The Disinherited

It’s said that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. travelled with a copy of Howard Thurman’s seminal book, Jesus and the Disinherited. “Considering the generations-long relationships between the King and Thurman families, Martin likely had the message of these pages etched on his heart,” writes Vincent Harding in the book’s forward.

I’ve been marinating on this book since November’s book club, and keep coming back to its central question, a haunting one which hides itself in the book’s title.

I’ll get to that question in a minute.

A Dry Mouth

 

“The objective reality is that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America.”

These past two weeks.   Have left me with a dry mouth, unable to form words.  I wanted to be able to say more but the letters on the screen all blurred together.

The death of George Floyd was but one in a long line of wake-up calls about racial disparity, but it’s a loud one.

But this dares me to have hope: that we might all agree there is a problem. And when we do, our call is to stay focused on addressing this problem amidst all the distracting reactions and counter-reactions.

“How did I miss this?”

To move forward, though, we must

Tied into a Single Garment of Destiny with MLK

Pause to think for a moment: you’re boarding a public bus to head downtown for some errands, maybe to the department store before a Saturday lunch at a barstool diner. In front of you, an older gentlemen steps onto the bus, pays, and turns walks past the only empty seat in the front, all the way to the back where he will stand for the ride, because where he sits depends not on his age or order of boarding, but on the color of his skin. You follow him onto the bus and then, because your skin is white, rest yourself in that front seat.

White people in the front, Black people in the back.

And when you get off that bus, heading toward Woolworths, you stop for a drink at a water fountain. There’s a water fountain clearly designated for you, which you enjoy before a quick stop at the “Whites only” bathroom.

All of this happens out in the open, right there in the 1950s, in front of God and everybody.