old Montgomery, Alabama house. The little girl standing on that spot jumped and moved as if it all might happen again. Perhaps another bomb thrown by a racist terrorist upset about the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott might […]
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What I Learned From a Day with Emmett Till
In the video, Johnny B. Thomas, mayor of Glendora, Mississippi, looks out over Black Bayou. This is where the body of Emmett Till was dumped following his brutalization and murder in 1955. In a voiceover, Thomas says, in effect, “Things haven’t changed here. A lot of the problems that were here then are here now.” […]
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Interchangeable heads and crayons in Selma – my interview with photographer Michael Mergen continues (part 2 of 3)
I’m so glad I obeyed my impulse at the stoplight in downtown Farmville, Virginia. I was driving through and stopped at a red light next to the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts where a local photographer’s work was on display. I pulled into a parking spot and discovered Michael Mergen. In the first part […]
Heartlands 