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One of the most encouraging stories of racial reconciliation among Southern Christian congregations is taking place in Mobile, Alabama, a port city that is still heavily segregated. The Black and White ministers who have come together to root out longstanding prejudice and simple fear of racial and cultural differences were featured in a November "Seeking Common Ground" series by NPR national correspondent Debbie Elliott. Elliott mentioned some of the well-known racial history of Mobile, including the nation's most recent Ku Klux Klan lynching in 1981 and the documentation of Mobile being the last U.S. city where smuggled slaves were transported in 1860. It is still mind-boggling to me that I was in the seventh grade growing up in Athens, Georgia, when Mobile lynching victim Michael Donald was brutally beaten and hung from a tree. I do not remember Donald's tragic murder being discussed among the adults in my community, and I know they did their best to protect me and my peers from the lingering bigotry of the Jim Crow era.

The racial segregation in Athens' churches was also not a topic of frequent discussion during my teen years in the 1980s. Black and White parishioners praising God in separate edifices on Sundays was viewed as a cultural norm in my hometown, and most churchgoers probably had the mindset Rev. Ed Litton, pastor of Redemption Church in Mobile, expressed in Elliott's "Seeking Common Ground" feature. Litton pointed out, "I think we just have learned to ignore it and to isolate ourselves by saying, 'You know what, I'm not a bigot. I'm not prejudiced. But it's not my problem.'" Elliott explains how four Mobile pastors, two White and two Black, were moved to address this pervasive complacency of racial isolation in churches after the death of Freddie Gray, a Black man in Baltimore who succumbed to neck and spinal cord injuries he suffered in a police van in 2015. The ministers speculated how Mobile would be affected by the type of racial unrest that broke out in Baltimore if a similar incident occurred in their city and more specifically how churches would respond. This resulted in the establishment of a "pledge group" that meets twice monthly with the objective of building stronger relationships across racial lines.

As I was reading Litton's comments in Elliott's story regarding how the issue of race has continued to be ignored in many churches today, I immediately thought about how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged White clergy to lend their support to the civil rights movement in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." King had hoped that White religious leaders would back his efforts in the fight against racial injustice, and he expressed disappointment that many White ministers believed he was moving too fast and considered his Birmingham demonstrations "unwise and untimely." King conveyed his frustration, stating that this "laxity of the church" was one of the main reasons people viewed it as "a weak, ineffectual voice" and "arch supporter of the status quo." The White ministers in the Mobile pledge group do not want to continue the indifferent legacy of the status quo, and their affiliation with Black pastors helped birth the Shrink the Divide organization, which has reached out to city politicians in efforts to strengthen community connections. These uplifting accomplishments, however, are not without hindrance. Elliott reported that "people of both races (have pushed) away from the table, unable to work through ideological differences." This "ideological" setback reminds me of the racial rift in the Bible between the Jews and the Samaritans, a social breach that kept them from worshipping God together. When the Samaritan woman at the well told Jesus that the Jews had no dealings with her people, the Lord responded, "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water" (John 4:10). "Living water" in this passage refers to eternal life, and water in the New Testament is also a symbol of rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit. With the great work that Black and White Mobile ministers are doing, I pray that a powerful revival of the Holy Spirit takes place to overcome the setbacks they have encountered. Many people are looking to the church to lead in a time like this, and in order to completely triumph over the long-established Southern strongholds of racism, the body of Christ must be on one accord.

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Dr. Jessica A. Johnson is a lecturer in the English department at Ohio State University's Lima campus. Email her at smojc.jj@gmail.com. Follow her on X: @JjSmojc. To find out more about Jessica Johnson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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