SHA, Day II

Dinner at Dailey's with my friend, Randal Jelks of Calvin College, closed out a long day of history talk at the SHA convention here in Atlanta. Randal was born and raised in New Orleans, but with the interesting qualifiers that he was a black Lutheran. He manages that complicated mix of"Here I Stand,""Shake My Jelly Roll," and"I Have a Dream" about as well as anyone could.

At a conference at The Citadel several years ago, I inflamed the memories of some aging white moderates in South Carolina race relations by being insufficiently reverential of their moderation. If race precluded black and white Christians from praying together in 1950s South Carolina, I argued, it suggested that race was a stronger identity than religion. Even in Montgomery, Alabama, in the same period, groups of white women like Virginia Foster Durr and black women like Rosa Parks had met together for prayer. The police had taken down their automobile license numbers and reported their owners. White husbands had even published repudiations of their wives' behavior, but women of both races had met together for prayer. I wondered about the timid failures of South Carolina Christians in the same period and quoted John the Revelator to the church at Laodicea (3:16):

I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I wish you were cold or hot. So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth, saith the Lord.

Well, hearing that said about South Carolina's white racial moderates, whose sacrifices they had come to celebrate, just enraged my audience. I was about to be lynched by a mob of little old white Christian ladies in tennis shoes, when Randal stepped in to calm the waters with some authoritative citations of Dr. King's use of John's letter to the church at Laodicea. I've been in Randal's debt ever since.

But the dinner was also a calming relief from a day spent in hotel towers, balancing a drink in one hand, a fist full of peanuts in another, and trying to figure out how I was going to shake hands with the luminary to whom I'd just been introduced. At one point, I looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Those spacious windows looked out on nothing but vertical towers of sterile concrete and glass – towers that, I thought, must look very much like the one in which I stood, balancing my drink, peanuts, and introductions. I'd been in such places a thousand times, but this time a moment of weariness and panic struck. I rushed to get down from that tower of glass and concrete, find a friend, and enjoy a quiet dinner together. Randal and I shared pure Southern comfort: fried chicken, mac ‘n cheese, and collards.