I remember a summer evening gathering of the history department where I was a Ph.D. candidate. Faculty and other doctoral students began discussing their current favorite reads, which I noticed were all works of fiction. How mortified I was when someone asked me what I was reading and I could only list history works related to my dissertation. Finishing my degree was all-consuming and I dared not relax with a novel.
Even today, I’d suggest a nonfiction essay collection by a poet and former member of First Presbyterian Church in Oakland, California, as well as two compelling history reads by researchers who utilized the collections at the Presbyterian Historical Society. Each work invites us to think about the ways faith and racism have shaped our society and our lives — and how history can tell the stories of individual lives just as well as narrative fiction.
“If memory is home, I am a long way from hope,” Camille T. Dungy writes in her award-winning “Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History.” She continues: “I have to remember what has been said: I am black and female; no place is for my pleasure. … How do I write about the land and my place in it without remembering, without shaping my words around, the history I belong to, the history that belongs to me?” Dungy’s work, shaped by her gifts as a poet, her reflections on the history of African-Americans and her mother-love about her young daughter’s place in that history, is provoking and soul-informing. At one point, Dungy recalls a visit to the notorious Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, a horrific stop along the Atlantic slave trade. Her 3-year-old daughter ran circles around the tour group, worrying Dungy. Her husband calmed her by suggesting that little Callie was “reclaiming the space.” This is what Dungy does in her essays and in her poetry: reclaims haunted space to make it sacred and allow it to again breathe.
Historians Crystal Sanders and LeeAnn Reynolds plumb 20th-century Southern history in order to better understand how African-Americans created paths and dignity for themselves and their children with education and the responses of white people, including Presbyterians. Sanders wowed the participants at the PHS General Assembly luncheon in June with her presentation based on her book, “A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle.” We learned about the persistence of African-American parents in Mississippi who started a successful and independent Head Start program. The United Presbyterian Church was an important partner with the parents, providing backing and support in the face of government challenges. Her book widens our understanding of the civil rights era and gives hope to our church.
In “Maintaining Segregation: Children and Racial Instruction in the South, 1920-1955,” Reynolds explores how racial segregation in the home, school and church during the early 20th century instilled in both white and African-American children notions of race that needed to be overturned in order to engage in the civil rights movement. Reynolds looks at churches as sites of both resistance and change. Her insights are timely and relevant for our own time in which we are challenged to bring to fulfillment the promise of a society where no one is degraded, oppressed, silenced or treated as less than a beloved and equal child of God.
Beth Shalom Hessel is the executive director of the Presbyterian Historical Society, a ministry area of the Office of the General Assembly. For 166 years, PHS has been the national archives of the PC(USA) and its predecessors.
