On February 23, 2020, a Sunday afternoon, a young man named Ahmaud Arbery was tracked down by three white men with trucks, guns, and a camera. They shot him in the middle of a street in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Brunswick, Georgia. He died; the three men told police he had attacked them, and they fired in self-defense.
Eleven days later, ten miles due north on the other side of Brunswick, I launched my radio show. I was in the studio of Rejoice Radio, 97.5 FM and 94.5 FM, broadcasting to the Golden Isles, including St. Simons Island, Sea Island, Jekyll Island, and the rest of Glynn, County. I had never heard of Ahmaud Arbery and knew nothing about his killing.
My guest that first show was local Rabbi Rachel Bregman, and the next week it was my own pastor, Tony Lankford. Others followed: pastor Brenda Iglehart, mayor Cornell Harvey, and daughter Kate Bringardner.
But by the time local pastor John Perry arrived for a scheduled broadcast, all we could talk about was the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Then and now, Perry is president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and he will be my first guest when I launch a one-year retrospect of the events that flowed out of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery.
The series is called Race, Religion, and Us.
It begins this week, May 6, and will run through the month of May, including May 20, the day before the one-year anniversary of the arrest of two men, both now charged with murder. My guest that day will be local lawyer and former state Senator William Ligon, a key player in the legal and political maneuvering that followed the murder.
It took a long time for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery to gain the attention of the police, the public, and the political authorities in Atlanta. During that time, Breana Taylor was killed in Louisville, Kentucky, by police busting into her apartment in the middle of the night. Then on May 25, a black man birdwatching in Central Park, New York, was accused by a white woman walking her dog of harassing her; she called the police. That same day, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.
The fuse of racial frustration that was lit in Brunswick, Georgia, that burned through Louisville and New York, reached the motherload of suppressed resentment. The subsequent explosion rocked the world.
Here we are, one year later.
I am going to devote four weeks of my radio/television/podcast venture to address these issues. I will focus largely, but not exclusively, on the social, legal, religious, and political aftermath in Glynn County, Georgia. This includes changes in the police and prosecution culture of the county; upheaval in what was then my own congregation on St. Simons Island; efforts to mobilize both the public and the religious leadership to work for progress among the people; and the stunning results of the national elections, for president of the United States and two senators from Georgia.
I hope to frame these local dramas by what is happening in the United States as a whole, including the conversation about racism in America: whether there is systemic racism, and what we mean by that phrase, and how we approach this subject in pulpits, in public schools, and in the wider political discourse.
There is pushback to all of this.
A year ago, in Brunswick, Georgia, the local police and county attorney refused to arrest those who murdered Ahmaud Arbery. A week ago, in the Dallas suburb of Southlake, Texas, white voters rejected by strong margins plans by the local school board to introduce diversity curriculum into the system.
“As goes Southlake, so goes the rest of America,” is the way one commentator put it in the days leading up to the vote.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Beneath all the public rhetoric, things are changing.
My grandson lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was with me Sunday morning when I preached at Providence Baptist Church in Hendersonville. He read the scripture story of the black, gender-bending official from Ethiopia who was baptized by Philip; who, in turn, had been selected to address the racial tension afflicting that first Christian congregation in Jerusalem. Could any text in all the Bible be more relevant to our common life today?
On the drive back to Charlotte, that 12-year-old boy said to me, “I have never gone to a school where one race dominated. In my middle school, we have blacks and whites, Asians and Latinos, Christians and Muslims.” I said, “You don’t know how blessed you are.” I pulled into his cul-de-sac and noticed his neighbors, both black families. “The people in that house,” he said, pointing to the one next to his, “are from South America.”
Did I mention that his other grandfather is a practicing Jew, his other grandmother a Methodist?
Race, religion, and us. I’m going to talk about it in The Meetinghouse for the next few weeks. I dedicate these shows to him, my grandson Sam and all his friends, that the world they inhabit will be less about race and more about love, less about color, exclusion, and fear and more about welcome, friendship, and peace.
(May 2021)
