Black History Month—A Life Saver
Listen: “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday
On January 25, 2009, I woke up in my nice suburban home in a mostly white neighborhood. I went outside to pick up The Kansas City Star, which was thrown on my driveway every morning by the person who delivered papers in my neighborhood. (I was still supporting a dying artifact of Americana by reading a printed paper.) I made my morning coffee and opened my paper to read the news from the day before. An article written by Tony Rizzo jumped out at me entitled: “Murder Factory.”
The article reported on a zip code in Kansas City, Missouri which was the home to 101 convicted murderers incarcerated in Missouri prisons, far surpassing any other county in the state of Missouri. The zip code was a twenty minute drive from my house and church. At the time I was pastoring one of the fastest-growing churches in America, which I had planted in 1990 (Vineyard Church). As a church, we had partnered with urban core ministries, and I had a few relationships with black pastors in Kansas City like Pastor Charles Briscoe of Paseo Baptist Church.
I couldn’t get the article out of my mind. For days it kept resurfacing in my thoughts. “This is our city,” I was thinking, “Is there anything we can do to partner and come along side existing churches and projects in the core of Kansas City?” I started praying and thinking about the potential of partnering with churches in or around the zip code in order to build some relationships and do some good together.
In 2009, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II, who was our former city mayor, was launching a large urban renewal project called “Green Impact Zone.” After much reflection, I got in contact with Anita Maltbia, whom Cleaver had recruited to be the Director of the Green Impact Zone. She was excited to have a church partner from the suburbs, and she encouraged me to contact a few pastors from the core, like Pastor Michael Brooks (Zion Grove Baptist Church, now The Oasis Church International) and Pastor John Brooks (Macedonia Baptist Church).
These pastors remain friends to this day, and both of them have been crucial to my education of the black church and black experience in America. I had so much to learn, especially considering that my ordination and education was with the Southern Baptist denomination (BA from Baylor, MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary). We spoke in each other’s churches, doing community service projects, Juneteenth, and MLK events. I am forever grateful for the friendships and partnerships that were created during this time in my life.
I never imagined that these relationships might one day help save my own life, but they did.
In 2019, I went through a personal crisis which resulted in the loss of my church, my pastoral career, my marriage, my home, and my faith, which felt shattered. The darkness of that experience caused passive suicidal ideation and questioning of everything I had ever believed. Even though I didn’t feel like attending church, I started attending Pastor John Brooks’ church (Macedonia Baptist, which was my home for over a year). I was one of maybe four or five white people attending a church of 1,500 people.
Every Sunday morning, I would sing black gospel for an hour led by Tim Robinson. The music was sobering as it highlighted the struggles of the black experience in America—slavery, darkness, bondage, chains, segregation, persecution, and lynching—alongside themes of hope, justice, mercy, grace, gospel, and freedom—an American Exodus story.
In February of 2020, before COVID shut everything down, I went through Black History Month in a historically black church as a white man from the white suburbs struggling with my own deep darkness. We sang the Black National Anthem weekly entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson. I had heard the song a few times but never focused on the words. The song speaks of the dark struggle for freedom from slavery, but it also speaks of the gospel of freedom. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I sang this song with my faith family. There’s no comparison to my self-imposed darkness with the journey of the 400-year struggle of the black church in America, but the song broke me open and gave me hope at the same time. I survived the dark prison of my own emotions, in part, because of this experience:
Lift every voice and sing‘
Til earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling seas
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has brought us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on ‘till victory is won
Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
‘Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand, True to our God, True to our native land.
May we never forget or rewrite our American history. And may we find hope in our shared vision of democracy and freedom for all. We need each other.
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2025
