Meeting Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and a tough question.

This was one of the better Fridays I can remember...typically, Fridays are riddled with exhaustion and wild urchins, but today is one that I will never forget. Thought I'd share with you here.

We had a visit from The History Makers and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and his family. Rev. Shuttlesworth was a prominent civil rights activist/hero and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
(Pictured here - Rev. Shuttlesworth, his wife, Mrs.Sephira Shuttlesworth, and me)

On the morning of September 9, 1957 he came to Phillips High School, the school where I teach (now Phillips Academy, grades pre k-8) then an all white school, to enroll his children. He was savagely beaten by Klansmen on the front steps of the building with brass knuckles, chains, and clubs. His wife was stabbed in the hip trying to get her daughters back into the car, and one of his daughters broke her ankle when her leg got slammed in the car door.

His wife and children watched in horror from the car as their husband and father was beaten almost to death. Today, for the first time since that day, this family returned to Phillips. They walked onto the same front steps and this time, they did what they meant to do 53 years ago.

pictured above: my principal, Colonel Stone Johnson (who is HYSTERICAL), and me

We got to hear his childrens' accounts of witnessing this devastating beating...Rev. Shuttlesworth is 87 and has suffered a mild stroke, so although he was there, his children spoke on behalf of him. I listened with tears in my eyes for most of the presentation, and as I thought of all that has been accomplished since that day in '57 and as I looked across the sea of the brown faces of the people and children that I have grown to love like my own family, my heart hurt because of the fact that this is still not an integrated school. There are no white faces among the students.

And I felt a new kind of embarrassment, a new kind of shame in the part of my own culture's history that we call White Flight. I have thought about this a lot, but today I felt it. I was sitting in a gym with 300+ of the most beautiful, endearing, and delightful (it IS Friday, so I admit I had to dig rather deeply into my heart to find those truths:))... children who are SO obviously made in our God's image...

...and I FELT the reality of my history, my culture having FLED from movements toward living in communities together as God intended - we fled, we maintained the segregation however we could.

Our lives, for the most part, still reflect this. Mine not excluded.

So with this day came some hurt, some embarrassment. But with it also came significant joy and real hope.

My school is on the National Registry of Historical Sites (if you ever take a Civil Rights tour of the city, you'd stop here, so come by and see me in room 104!!) and you can read an in-depth history here...while I was reading it, I came across this...

"During the melee Reverend Shuttlesworth believed that he heard the voice of God telling him not to die, but to get up as God had a job for him to do. Shuttlesworth’s miraculous survival signifed to ACMHR members the intervention of the divine in their struggle for civil rights. His heroism increased his local, and national, reputation as the "South’s Fearless Freedom Fighter." The local Movement which Shuttlesworth headed, the ACHHR, gained strength and members willing to stand up to Klan-sponsored violence in their pursuit of equal rights to education and other civil rights in Birmingham."

I got to meet Rev. Shuttlesworth and briefly talk with his oldest daughter, Mrs. Pat, who witnessed the incident on the front steps of my school building 53 years ago and during my conversation with her, she looked at me said these words...

"I look at you and I can tell that God has a job for you to do. And dear one, it has only just begun."

So this afternoon when I read that line above in the document recounting my school's history, hot tears pricked my eyes for the second time today.

I know the Lord is asking me to look at my own life and to ask some hard questions and to seek his kingdom in my life in some very tangible ways. Only He knows and only time will tell what those ways will turn out to be, but I do agree with Mrs. Pat...it's only just begun.