Five Words That Made a Difference

In 1968 I was 14 years old, and living in a suburb outside of Birmingham, Alabama, known as Rocky Ridge. That year five words changed my life.

Books have always been a source of great enjoyment for me and my parents wisely nurtured that interest in many ways. One was to allow me to order just about anything I wanted from the Scholastic Book Club flier that was given to us regularly at school. I ordered books on every subject under the sun and took pride in having the biggest stack of new books every time the teacher distributed our orders in class.

In the eighth grade one of those stacks included a book I ordered only because it had “Birmingham” in the title. It was not until the teacher distributed our books and I began examining my new acquisitions that I found out it was a book about the civil rights movement in Birmingham. In it were pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and others, leading civil rights marches in downtown Birmingham. Also pictured were the dogs, water hoses, and clubs the Birmingham police turned on protesters.

At this point a classmate spoke to me from over my shoulder, “What you want that book about those (n-word) for?” Some other comments followed from my classmate and others nearby that parroted the racism of their parents. I had not learned such attitudes from my parents. While they had isolated me from the turmoil of the civil rights movement and talked little about the issue, they non-the-less modeled loving acceptance of all and had taught me to respect all people equally. I was confused and did not know what to make of the hatred my classmates’ comments conveyed. Sadly though, bowing to the power of peer pressure, I was quickly agreeing and echoing their prejudices.

That evening I showed  the book to my dad and began repeating some that comments of my peers. “Look at this terrible book. It says awful things about Birmingham in it.” Then Dad made his only comment about the book, five words that would stop me dead in my tracks and have a profound impact on me from that moment forward.

“Have you read it yet?”

In that moment I knew that I had just been confronted with the intellectual dishonesty of prejudice. I knew that examining an issue and taking a stand of my own instead of uncritically accepting the judgment of others was a matter of integrity. I also knew that as surely as that was what Dad expected of me, it was what God expected of me as well.

I read the book. I learned about noble men and women making a difference by taking a stand against hatred and injustice. And, by the way, I wrote a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the cover of my school notebook for all my classmates to see.

I wonder, “Have I said five words that made a difference lately?” Have you?