COSTLY COURAGE
This last week I started reading Will D. Campbell’s fascinating memoir Forty Acres & A Goat. It is a rich source of true stories, including the following two involving costly courage. Will is a white Southerner, a Baptist, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, a farmer and a preacher. He has been active in the civil rights struggle to bring equal treatment and freedom to his brothers in the south who have been held back by the color of their skin. He tells about the cost of many courageous people in that struggle: In the fall of 1956 I had gone to Clinton, Tennessee, a small, mountain-edge town which was under a court order to admit a few blacks to its previously all-white school. John Kasper, a native of New Jersey and a self-styled champion of white supremacy and constitutional government, had agitated and organized during the summer months, and when the school opened it was greeted by demonstrations, riots, and physical…
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