We Still Have a Dream
Everything in that seven-year-old girl’s school life changed in the fall of 1969.
As she walked into her new second-grade class, things couldn’t have been more different than they had been the year before. In first grade, her classmates looked like her. So did her teacher, and they shared a community. They all had a similar understanding of the world and their place in it. But in 1969, her world changed. Her parents believed in her ability to succeed, so they enrolled her in the pre-integration “freedom of choice” program. This new program in Alabama was likely another tactic to delay the inevitability of full racial integration. That year, it meant that Black families could choose to bus their children to white schools, and little Lisa’s family chose just that. She no longer looked like her classmates from first grade.
Ten years later, my elementary school education began. I, too, walked into a classroom where few other students looked like me. My teacher and all my closest friends that year were Black. I was part of a small minority of white students enrolled in a nearly all-Black school near Memphis, Tennessee. My grandparents were pre-civil rights era, white southerners who honestly thought America as they knew it was coming to an end because their grandbaby was in a Black school with a Black teacher. I don’t really know what my parents thought. My Father, a pastor, served a struggling white church in the community where we lived. Perhaps they thought they were failing me. Maybe they hoped that my generation might be the beginning of change. For my part, I’m thankful that I experienced being the “other” at such a young age. I learned it could be okay to be uncomfortable and be the “only one,” a lesson rarely encountered by most white Americans.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Lisa and I were living out different sides of the same, enormous, American cultural transformation. We were embodying the dream articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous 1963 speech. Because our families chose it, or because they couldn’t escape it, we were “little Black children and little white children sitting together at the table of fellowship.”
It’s been 58 years since King spoke those iconic words. Lisa and I still carry our own dreams today. We enjoy a beautiful friendship, and although our lives have been very different, we hold many of the same values dear in our hearts. Our bond has been an exercise in mutual understanding accompanied by the growth that always follows it.
Many years later, well into her adulthood, Lisa still carried curiosity about those days in the all-white classroom. She went back to her old elementary school and asked for the records of her second-grade year. When she saw the class roll, one thing leaped out from the page. Her name followed a capital letter C, for “colored.”
Lisa has never taken to letting people label her, and she doesn’t go around putting labels onto others. I asked her what her elementary school experience was like and braced for the horror stories I thought she might share. “I was only seven years old and I don’t remember any problems,” Lisa told me. “Perhaps my teacher intervened for me before I arrived.” Those sorts of positive, even harmonious experiences in uncertain and potentially uncomfortable settings have followed Lisa throughout her remarkable life. “Even at that age, I went in there as a person, and that’s how people treated me. At that age, we were just kids playing with each other. I made great friends, even though we didn’t live in the same neighborhoods. I rode the bus with those kids, and we came to know each other and went all the way through high school together. I always look people in the eye, and that’s how I raised my daughter, too.”
Lisa is the best example I know of what Gary Gunderson calls a “boundary leader” in his book, Boundary Leaders: Leadership Skills for People of Faith. Boundary leaders are essential to building strong, vibrant, healthy communities. They are connection-makers and web weavers who carry an innate curiosity about people, have the confidence to reach out into uncomfortable settings, and find things in common with people, no matter the situation. Lisa’s family spotted these attributes in her at a very early age. “In my family,” she says, “I was the only one that was sent to the white school. I was too little to know why, and I guess I still don’t. I think my parents and my grandparents just saw something in me that made them think I could do it.”
Key West — Spring Break Service, Hurricane Recovery Trip, 2019
Though she was born in Atlanta and raised in Lanett, Alabama, Lisa has lived most of her life in LaGrange. She went to work at the Hanes hosiery factory in the early 1980s. When the plant closed in 1989, she took the opportunity to enroll in classes at West Georgia Tech. “My mother always wanted me to get a college degree,” she said. When she needed an internship, she spotted an opportunity at LaGrange College. A Black woman on the LaGrange College staff “vouched” for Lisa and gave her the courage to apply. She landed the job as an administrative assistant in the evening studies program, but was soon recruited to the library staff by Mr. Frank Lewis, the library’s Director. Lewis was the very first Black staff person to work at LaGrange College. Today, the new library building bears his name and that of his wife, Laura. Though she did not know him at the time, looking back, Lisa says he may have been keeping an eye out for her. “At the time, I was one of only four or five Black people working at the college. Perhaps it was important to him that I was at the college, but that was never said. I told him I didn’t know anything about working in a library, and he said, ‘We will teach you everything you need to know.’”
But all was not smooth sailing. A white co-worker in the library also wanted the job and met Lisa with great hostility. In the end, like always, Lisa made her way across that boundary and won her adversary over. “She became one of my very best friends, and we are still in contact,” Lisa says.
Thirty years have gone by, and Lisa Farrow has become a beloved institution in the Lewis Library and across campus. Shortly after arriving at LaGrange College, she acquired her bachelor’s degree and completed a Master’s of Clinical Counseling in 2017.
I met Lisa in 2014 when she served on the search committee that hired me as LaGrange College’s Chaplain and Director of Spiritual Life. “I knew there was something about you that was open,” she said. “I knew when you answered questions about diversity and race without defensiveness and with an authenticity that you were the right person for the job.”
Our friendship makes me want to live up to the promise she saw. I have always been passionate and curious about issues of racial justice. As a child, I never understood why white people often seemed to carry such hostility, anger, and resentment towards Black people. What I found was that my Black classmates and teachers were terrific. I loved them as people and could see that we were so much the same.
Since my arrival at LaGrange College in 2014, I’ve tried hard to build bridges of connection with Black students, faculty and staff. Lisa has been a critical ally in that work. In truth, Lisa has been even more than that to me, serving as a much-needed teacher, friend, and mentor in my understanding of race. Her experience of racism is so much more visceral, immediate, and personal than mine. If I will listen to her, there is so much that I can learn. While I occasionally rage with incredible frustration against the realities of systemic racism in our society, Lisa takes a much more consistent, mature, seasoned, and robust approach. “It’s their ignorance,” she says when I ask her how she handles racist people and systems. “I can’t do anything about what they think. I can’t do anything about what they do. But I can do something about my own actions and thoughts.”
Lisa and I have also built a personal connection through our mutual work with students. She has attended every spring break service-learning trip that I’ve led as Chaplain. We have taught racial reconciliation in D.C., religious diversity in New York, cross-cultural service in the Florida Keys, and non-profit leadership in New Orleans. We have spent time among the wealthiest Americans and the poorest. I’ve seen Lisa work with students and people of every possible background and life experience. Without fail, she always finds ways to connect with their experiences.
Lisa at Islamic Center of New York, Religious Diversity Trip, 2017.
I’m convinced that this kind of radical, boundary-crossing leadership can start to answer our worst problems in LaGrange, Georgia and beyond.
In 2016, Lisa and other Black leaders on our campus helped me conceive of a group now called the “Black Male Initiative” for Black men on the LaGrange College campus. This work culminated in my doctoral project which sought to test my ideas about boundary leadership while serving an overlooked LaGrange College student demographic. My Emory advisor, the Rev. Dr. Gregory Ellison, asked me what I hoped to accomplish with the work. With unbridled optimism, I said, “I want to end racism in LaGrange, Georgia.” Wiping his eyes after a good belly laugh, he said, “Well, what if we reigned that in just a little bit? What if instead of worrying about the whole town, we tried to go three feet at a time?” Three feet is the length of the human arm. He meant, “What if we go one real relationship at a time?”
Whose hand can we take (figuratively, until Covid is over)? Where can we find someone who seems different than us and then work to find common ground?
I asked Lisa what she most wished the white people of LaGrange could hear. She was silent for a time and then said, “You don’t have to be scared. Mean what you say. And it’s ok to be uncomfortable and still show up.” Indeed it is. Discomfort is precisely where all the best stuff is found. Lisa still has a dream, and so do I. Join us, LaGrange! One relationship at a time, we can make that dream a little bit more real.
Outside LC Chapel.