Racism and my family

Reading about the revelations of the long-hidden racism in the US, I began to think about my life. I am not free from prejudice or racism, but I have been blessed in many ways to help overcome this sinfulness.

Most of all I think of my parents.

My mother told a story of the time she visited my Dad in Mississippi during World War II, when he was in training with the Seabees. My dad got to know a friend, Freddy, whose wife, Dot, lived in the Philadelphia area. My mom met up with Dot and they went to Biloxi and spent time with their husbands. But the men had to be away for a few days and so the women decided to go to New Orleans by bus. When they got on the bus, they noted people standing in front but saw some seats in the back of the bus, where they sat down. The heads of many of the people in front turned to them, for they were sitting in the non-white area of the segregated bus.

My mom’s response was simple. “I wasn’t going to stand all the way to New Orleans. Besides, in Philadelphia we sit with all sorts of people in the busses and went to school with them.”

No moralizing – just the common sense of a woman who grew up in a neighborhood which encouraged living together, the Meadows.

This became clear to me the day we buried my father. I had put together photos and was showing them to my Aunt Mary that evening. I asked whether a Jewish man in one of the photos was one of those who lived near my father’s family. He had told me how he would go on Friday nights to turn off the lights in the Jewish family’s home.

My aunt said, “No.” But then she began to talk of the Meadows where she also grew up. She told how the cantor of the synagogue would come each Friday night to lead her there to turn off the lights. She would take the coin he had left there.

But then she began to talk about the neighborhood. Catholics, Jews, Protestants, blacks, and whites lived together. She told about a Pentecostal black church near where she grew up. She was a little taken aback by their style of worship, but there was no prejudice.

Then she talked about how the local parish, Saint Raphael’s, had a gym where blacks and whites, Protestants and Catholics, and Jewish kids, all played basketball together. And this was in the 1930s

I had neighbors where I grew up you had been raised in other parts of Philadelphia and who regularly expressed what we would now call racist remarks. But I didn’t see this in my parents. They were a little perplexed when the local NAACP picketed a local bank, but they gave me, by their example, an openness to all.

I also recall how my mom was a bit upset when a friend of hers was vocal in opposition to the presence of a black sister in a neighboring parish school.

There was probably more – but I am grateful for their example and for the neighborhood of the Meadows in West Philadelphia, that helped them overcome the racism that permeated their society.

As a result of this, I was open to the civil rights movement which has continued to inspire me to be with those disregarded and treated as less than human.

As a result, I was opened to the message of nonviolence which Martin Luther King, Jr., helped me to see the roots of active nonviolence in my faith.

I am now here in Honduras, where racism and classism exist. But by the grace of God, I find myself opened to those impoverished by systems of power and economic control.

Thank you, God. Thank you, Mom and Dad. Thank you, the Meadows and all those who have helped me to be opened to the God who comes among us, amidst the outcast.

My parents and me on the day of my baptism, June 15, 1967