We need new friends ... not new laws

This past Monday I was honored as the principal speaker at the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration co-sponsored by the Fayette Chapter of the NAACP and the Fayette County School System.

I shared with them the irony of the whole thing since my grandfather on my mother’s side fought for the Confederacy enlisting in Texas (yes, my grandfather: it seems he was born in 1833 and had my mother when he was 79 years old). What genes. I admonished the crowd never to chastise an old man for having sex.

I also shared that, as such, I was a product of my culture. Several years after Rosa Parks had helped establish the moral and legal right of blacks boarding public buses through the front door and sitting rightfully up front, I shared my own “bus” encounter.

It seems Mama had sent me (about 13 years old) into town to pay bills (my family didn’t know about paying bills by check). I boarded the bus and sat in a two seater, near the front naturally. The bus was fairly empty. As the bus made its way through a black section of town, a young girl, 15-years-old or so, boarded and, seeing all the empty seats, she decided to sit by this 13-year-old white boy. I just knew she was doing it for spite — or was it for freedom?

A son of the south and a boy of my culture, I immediately jumped up, declaring in my mind I was not going to sit by a black person. It would be a violation of my upbringing. I moved as quickly as possible to a three seater, leaving the 15-year-old girl to a seat by herself. There, I thought. I handled that situation. Nobody was going to make a fool out of me, at least that’s the way I thought 45 years ago.

Today I serve as pastor of a church that is 60-70 percent black in addition to having people from Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Haiti, Uganda (West Africa) and Nigeria (West Africa). Don’t tell me that God can’t bring a revolution in your life if you give him permission. He certainly did mine.

How? The raw Gospel did the job. You just can’t read the Bible, accept it as God’s inspired Word and come away the same.

It was Dr. King who made the observation that Sundays from 11 a.m. until 12 noon was the most segregated hour of the week. He made that observation more than 43 years ago. What has changed?

And yet it must. We are raising a whole new generation of children who don’t even know what it is to ride the same bus with whites and blacks. We see our white and black legislators discuss issues on the floors of the Congress and of the State House, but seldom do they break bread in one another’s home. We talk of racial tolerance, but we do too little about it.

We don’t need new laws, we need new friends: red and yellow, black, brown and white. You know, those who are precious in God’s sight.

This year of 2006 I challenge you to get out and make friends with someone of a different color. I look toward the day when the NAACP will stand for the National Association for the Advancement of Christian People.