Redemptive

I haven't been able to write about the results of the election until now.

Frankly, the outcome is so overwhelming to me personally that I haven't been able to type a word. More on that below.

And then, it seemed to me that I needed to remain quiet and listen to my friends--black, white and brown--and their emotional, thankful and celebratory reactions.

My feelings here really have nothing to do with politics or political party or philosophy.

My response emerges from my own life, my experiences and my own journey as it relates to race, community, love and hate, division and unity.

The election of Senator Barack Obama is historic for the nation. And, it is historic for me, a white man.

It is also somehow redemptive, or so it seems and feels to me.

I grew up in a segregated community.

I lived a thoroughly segregated childhood in Jim Crow Dallas.

I enjoyed and had the benefit of virtually no exposure to African Americans as a child. Though, I do remember attending a fundraiser for some local organization when I was 9 or 10 that involved a black-face minstrel performance

I attended completely segregated public schools.

My first "real job" I worked at a Sinclair service station--8th and 9th grade summers, so much for child labor laws! My boss was the owner of the station, a former law enforcement officer and about the most racist person I've ever encountered in my life. He represented to the extreme the prevailing thought and worldview of most of the people I knew.

My first real experience of and exposure to black youth came during the summer prior to my junior year in high school when I landed a job with the school district mowing football fields and working as a custodial assistant. Two of my young workmates were black, Carl and Leotis. I have never forgotten them or that summer. They attended the Hamilton Park schools, the campus where African American students went to school, their only choice back then.

That first experience was extremely positive and, thus, very confusing to me. These young men were just like me, except they couldn't go into all the places I could enter during that summer. I remember clearly a hot summer afternoon when we were taking a break. They were asked to leave a convenience store where we had all entered to buy a cold drink. Until then, it had never occurred to me that such treatment took place in my hometown.

They were just like me, but I'd been schooled by my environment, and the people I trusted, who dominated and informed it, to believe that black people were not like me at all. This was undoubtedly the most significant and crippling lie of my childhood.

I remember playing in a football game during my junior year at Richardson High School against South Oak Cliff High School, an all black public school in Dallas. I remember how nervous we were before that game--the first time any of us had competed against black students. Frankly, we were afraid. We won the game, but I remember once again feeling confused and relieved by my experience.

To be blunt, I wasn't prepared for life in my own country--my upbringing, my education, my experiences in the church, nothing had really provided me what I needed to negotiate the American racial reality.

These experiences caused me to recall images and experiences from earlier in my life. The real nature of my community and of its unspoken, but clearly normative values were coming into focus for me. I remembered hearing classmates shouting and celebrating as they ran down the halls and out of school on that terrible day--November 22, 1963--when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated here in Dallas.

I heard children shouting, "Thank God, he's dead, the Catholic is dead!"

When I arrived at home that day, my mother was crying. But, for the first time I had encountered the amazing capacity my community possessed for terrible hatred. There was no confusion on that awful day.

I also remembered the hatred that was directed toward President Lyndon Johnson, mostly around issues related to civil rights, voting rights and segregation.

Then, I went off to Harding College (1968-1972).

During road trips as a member of the football team, I remember confronting the racism that greeted my black teammates. We staged a mass walkout in Jackson, Mississippi when black members of the team were asked to leave a restaurant. Painful, embarrassing, but not unusual at all to these African American friends.

But, it was on campus as well, and from the top.

I recall sitting in chapel one day listening to President Cliff Ganus arguing against interracial dating on campus. He said, I can hear him as if it were yesterday, "Dating across racial lines would be like my daughter bringing home a boy with a fourth grade education."

At that almost all of the black students walked out.

Why didn't I?

After college, I spent a year in Memphis, Tennessee doing graduate work. Less than four years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We moved from there to Shreveport, Louisiana where I served my first church full-time.

My church was located on a boundary line between a relatively affluent, historic area and a very low-income community. Across the street from the church, really adjacent to the parking lot was a row of slum housing, owned by an absentee slumlord. A small, struggling black community occupied the substandard housing.

Early on I met a little boy who lived in that housing. His name was Wayne. He came to church with us and we became good friends. He lived with his Granny. He was a sweet, wonderful little boy. He loved to wag Jennifer, our first child around on his hip! I can still see him at our church.

Church members took exception to my inviting Wayne and other African Americans to church services, as well as to membership. I have many stories I could tell.

I suppose the most revealing involved a meeting with one of my deacons. He called me to his office at Louisiana Bank and Trust located at the time in the tallest building in downtown Shreveport. He served as one of the Vice-Presidents of the bank, a very successful, well-placed young guy who had attended a Christian university.

"Larry, are you telling me that I could go to hell because I don't like n_________?" he asked with real aggression.

"It is something you should consider," I replied.

I tell people we were in Shreveport for two years and 45 minutes for good reason!

My experiences while living in New Orleans for five years were much better. But the segregation, the classism, the barriers remained, as they do still in Dallas and across the nation today.

I'm not wise enough to weave even my own story together with much insight. But, one thing I do know: the election of Senator Barack Obama as our 44th President is a national accomplishment, a moment of great significance.

It would be a mistake to assume now that race doesn't matter or that we now live in a post-racial nation.

But the ascendancy and success of Barack Obama represents a redemption of sorts, a crossing over, a sorting out, a clarifying experience. The pain, the suffering, and the endurance in the face of great injustice and national evil has been vindicated in a very necessary manner.

I am a white man.

I, too, have been crying since November 4. Tears of joy, even though there is much yet to do.

.