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is an interlude during each Sunday-morning service at the Assembly
of God Tabernacle when the pastor invites his parishioners to roam
around the sanctuary, welcoming visitors and greeting each other.
I suppose it was at that moment on the day I first attended that I
realized I had come to the right place.
I had not come to join, though I would be gently nudged
in that direction any number of times during the year I spent at the
Tabernacle. Rather, I had come to observe, and what I saw that Sunday,
and on dozens of subsequent Sundays, was a revelation.
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| Praise and thanksgiving:
Members of the Assembly of God Tabernacle in Decatur, Georgia,
worship together |
| photo:James Estrin
/ The New York Times |
Here, seemingly, was a perfectly integrated
church situated in suburban Decatur, Georgia, only a few miles from
the site on Stone Mountain where the twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan
had been born. When I counted heads, the congregation was almost evenly
split between blacks and whites, with many families sharing pews with
those of another race.
During those five minutes of
mid-service fellowship, blacks and whites slapped backs and exchanged
tidbits of gossip in the aisles. A tall black man in his forties bent
over to hug an octogenarian white lady. He would later tell me that
he understood that forty years earlier he might have been hanged for
doing so. It was touching. And in my experience, having written about
race in the South for many of my twenty years in journalism, it was
virtually unprecedented. This place, I told myself as I drove happily
home, must have one hell of a story.
That first trip to the church in the spring of 1999 came
a week or two after a daylong meeting in an Upper East Side brownstone
owned by one of my editors at The New York Times. After years of discussion
and planning, the paper’s management had convened a large group
of reporters and editors to discuss the contours of a project that,
ideally, would present a new way to think and write about race relations
in America.
Like many Americans, editors at The Times had been taken
aback in 1995 by the racially polarized responses to the acquittal
of O.J. Simpson in his sensational murder trial. Even in our newsroom
on West 43rd Street, as just outside in Times Square, whites had reacted
with disdain while blacks could barely contain their glee.
Two high-level editors had already been mulling
the possibility of a series on race, and the Simpson verdict got them
talking about what the discordant reactions might signify about the
state of race relations some three decades after the demise of legalized
segregation. It was clear, they concluded, that blacks and whites
still had little concept of each other’s worlds, even when they
interacted civilly in the workplace and the community.
Two high-level editors—Gerald
Boyd, who is black, and Soma Golden Behr, who is white—began
grappling with how the paper could best examine the topic without
being bound by the traditional journalistic approaches to writing
about race. Over the years, newspapers had printed hundreds of statistical
analyses about income gaps and housing patterns, usually concluding
that we had come far but still had far to go. Millions more words
had been devoted to the racial policy debates of the day, like affirmative
action and racial profiling.
While often important, those stories had become stale,
predictable, and not particularly insightful. They provided only the
most superficial sense of how people of different races actually got
along when they were thrust together, as was increasingly the case.
In a country where many seemed fatigued by the mere mention of race,
the editors concluded that perhaps the best way to assess the current
state of affairs was to trade a macroscopic view for a microscopic
one, to write about people and relationships rather than about policy
and statistics.
That notion became the guiding principle behind “How
Race is Lived in America,” a series of fifteen lengthy stories
that appeared in The Times in the summer of 2000. Fourteen reporters
and I scoured the country for settings and characters that would reveal
something interesting about the role of race in today’s America.
Afforded a luxury rarely enjoyed by print journalists, each of us
devoted the better part of a year to researching and writing a single
story, often 7,000 or 8,000 words long. As we progressed, photographers
parachuted in to illustrate our words, many shooting thousands of
frames in search of the half-dozen images that ultimately would be
published.
To the extent that the series succeeded, it did so because
of the variety of characters, settings, and relationships that we
discovered. Some of us came to that first meeting in New York with
vague notions of the subjects we wanted to explore. Others searched
for months and only found their stories after any number of wrong
turns.
My piece about the life of an integrated church kicked
off the series, followed by tales of Cuban immigrants in Miami, drill
sergeants at Fort Knox, the creative team behind an HBO series, partners
in an Internet start-up in Atlanta, and politicians in Seattle. Charlie
LeDuff, a correspondent on the metropolitan staff, worked undercover
in a hog processing plant in North Carolina to learn about the racial
and ethnic striation of the workforce. There were stories about the
inexorable force that breaks apart biracial schoolyard friendships
and about the tensions between the white owner of a Louisiana plantation
and the black National Park Service ranger dispatched to interpret
its history. We wrote about rival newspaper columnists, a white quarterback
on an otherwise all-black college team, a white hip-hop aficionado,
a police anti-drug squad in Harlem, and three Houston businessmen
forced together by affirmative action. Don Terry finished the series,
in a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, with a first-person
piece about his own struggle to accept his place as the son of a black
father and a white mother.
By the end, the project accounted for the greatest expenditure
of resources that The Times has ever devoted to a single series—even
more than the publication of the Pentagon Papers. And when it was
published, the response was gratifying. In addition to our paid circulation,
which ranges from 1.1 million on weekdays to nearly 1.7 million on
Sundays, more than half a million people read at least part of the
series on our website. More than 12,000 comments were posted to special
website forums about the series. Three thousand readers filled out
website questionnaires about their racial views and experiences. Earlier
this year, the series was reprinted in book form by Times Books. There
were television appearances, radio
interviews, a special forum broadcast by Charlie Rose ’64, J.D.
’68, and panels of reporters and editors at universities from
Berkeley to Ann Arbor.
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| Friendly greetings: Ruben
Burch, right, speaks to Madge Mayo during a Sunday service at
the Tabernacle |
| photo:James Estrin
/ The New York Times |
The stories diverted from journalistic
convention not only in their length and the time devoted to them,
but also in their structure. Each was written as narrative, usually
focused on the interactions of a small number of characters. And from
the outset, we decided to omit what we in print journalism refer to
as the “nut graf,” the grand summary, usually placed high
in the story, that tells readers what to make of it all. Instead,
we chose to let readers decide for themselves what each individual
story signified, and what the series as a whole had discovered.
“If our basic concept was valid,” wrote Joseph
Lelyveld, our recently retired executive editor, in his introduction
to the book, “the meaning of the articles would not be found
simply in each narrative as the reader went along but in the resonance
among all the narratives—in their overlay, each one on top of
all those that came before, striking a richer chord because of the
progression from one situation or sphere to the next.”
Clearly, the series was not reading for the subway ride
home. But the profession, at least, seemed to appreciate the innovation.
Last spring, the project was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for national
reporting and a special George Polk Award, another prestigious journalism
prize. In May, I joined a number of colleagues at a luncheon in a
cavernous hall at Columbia University to watch Gerald, Soma, and another
project editor, Michael Winerip, accept our Pulitzer certificate.
(The second biggest thrill of the day was meeting Alan Diaz, the humble
photojournalist for the Associated Press who won a prize for his amazing
picture of the seizure of Elián Gonzalez.)
Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to
summarize the common themes that coursed through the series’
stories. As Joe pointed out in his introduction, there were clear
signs of racial progress. The simple fact that we found so much interaction
between the races—in church, on the job, on the playing field—was
evidence of that. But each of the stories also found disturbing evidence
of a persistent separateness, of a disconnect, really, of blacks who
still felt the sting of racism almost daily and of whites who were
tired of hearing about it all. In story after story, they talked past
each other, when they were talking at all.
For me, the project was a dream assignment. My greatest
professional regret had been being born twenty-five years too late
to cover the civil-rights movement in my native South. Born in 1959,
I had grown up in the suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida, a white kid
utterly oblivious to both the segregation and racial turmoil that
was everywhere around me. I had no black friends or classmates, and
the first time I remember hearing the name of Martin Luther King Jr.
was on the day in 1968 when I watched my grandmother weep at the news
of his assassination.
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came to the church with the preconceived notion that I would
find a congregation that was integrated in the pews but divided
outside of the church walls. I could not have been more wrong.
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But over time, I concluded that covering the aftermath
of the movement could be just as intriguing. Over the years, I sought
out stories that told of the region’s struggle to get comfortable
with its new racial clothing, of its incremental progress, often taken
in baby steps, sometimes one back for every two forward, sometimes
vice versa. I loved writing about the black south Georgia congressman
who managed to win the support of craggy white peanut farmers by delivering
black congressional votes for price supports. And about the white
Ole Miss president, a star place-kicker in the segregated Oxford of
1959, who like Nixon to China finally persuaded his students and alumni
to stop waving the Confederate battle flag at football games.
I felt the same enthusiasm, only more so, for what was
happening at the Tabernacle. I came to the story, oddly enough, with
the help of Pat Buchanan. While covering his presidential campaign
for a few days in 1996, I followed Buchanan on a Wednesday night as
he made the rounds of three Pentecostal churches in Lake Charles,
Louisiana. Each, to my amazement, was integrated to some degree and,
before long, I found myself far more interested in the racial dynamics
of the churches than in Buchanan’s declaration that he would
wage “a cultural war for the soul of this country.”
Clearly, something was happening in these churches that
we should look into. The demands of daily journalism being what they
are, it would take me three years to get around to it.
My first interview was with an Emory University professor,
an authority on Pentecostalism, who explained to me the fascinating
racial history of the faith that started as a radical biracial movement
in turn-of-the-century California before dividing quickly along racial
lines. She also made me understand how Pentecostalism’s most
fundamental tenet, that anyone regardless of background or standing
can have direct experience with the Holy Spirit, had imbued the faith
with an egalitarian streak.
Then she directed me to several
integrated churches in the Atlanta area. Some were too big and unwieldy
for my purposes. At others, the pastors rubbed me the wrong way. But
the Tabernacle had all the elements. It was of moderate size, about
800 members. Its pastor, Roger W. Brumbalow, was smart, funny, talented,
and inspirational. He seemed like the real thing. And the congregation,
I would soon discover, consisted of the warmest and most welcoming
people, both black and white, that I had ever met.
• continues on page two.
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