Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays

By Melinda A. Quivik and Joseph A. Donnella II

This book calls Protestant churches, and the ELCA in particular, to a church-wide conversation about racism. It is a response to the 2019 book Dear Church by Lenny Duncan, a former Lutheran pastor who is Black and who, among other reparations, calls for changing the church's worship in order to address segregated Sundays.

Changes in worship affect theological foundations. Informed consideration is essential.

Because entering into life-changing conversations requires vulnerability and commitment, this book includes several narratives: my life as a White woman and pastor, the history of the Black church as defined by Black theologians, the development of the liturgical renewal movement, and my experiences as a professor navigating worship conflicts as my seminary struggled with financial constraints and a changing student body.

The seminary conflicts offered me a window into how better to address racism inspired by the example of post-WWII German truth-telling and how some US Southern states have come to grips with the history of the Jim Crow South (described in Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans).

This book outlines a way forward for churches in responding to racism by encouraging healthy engagement with contentious relationships as a necessity for healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666792058

Melinda A. Quivik

Melinda Quivik, an ordained ELCA pastor who has served churches in three states, former professor of liturgy and preaching, and past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, is the Editor-in-Chief of Liturgy, a mentor with Backstory Preaching, and a freelance liturgical and homiletical scholar whose books include Serving the Word: Preaching in Worship (2009), Leading Worship Matters (2017), and Remembering God’s Promises: A Funeral Planning Handbook (2018), among other publications.

Book preview

Introduction

I have long appreciated the searing critique of White mainline Protestant churches made by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when in 1963 he has been quoted as saying that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.⁴ This statement points to the church as the locus of fault for segregation. Indeed, a 1964 New York Times article, reporting on President Lyndon Johnson’s call for strong civil rights legislation, laid the blame for racism with the great, white midstream America—i.e., Christian America as it produces and preserves the racial chasm in American society." Kyle Haselden, the article’s author, a prominent Baptist minister who was named editor of The Christian Century in 1964, summarized the history of the churches’ failure to speak to the conscience of the American people.

As early as

1630

, a bare

10

years after the arrival of the first Negro slaves, white Christians condemned the crossing of the racial line as an abuse to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians. While systematized and legalized racial segregation in American secular life did not begin until

1877

, a hundred years earlier there were churches in the United States in which free as well as slave Negroes were isolated from whites in their common worship. In

1795

, the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City, a mixed church including whites and both free and slave Negroes, restricted Negroes to pews in the rear of the church marked B.M. for black members and discriminated against Negroes in baptismal and communion services. The air is full of cliches which remind us that the religious community’s old sin against the Negro remains its current shame. . . . For most American Christians the local church remains the last segregated bastion defending their segregated personal lives from the presence of the Negro. Racial segregation is purposefully built into the site, structure and spirit of these churches. Racial segregation is one of their chief reasons for being. Who will reawaken the consciences of such religious communities?⁵

Segregation violates the very meaning of Jesus’ witness and command that all Christians may be one. No body of Christ should exclude anyone. King was correct in his time, and yet still today, we Christians gather ourselves into our differing liturgical traditions on Sunday mornings. The implication is that we all ought to worship together.

To be clear, here are my convictions:

•Christians ought to worship together.

•Christians need nourishment for faith.

•Worship is a crucial place for nurturing faith because it is where God meets us as the church, in the gathering of the body of Christ to receive God’s word and the meal that feeds us with Christ’s own body and blood.

•Christians see and know God in many different ways which are reflected in the diversity of worship traditions.

•Christians are called to welcome anyone who wants to join in worship.

In Dear Church, the Rev. Lenny Duncan writes of having found the Lutheran theology of salvation so powerful that it took a lost soul to seminary. Dear Church decries the fact that Sunday morning worship in our churches does not reflect the diversity of people in our nation. It calls for renunciation of whiteness in order to live the inclusivity of the gospel and specifies needed changes in worship.⁶ The ELCA and people in other traditions are listening to Rev. Duncan, and that is appropriate. Keenly aware that the ELCA (not alone among mainline denominations) is a very White church, already decades ago we made a commitment to increase diversity in our congregations.⁷ We failed.⁸ The indictment stings. The majority of decision-makers, members, and participants in the ELCA, along with other mainline Protestant denominations, are still predominantly White and wield power conferred on us through our complicity with a culture saturated in racist policies and practices. We White folks breathe it in.

Barbara Holmes, a writer, professor, seminary dean, and president who focuses on African-American spirituality names a failure long ago that has left us all in this situation of racist strife. Despite our best efforts, race remains a difficult issue in North America. Perhaps it’s because our attractions and aversions to one another have seeped so deeply into the culture; perhaps it’s because we did not have the cathartic benefits of a South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after slavery. Whatever the cause, racial wounds continue to fester.⁹ Even without the intended healing formality of a commission such as South Africa created under the wise direction of Bishop Desmond Tutu, we might now still benefit from telling our stories and facing reality.

As a liturgical scholar, I want the ELCA and other churches similarly indicted to continue the conversation about racism and Sunday morning segregation that has been going on since well before the ELCA was created out of German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. We need to admonish any churches that insist that segregation is God’s way and who, for that reason, exclude people. We need to look at the reasons why worship is such a segregated time to understand our different worship ways as resulting from divergent histories and cultures of people. Our differing traditions rest in both theological convictions and practices that become second nature to worshipers. Changing worship requires careful examination of the relationship between worship and culture.

A decade ago, as a professor in a seminary of the ELCA, I taught courses on worship and on preaching and shared responsibility for the seminary’s daily worship. Almost from the first week of my teaching life, instead of being able to engage and teach joyously what I knew, I ran into challenges to my beliefs, my teaching, and my pastoral calling. Critics of the seminary chapel wanted to change the worship symbols, free the scripture readings from the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), employ a Hammond organ to undergird high moments in the service with music as is found in many Black churches, institute less formality, and embrace altar calls, among other things.

When the time came for my promotion review in 2007, my faculty colleagues complained that the worship services I oversaw and my teaching of preaching were too Lutheran. A small but vocal minority of my faculty colleagues also labeled as racist the shape of the liturgy and certain elements in it. They even considered the pattern of worship in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW), the ELCA’s 2006 worship book, to be racist. In broad terms, the pattern of ELW Sunday worship—Gathering, Word, Meal, Sending—is shared by many Christian traditions with its origins in various forms in ancient texts and in biblical descriptions of the assembly.¹⁰ Some of the complaints touched on institutional structures; others, on images that have biblical roots. The allegations charged the chapel, the teaching, and me with racism for several reasons.

•If BIPOC students (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) did not attend worship it meant they were being excluded deliberately.

•Chapel worship planned according to the seasons of the church calendar was considered to be northern European liturgical practice and therefore racist.

•Using the Revised Common Lectionary’s ecumenically appointed readings engendered complaints that the lectionary was created by Europeans and was, therefore, racist.

•The stained-glass windows in the chapel, depicting first-century followers of Jesus as White males, demonstrated that the chapel was racist.

•White albs worn by the ministers and choir members with a hood that hung down the back were associated with Ku Klux Klan robes.¹¹

•Using a hymn from the Lutheran worship book was racist because non-racist worship employed a call-and-response form of singing that didn’t require a book.

•Complaints extended to White worshipers singing a spiritual or gospel hymn as cultural appropriation; no one but those whose experiences gave birth to that music ought to be allowed to sing it. There could be no Balm in Gilead for people whose ancestors had not been enslaved.

Rev. Duncan’s book raises some of the same complaints against worship that confronted me as a professor. The following paragraph sums up his concern.

Paying lip service to Blackness in this church [the ELCA] isn’t enough. What I’m proposing is something much more drastic and holistic. We need to change the fundamental ingredients of Lutheran worship. I don’t mean stepping away from the formula of word and sacrament, but detangling those experiences from the white Eurocentric model we passively except [sic] as church. Over and over again in our music, liturgies, displayed artwork, and language and word choices, we have reinforced the idea that white is holy and Black equals sin.¹²

Along with this description of something more drastic and holistic is an earlier statement by Rev. Duncan that we need to set aside what we think Lutheranism is and instead imagine a future where we allow the many expressions of Lutheranism to bloom and grow unhampered by neglect and systemic oppression. Imagine the harvest we would reap!¹³ I appreciate the fact that this change is not calling for the wholesale elimination of word and sacrament, but there is a lot of room for discussion about what is meant by changing the fundamental ingredients of Lutheran worship and what Rev. Duncan means by a Lutheranism that should be set aside.

Rather than watching the church’s responses to (or avoidance of) these charges unfold from a safe distance, I decided to address the complaints, hoping to foster a discussion about worship. This will entail looking at the history of worship practices and the theological implications to explore why Christians in the United States are still largely worshiping in segregated communities. The deliberation I longed for at the seminary did not happen. Instead, the community coalesced around the thesis that racism is a problem that emanates from the community’s worship and that can be solved by changing how we worship.

My alternative thesis: racism undergirds our entire society and finds expression in ways of which predominantly White churches are unaware. There is no question that the worship of some communities of Christians—past and present—has and still does signal acceptance of segregation. Worshipping assemblies that preach welcome and equality to all people can and do differ in pattern and specific ingredients (to use Rev. Duncan’s term) and all of these are worthy and needed. Addressing segregated Sundays, however, cannot be achieved by melding divergent starting-points and resulting patterns in order to meet the needs of all people at once. Neither can the answer to segregated Sundays be dictated by one tradition (or part of a tradition) while dismissing others.

In addition, the ELCA would be best positioned to respond appropriately to charges of its own racism in worship by hearing both how critics like Rev. Duncan perceive it and how liturgical scholars since the Second Vatican Council have come to understand worship. That latter voice has contributed in fundamental and expansive ways to the shape and substance of the pattern of worship in ELW and in the patterns of the holiness traditions. While liturgical scholarship is not univocal on the fundamental ingredients of worship (for example, some advocate weekly communion while others do not), lively debate ensues over the fundamental starting-point of worship and the resulting over-arching tone. By that I mean that feminist and Womanist theologies argue that worship should start with the experiences of women and, for Womanists, Black women in particular. The starting-point for second-century worship as practiced in ELCA seminaries for a very long time had been scripture and tradition.

Like Rev. Duncan’s experience with Lutheran theology as manifested in worship, it was the worship of the church that drew me back into faith in my thirties and catapulted me to seminary to explore my theological questions and become an ordained pastor. Rev. Duncan writes about the baptism of a trans person, saying to the ELCA, You resurrected a Jesus I thought was long dead in my life. You put words to an experience I have been having my whole life long.¹⁴ In my experience, too, worship articulated an astonishing openness about faith that I found magnetic and, for that reason, healing. God, in Christ, gave me faith; I didn’t have to decide in favor of Jesus. I did not have to conjure up what was too mysterious to be grasped.

I ask the ELCA and our siblings in the faith: Let us look in detail at the complaints about racism in our church that Rev. Duncan has laid out so that our churches can respond in a meaningful way.

We are called through baptism to teach the Holy Scriptures, to teach the world about the power of prayer. We have confessed the Apostle’s Creed, and now it’s time to renounce the devil. Now is the time to renounce the forces that oppose God and defy grace. We need to stand up.

This may mean public repentance. This may mean that straight white men remove themselves from ecclesial ballots for bishop. This may mean that we divert funds to support Black churches and leaders indefinitely. This may mean our seminaries offer free tuition to any African-descent leader who wants to serve in any rostered or non-rostered position in the church. This may mean that we make sure Black voices are at the table for our next Evangelical Lutheran Worship and aren’t relegated to a separate book. This may mean that Advent is no longer about a journey from darkness to light. This may mean that white paraments no longer represent resurrection. This may mean that your next capital campaign is to remove white Jesus from your stained glass. This may mean that our seminaries have to guarantee at least

30

percent faculty of color. This may mean you should join the African Descent Lutheran Association. This may mean that you go to your pastor and say you want to hear about slain unarmed black men in the sermon. This may mean that you are going to be really uncomfortable. But white discomfort is not worse than experiencing racism as a black person. This may mean that you will have to hold this church accountable to its own belief that racism is a sin.¹⁵

The fact that some of what Rev. Duncan draws to our attention here is not about worship itself shows the deep pain experienced by people who have felt excluded and dishonored. Reference to relegating to a separate book refers to the publication of the ELCA’s hymnal dedicated to the Black church, This Far by Faith.¹⁶ Rev. Duncan sees that in a negative light. At the time it was spurred by a 1990 request by African American Lutherans in the LCMS meant to make available a wider range of songs and prayers. Today doing that sort of hymnal may need more discussion. Suggestions that call for encouraging non-White ecclesial leaders, for financial support (reparations) for Black churches and leaders, and for Whites to venture toward what is uncomfortable need to be taken seriously. My hope is that we can learn from these critiques by speaking from the heart as Rev. Duncan does.

To face the question of whether or how the ELCA is racist, I suggest in chapter 1 a model for our soul-searching based in the book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by philosopher Susan Neiman. Her research compares Germany’s acknowledgment of its Nazi past with how the United States has responded to its history of slavery.¹⁷ In order for Germans to face the legacy of the Holocaust, they have taken on the task of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which means working-off-the-past. I ask churches to live up to the fruitful self-examination that Germans have undertaken (never perfectly or finally) and that a number of communities in the American South have done by educating and advocating for civil rights through their museums and other educational venues.

Chapter 2 explains how a White woman from the Midwest—who rejected the church for some years because of its silence on civil rights, liberation, and peace, and became an ordained ELCA pastor and a PhD in liturgical and homiletical studies—is now calling for a sober and learned church-wide discussion on racism. Rev. Duncan’s life story, as told in Dear Church, is vital to understanding Black critique. I likewise offer some of my story here in the spirit of giving context to my views.

Chapter 3 explains how, as a pastor, I saw the absolute centrality of worship to both individual and corporate faith and the need to stand on carefully considered theological bedrock for the sake of the congregation. It also describes why I felt a need to dive deeply into the scholarship on liturgy and homiletics in order to determine which of the cultures’ many voices concerning worship were worthy and which needed to be ignored for failing to promote values in keeping with Christ.

Chapter 4 walks quickly through scholarship that since at least the fourth century has shown that liturgical structure forms faith. My study—and subsequent teaching—of worship included the history and theology of worship and ritual studies by combing ancient texts that displayed both variety and commonality, while also weighing the demands of a postmodern vision. Core to my convictions is that worship is enacted theology. Many practices exist for gathering in the name of God in order to be nourished in faith. None of them is to be dismissed. No one way of worship addresses the needs of every worshiper.

Chapter 5 looks at how Black liturgical scholars, historians, and homileticians define the Black church, showing numerous and diverse views. The Holy Spirit’s centrality, the role of music in building emotion, and the importance of an experience of God’s presence link the Black church with Pentecostals and Contemporary worship.

Chapter 6 discusses what I am calling the second-century pattern of worship that was followed by the seminary where I studied and taught and is found among Roman Catholics and many mainline Protestants. (I recognize that some readers will object that this was the worship pattern of colonizers and enslavers. I’ll note that it was also the worship pattern of some of the abolitionists and anti-colonizers like the Roman Catholic priest Bartholomé de las Casas. The problem is with segregationists, not with the worship pattern. Maybe we need to disentangle the worship pattern from the actual behavior of individuals and communities.) Liturgical traditions differ based on what the practices have instilled and how they relate to a tradition’s theological underpinnings. Much richness exists in recent research in the ELCA and documents produced from laying out principles for worship.

Chapter 7 describes some of the specific instances that fueled the seminary worship controversies. I faced an institution that had changed dramatically from the time when I studied there as a Master of Divinity (MDiv) student. For economic, technological, and social reasons, the ELCA has been experiencing a vastly changed landscape in the training of church leaders and pastors—as are seminaries in nearly every denomination. The diminished and demeaned role of the church in society has burdened all Christians with the problem of maintaining theological integrity in the face of shifting values, and this has had huge implications for worship. Change in worship has come as well from those who, abused by church and society for centuries, challenge injustice, authority, expertise, and expectations as articulated by Rev. Duncan.

Chapter 8 zeroes in on the culmination of failed opportunities at a seminary to learn how to live together as different worshiping traditions. By describing what did not happen there to come to conclusions that can result from facilitated discussions, I hope to show a path for all churches that grapple with the segregation of Sunday mornings. No one perspective is the only reasoned view but together we may find a way forward.

Finally, chapter 9 lays out the issues that could be included in church-wide discussions of racism and worship. If our second-century worship pattern (based in Justin Martyr’s description of worship in ca. 150 CE) is racist, I do not know how. I am asking to learn. I did not learn it from Rev. Duncan’s book or others, despite the fact that the request in Dear Church for changes that would address racism included altering worship.¹⁸ I hope readers will welcome this invitation to do the communal work of examining the charge that traditional worship is racist.¹⁹ I invite Christians to look at what we have become and what we desire for the future.

This book is, however, not meant to be a comprehensive description of the histories of all liturgical or all cultural influences. I am responding to Rev. Duncan’s book as a catalyst for a larger conversation. I want to encourage readers to introduce into the conversation voices additional to those I have relied upon. That exchange teaches everyone, and I welcome it. Worship has many facets: arrangement of space, language, music, preaching, silence, tone, and more—all determined by whose authority holds sway. My focus is on the structure of worship and especially on the starting-point, the bedrock (which is also the aim), on which decisions about worship are determined for the purposes desired.

Regarding how to conduct a fruitful discussion, I am reminded of the rules I learned in the 1990s about interfaith discussion when I participated in the National Conference of Christians and Jews’ Seminarians Interacting program that brought together mainline Protestants, evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Jews.²⁰ When we met at different seminaries for two days twice each year for two years, we attended worship together in the traditions from which we had come, and we discussed what we saw and wondered about. The rules were simple: Ask any question you want. You are not required to answer, but if you do, be honest. Do not define others. These rules would well serve discussion on worship.

4

. Price, Eleven O’Clock on Sundays.

5

. Price, Eleven O’Clock on Sundays,

9

,

27

.

6

. Duncan, Dear Church,

66–67.

7

. "Historically, American Lutheranism saw immigrants from other cultures struggling to maintain the best of their cultural heritage. More recently, Lutherans have recognized that faithful proclamation of the gospel and witness for justice requires that Lutherans respect and learn from other cultures. This church, at its Constituting Convention in

1988

, adopted the goal, ‘that within

10

years of its establishment its membership shall include at least

10

% people of color and/or primary language other than English. ELCA, Freed in Christ,"

5

.

8

. "Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (a mainline denomination), the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (an evangelical denomination) and The United Methodist Church (the largest mainline church) are all more than

90

percent White. Meanwhile, two of the largest historically Black Protestant denominations, the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, have almost exclusively Black members. According to the study, Seventh-day Adventists, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witness, and Buddhists are the most diverse in that they are the closest to approaching equal shares of each of the five racial and ethnic groups (

20

percent each). The least diverse are the National Baptist Convention, ELCA, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, African Methodist Episcopal, United Methodists, and Hindus. Lipka, Most and Least Racially Diverse," paras.

10

,

3

, fig.

1

.

9

. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos,

29

.

10

. ELW,

91

–

93

.

11

. The very name of the Ku Klux Klan is meant to impart terror. Historians have surmised the name has roots in the Greek kyklos, circle. It is a familiar word for Southern organizations. The alliterative word klan was added to kyklos. It is a circle of like-minded people. Horn, Invisible Empire.

12

. Duncan, Dear Church,

66

–

67

.

13

. Duncan, Dear Church,

35

.

14

. Duncan, Dear Church,

119

.

15

. Duncan, Dear Church,

22

–

23

.

16

. ELCA, This Far by Faith.

17

. Neiman, Learning from the Germans.

18

. Connelly, Good White Racist?

19

. The terms traditional and contemporary for worship are too vague to be useful, and I attempt to avoid them in this book. All current worship is happening in contemporary time and traditional has acquired (through no fault of its own) a negative sense of being stuffy and boring or euro-centric and therefore racist. I use the word traditional in this sentence because it is a common designation that has been part of the critique.

20

. By evangelical here I mean those Christian communities that come out of holiness traditions (Frontier Revival and Pentecostal) for whom the center is the Holy Spirit. In Greek, evangelical means good news. The ELCA uses the word evangelical in its Greek meaning of good news and not as Ralph Reed or Franklin Graham would use it to refer to their brand of religious conservatism.

1

Working on the Problem

The people spoke against God and against Moses, Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food. Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us. So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live. So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

—Numbers 21:5–9

I arrived at a way to suggest moving away from blame about racial division toward healing as a result of a journey in November 2019. At the suggestion of my husband Fred—a historian of technology, expert witness in Superfund litigation, and a man with deep faith commitments—we set out on vacation for two weeks, driving from Minnesota to visit sites associated with the Civil Rights Movement. In Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee we found places of protest and museums devoted to the conditions that drove the movement for civil rights; homes of crucial figures in the cause; churches where meetings were held, where bombs exploded, and where children were killed; the bridge in Selma where police beat marchers; sites where Blacks and Whites together suffered at lunch counters and on buses; and where music responds to pain in the jazz of New Orleans and the blues of Memphis. We went to look at the serpent that kills in order to look at the truth that heals.

Every museum covered the mostly familiar story of injustice in America from the 1619 arrival of slave ships to the 1808 ending of the transatlantic slave trade, the continued domestic slave trade that ignored human rights in favor of economic gain for cotton and sugarcane growers, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the ensuing Southern battle against Reconstruction when Union troops occupied the southern states as the United States sought to establish a society of equal rights in southern states, President Rutherford B. Hayes’ removal of the troops that gave rise to the Jim Crow laws against Blacks having any agency or freedom, and the pivotal events of the mid-twentieth century that gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement. Each museum had a slightly different emphasis, but all contained excellent and sweeping recountings of both the story and the plight of individuals, organizations, and communities who made it happen.¹

Learning from the Serpent that Heals

Our pilgrimage began past the cornfields of Iowa and then the cotton fields of Louisiana (where 50 percent of both crops had not been harvested because the fields were too wet—a loss due to climate change). While one of us drove, the other read aloud from Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil which compares the hard work Germans have done in recent decades—coming to grips with the fact that the Nazi period is part of its history—with states in the Deep South that have examined the histories of their institutions of slavery and Jim Crow. Prof. Susan Neiman has a distinctive vantage point as a White American Jew who grew up in the South and now lives in Berlin where she teaches philosophy. Because it reads like a novel, it was entirely approachable and kept even the driver riveted.

I have been made aware of how off-putting it may seem to suggest that Germans might serve to encourage a conversation about racism in the United States. For one thing, the zeitgeist of our era turns away from Europe in an effort to combat the negative impacts of colonialism. For another, given the Nazi attrocities, people may well ask what the Germans have to offer toward healing between groups of people? Certainly the German government’s response to Jesse Owens’s Olympic track and field triumph is suspect. As sports writer Larry Schwartz wrote at that time, In one week in the summer of 1936, on the sacred soil of the Fatherland . . . the African American son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves had single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.² This was not a welcome outcome, and Hitler turned his back when Owens was presented with the four gold medals he won, breaking five world records. German officials complained that Americans were relying on inferior and non-human athletes, but as Schwartz described it, the German people felt otherwise. Crowds of 110,000 cheered him in Berlin’s glittering Olympic stadium’ and sought his autograph or picture in the streets. Advice given to Owens by German long-jumper Luz Long helped Owens win. ‘It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler,’ Owens said. ‘Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace.’ Yet, when Owens came home and was invited to attend a reception honoring the Olympic athletes at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, he was not allowed to enter the front doors; he had to ride the freight elevator. And Pres. Roosevelt did not invite him to the White House.³

Any conversation that means to tackle racism has to acknowledge the whole truth: the people we expect to act in accord with their unreasoned contempt for others will do so, and those we might expect to be just as hateful may not be. Hitler would not shake Owens’s hand; the German people celebrated Owens.

Enough German people, in fact, have taken a hard look at