Gospel-focused racial reconciliation in the Deep South

Over the last few years and through this year’s contentious campaign season, which was rooted in America’s deep divisions, there has been a coarsening in the way people talk to each other. We wanted to explore how some are trying to bridge divides. We asked our reporters across the NPR Network to look for examples of people working through their differences. We’re sharing those stories in our series Seeking Common Ground.

MOBILE, Ala. — In the sunny lobby of 3Circle Church in Midtown Mobile, a dozen people gather around a lunch table. They’re here to share sandwiches and a frank dialogue.

“Hey, everybody, thanks for being here today,” Host Pastor Micah Gaston welcomes the group. “Looking forward to a good conversation as always.”

This “pledge group,” as they call it, meets twice a month. It’s a biracial gathering of pastors, nonprofit leaders, lawyers and businesspeople — all from varying Christian denominations in this Alabama Gulf Coast city.

Gaston says the goal is to talk across those cultural differences to better understand one another.

“If we can do it here in Mobile, in a city that has the scars we do — the last lynching happened here, the last slave ship landed here — if we can build a movement here of people that follow Jesus well, that are not identified with the ideologies that divide but with the Gospel that unites, I think there’s power in that,” says Gaston.

The concept grew out of conversations nearly 10 years ago when four local pastors — two Black, two white — were together at an ecumenical function. Baltimore had just erupted in protests after Freddie Gray died after suffering injury to his neck and spinal cord while in the back of a police van.

“When the Baltimore thing started, the question then became, ‘what if that would happen in Mobile?'” recalls Pastor Joe Johnson of Mount Hebron Church. “As the body of Christ? How would we handle that?”

“Not only what would we do, but how would we do this as white and Black ministers — not politicians, but preachers,” says Jerry Jenkins, a retired Assemblies of God pastor. “How would we respond to violence, to nonviolence, to all those things that were a part of this movement that was happening in our country?”

Talking across the racial divide

The four men spent about an hour talking about the racial divide in Mobile and decided to keep the conversation going. They invited others, including community leaders, and met a few weeks later in the cramped conference room of a car dealership.

“It was a fairly tense time because there were completely different political views, social views, doctrinal views in the room,” says Anglican Pastor Tim Smith. “Somewhere along the line, Melvin Clark said, ‘Wait a minute, guys. Y’all don’t understand what it’s like to grow up Black in Mississippi and in the South.'”

The room was silent for a time, until Clark, a Baptist preacher, told his story.

“How I was treated as a kid growing up in Mississippi — really what it felt like being Black, stuff that we had to tolerate in order to survive,” recalls Clark. “My parents were sharecroppers. So it was many years before we became independent as a family.”

Jenkins says it was powerful.

“We all realized as much as we loved each other, we didn’t really know each other.”

Tackling the racial divide in Mobile is a tall order. There’s fraught history here. For instance, this is where the last slave ship was brought illegally to the U.S., and the descendants of those on board are still fighting for racial justice today. There was a notorious Ku Klux Klan lynching in 1981, more than a decade after the Jim Crow era. And the port city remains largely segregated by race. Even in Mobile’s celebrated Mardi Gras culture, there are separate organizations for Black and white revelers.

The pledge group acknowledges the lingering divide.

“Almost as if we live in parallel universes,” says the Rev. Ed Litton, pastor of Redemption Church in Mobile.

“We’re very much aware of it. But 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,'” Litton says.

Litton is a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and has been involved in the pledge group since its early days. He says it forced him to stop ignoring and see his city in a new light and as a microcosm of the national divide.

He thought other places could benefit from this kind of dialogue. So he called up another former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the first Black man to lead the group — the Rev. Fred Luter of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans.

“What we’re trying to do is bring America together,” says Luter.

“We’ve got to learn, someway, somehow, to live together. Yeah, we may have differences about Democrats, Republicans, independents. But the fact is, we’re all Americans and we all live in this country because we love this country.”

Luter and Litton have launched the Unify Project to foster church-based racial reconciliation groups. They’ve developed materials to help start the process, including prayer and discussion guides.

“Just to encourage pastors across this country that if anybody should be unified, it should be the church,” says Luter. “What better opportunity to do that for an Anglo pastor and African American pastor to come together and lead this project?”

Learning from fraught history

“We started with the notorious slave cities, Charleston, South Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, Montgomery, Mobile and New Orleans. Because it’s obvious to us that if God can do that here, he can do it anywhere,” explains Litton.

It’s not lost on them that the Southern Baptist Convention’s roots are as a breakaway sect intended to preserve slavery and a segregated society (something it apologized for in the 1990s).

“You cannot ignore your history,” says Luter. “Shame on the officials, whether it’s politicians, those in seminaries or schools who want us to say, ‘Let’s not even talk about it.’ How can you not talk about it?”

He says learning from history and acknowledging that everyone is a child of God are key to forging a path forward.

“We’ve got to get to the point where we realize you’re my sister. I’m your brother. You’re my brother. Different colors, different backgrounds, different upbringings. But we’ve got to be able to move on.”

In Mobile after nearly a decade of work, pledge group participants say they’ve seen the fruits of their labor. Some churches have diversified congregations, for instance. New multicultural prayer groups are meeting. And predominantly white organizations have begun to recognize Juneteenth and Black History Month.

“Just the fact that we’re standing here together in this city that has been so segregated, it’s made a difference,” says Jenkins, the retired pastor.

Now there are about two dozen groups like this one meeting in Mobile under the umbrella organization Shrink the Divide. Micah Gaston, a white man, leads it along with Shree Shaw Lovett, who is Black.

They’ve hosted occasional citywide gatherings to show political leaders what’s possible when you dig deep on racism.

“My passion is we cannot reconcile race of the skin color,” says Shaw Lovett. “We have to allow God to reconcile that in our hearts. It’s a heart condition.”

There have been setbacks too, with people of both races pushing away from the table, unable to work through ideological differences.

Building intentional relationships

But those who have stayed are undaunted and say the most productive outcome of their work has been new friendships across racial lines.

“When you see a community, not just a community, but really a country that’s fracturing and pulling apart, the only way that that divide can be brought together is by people intentionally choosing to be part of the solution,” says Barry McClean, a businessman and lay leader in his church. “Building relationships with that intention, I think, is what makes a difference.”

Nonprofit leader Marty Carrell says the new relationships she has formed with women of color have been revelatory.

“There’s so many things you hear about if you’re a white person about the Black community,” she says. “And you think, well, why do they act like that? But being at this table gave me a whole view of why those things happened, why the reactions and just things I never thought about.”

Carrell says she’d like to see other races come to the table — from Mobile’s Latino and Asian American communities, for instance.

Christal Johnson Jones is one of the younger members of the pledge group and says she plans to carry the torch forward.

“There’s no other way. We can watch from a distance. We can read articles, we can watch movies, but there’s nothing like hearing it from a person. What is your experience? How can I be more sensitive to you?” Jones says.

Her father, pledge group co-founder Joe Johnson, says if people of faith can’t lead on reconciliation, the foundation of the Gospel, who can?

“This group has helped us to shrink the divide within the body of Christ,” Johnson says. “We cannot be effective in the world until we can let God be God in the church.”

They call themselves the pledge group because they’ve adopted a rallying cry that incorporates Jesus’ commandment to love your neighbor, but also includes a vow to “reject my own tendency to distance myself from those who are different from me.”