McCOMB - In January 1963, as racial tensions were reaching a crescendo, 28 Mississippi Methodist ministers issued a statement stressing freedom of the pulpit and supporting an official "no discrimination" church position.
Forty years later, about that many Methodist ministers, including Bishop Kenneth Carder and almost a dozen district superintendents, are reflecting on past racial injustices and current reconciliations.
According to the Rev. Ron Barham, Brookhaven District superintendent, the current pilgrimage was inspired by, among other things, a visit to Carder by a bishop from South Africa who told of a "pilgrimage of pain and hope" to places where there were massacres, beatings and demonstrations. These visits were always paired with an institution or new process that demonstrates reconciliation.
Carder organized a similar pilgrimage in Mississippi, including visits to the Delta and to Philadelphia in Neshoba County.
This week the group held a two-day retreat at St. Mary of the Pines in Chatawa and toured sites of racial violence, including church burnings, in the Pike County area.
McComb was suggested as a place to visit by one of the resource people for the retreat, Amite County native Will Campbell, a white Baptist preacher who in the 1950s broke ranks with his more traditional brethren and openly advocated civil rights for black people.
Campbell, who now resides in Tennessee, is renowned as an author and philosopher, but I don't know of any First Baptist churches he has pastored, although I did hear him preach once at First Baptist Church of Oxford. I was a freshman or a sophomore at Ole Miss in the mid-1950s, and he was on the staff at the university as director of religious activities.
He soon left that job, though, after getting in trouble with the administration because of his liberal views. Among his other transgressions, he told me the other night, was playing ping-pong with a black man in the YMCA building on campus.
The Methodist group invited several local civil rights leaders from the 1960s to have dinner with them at St. Andrew's United Methodist Church Tuesday evening and discuss the past.
I also was invited, as the only Enterprise-Journal reporter of that era who is still around, to join the discussion.
It was an interesting evening, one that truly reflected the change that has occurred in Mississippi over the past 40 years.
St. Andrew's, then an all-white church in South McComb, is now a biracial church with a mission that reaches out to poor people. It is a place of reconciliation.
Before dinner, everyone was asked to draw a piece of paper from a bag that was passed around. Some of us drew red slips of paper, others got blue. There was nothing written on the paper. We were then told that the reds were to go to one serving table, the blues to another.
I was a red, and laid out before us was a sumptuous buffet of ribs, chicken, sausage, beans, potato salad, slaw, various desserts and iced tea.
The blues only got beans, cornbread and water.
The object, as explained by the Rev. Jim Glass of St. Andrew's, was to demonstrate that many people in this country, as well as the rest of the world, would be happy with a meal of beans and bread if they could get that, while some of us are abundantly fed.
Those of us with red cards were glad when the others were told there was plenty of food at our table and the blues were welcomed to it.
It was a good reminder that there are those right here in McComb who don't get enough of the right food to eat.
According to an article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger the next day, a recent study from the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University found hunger and food insecurity rising in almost every state. Mississippi was said to rank sixth among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in food insecurity.
Food insecurity is not knowing whether you'll be able to buy enough food and sometimes having to depend on charity. The study showed 13 percent of Mississippi households have food insecurity and more than 3 percent suffer from hunger.
Nurturing the poor is a primary thrust of the St. Andrew's Mission. It's something all Christians should be concerned about, and it is a multi-racial problem.
At the end of the meeting, someone came up with copies of another Clarion-Ledger article, this one from 1963, reporting on the 28 ministers taking what then was a courageous stand in a statement issued to the Methodist Advocate.
The statement said, among other things, that the ministers opposed racial discrimination and closing the public schools - an idea that was being raised in the wake of desegregation efforts.
Looking over the list, I note that some of the ministers, most of them young then, are still around today.
That sense of social justice remains evident in the Methodist clergy I met the other night, although it is being expressed in different ways.
