Mysteries So Bright

Richmond , Va.

June 2025

As a White man in my 80’s, I have spent considerable time looking at the world around me, and I want to tell the story of how my thinking about racial injustice has changed in the last 15 years. Keeping quiet about what I see around me is no longer an option. We White folks cannot change what we were taught by our kindred, nor by the White culture, but we can, as adults, open our eyes, review those teachings, and be willing to allow new facts and perspectives to challenge the beliefs and attitudes we have grown up with.  I believe that God, in His grace, is offering all of us an opportunity to become aware of the consequences of our actions and attitudes.  

Actually this journey of waking up started way back in my teens, followed by my college days, and most recently when my wife and I moved to Richmond, VA in the fall of 2010.  Now, some 14 years later, I have lost my hearing and so cannot do much in the way of interaction with people except through reading, writing, and speaking about what I feel and think the Lord is saying to me and possibly help others who want to change.  Maybe this story will help others, especially White men, to enter into the transformative work that the Lord has done with me.

Writing this is hard, and my words sound trivial, even to me, but I hope the telling of it may help some folks to examine their own histories and be able to bring thoughts and actions to the Lord that they now recognize as unhealthy.

I think most of us see our childhoods as “normal,” and that is how I felt about growing up in Pasadena, Texas, and spending my summers on my granddaddy’s 900 acre farm in Grimes County, Texas. 

As a family we were very proud to be Texans, and proud of being among the people who received land from the Stephen F. Austin Land Grant while Texas was a part of Mexico. We were also proud when the farm was awarded a Certificate of Honor, which read: “For a Century or more of continuous ownership and operation as a family agricultural enterprise since 1835.  To the Dedication and perseverance of the founders and heirs of these lands, we owe the basic wealth of Texas.” 

Despite the denial of my relatives, by digging in to some historical documents, I found evidence that any farm the size of my grandaddy’s could not have survived without a minimum of 20 or more enslaved persons. Thus, my family’s contribution to the “basic wealth of Texas” was based upon enslavement.

In addition to stolen labor, the land itself had been previously inhabited by several different Indigenous tribes. They became casualties of White settlement and were removed and placed with other tribes. Consequently, my pride has been transformed into a sense of lament and repentance over the injustice that the history of that land is built on. 

And finally, the fact that my great grandfather was a second lieutenant in the CSA (confederate states) army, has surely affected the attitudes of his descendants, even to this day.

I am still in lament over those discoveries and probably will always feel that sorrow till the judge of all the earth comes and makes all things just and right again.

I am still puzzled by the hidden history of my own background in the white majority culture, and why I have been blind sided by that reality.  For me, growing up, the experience of racism was just a minor part of life that didn’t need talking about.  Things like why my family never drove through certain parts of the city of Houston; not that I wanted to, but I never asked why. 

I only remember Pop (my step-dad, whom I greatly respected and admired),  saying he could smell a certain odor when he drove through that section of the city.  I remember that I doubted that, but I don’t think I argued with him. I have since come to know that Pasadena was known as a “sundown town, which meant that all people of color needed to leave the town by sundown.  

I also remember that a lot of us boys in Texas were taught how to tie a hangman’s knot in a rope.  At the time I did not know how this could be connected with racial lynching. We all saw it as something that was done in the Western movies and on TV where the good white guys hanged the white bad guys to keep peace and order. 

This story is about my own racism,  my unconscious acceptance of White Supremacy that governed my thoughts and opinions for 70 of my 83 years.  During those 70 years I would have staunchly denied that I had any racial bias.  Now I know how wrong I was.  

I thought of myself as one of those “better,” freed-of-racism-white- men because of a college experience in my 20’s.  In the 1960’s I got involved with the Civil Right’s movement at First Baptist Church in Atlanta.  A number of Black ministerial students had a desire to hear the well-known preacher Dr. Roy McClain. Because they were not white, they were denied admittance beyond the foyer, and were herded downstairs to the overflow auditorium, where there was a closed circuit TV of the service.  Several of us from Georgia Tech, and some other white students joined them in the basement for several weeks in support of their right to be welcomed into the sanctuary of the church.

That was the beginning of a my having a relationship with people of color, which ultimately helped me to understand that I had grown up in a segregated environment.  Prior to that I had never even thought about that.  It is interesting that the experience of sitting in the basement is always a major topic of discussion when I meet with my friends from Georgia Tech on Zoom once a year.  But it is as though that event is frozen and time, and, so far, there has never been any further mention by the group of  more recent experiences of trying to reduce the effects of systemic racism.

I had another experience of racism after graduation when I taught for two years at Albany State University, a historic Black university (HBCU) in Albany, Georgia. I had a wonderful teaching experience there, but I also saw some of the discrimination my Blackc students faced.  One student, who commuted 30 or so miles from home, was regularly stopped for speeding, even though he was very careful not to exceed the speed limit.

My experience with racism at college, however, did nothing to change most of the ways I lived.  Over the years I continued to follow my upbringing by choosing White-only, relatively affluent neighborhoods in which to live during at least seven different home locations because of career changes.  All of these choices were unconsciously made based upon my belief that buying in a mixed race neighborhood meant risking that the property value would go down.  

I remember in 1991 we were looking for a new home in Caroline County, VA, and being shown available houses by the realtor who made it clear that a certain available home was in a mixed racial neighborhood.  I don’t think he said anything negative, but we got the clear, but unspoken message not  to pursue that house any further. 

Moving from small, mostly rural Caroline County to Richmond in 2010, we wanted to be part of the East End Fellowship.  However,  there were no homes available that we could afford that were designed with a downstairs bedroom and bath, which we knew we would need. We found a small house near City Stadium, and this was our first experience living in a racially mixed neighborhood, and our experience there was an eye-opening experience.    

That neighborhood was a place where many Black residents had settled after the passing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and most of the Black residents were older (like we are now) and did not know how to use technology to email or use the internet. This  became an issue when a local land developer submitted an unsolicited proposal to the City which would have completely overwhelmed the neighborhood by tearing down the stadium and replacing it with high rise office buildings and retail. One of our black neighbors asked my wife to join a group to try to inform the rest of the neighborhood, and they went door to door at each stage of the process, explaining the plan, gathering signatures, and working out transportation to meetings with the City so residents could attend. My wife was delighted to be a foot-soldier working in our racially mixed community. The project planners clearly had not anticipated that kind of organized response from a neighborhood of mostly elderly Black homeowners.  The project was ultimately rejected, and the neighborhood remains a nice neighborhood of small houses and well-kept yards.

We also witnessed examples of racism while living there.  My wife has made note of this experience: 

“This is the story of two men and two traffic stops.  Both men are married, attend the same church and the same men’s Bible study.  They are both viewed as valuable members of the church and community.  They are friends.  In mid- 2011 the first man was stopped by police.  His wife was in the car with him at the time.  He was told that the license plate  on his truck had expired five months ago.  He was given a citation.  The officer was courteous and polite.  A week or two later  the second man was in his car with his daughter,12, and his nephew,14.  He was approached by two VCU police officers with guns drawn.  They informed him – with the guns still trained on him – that his license plates were expired.  He pointed out that he had children in the car and that the guns were unnecessary and were frightening the children.  One officer holstered his gun, but the second officer’s gun remained trained on him during the entire stop. My wife and I are the couple. We are White.   A Black friend at church was the second driver.”

As our awareness of racism grew, so did our desire to live in the East End, and God made a way for us. In 2014 when we moved to Church Hill.  The Lord provided an opportunity to buy a small lot that we found within walking distance of most of the Fellowship’s family’s homes and its meeting place.  We built a small house on that lot with a downstairs bedroom and bath.

While our house was being built we began our life in Church Hill, in an apartment which bordered on one of the public housing projects on Mosby Street. We began to see what life is like when people have limited options for employment.  There was not even a grocery store that people could get to without a car.  (Thankfully that lack has now been filled by the Market at 25th, where we shop regularly and are glad to see the vans that regularly transport people to and from the store.)

Living there was an eye-opening experience.  Not only was the apartment very close to one of the housing projects in the poverty area in Richmond’s East End, it was a 6 unit apartment with mostly Black families with whom we made acquaintances and friends.  What struck us most about the situation was the constant noise of police activity and the sense of hopelessness that most of the people seemed to feel.  

We also experienced episodes of gun violence near where we lived. We saw a man in one of the other apartments being led off in handcuffs. And another man was murdered in the alley behind us. Knowing that many of the Black families have personal knowledge of this all-too-frequent occurrence was another area of life that had always felt remote from us — not so, for the victims of poverty and racism. 

During these past 10+ years my eyes have been opened as I have been forced to examine my own biases and judgements which I have absorbed from my environment, my family and friends (almost all white), for all those previous years. 

In 2015, the second year in our new home,  a neighbor’s son, was arrested on our street corner, because he fit the description of a criminal offender one or two blocks away; another long-time resident, a black lady friend of ours, came out to confront the policeman, and my wife walked down to join her.  Finally the original person who called the police arrived and said our neighbor’s son was not the perpetrator.  

Also around that time, on one block over from our street, one of our best friends – a single widow mother,  who raised her 7 children – was able to move out of the housing projects – but she still experienced the frequent anguish of having her son  stopped repeatedly for walking down the street toward their home with a backpack.  We raised two sons, but we never had to worry that they would face this kind of oppression.  It causes us pain to know that so many Black mothers still face this.

We were saddened, but no longer surprised, when we listened to a podcast by a White Public Health doctor and college professor, Dr. Bob Aronson, (father of our friend, Elena Aronson) who has studied health outcomes including both BIPOC (Black and Indigenous  People of color) and Whites.  The study determined that people of color are likely to be more seriously affected by chronic diseases, or to have more serious outcomes (including death) from disease because their immune responses are diminished by the additional day to day stress of being a person of color in America today. 

For example, the death rate of Black women in childbirth in the U.S. is almost 3 times the rate for White women – and this is just as true for college educated Black women as for those with less education.

Finally, I have realized that racism is not merely an attitude toward others, although it includes that.  Racism is realizing and acknowledging that the country I live in was set up for White people to succeed, to be the leaders, to make the rules.

I am enormously grateful to our Black pastors, Don Coleman and Nathan Walton, and to the Black friends who have been willing to speak truth to me that I might see the truth and be set free from the blinders of Whiteness that have done so much harm to so many people.  I am an old man now, and I have much to lament.  But God has also made it possible for my final years to be lived in the light of truth of American racism and to change the way that I see, the way that I live, and the way that I love my fellow humans.  

My prayer is that my story will lead some of you to want to explore your own hearts and find the truth of God in this matter:

“For we must all stand before the bema seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.”