June 1, 2009
By Peggy J. Shaw

ATLANTA – The Diocese of Atlanta explored paths to racial reconciliation May 30, in a special conference at the Cathedral of St. Philip. Participants shared stories about segregation, discrimination, and slavery; speakers such as human rights advocate Ruby Sales offered inspiration, and some 100 participants searched for ways to breach the alienation that continues among races.

Ideas generated by the conference, which was called "Toward a Full and Faithful Telling," will be shared at the Episcopal Church's 2009 General Convention, scheduled to take place July 8-17 in Anaheim, California.

"We are too quick to tout the progress we've made toward racial reconciliation as though the work is finished," explained Bishop Neil Alexander of the Diocese of Atlanta. "Such thinking blinds us to the reality. In so many ways, we have only just begun. This must demand of us fresh energy and renewed commitment."

In a keynote address, civil rights activist Bishop Duncan Gray remembered his years as a Mississippi priest in the turbulent 1950s and 1960s when a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till was murdered, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed, and James Meredith risked his life to become the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi—an action that ignited riots and left two people dead.

"I was on the campus trying to get people to lay down their bricks and bottles," Gray recalled. "But in the midst of this tragedy, there was a small positive note coming through: It showed people just how awful it was in Mississippi, and more and more people came forward to do something about it."

At the conference, small-group workshops such as "Vanquishing Racism Among Us" ran concurrently at the cathedral while oral histories were videotaped in a classroom. Janet Turner, 59, of Sandy Springs, Georgia, for example, noted the disparities between two Georgia Episcopal summer camps in the 1950s— one for white children at Camp Mikell and another for blacks at Camp John Hope. "We had to swim with the leeches and fish and the frogs," Turner recalled. "They got to swim in a chlorinated pool with air-conditioned cabins. We made fans with leaves."

Turner also remembered being denied admission to Atlanta's Lovett School, then affiliated with the Cathedral of St. Philip. "I was a good student and an Episcopalian, and had a great personality, I thought," she said. "We got a letter from [then] bishop [Randolph] Claiborne saying we didn't qualify … and a few years later the [civil rights leader Martin Luther] King children applied and they didn't get in either."

Sales, a theologian and founder of the SpiritHouse Project, a organization that combats racism, praised the idea of using such oral histories to help eradicate racism and help with reconciliation. "The injustices were real things that happened to real people," said an impassioned Sales, whose life was saved after a 1965 Alabama protest by Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian whose subsequent murder galvanized support in the church for civil rights. "Without memory you have lost your ancestors. You are murdered," she said.

At the end of the daylong conference, participants were asked to describe what steps could be taken to continue the journey of reconciliation. "Hopefully, people coming away from an event like today will be motivated to make a difference somewhere," said Alfred (Chip) Marble, assisting bishop of North Carolina. "Get involved in the community … You don't have to be a Duncan Gray."

Gray himself emphasized that people need help from the community to achieve reconciliation. They need both community and heart, he said. "We still have a long way to go toward healing the alienation from one another. And if we are ever to resolve this problem of racial polarization, it's going to be in and through the church community," Gray explained. "This is what the church's business is all about."

Georgie White, a black participant from LaGrange, Georgia, said at the beginning of "Toward a Full and Faithful Telling" that she feared it was all "too little, too late."

Afterward, however, she felt encouraged. "After talking with people in the different seminars, that's when I realized that this could be fantastic. Just taking the time to do this for one day is not going to make much of a difference, but with the attitudes we had—attitudes of being willing to understand—it's going to work," she said in a phone interview.

Episcopal News Service
Peggy J. Shaw is an Atlanta journalist and author of a book about Martin Luther King, Jr. called "Voices: Reflections on an American Icon Through Words and Song."