Sing.

I’ve been thinking about my childhood a lot recently and when I think about my childhood, I’m thinking about growing up in a community right on the edge of Cleveland.

When we moved there, it was a neighborhood being effected by white flight. A few black folks moved in and, as they did, the white folks started to move out and, as they did, more black folks moved in to the vacant houses freaking out more white folks. . . You get the picture. Within about a five year time period, the neighborhood went from one that was predominantly ethnic-Euro to a neighborhood that was predominantly African-American.

My Dad was a United Methodist minister and within that tradition the UM Bishop can move pastors where they believe the church needs pastors to be moved. When my Dad was assigned to Church of the Cross by the African-American Bishop, it was primarily a white church in this increasingly black neighborhood. My Dad was sent there to try and help integrate the church.

It was around 1973 and I was maybe four or five when we moved there. I don’t remember being conscious of race, yet. If I was, it was more of an issue of personal identification than racial identification. Within the neighborhood group of friends, there were two Davids. To us, it just made sense to identify them as “black David” and “white David.” Kids seem to find last names much more awkward and useless than identifying people based on how they look.

Along the way, I learned different things. Although there was lots of horrible history that was being made at that moment in time (Vietnam, Robert Kennedy, Kent State, Cambodia, Watergate, etc.), I remember hearing the most about Martin Luther. To us kids, he seemed like something that had happened a long time ago but it was still a fresh memory for the adults we knew. King became my first hero. Discussions about race, racial reconciliation and black history became a regular part of my education. We didn’t celebrate Martin Luther Kind Day, we celebrated Martin Luther King Week. There were special parties in the classrooms, special assemblies and I still remember the songs. I still can’t sing “Lift Evr’y Voice and Sing” without standing and the sense of singing something very, very important.

I got questions and had conversations that were amazingly frank and honest in retrospect. I remember walking home with one of my friends when he asked me, “Why did your people make my people slaves?” I remember being a candidate for the captain of the Safety Patrol and our deciding, in what felt a very common sense and practical way, that I really shouldn’t be the captain because it wouldn’t be right for a white kid to be the captain over the black kids. I remember becoming friends with a Vietnamese refugee kid, Chuc, and the stories he told me about shootings and bombs and how his being Asian did and didn’t mix in with the other kids. I remember the day I figured out that I’d reversed my understanding of “majority” and “minority” and how shocked I was. I just assumed that most of the people in the world were black. For us living it, this wasn’t an experience that was unusual or special in any way. This was just our neighborhood.

As I grew up, we moved around and my experiences changed. I had a more conscious understanding of what it meant to be white and - sometimes to my horror and sometimes to my relief – found out about the privileges that I received just for the fact that my skin was white. I found out how hard it can be to start up friendships with folks of different colors and the roles we sometimes play with and to each other. It took me a long time to figure out how to build relationships with white males. Although that’s changed some, the majority of my closest friends continue to be women, GLBT folks and people of color.

So, then there was this whole Barak Obama thing. Now, I can’t say that I’m as enthusiastic as some are about him – we’ll need to hold him accountable and he’s going to let us down on some points, too – but I have believed that he was one of the best two candidates.

On the night he won, I, like many other folks, cried. It felt like some kind of healing. It felt as though a curse had finally been broken and I found myself thinking about my old neighborhood, again. I thought of the faces, the names, what I learned in school. . . all of it. I’ve been thinking about it frequently ever since. Not analyzing it as much as realizing how incredibly lucky I was. That’s where hope began for me and where I learned that hope was something that also needed to be tempered with calculated risk and calculated caution. Hope is not something that just happens. Its something you make. That Tuesday night, as the horns outside honked, O-BA-MA was chanted, the fireworks were popping and flags were waved, I was reminded by that kind of wise hope once again.

The next Sunday, I preached in a church where people were talking about the election in the same way that some speak of miracles. I smiled and nodded, not quite willing to be sucked in to this; it didn’t feel like the right sense of risk and caution were there.

But then, for the final hymn, we sang “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” and this day it seemed extra important. I set down the hymnal and sang all the words from memory with only a few stumbles. Some of the stumbles came because I felt tears forming and my voice was choked off by that lump in my throat as I tried to sing, struggled to sing. I swallowed hard repeatedly and warbled through the end “. . . as we forever stand, true to our God true to our native land.”

At that moment, I let go to pure, unadulterated hope praying that maybe, please God maybe, we actually got something very right this time. At that moment, singing that history, I realized this was one of those very moments that many of those who had sung this song before had been singing for. I could hear this song, sung by the children – my friends and classmates - in the gym of Caledonia Elementary School in East Cleveland, Ohio, as an echo in my mind that was actually increasing in volume.