Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Broadway Baptist Church
Third Sunday of Advent
December 11, 2011
Brent Beasley

“We know that not to believe it would be to live in that cold, joyless place where it is always winter but never Christmas.”

Young William—or “Trey” as his family called him—was a bit of an under-achiever. He enjoyed being the class clown in school and being a bit of a goof-off.

It got to a point where eventually Trey’s parents felt it necessary to send him off to a private school that would provide a more strict and structured environment for him. They sent him to a psychiatrist for a while to help him better understand how to focus his concentration so that he would work harder.

When Trey was 13 he met a friend who had similar interests. As these two kind of “nerdy” guys grew older, they went off to college but quit after a couple of years to form their own company.

They had some interesting ideas and a little money—about $15,000. But Trey made the right business decisions with his first simple product, and received the attention of a business giant, which paid him to develop something they needed.

He did so successfully and then continued to build on his successes. About 10 years later at the age of 35, he became the youngest person in America ever to reach billionaire status. Now in his mid 50’s, he is the richest individual in the entire world with a net worth of 56 billion dollars.

For young Trey (or William H. Gates III or BGIII or Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft) it didn’t start off so promising. And yet, his story is one of a reversal of fortune.

Just the kind of story we enjoy hearing, isn’t it? We like to read books and watch movies about people who in some way or another, either through hard work or just dumb luck, have their lives turned around. We love these rags to riches tales, and countless rags to riches books and movies have been big sellers. Cinderella stories, we sometimes call them. We like stories about a reversal of fortune. (more…)

By Alan Bean

Friends of Justice is on the road again.  Thus far we’ve held sit-down meetings with folks in Waco and Houston, Texas, and the Louisiana towns of Crowley, Lafayette and New Orleans.  The agenda is broad.  Over the next year we plan to engage every advocacy organization in TX, LA and MS working on indigent defense, juvenile justice and immigrant rights issues.  The long-range goal is to create a collaborative platform that makes it possible for a number of diverse groups to participate in a single narrative campaign.  The big goal is to allow advocacy organizations to pursue their distinct (and limited) agendas while addressing the larger issue of mass incarceration.  

At this point, we’re mostly listening.  We want to learn more about how our natural allies see the world, what worries and excites them, and how they feel about working with organizations that focus on a different piece of the mass incarceration pie. 

While Melanie Wilmoth and I are on the road we’re also spending time with the families of Jace Washington and Kelvin Kaigler, two young men from Slidell, Louisiana who, in unrelated cases, were framed by jailhouse snitches. 

On Friday, we will be visiting with Ramsey Muniz, an icon in the Texas Latino community who is serving a life sentence for a crime he did not commit.  Over the past few months we have been working through all the legal documents related to this bizarre case and will soon be releasing a narrative summary. 

While we’re on the road, three families with heart breaking stories have reached out to us.  The patterns are familiar.  Little or no investigation.  Over-investment in snitch testimony.  Overworked defense counsel.  Prosecutorial tunnel vision.  In virtually every case, legal remedies have been exhausted, but the power of story in inexhaustible. 

We spend a lot of time with the affected community for a number of very practical reasons, but brushing up against the human consequences of mass incarceration heads the list.  We need to remember why we do what we do.

A church sanctuary for the Occupiers

Jim Wallis

Originally published on Sojourners site.

It’s time to invite the Occupy Movement to church!

And  Thanksgiving is the perfect occasion. Have some of the young protesters —  the “99ers” as they’re becoming known — from this rapidly growing  movement over for a big holiday dinner!

Our faith communities and  organizations should swing their doors wide and greet the Occupiers  with open arms, offering them a feast to say “thank you” for having the  courage to raise the very religious and biblical issue of growing  inequality in our society. (more…)

Last night, the NYPD, at the bidding of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, ordered the evacuation of the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park.  The NYT story provides most of the pertinent details, but the more than 1,000 comments that follow tell the real story.

One reader asked why the Occupy protesters couldn’t hold nice, orderly gatherings like the Tea Party.  If the Koch brothers would fork over a few millions dollars (as they did for the Tea Party organizers) that might happen.  In fact, money from the ultra-right organizations created and sustained the Tea Party movement; Occupy Wall Street runs on the conviction of the occupiers plus nothing.

This op-ed, published in the Washington Post, tells the story from the protester’s perspective: (more…)

By Alan Bean

For the past few days, we have been attending a human rights conference in Philadelphia sponsored by the U.S. Human Rights Fund.  We have learned a lot and met so many inspiring individuals it is a bit overwhelming.  But the high point of the conference, for me, was a chance encounter with Dianna Freelon Foster of Grenada, Mississippi.

Grenada, you may recall from an earlier post, was the site of the most heroic, dreadful, awe-inspiring and anonymous civil rights campaigns in American history.  Nobody knows about Grenada.  Everybody should.

Dianna Freelon Foster was going into the eleventh grade in the fall of 1966 when the civil rights community decided it was time to integrate the public schools.  Every night, hundreds of people would gather at a church near the courthouse square to sing freedom songs, pray and preach.  Then, in the power of the Holy Ghost, they would march to the courthouse and take a stand for civil rights.  And when morning came, the first day of school, hundreds of black children had the audacity to show up at the all white schools of Granada, Mississippi.

“We walked into the school the first morning, ” Dianna remembers, “and the first thing I noticed was how beautiful it was–nothing at all like the black school I had been attending.  It was a very tense atmosphere and you had the feeling something was wrong.  Then, one by one, all the white girls were called to the office.  I remember thinking ‘there was no way all those white girls can fit in that tiny little office’.”

When all the white girls had left the building, the black girls were informed that the school was closing for the day.  “We walked out the door,” Dianna recalls, “and all I could see was a bunch of white men, some of them sitting in the branches of the trees, and they were all carrying weapons: baseball bats, tire irons, that sort of thing.  We tried to rush back into the school but the principal locked the door on us.  That’s the thing that really hurt me–that a human being could do something like that–locking us out when he knew we were in danger.”

“We were walking with a male student and we were trying to get to the church, because that’s where we felt safe and strong.  Then the men surrounded us.  They were pushing and prodding us girls, but it was the boy who received the real beating.  They would have left us pretty much alone, but every time we tried to help our friend who had been horribly beaten, they’d start beating us up too.  I guess I blocked it all out of my mind.  For a long time I didn’t remember much about it.  But then, years later, I talked to my mother and my brother, and they told me how awful it really was.”

The public schools of Grenada were not integrated in 1966.  Or 1967.  Or 1968 or 1969.

The Grenada movement has been forgotten because it did not achieve its objective; but nowhere in America did a community come together in such an emphatic and disciplined fashion behind a human rights agenda. 

Dianna Freelon Foster wants to talk about the past.  She made a successful run for mayor of Grenada a few years ago because she wanted to help her community come to terms with its painful history.  Most of the most prosperous majority white neighborhoods had formed separate municipalities for the usual reasons, but when Ms. Foster was elected mayor these communities were quickly re-annexed by the city of Grenada and Foster was defeated.

“I’m the racist because I want to talk about the past.  Well, I need to talk about it.  Everybody does, but they just want to forget and move forward.  Most of our black children have no idea what happened in our community.  Their parents don’t want to think about it.  We all just live as if all the ugliness never happened.  But it did; and we need to deal with it.”

The next time Friends of Justice sponsors a civil rights tour in Mississippi we’re going to Grenada and Dianna Freelon Foster will be our tour guide.