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Comments: This is the book that SPU students and faculty (and friends) were given to read this year, as part of their annual let's-read-it-together program. The setting is the American civil rights movement of the 1960's, and it's in autobiographical form, starting with Perkins' descriptions of his growing-up years in Mississippi. This part is pretty graphic - the abject poverty, the brutal racism, the lack of hope or opportunity, and the constant reminders that you're something less than human. As a friend of mine used to say, it's enough to turn you into a liberal.
As the story goes on, Perkins manages to escape his boyhood environment, and ends up on the West Coast, where he begins to make a life for himself. However, during that time he experiences a growing conviction that this is not where he's supposed to be. Ultimately, he packs up and moves with his family back to Mississippi, where he founds Voice of Calvary ministries to begin fighting the root causes trapping African Americans at the bottom of the social heap: poverty, poor healthcare, lack of education, poor access to jobs, etc.
Perkins was not about politics -- he wasn't a lobbyist, didn't run for office and wasn't looking to the government for solutions. Rather, his organization worked directly with people - providing education, healthcare, job training, leadership development and support for basic needs - the kinds of things that ultimately help people help themselves.Helping people take responsibility for themselves - he must have been the darling of conservatives, right? Sadly, not at all. A recurring theme in the book is Perkins' puzzlement and hurt over how little support there was from the conservatives during those years - notably the churches. Frankly, I remember that well - not outright racism, just a feeling that things couldn't possibly be as bad as we were reading in the papers. After all, we had the right laws in place to ensure equality, governments who were dedicated to enforcing them fairly, and police who were always on the side of goodness and justice. Didn't we? So why were these guys being such rabble rousers? If they didn't like living in Mississippi, why didn't they just move? After all, this is the land of opportunity. And so on and on.
It would be another 10 years until the American evangelical church would get comfortable speaking out on social issues, and even then it would be limited to issues that could be boiled down to simple black and white. Abortion: bad. Prayer in schools: good. Those we could thump our chests about all day long, and it made us feel like real Christians. But we struggled (and still do) with complex issues such as affirmative action,, busing and equality of opportunity. These were (and are) hard issues without easy answers, and I think we just tended to stay on the sidelines.
Anyway, this is an very good book about an important player in one of the more important eras of our recent history. If you grew up in the 60's, the setting will be very familiar, and will perhaps have you thinking about how far we've come since then, and whether it's far enough yet.
