By Kristin Szakos, Truth and Reparations Task Force Member
I didn’t grow up Episcopalian, but I got a chance in the 1960s to see the Church taking the right side in the struggle for racial justice.
My parents taught at historically Black Tougaloo College outside Jackson, Mississippi. In 1965, my dad registered me for first grade at the public school that served the campus so I could go to school with our neighbors. The Supreme Court had called for integration in 1954, but eleven years later, Mississippi schools were still firmly segregated, and this school was a Black school. Because I was a little white girl, that was a problem. As word got out of my registration, the local KKK announced that they would burn the school down if I attended. Instead, for the next year, my parents drove me to the white school, where my parents’ activism in the Civil Rights Movement made them – and me – hated by many families and some teachers. It was a miserable year, and I didn’t learn much.
That spring, a friend of my parents let them know that St. Andrew’s Episcopal Day School in Jackson was voluntarily integrating the following year – the first school in the area to do so – and invited me to apply. I was accepted on a full scholarship, along with several local African American students. St. Andrew’s was a wonderful place, and our family’s activism was, for the most part, a cause for celebration rather than condemnation. I saw first-hand how a community could make a difference by putting their actions where their faith was.
It is my hope that the work of the Diocese of Virginia, through the Truth and Reparations Task Force, will offer a similar light of inspiration to generations to come.