“Are you sure you want to invite them?”
Mom pulled me over to the kitchen table. “I need to talk to you about something.”
It was October. We had just moved into the parsonage—brand new—the month before.
I was just home from school. I must have had something after school, because it was already getting late in the day. The sun was sinking into a pale yellow puddle on the horizon, setting behind the trees that stood across the road, their bare branches scratching thick black lines across the sky.
Mom wanted to talk to me about the party my brother John and I were planning for December. December 13, 1969.
“You know,” she said, “some people are going to be upset that you are inviting Bettie and Jean, William, Mike, and Silas, and Marjorie.” Running down a list of some of my Black friends. “Are you sure you want to invite them?”
Every year since I had entered high school in 1967, I had thrown a party for my friends. Since the schools were still mostly segregated in Wake County, even as late as 1968, all of my friends were white. But the fall of 1969 was the beginning of the last school year before total desegregation, and several Black students opted to transfer to mostly-white Wake Forest High School a year early. Many of them were juniors, like me.
It was my first contact with Black students my age. We shared many of the same classes. We joined many of the same clubs. We became friends. So, when the time came to plan my annual party, naturally they were invited.
Mom’s question felt like a slap in the face. For as long as I could remember, my parents had been teaching me and my two younger brothers that we are all God’s children, every human being on earth,. And since all of us are God’s children, that makes us all siblings—“brothers and sisters,” as they said—and it doesn’t matter what color we are.
What is she saying? And why is this even a question?!
“Mom, if I can’t have a party with all my friends, I don’t want to have a party at all!”
She was quick to reassure me. “That’s what your father and I thought you would say—and we agree with you. We support you. We just want it to be your decision.”
By the time December arrived, my dad had been the pastor of Ridgecrest Baptist Church for nine months.
Church and parsonage sat out in the country, six miles west of town, surrounded by an area known for stills and segregationists. People in that neck of the woods were none too pleased that Mom and Dad were allowing my brother and me to entertain Black friends in our home. There were angry rumblings in the church. The deacons were anxious about possible damage to the parsonage, about loss of influence and respect in the White community. But most of all, they were outraged by the thought of Black and White teenagers socializing together—“mixin’”, as they called it.
Three nights before the party, the deacons of my father’s church called a special business meeting. There was only one item on the agenda: to convince my father to cancel it.
Dad pointed out that the party was being held in the parsonage, which was our home—not in the church. He was not trying to force integration down their throats. He was not insisting that church members invite Black people into their own homes.
“But Shirley and I have been teaching our children to judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin,” he said, quoting Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “How do you suggest I tell them now that their friends are not welcome in our home because they are Black?”
My father remembered the discussion going round and round for two or three hours. But Mom insisted, “It was four hours before your father got home.”
One of the deacons piped up, “Well! If you allow this party to go on as planned, one thing’s for darn sure: we will ask for your resignation.”
“Well, I’m gonna do what I have to do,” Dad said, “and I guess y’all are just gonna do what you have to do.”
With that, the meeting ended.
Months later, we were told that two deacons had left the meeting and gone door to door in the community over the next few days, spreading word about the party. “Making sure,” my dad said, “that everybody was properly riled up.”