Courage

Confronting Racism

Dick Prouty. 10.23.202

 

 

Fifty years ago this month, Doris and I were in bed @ 10:30PM in our new house in Lanesville, just up from the Cove, on a chilly evening.  Suddenly, we heard a lot of commotion in the front yard and looked out the bedroom window.  There was something burning in our yard with a crowd gathering in the street.  We ran down the stairs and out into the yard.

 

There, burning brightly, was four foot  rough wooden cross, with a Wallace sticker wrapped around the base.  I began trembling, in a state of shock.  Was this really happening to us?

 

Doris, eight months pregnant with our second child, walked up to the gathering crowd and was smiling.  She started chatting with the few people she had recently met when we moved in that summer, and laughing at the scene, trying to put people at ease. 

 

Someone had called the fire department and as they quickly put out the blaze, they asked me if we were alright.  I mumbled that we would be ok.   The crowd began thinning out.

 

When we went inside, we decided not to call the police, as that was not something that Doris had grown up doing in a situation like this; in her world, the police just might make things worse. 

 

 It took us a while to fall asleep that evening, as we hugged each other, and chatted about what we thought had happened.  There had been a flurry of ‘n-word go home’ calls to us the past few months, which we just ignored.  Obviously, someone was trying to intimidate us.

 

Well, it didn’t work, as Doris was not intimidated.  And…., I followed her example.   There was a fascinating follow up story, and I’ve spoken about it in a sermon here ten or so years ago now.  But this reflection is about courage.

 

So, about courage: why was Doris so courageous that evening? There is no easy answer, but a big part of it was her experience of growing up black and experiencing racism on a regular basis.  Her family and neighborhood culture helped her learn to keep cool in the face of frequent racism.  The lesson is, in the face of racism:  Never back down , and always to speak your truth.  Never back down and speak your truth.

 

 Doris showed courage frequently these last fifty years, consistently being an authentic black person in a mostly white community.  And this last year, our community saw how well she used her quilting art to tell the stories of resilient courageous black people and the people in her life.