Testament

Last night we went to see LRC youth group member Alex Philbrick play baseball. Because he's related to just about everyone who goes to our church, we got to hang out with quite a few of them at the game. Here's something cool about Alex's mom Ashley and me: We both have dads named Winston. How many of you can say that, huh? HUH??


Since we were in the area, and since I just finished "Turn Away Thy Son," Elizabeth Jacoway's book about the Little Rock desegregation crisis, we drove by the Arkansas State Capitol on the way home because I wanted to look at the sculptures depicting the Little Rock Nine. The sculptures show them as the teenagers they were almost fifty years ago taking the courageous walk to Central High School. It actually took them several tries to get in, and they finally entered the school on Sept. 24, 1957 -- several weeks after the school year had started. This was a monumental victory, but it was also the beginning of a traumatic year as all nine were subjected to all kinds of torment for the duration of the school year.

A couple of quotes that have stuck with me from the book:

"For the first time in my life, I felt like an American citizen." -- Minnijean Brown, one of The Nine, on walking into Central High School on Sept. 24, 1957.

"I hope that one of these days, when I put my hand over my heart for the Pledge of Allegiance and salute the flag for its promise of liberty and justice for all, I will be talking about a present reality and not just some future possibility." -- Terrence Roberts, one of The Nine, speaking in the Central High School auditorium in 2005 when a stamp commemorating the crisis was unveiled.

The story of the Little Rock Nine demonstrates so clearly something I've been kicking around in my head for a while now: That a country is not truly free unless it is free for all of its citizens. A seemingly simple concept, but one our country still struggles to grasp.

One side note: Hazel Bryan Massery, the yelling white girl in this famous picture (in all fairness, she immediately regretted her actions and eventually apologized to Elizabeth Eckford), was -- at the time this photo was taken -- a member of the Church of Christ right here in Little Rock.

Dilemma

Well, I started one book and got all into it and then I started another book and got all into IT. So I have to make the heart-wrenching decision to postpone one until I'm done with the other.

The first one is "Turn Away Thy Son" by Elizabeth Jacoway. Jacoway was a student in Little Rock during the 1957 desegregation crisis. Her uncle was the superintendent of schools, but Jacoway was sheltered from the turmoil of the crisis. It wasn't until graduate school that she realized the gravity of the situation she had ignored as a teen. About this discovery, she wrote:

"My intellectual awakening began with the realization that I had mindlessly participated in and benefited from a racist culture."

So she wrote this book -- the most exhaustive account of the Central High School crisis that has been written. I want to read it because the 50th anniversary of the crisis is this fall, and, since it happened so close to where I live, I want to understand more fully what happened. And more importantly, I want to get my mind a little more around the continual quest for freedom that exists and I think will always exist in this country of ours that has always, strangely, been called "free."

The other book is "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" by Anne Lamott. Lamott is pretty much the only Christian writer I like right now. Think of Joel Osteen and what he preaches. Then think of the exact OPPOSITE of that. That's Anne Lamott. She writes of faith from a very real perspective. She shows that faith can be found in the midst of the cesspool that is real life. She gripes. She complains. She curses. Quite a bit. But she always leads us back around to where God fits into the chaos. Here's a bit from her description of when she first found God -- when she first realized he is everywhere -- , while she, an alcoholic drug-user, attempted to hitchhike home from a former boyfriend's house:

"I remember standing there at dusk with my thumb out, euphoric and exhausted as if I'd been at the beach all day, then taken a long, hot shower to wash off all the sand."

Lamott can be quite profound, but also sarcastic and funny and irreverent and downright crude. I think this is why I identify with her so much. Here's her description of a town in California where she lived during her hippie days:

"Bolinas was a great place for ritual and celebrations -- it was nearly as exotic as India, if you thought about it, but without all those dying animals in the streets and people defecating in the holy waters, which doesn't really work for me at all."

Oh, and I have four deadlines looming. So I may not be reading anything at all.

A Life is More Than a Moment

"I still find it difficult to believe that this display of racial hatred was happening in front of my high school and my camera." -- photographer Will Counts from his book, "A Life is More Than a Moment."

The front page of the Style section in today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has a feature about Will Counts, the photographer who caught this well-known image and many others during the Little Rock's desegregation crisis in the late 1950s.

These pictures remind me that although our country has always held freedom in the highest esteem, so many of us -- over the past 200 years or so -- have not understood what freedom is really supposed to be.