Who said I was skipping Church today.....

Bishop Calvin Woods--I picked this web image of him because it shows him preaching the truth, which he did in our opening session tonight.  Read on.....

Wow.  I wasn't sure as I drove through torrential rain to get here today what I might write about tonight.  But then we toured the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (wow). Then our speaker for the evening, Bishop Calvin Woods (a small 80 year old African American minister) sat at my table and talked quietly with our small group about some of his involvement in the Civil Rights movement--including having his 2 elementary school daughters arrested for cutting school to march in the children's march in 1963 (he was very angry with them and let them sit in jail as their punishment).  Then he got up to the podium, and church began.  Suddenly this soft spoken, elderly gentlemen, became what I've always envisioned as the voice of an Old Testament prophet.  He started by getting us to sing two songs that they would sing prior to going out on a march ("I'm on my way to Freedom Land" and "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn me Round).  I have listened to authentic recordings of those songs on cd I have, but singing them as call and response with Bishop Woods stomping all over the stage was a spiritual experience that I don't often feel. What power!  And what faith he spoke of.  He recounted how God told him that he wanted him to "be a sunbeam" for God.  He spoke of whites threatening his family, beating him, arresting him, trying to blow up his brother's church (God spoke to him that night, by the way, and told him to go to his brother's house---when he pulled into the driveway he saw a white man with a bag over his shoulder climbing the steps. The man saw Bishop Woods' car, ran down the steps and drove off quickly.  Bishop Woods floored it and chase him for 3 blocks until he thought to himself--'What am I intending to do if I catch him?', at which point he stopped the chase).  He emphasized that "we have come this far by faith", and that the work never ends.  By the way, he sees the recent Supreme Court decision about the Voting Rights Act as God's way of waking up African Americans who he says have become complacent, believing that the victory is won.  He is quite distressed by the decision, but hopes that it re-ignites activism.  Oh there is so much more.  Fortunately we are going to get copies of all the videos of the speakers, so hopefully I can share some of this with my faithful blog readers and my students.
Now--I'm exhausted, am supposed to read lots of stuff for tomorrow, and...well..we'll see.

Oh, by the way-it turns out that my suitemate this year is the same teacher who was my suite mate in Atlanta last summer--Dick Arnold--who left the US in 1970 to teach in Taiwan (he was furious over Nixon and the Kent State massacre)--and has taught there ever since.  Small world! 
Shalom,