“Look! There’s a white man in our school!”
Those words stunned my ears as I walked through the hallway at a local elementary school. I smiled and continued walking, but as I looked at the pictures of all the kindergarten classes on the wall, I now noticed there were no white kindergarteners at this school. In fact, out of a total student population of 413, only 6 were white. These numbers might not be staggering if you live in a densely populated urban center, but this event took place in my own city of Jackson, TN, which has a population of 67,000 and no suburbs to which whites have fled. As I sought to understand how a public school could be 99% African American half a century after the Supreme Court shot Jim Crow and school segregation dead, I found that race, education, and church have a very convoluted history in my community that has many implications for evangelicals today and the unity of the body of Christ.
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