Let Justice Roll Down

by John M. Perkins

I didn’t drop gambling because anybody preached against it. That kind of push never really works over the long haul. True Christian change works more like an old oak tree in the spring, when the new life inside pushes off the old dead leaves that still hang on.

Every Tuesday night I sat with my white teacher, Mr. Wayne Leitch. God was taking me step by step. First He showed me black people changed by the gospel. Now He was showing me that it had power even for whites.

After a while I found myself constantly on the go. You know, every Sunday night, every Sunday morning, through the week, some place, some church, some group. I got so busy I didn’t have time anymore to look at the system around me. I almost forgot my upbringing.

Yielding to God’s will can be hard. And sometimes, it really hurts. But it always brings peace.

But how sad that so few individuals equally committed to Jesus Christ ever became a part of that movement. For what all that political activity needed—and lacked—was spiritual input. Even now, I do not understand why so many evangelicals find a sense of commitment to civil rights and to Jesus Christ an “either-or” proposition.

One of the greatest tragedies of the civil rights movement is that evangelicals surrendered their leadership in the movement by default to those with either a bankrupt theology or no theology at all, simply because the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians ignored a great and crucial opportunity in history for genuine ethical action. The evangelical church—whose basic theology is the same as mine—had not gone on to preach the whole gospel.

Yet too many white church people do not recognize that. They teach their own sons to “stand up and be a man,” teach them to be confident. Then they go all to pieces when an oppressed minority starts doing just that.

If sin can exist at every level of government, and in every human institution, then also the call to biblical justice in every corner of society must be sounded by those who claim a God of Justice as their Lord.

It’s hard to make all this clear or real to white people, but a lot of black people had come to this same point—feeling that there simply was no justice, no hope. All those radical anti-whites—Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver and the others—you heard about in the news, didn’t invent the injustices they talked about. They saw and felt oppression in a thousand ways. And not always open brutality either. It’s the system, the whole structure of economic and social cages that have neatly boxed the black man in so that “nice” people can join the oppression without getting their hands dirty—just by letting things run along.

I thought with real sadness of the gospel I believed in with all my heart. The gospel that says in Christ there is no black or white. I believed that gospel was powerful enough to shatter even the hatred of Mendenhall. But I had not seen it. Especially in the churches. On April 3, 1970—a month after my trial in Mendenhall—the state legislature repealed both statutory prohibitions against racial integration and the criminal laws providing for racially segregated public facilities. Restaurants, schools, offices—even in Mississippi, these places were starting to integrate. But where was there an integrated church?

I began to see with horror how hate could destroy me—destroy me more devastatingly and suddenly than any destruction I could bring on those who had wronged me. I could try and fight back, as many of my brothers had done. But if I did, how would I be different from the whites who hate? And where would hating get me? Anyone can hate. This whole business of hating and hating back. It’s what keeps the vicious circle of racism going. The Spirit of God worked on me as I lay in that bed. An image formed in my mind. The image of the cross—Christ on the cross. It blotted out everything else in my mind. This Jesus knew what I had suffered. He understood. And He cared. Because He had experienced it all Himself.

He washed my hatred away and replaced it with a love for the white man in rural Mississippi.

If black folks were getting 10 percent justice in the ’60s, they’re getting 30 percent or 40 percent now. So there has been almost triple the amount of freedom. There has been massive progress. But if we talk in terms of justice as equality, we’re still talking about an imbalance.