Black History
By Roger Lovette
[Dr. Roger Lovette is Pastor of the Baptist Church of the Covenant in Birmingham, Alabama and is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today.]
Black History Month has come to an end. All month long we have been observing the richness of the black tradition in the church I serve. One of my pastor friends finds this strange. He writes: "Why in the world would a primarily Caucasian congregation observe Black History Month?" He goes on to ask: "Why not have a `White History Month?`" Good question. I wrote him back that all my life I have been observing White History Month. Growing up in Georgia in the forties and fifties, the racial lines were carefully drawn. There were no blacks in my neighborhood, my school, or my church. There were a few domestics that cleaned our houses, shined our shoes, and took away our garbage. Across the street from the little mill house where I lived, blacks would sit on the curb three times a day getting ready to go to work in the cotton mill. You would see them at 6:30 in the morning, 2:30 in the afternoon, and then at 10:30 at night waiting for the shifts to change and go to work. The lines of demarcation were carefully drawn. Blacks on one side of the street, whites on the other. They never talked or laughed or sat together. It was only years later that I learned that the black folk who worked in the mill were paid much less than their white counterparts for the same jobs. When we opened our books at school there were no stories of black heroes. I knew little of W.E.B. Dubois, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington. They simply did not exist in our world. Ralph Ellison wrote, years ago of the "invisible man." I can now look back at a whole culture and say that it was invisible. It was White history month all the way.
When I moved to Birmingham in the fifties to attend Howard College in East Lake, blacks were still invisible. Maids cleaned our rooms. Down the hill a black woman washed and ironed my shirts for fifteen cents each. Walking across the Baptist campus, the black Janitor would always say: "Fine, Suh, How you." We young, green eighteen year olds had no idea that only miles away there was another world of cultural richness of which we were largely unaware.
Moving back to Birmingham in the nineties, I looked around at a different world. We had a black Mayor. I was asked to serve on boards where I met black community leaders as sharp and astute as citizens anywhere. Through the years I have come to meet and appreciate a multitude of black friends. They have been preachers, architects, interior designers, business leaders, and statesman. I walked across the Samford campus one day and learned that the President of the Student body was a black man. Slowly I have begun to discover the richness of the black culture in Birmingham that my white history had strangely ignored.
So all month long we mostly Caucasians in my church have listened to stories of grace and courage. We have heard about miracles when somebody left a life of crack and cocaine and alcohol, got their lives together and is making a contribution to the community. We have heard of black men, raised in the project houses, who shook away the heavy burdens of poverty and are now themselves changing lives. We have heard a prominent black lawyer tell about all the roadblocks that were thrown in his way when he simply tried to register to vote in Alabama. Probably the most moving story we have heard is that of the young woman who survived the bombing at the Sixteenth Street Church in September of 1963. She lost four friends in that Sunday morning bombing. Seeing her stand there, competent, articulate, we wept as we thought of those other four girls who would have been her age, whose promise and possibility were snuffed out that sad Sunday morning in 1963.
When friends come to visit Birmingham, I always take them by the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. I want them to see the stained glass window in the balcony of that church. After the bombing of the church, the people in Cardiff, Wales heard of the loss of life and the damage to the church. The children in Cardiff wanted to respond to the church in Alabama. So they established a penny fund. They collected pennies to replace one of the bombed out windows of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. The business community in Cardiff learned of the children`s efforts and commissioned a great stained glass artist John Petts, to design the stained glass window. The project would come to be known as "The Wales Window of Alabama."
This is the window I always want my friends to see. It was placed in the balcony of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. As the sunlight shines through the window, the sanctuary is filled with the light. The shadows from the large form of a black Jesus, touches all who worship. It is a parable in stained glass. Jesus is portrayed as reconciler and demonstrator–his outstretched arms reaching outward taking the abuse, the fire hoses, the hatred that comes.
John Petts, the stained glass artist, wanted the window to symbolize the struggle of black people everywhere, not only in Birmingham but wherever people suffer from injustice. Underneath the black Jesus are the words: "You Do It To Me." This was to be the Pastor`s sermon topic that Sunday morning in September. It was never preached. But maybe that sermon is preached after all. Week after week. Sunday after Sunday as we look up at the Jesus with the outstretched arms and remember, the sermon comes to life.
When I take my friends to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church I always try to go inside. You can`t see the richness and the color of stained glass on the outside. Maybe all of history is like the viewing of a stained glass window. We have to go inside. We have to hear the stories and meet the faces and remember the events. History is not white or black. History is simply history. Looking at the window from the inside of the church, I marvel at the richness of the dark colors. Birmingham is like this, too. Without the diversity of this city, Birmingham would be poorer, smaller, different than the city we know. In looking up at the colors and the richness streaming through the window, we are moved to be better persons and to make this city a far better place.
