Man to Match God's Mountain: Autobiography of Acen Phillips

By Bishop Acen Phillips

Man to Match God’s Mountain is a written self-portrait that takes an inside look into the challenges and emotions of a man who was determined to follow a structure-bound destiny to reach the height of God’s potential in his life. We are privileged to share the vision God has deposited in his predestined path. We are created with a design to live on level plains but the fall of Adam invokes a disruption in the cosmos and we are challenged to live in the ebb and flow of mountains and valleys. On each side of our valley is a mountain. Our earthbound journey lead us from mountain (Calvary) to mountain (Zion) through the valley of the shadow of death. Our blessing is always wrapped inside of our burden (2 Cor. 4:7). The more intense the darkness of the burden, the more excellent the bright propensity of the light. When we surrender our will to the will of God and allow Him to own our life and give us as ambassadors to become co-laborers together with Him in His ministry of reconciliation, we all become men to match God’s mountain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639033478

Book preview

1

From Hillhouse to The White House

Iwas born on May 10, 1935, in Hillhouse, Mississippi, to the union of Lee T. and Ernestine Phillips.

Hillhouse was a cooperative plantation owned Mr. John on which families sharecropped.

Sharecropping is a step removed from slavery where large White plantation owners took unfair advantage of the disenfranchised, economically depressed, and deprived families who searched for hope during despair.

The concept spread across the cottonfields of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama and extended the legacy of slavery decades past the Emancipation Proclamation, which was designed to free blacks from the embodiment of slavery.

Slavery is a mind cybernetic, which controls and imprisons us with laws without physical prison bars.

It is an awesome institution developed by the psycho-cybernetic syndrome of the white psychic.

This mind syndrome declares the inability of the Black mentality to coordinate and assemble economic resources to establish and process freedom from poverty.

Institutionalized racism is a slavery mind syndrome designed to prevent our deliverance from a socioeconomic class system predetermined by the pigmentation of a person’s skin preparation.

Slavery was never about color but about economics. Color was merely the methodology of how to manage the misery of the masses. It was easy to distinguish the black slaves by color. White slaves required more specificity in management identity.

Society specializes in managing misery for profit. We design programmatic systems to profit by capitalizing on the misfortunes of those who have been disenfranchised. Our morality is adjusted when we discover how to legalize negative systems that deprive society of values.

We lived through years of prohibition against the sale and use of alcohol as a beverage until we developed a process to tax the sales. We repeated the process with the current sales of marijuana. We have adjusted to the coexistence of poverty and plenty as we institutionalize homelessness. We have extended the process of slavery through the recidivism of ex-offenders who have been incarcerated.

Society must design a system of politics and law enforcement supported by an economic structure that will perpetually educate the populous to endorse and spiritual sanction the process of racism as an institution.

Institutions are created and sustained by the law of supply and demand. The life and legacy of an institution depends on its ability to be fruitful, multiply, replenish, and subdue its position in society.

The influence, viability, and effectiveness of an institution depends on the clarity of its vision. The understanding of its mission and the portability of its marketing.

In the five formats of society, racism operates as an institution.

The faith community: pastor = thumb

The family: parent = index finger pointer

The school: principal = middle forefinger

The law enforcement: policeman = ring finger

The lawmakers: politician = little pinky finger

We have been structured in a mental syndrome to believe there is something wrong with being born black.

Religion, not Christianity, has been used to indent the fact of racial prejudice and enhance economic discrimination.

Legislation has given us the right to vote, the right to equal education under the law, the right to equal access in transportation and public accommodation.

Economic development and economic empowerment is necessary for us to acquire and possess the ability to exercise the rights and privileges that legislation has produced.

We remain impoverished and imprisoned when we adapt the premise projected by the dominate White psychic system that continues to reinforce in every phase of our lives that there is something negative about being born black.

Some religious beliefs would have us believe that God by accident or by design left us in the oven too long and our minds were inundated with less than the ability to function on a norm as is expected of other homo sapiens.

The word of God totally rejects all attempts at racism. God was at His best when He made all of humanity. Black people have been making positive contribution to the societal system since the beginning of time.

The record of high-level development of civilizational systems are analogue from the banks of the Nile to the twentieth century challenge of Jesse Jackson for president and the election of Barrack Obama as the first Black man to serve as president of the United States of America.

Born in the mega of the aftermath of slavery and bred in the era of separate but equal controlled systems of education. I am the product of a misguided genesis that caused a personality ambiguity in my development.

I witnessed as a child the harsher reality of racism in Clarksdale, Mississippi, when the KKK dragged my uncle behind a pickup truck tarred and feathered through the streets.

Thirty years later, Emmet Till was hanged in Mississippi for looking scantly at a white woman.

In 2020, we are yet reminded of the reality that whatever challenges America impacts the Black community more intensely.

The mandate of the message from Apostle Paul reminds us we must always press through our pain to reach our power. We press toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God, which can only be ascertained in the Man, Christ Jesus.

I remember as a young child in Mound Bayou going with my father to chop and pick cotton. I was four years old; my father had made a special little sack for me.

I watched Black sharecropping families picking cotton in family groups; it looked like a magical experience. Some would pick one row at a time with the cotton sack on the right or left side; others had mastered the art of cotton picking, and they picked with both hands from two different rows as they walked through the middle. The minimum requirement was for one hundred pounds per day per family member. I struggled to pick twenty-five pounds.

Chopping cotton was never quite understood. The process required that you chop the weeds from around the cotton to allow the cotton to breath and grow. It was a process of pruning.

When I went to the fields using the best of my childlike understanding, I did what the process said, I chopped the cotton. I was fired for chopping down the cotton and allowing the weeds to grow. My father then made me the water boy.

My job was to bring water to the field to refresh the workers and allow them to continue their work without interruption. I was too short, and by the time I arrived with the water, dust was all in the water. I sat down and cried because I felt inadequate to be of any value as a part of the family business; but my father comforted, encouraged, and explained to me I did have value.

I was a whole part of our family; my role as water boy was most significant. If they had no water, they could not work and produce the quality and the quantity of cotton required.

He explained that as water boy, I could take credit for my portion of delivering every pound of cotton we picked and every row of cotton we chopped. I still cried and said to my father; the water is filled with dirt, and they cannot be refreshed drinking this dirty water. My father continued to encourage me; he said, Son, your work is not in vain. Be still, set your water bucket down, and wait on God.

I obeyed my father; I sat the water bucket down and waited. In my waiting, I watched God’s process of separating the good from the bad as the dust settled to the bottom of the bucket and the purity of the water rose to the top.

The scripture came to life from Isaiah 40: They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall rise on eagle wings; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

My father explained that as water boy, I was a whole part, but as his son, I was part of a whole family.

I served my now-purified water with pride because I was Lee T. Phillips’s son.

I went running through the fields, crying out, Water boy, water boy, water boy!

I was challenged to achieve. I was led to believe that I could overcome my position of poverty and enter the economic mainstream of the American way.

I was led to believe that my problem was the lack of education.

I was told that it was the illiteracy of Blacks that White people rejected. I accepted the challenge and I trained my mind.

I graduated from Sumner High School in Kansas City, Kansas. I am the product of a totally segregated school system; we used leftover books from white schools. I entered Kansas City Junior College in the fall of 1952. This was my first experience in an integrated learning system. I discovered quickly that there was nothing inferior about my mind, that God was at His best when He made me. I excelled in all my classes and became a leader in my class and in the total school community.

I shall never forget the incident in my chemistry class when students were copying my experiment following in my footsteps, point by point, when I made an error in the composition and my experiment blew up and like popcorn in an open furnace; one by one, other white students’ projects began to blow up in sequence.

I encountered my first great challenge during my last year in high school.

I engaged in a premarital sex relationship with my then special girlfriend an impregnated her with my first son Acen Lee Phillips Jr.

According to the rules of that generation, you were required to drop out of school, by law and by family standards. Without question or dialogue, it was understood that you must marry the girl.

I had been privileged to start school early at the age of three in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where my mother, Ernestine Phillips, was the teacher. I was always proceeding ahead of my chronological age in my psychological and sociological development.

I was fifteen years old, in my last year of high school when I suddenly became a father and a husband to my thirteen-year-old wife, Effie Stein, and our son, Acen Jr.

Through special arrangements, by my parents and the superintendent of schools, I could remain in Sumner High School and graduate with my class.

I was also responsible to become the provider for my household. I secured a full-time job working from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am at a local dairy company. Work had always been a part of my orientation, so this was not a new experience for me. From as early as I can remember, my father had always taught us good work ethics.

As a young child, I worked with my older brother Ernest, first chopping and picking cotton in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and then pulling a wagon to deliver papers, setting pins in a bowling alley, and selling ice cream from a pushcart.

My dad was always there to help us with the paper route on a cold snowy morning or to assist us when we were pushing the iron-wheeled wagon from Sunken Galambos steel plant, where my dad worked. We hauled the used, greasy, nail-infested lumber from the steel plant to renovate and remodel the little three-room shanty at 333 Nebraska Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, into a fourteen-room home.

Our dad, Lee T. Phillips, had left the plantation in Mound Bayou with haste in the middle of the night and moved us to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to live with our grandparents, Ernest and Clara Strong, whom we affectionately called Big Mama and Papa.

Papa Strong had a lovely home in the Friese-Point community of Clarksdale, Mississippi.