How Sad

The spring of 1970 found Ruth, the boys, and I living in Southern California.  I had signed a contract to teach in Orange County.  Having nothing to do until school started, I was hunting a summer job.

Somehow, I found out about a prospect in one of the suburbs of Los Angeles, called Compton.

Compton is the city that is next to Watts.  Watts may bring back some memories in that is where some folks experienced deadly riots where whole blocks were burned to the ground and things got out of hand for a while back in the sixties.

Well, Compton had been experiencing a color shift in what we would call demographics.  The white folks moved out and the black folks moved in.  Now, here is where the problem lies.  While the white folks moved out into white neighborhoods, they continued to attend their old churches in their former neighborhoods, in other words they wouldn’t let go.

Here was the plan, and of course we have heard the phrase, “The best laid plans of mice and men often seem to be the toys of fate.”

Let’s see how this thing unfolds and how Ruth and Jim and the boys fit into the plan.  The plan was to somehow incorporate the black neighbors into the local church.  “Let’s have a summer program to bring the black kids into the church and maybe we will get some of the parents.”  Great idea.  This is where Ruth and Jim come in.  “Jim, you organize a summer program, and bring them in. 

Well, I sucked in the bait and went for it.  I met with the local pastor and he was all for it, a few of the members that I met seemed to be for it as well.  Let’s go. 

The church had a beautiful facility.  It had once had a school program and there were several classrooms as well as a full sized gymnasium.  Great.

I contacted several churches, white churches, and they agreed to send me several teenagers each week to help with the program. Ruth would be in charge of the classrooms with a multitude of programs and I was in charge of the gymnasium with a basketball program. Now there were about 6 or 8 churches in this program and we were to play each other’s basketball teams as part of the summer program. 

We were also allotted a large bus so every Friday would be a field trip day.  We went to the Los Angeles zoo, the airport, the aquarium, and of course the beach, among other interesting places.  I still remember going to a nice beach in Redondo Beach.  All white folks lounging on the beach when this big bus pulls up and deposits 50 or 60 black kids on its nice white beach.  Well, needless to say, within only a few short minutes we had the beach to ourselves.  You can imagine the looks on those white folks faces where they walked by and saw Ruth lying on a blanket and about a dozen little black kids crawling all over her, like flies on a white handkerchief.

Things were going smoothly for the first few weeks of the program.  We had lots and lots of kids.  Actually too smoothly.  Right in the middle of the program the pastor decided he needed to take a vacation, “only two weeks,” he said, “you can handle things Jim.”  Yeah, right. 

It only took a couple of days for things to come unglued.  All of the hostility that had been building up over the first few weeks broke loose.  It only took a handful of women, it usually does, and they told us in no uncertain terms what they thought of those black kids messing up their nice clean church building.  A couple of the glasses were broken in the kitchen and a few other things got scuffed up a bit.  Those two weeks were about the longest two weeks of our lives.  By the time the pastor returned any progress that we had made making inroads with the local people was destroyed. As I remember, one mother and her 10-year-old son had started coming to church through the summer, but I think that they saw the error of their ways and hightailed it out before the end of the summer.

The summer was an expensive one for us because Ruth had a miscarriage near the end of the summer.  There went the shot at the little girl that we were wanting, part of the casualty list from the fall out of the “best laid plans of mice and men.”

We sometimes only get one chance at an opportunity.  Our hearts and the hearts of the many teenagers who helped us were in the right place, but we needed all of the ducks to be lined up in a row to make it work.

Ruth and I love those black folks, but those white folks really didn’t want them coming round and messing things up for their nice little white church.

I think that we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions;

How do we really feel about our lost brothers and sisters?

What eternal ramifications do our attitudes toward the lost have?

Here is the big one. Will we be held accountable for our attitudes toward the lost?