One Sunday morning in 1977, a school bus from a white Baptist church rolled into my black neighborhood. I donât know how they got my name or when the negotiations with my parents took place, but the folks in the Memorial Baptist Sunday school department targeted me during one of their annual church-growth campaigns, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in a partitioned room watching flannelgraph Bible stories, mentally salivating over the promise of doughnuts after class.
My parents, who were not regular churchgoers at the time, saw Sunday school as a useful way to get me some additional moral instruction. My mother especially was diligent about keeping me on a positive course. The boys who had nothing to do but hang out on the streets were usually up to no good, sheâd often say. She was right.
The bus was the first thing I liked about the white Baptists. Their Bible songs, large gymnasium, and sweet pastries were fine. But it was the bus that initially won my eight-year-old affection. It was different from the one I boarded each weekday morning for my cross-town trek to grade school. This school bus wasnât caution-sign yellow but brown and white, like a petting zoo pony. It had rounded edges, not the boxy angles of the yellow bus. Colorful pictures of smiling children were taped to its interior walls, and the seat cushions didnât numb your cheeks. And get this: The bus actually pulled up in front of my house and a nice white man came to my front door and knocked each Sunday morning. In contrast, the stop for the yellow bus was a half-mile hike down the road.
Buses played a pivotal role in my life back then. Far more than transportation, they became a strange symbol for who I was, where I could go, and what I could and couldnât do.
Shortly before I entered kindergarten, the Rockford, Illinois, school district began requiring a number of students of my racial and social complexion to ride buses across the Rock River to the other side of the city, passing numerous other grade schools, so we could attend Bloom Elementary. The seven-mile ride took about an hour, once you factored in the half-dozen additional pick-ups along the way.
There were days, sitting precariously on the edge of an aisle seat, that I wondered to myself why the students on my overcrowded bus couldnât go to McIntosh or Ellis or William Dennis. Were those schools not good enough for us? And if they werenât, why were most kids from our neighborhoods forced to go to them? Why had a random slice of us been chosen to get up earlier, travel farther and get home later?
I didnât understand anything then about school desegregation or Brown vs. the Board of Education or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I didnât perceive myself as being a piece of a larger social experiment, a supporting player in a nationâs court-ordered mission to undo two hundred years of systemic injustice. For me, it was just an inconvenient bus ride.
Of course, there were also times when I felt special about my privileged status as a âbus kid.â After all, I got to leave the âpoorâ side of town each day to spend time in the ârichâ section. The neighborhoods were cleaner, the white girls seemed friendlier, and I was usually better at kickball than any of the little white boys. (There were some perks to being one of the only black kids at your school.)
Still, for me and dozens of other kids from my side of town, our sense of worth was tied to those yellow buses. Each day the bus took us to a brighter, more hopeful life, only to bring us back home seven hours later.
In mundane ways, the school bus defined who we were. The rich kids walked home or were picked up by their parents; the bus kids had to load up at 3:15 p.m. or risk being left behind. The rich kids could stay after school for sports or Cub Scout meetings; the bus kids didnât have the luxury of extracurricular activities, nor did we get home in time to watch reruns of The Brady Bunch or Batman. (Shameful confession: some days I would feign illness so I could stay home to watch Adam West in gray tights.) Each school day offered real-life lessons in what it meant to be, in the truest sense of the phrase, from the other side of the tracks.
Most American cities have an unspoken dividing line that splits black communities from white, poor from middle class, urban from suburban. It might be a highway, a park or a literal railroad track. Whatever its form, it provides a physical landmark for the social separation that, by fate or choice, we all practice.
In Rockford, the dividing line is the Rock River, a gorgeous body of water that cuts through the tree-draped town of 150,000 like chalk across the center of a soccer field. To live on the east side of the Rock means nicer houses, bigger yards and easier access to shopping and other services. To live on the far west side (where I am from) means public housing, weed-infested concrete and empty storefronts.
Even as a child, I recognized the difference. I understood that there were essentially two Rockfords.
I donât mean to sound ungrateful. Growing up on the west side wasnât bad, relatively speaking. My childhood was full of lovely memories. I lived in a two-parent home, unlike a lot of my friends who resided a few blocks away in the government-subsidized Concord Commons apartments (a.k.a. âthe projectsâ). I had a yard to play in and a hyperactive mutt named Sherwood. As a young kid, I was content with my lifeâthat is, until I got on the school bus and was confronted with how the other Rockford lived.
The west side was my reality. But the school bus was my entrée to the larger world. It was no small thing, then, that my introduction to white Christianity should come via a bus.
JESUS IN WHITE SKIN
Like Oreo crumbs in a glass of milk, there was just a sprinkling of black kids in the Memorial Baptist Sunday school program, and I was the only black child in my class. I knew I was different, but at that time I didnât know how much race mattered in Americaâand especially in American churches.
The first thing I learned in Sunday school was that black is the color of our hearts without Jesus, red is the color of Jesusâ redeeming blood, and white is the color of our cleansed hearts after we accept Jesus as our âLord and Savior.â There were even visual aids, construction-paper cutouts that demonstrated the red blood washing away the black sin to reveal a brand-new white heart.
Racial subtext notwithstanding (I was a few years away from making those kinds of hypersensitive inferences), this was riveting stuff for an eight-year-old. Though he didnât wear a cape, this Jesus was a heroic character.
Actually, I was somewhat familiar with Jesus already. My parents periodically took me to a black church around the corner from our house, and he was regularly invoked there: âPraise your name, Jesus!â âGive Jesus the glory!â âHelp us, Lord Jesus.â But most of the time, I could never figure out what the sweat-drenched preacher was saying beneath his gravelly wails and singsong declarations. In years to come, I would grow to love the unique power and expression of the traditional African American church. But as a young lad, sadly, I didnât get it.
Jesus also hung prominently on our living room wall, where he gazed out ethereally from a bronze-plated wire frame. That the man in the painting looked more like the lead guitarist of a British rock band than a Jewish Messiah didnât bother me much back then. This was the bearded white Savior who was mightier than Santa Claus, Superman and Muhammad Ali all rolled into one.
There were prayers to God in my house. My parents made sure of that. They were usually over dinner or during bedtime. The prayers were short, reliable utterances like âThe Lord is my shepherdâ and âJesus weptâ and âNow I lay me down to sleep.â Though simple, they kept me cognizant of an invisible God who, for whatever reason, had a special interest in our lives.
The God-Jesus thing was a bit more nebulous. My parents taught me that Jesus was good and that somehow he was God. But I didnât really get the full story until I sat in that Sunday school class at Memorial Baptist Church.
âJesus is Godâs Son, and he wants to come into your heart,â the Sunday school teachers told us each week. âWe all are sinners, and we need Jesus to save us.â
We learned that it wasnât something you could earn or work for. Jesusâ salvation was a free gift. And so I accepted Jesus into my heart about every other week. To recast an old Chicago saying, I was saved early and often. Salvation was free, so I wanted to get as much of it as I could.
We sang bouncy songs like âJesus Loves the Little Childrenâ and âRoll Away,â which had us gesturing wildly like NFL refs as we sang, âRoll away, roll away, roll away. Every burden of my heart, roll away.â
There also were those flannelgraph Bible stories and obligatory lessons on obeying our parents and telling the truth. But the main attraction, week after week, was always the âpersonal relationship with Jesusâ message.
Though I went through a variety of teachers during my three-year tenure at Memorial Baptist, the one I remember best is Mr. Kaiser. A tall, heavy-set man with a tight buzz cut and dark-rimmed glasses, Mr. Kaiser would have probably looked more fashionable in the Leave It to Beaver era than the disco and Star Wars vibe of the late seventies. But he fit the fundamentalist mold to a T.
I remember Mr. Kaiser because he gave me my first Bible. It was a shiny black, hardcover King James Version with color relief maps of the Holy Land printed across its inside covers. I loved the smell of its crisp new pages. It was my unexpected prize for winning the âinvite a friendâ contest during one of the churchâs many attendance campaigns. With the tantalizing report of doughnuts and fruit juice after class, I was able to lure the next-door neighbor kids and my buddies from Concord Commons to Sunday school. Four Sundays in a row, I out-invited all the other kids in my class to take the contest crown. Mr. Kaiser signed the front leaf of my new Bible, thanking me for my efforts.
I still have that prize Bible on my bookshelf, though itâs no longer shiny and the pages now smell like musty newspapers. What I value more now is the memory of Mr. Kaiser. He was an average, working-class man who answered a call to teach young people about God. Looking back, the image of this thick, redneckish white man teaching a little nappy-haired black kid about Jesus couldnât seem any weirder.
What my head tells me today is that, for many people, the stereotype of a white man who looks like Mr. Kaiser is one of a warm-blooded bigot, the kind you see in black-and-white video clips badmouthing Dr. King or aiming fire hoses at helpless marchers. But what my personal history tells me is different.
LIFE AFTER INTEGRATION
As a postâcivil rights baby, the majority of my life has been spent integrating institutionsâpublic schools, white churches, Christian colleges, evangelical ministries. Like many African American professionals from my generation, most of my days take place in settings where I am the only person of color in the room.
I am not lamenting the situation, nor am I blind to how I got here. My faith, family and career have been indelibly shaped by my experience as a child of integration. It has meant the chance for education in better schools. It has meant opportunities to knock on professional doors that, given a different set of circumstances, would have been off limits to someone from my neighborhood. It has meant becoming a part of a Christian tradition that, when true to form, brings Godâs love and truth to bear on every aspect of life.
But it also has meant living within a religious movement that takes for granted its cultural superiority. It has meant disregarding the occasional stray epithet or ignoring shortsighted comments that beg for a retort. Youâve heard them, perhaps said them: âI donât even think of you as black,â or âWhy do black people need to have their own beauty pageants and magazines and colleges? If whites did that, weâd be called racists.â
Iâve never thought of myself as âthe token black,â but I have enjoyed the privileges of being the only African American in the house. For a long time, I lived in blissful denial of the inadequacy of this arrangement. While certainly conscious of race, I didnât consider it something that would affect peopleâs perceptions of me, nor did I allow it to influence my view of others. I wore color-blinders.
I was the approachable black guy, the white communityâs friendly interpreter of all things African American. And hey, it was great! I admit it. At moments, I prided myself on being the only black person some white people would ever know personally. When another black person would come into the picture from time to time, Iâd feel threatenedâlike they were trying to intrude on my territory. âThese are my white people!â Iâd think.
The problem, of course, is that no single person can legitimately represent an entire race. Though ...
