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A White Preacher's Message on Race and Reconciliation NewSouth Books When, in the summer of 1955, Lutheran Church officials sent a young white West Virginian to Montgomery, Alabama, to pastor an all-black congregation, they could not have foreseen that six months later he and his family would be thrust into a second American Revolution. But they had chosen well. Young Bob Graetz had already studied and thought deeply about race and religion and about racial discrimination in America. He had started a race relations club at his Ohio college. He had served as student pastor of a black church in California. And when he and his young wife, Jeannie, and their two children arrived in the Deep South, they moved happily and comfortably into Montgomery’s black community and were accepted. Among the friends they soon made were Raymond and Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks’s arrest, of course, triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Bob and Jeannie were among the few whites who supported the first broad-based civil rights protest of the twentieth century. White thugs retaliated by bombing the Graetzes’ home twice; their lives were threatened often. But Graetz never wavered, and his Montgomery experiences, recounted in rich detail here, shaped a long ministerial career that always emphasized equality and justice issues no matter where his call took him. In addition to Graetz’s boycott memoirs, this book includes provocative chapters of white privilege, black forgiveness, and the present-day challenges for human and civil rights, including for gays and lesbians.
Praise for A White Preacher’s Message on Race and Reconciliation “Graetz’s memoir does more than give a rich account of a pivotal moment in U.S. history, it also shows how committed people were called to their roles in the civil rights movement. He also does a great service by looking beyond Montgomery to the larger issues of equality and justice for all Americans.” “I believe in my heart that we need to read and understand stories like these told in this book. We need to understand that people of courage, conscience, and commitment are still willing to spend their lives dedicated to the brotherhood of mankind. As I learned in my work, and as Bob Graetz clearly learned in his, the Beloved Community is nothing less that the Christian concept of God on earth. Believers in the Beloved Community insist that it is the moral responsibility of men and women with soul force, people of goodwill, to respond and to struggle nonviolently against the forces that stand between a society and the harmony it naturally seeks. This book shows that the Reverend Robert Graetz has done that with his life. In fact, he is still doing it.”
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