My Story For My People

Some of the questions I asked myself in that May 7 journal entry have been answered. The men were arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Also, My Story for My People is my response to the ways Ahmaud Arbery’s death brought about change in me. This work continues, and will for the rest of my life, as an attempt to answer the question about what pieces of me I can keep and what pieces I must let go. But as this journey began, I had no idea that the question “when and how and with whom do I have honest conversations with people of color solely for the purpose of learning and not debating” would have its’ first answer within a month.

Eighteen days after I wrote this journal entry, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd died while being suffocated under the oppressive knee of a police officer in Minneapolis. For eight minutes and forty-six seconds that policeman slowly, agonizingly, took George Floyd’s breath from him while bystanders captured it on their phones. Marginalized, racialized, and victimized people had seen enough. The volatile combination of Covid-19 lockdowns, Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, and George Floyd’s murder led to the country erupting in floods of violence, destruction, and outrage, especially in urban and suburban settings. My home in the northeastern suburbs of Atlanta was fully engulfed in protest. The riots were mostly in the city but there were many peaceful protests and marches all around Gwinnett County. Tension, anxiety, and sensitivity was high, even within the church, especially a church with a diverse congregation. I am on staff at a large multi-site church in the area. The diversity of our church varies according to the demographics of the location of the campuses. Some campuses are almost all white, while others are quite diverse. The campus my wife and I attend reflects the diversity of the community in which it is located. Our church uses the model of live worship and a live campus pastor but the message is streamed from one location. For many who attended the church in the summer of 2020 the emotions around the racial tension were real and raw. For others, the unrest was distant and unnecessary. The founding senior pastor, a 59-year-old white man from the north, was attempting to navigate the uniqueness of leading a church of diverse thought, background, and opinion through this tempest. The Sunday following George Floyd’s death, our pastor took some time at the end of the message to address the situation in an official way as the church. Reactions to this statement ranged from anger that he said anything at all to outrage that he didn’t say enough. Word soon spread to church leadership that there was a large group of African American church members who were upset enough to demand a meeting with the senior pastor. To honor that request a meeting was quickly organized. Those who attended the meeting were all connected to the campus I attend, where my oldest son, Trey, was the campus pastor. All of the church’s top leadership was in attendance as well. Although I’m not top leadership, I was allowed to attend. For almost three hours the tension rose and fell as hurt African Americans began to share their feelings. The atmosphere was tense throughout the evening until one gentleman stood up to speak. Garry shared some of his story about growing up in Buffalo, attending Northwestern Law School, then moving to and working in the South. Garry brought a calm and peace to the room that had not been there all evening. Although I had seen Garry at church we had never really met and now, still in lockdown and not allowed to begin in-person meetings, I didn’t know when I could possibly talk to him personally. That night at the meeting I sensed God prompting me to reach out to Garry and just start a conversation. Trey knew Garry and had his phone number so sometime that next week I called Garry and began a relationship I could not have imagined a month earlier.

Garry was born in 1955 and I was born in 1963, he near the beginning and me in the middle of the civil rights movement. I knew when I heard him speak at that meeting that he was a man of wisdom, patience, and humility. I called Garry and asked him if he would mentor me in this journey of racial awareness that I had begun. Garry was gracious and he agreed to meet and talk face-to-face so that we could both learn more about each other. I don’t remember the exact date but we met for breakfast in June of 2020. Garry listened and asked questions about my experience over the past month. If he was skeptical, he never showed it. His humility led me to be more and more honest with my racist past. After my ontological shock, I was seeking more knowledge about what it was like growing up Black in America. I would ask questions that I’m sure exasperated Garry but he never let that show. He patiently listened then would share his thoughts. Garry and I quickly developed a trust in such a way that I could ask him anything, but he could do the same with me. More than once Garry mentioned that he was learning as much from me about how and why white people think the way we do as I was learning about how and why Black people think the way they do. We were developing and nurturing a friendship.

Garry and I met with what I’ll call irregular consistency. We didn’t have a standing meeting on our calendar but every three weeks or so I’d give him a call and we’d meet that upcoming Friday. These irregularly consistent meetings continued through the end of 2020.

During this season of discovery, I realized that I was enjoying learning so many new things. I was reading books, listening to books (the fastest and best way for me to take in information,) watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, and scanning the internet to learn as much as I could. What I realized is that I was allowing myself to learn a history I had never allowed myself to learn. I was discovering more and more that the history I had been taught, at best, gave inconsistent treatment to the truth and, at worst, were out-and-out lies. I was drinking from the fire hose of resources teaching me a history I had never allowed myself to learn and, in honesty, I was enjoying it, even when I was discovering hard truths of slavery, convict leasing, and Jim Crow. I learned all I could about the Great Migration, red-lining, and lynching. The deeper I dug the more lies I uncovered. Lies told to me, lies I believed, and lies I told.

Before my ontological shock I wasn’t interested in learning about or discussing race. When the subject of racial disparity came up, I had the thought, or sometimes said, “why are we talking about this now because I don’t own slaves and my family never owned slaves?” Well, you can probably figure out where this is going. Years before 2020, I had opened an Ancestry.com account and began to delve deep into my family history. For the most part, I was interested in the lineage on my Hildebrant side of the family, but Ancestry would send me hints that they deemed applicable to both sides. During the early part of my racial awareness journey, I logged back in and because of those hints, I began tracing my mother’s lineage. It didn’t take long to find an ancestor who had fought for the Confederacy, since my mother was born and raised in Bainbridge in the far Southwest corner of Georgia. That relative may have been wounded or diseased but, either way, he died during the war. Ancestry.com can quickly become a well of information that never runs dry. The deeper I went the more information I discovered. And then I found Lott Long, my great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side. I saw that Lott Long had a link to the 1850 U.S. Census- Slave Schedule so I clicked that link and saw my ancestors’ name and a list of the human beings he owned. I didn’t see the names of the slaves because, as property, their names didn’t need to be listed because the slave wasn’t any more important than the name an owner gave a cow, chicken, or pig. In 1850, Lott Long owned six people all listed as “B” for Black. The other color option was “M” for Mulatto. The slaves were all female and their ages were 28,17, 8, 7, 5, and 3- Black Female 28, Black Female 17, Black Female 8, Black Female 7, Black Female 5, Black Female 3. No longer was “I never owned slaves and my family never owned slaves” an excuse for not having difficult conversations around race.

Some of this new-to-me history involved the speeches and writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Although in elementary school I had written a report about him and was, at the time, sympathetic to MLK’s cause, when I reached high school and was living in South Georgia, I avoided learning more about who he was and what he had done. This blasé attitude about Martin Luther King, Jr continued into adulthood. But now as part of my new journey, I was reading and listening to messages from MLK. I read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and watched his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where an estimated 250,000 were in attendance. Not only did I watch that speech, I printed the transcript so that I could read it as well. The most noted, and sometimes abused, quote from this speech is, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a country where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Sixty years later that dream is yet to be broadly fulfilled. In January of 2021 I honored Martin Luther King’s birthday personally in a way I never had before. I was grateful my church had a time of remembrance, especially with how tense the previous year had been. Sometime in late January or early February I was rereading MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech again. This time a particular phrase stood out more than any other. That phrase was, “I have a dream that on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners would sit together at the table of brotherhood.” That passage just landed different this time. I read it again and then it hit me. Garry and I live on the red hills of Georgia. Garry is the son of former slaves and I had recently discovered that I am the son of former slave owners. And together we had literally been sitting at tables eating and sharing and learning and growing. Garry and Loren had become brothers and, at least in this case, Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream had come true.