DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON COURAGE
When school began in Nashville, we watched with fear and sorrow the effectiveness of Mr. Kasper’s community organizing. Rioters gathered each day at the schools where the nine black children were enrolled. Hundreds of screaming, irrational, sometimes armed men and women, on one occasion pulling cobblestones from the sidewalk and hurling them at the building. One school was destroyed by a dynamite blast in a nocturnal act of defiance. Nine days after the first black child crossed its portal. One of the children was the daughter of Pastor Kelly Miller Smith. Late one night I sat with him in his study, peeking often through the window in a vigil against threats to the building. After a long period of comfortable silence, I asked, “Kelly, what if something happens to little Joy?” He moved the candle, the only light we had risked, closer to him and opened his study Bible and began to read about Abraham being told by the Lord…
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