Join the Discussion!
We’ve set up a web page on the online Connection site where you can read these interviews, and add your own thoughts and stories:
www.allsoulsconnection.org/repairing-the-breach
To keep the discussion private to All Souls members, you have to know the password to see the page and read and make comments. The password is: breach
We welcome both your stories and your thoughts on how we can continue to “repair the breach” beyond the service on April 9th.
Glenda McDowell
excerpt from Lenten Supper talk on March 27
I personally don't need an apology, however I feel the Church does owe African Americans an apology for its complicity in slavery. The act of baptizing the captives and changing their given names to Christian names before the journey of the Middle Passage, often recorded as the "Black Holocaust"; this was the first act of stripping the humanity of one group of God's people. Many slaves were shipped on a vessel named Jesus. Often churches were built with slave labor, and many priests owned slaves.
Now I wasn't a slave and you weren't a slave owner, but our relationship is flawed by our past. I stand today as a proud tropical tan, Egyptian ginger colored female of slave descendants; this is evidence of our relationship. For without YOU there would have been no ME. Therefore I'm not mad at you. For the Grace of God we, descendants of former slaves, still stand, and stand actively in the Episcopal churches. An apology: perhaps this could be viewed as a cleansing, a cleansing in the name of our Lord and Savior. My brothers and sisters in Christ we are answering the call to salvation by Repairing The Breach.
Allen Worth
Allen is a junior at Asheville High
In discussing the state of race relations among young people with older people, one topic invariably comes up: interracial dating. Though the laws preventing it ended much later than other Jim Crow laws, their effect has ended sooner. In my experience, no one questions a relationship between a black guy and a white girl at our school, and they’re not particularly unusual.
On other fronts, however, much remains the same as in the past. In my four AP classes this year, academic courses that provide college credit if you achieve a certain level on a standardized test, I have one African-American student. In the sixties and seventies, this would have been the result of deliberate policy on the part of the administration. Yet, with several black principals, this seems unlikely today.
As well, there is still racial separation socially. I eat lunch with students I’m in class with. I am friends with, by and large, that same group of people. So despite the fact our cafeteria is as split as ever, it isn’t racial animosity that keeps it that way. In fact, during my time at Asheville High, I’ve never heard a white or black person make a racist comment to someone of the opposite color. I’ve certainly never felt unsafe in the halls or at football games, despite the fact that the stands are segregated there too.
The split seems not so much along racial lines, then, as economic ones. In Asheville, there seems to be a very small black middle class. There are no poor whites in my classes either, something unusual in the South. It’s sad that having beat racism, the power of economics has stymied the march of integration.
The problem with the power of economics, too, is the immobility it seems to create for African-Americans. My great-grandparents were farmers in Appalachia. My grandfather was a small town lawyer and my grandmother was a teacher. My father attended Davidson and became a teacher and my mother attended Chapel Hill and became a doctor. Now, four generations out from abject poverty, I can think seriously of attending a top school in America. That kind of generational progress seems elusive for many black families, at least in Asheville anyway, and is probably the most serious opponent to real integration. I met a black kid in Multicultural Studies last semester. I still talk to him fairly regularly and he’s a great guy. Yet, he does poorly in school and, as I discovered in Multicultural, his mother was pregnant with him while taking the same class 16 years ago with the same teacher. He’s a smart kid, but doesn’t have the same chances that I’ve had.