Crossing the Line: a Memoir of Race, Religion, and Change

By Richard Abercrombie With JoAnn Borovicka

Bellwood Press 401 Greenleaf Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091 Copyright © 2019 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States All rights reserved. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ 22 21 20 19 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Abercrombie, Richard, author. | Borovicka, JoAnn, author.

Title: Crossing the line : a memoir of race, religion, and change / by Richard Abercrombie with JoAnn Borovicka.

Description: Wilmette, Illinois : Bellwood Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. | Audience: Ages 12-15 | Audience: Grades 7-9 Identifiers: LCCN 2019040904 (print) | LCCN 2019040905 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618511522 (paperback) | ISBN 9781618511546 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Abercrombie, Richard--Juvenile literature. | Bahais--South Carolina--Greenville--Biography--Juvenile literature. | Bahai converts from Christianity--South Carolina--Greenville--Juvenile literature.

Classification: LCC BP395.A28 A3 2019 (print) | LCC BP395.A28 (ebook) | DDC 297.9/3092 [B]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040904 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040905 Cover design by Carlos Esparza Book design by Patrick Falso

Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................ix 1 / Missing Pieces........................................................................................ 1 2 / “That Can’t Be My Son”...................................................................... 13 3 / Listening.............................................................................................. 25 4 / Inquisitions and Confirmations........................................................... 39 5 / “You Get Off that Tractor”................................................................... 53 6 / Strange Looks...................................................................................... 65 7 / Taken by Surprise................................................................................. 75 8 / The United Kingdom.......................................................................... 87 9 / Biggie................................................................................................... 95 10 / Wheels..............................................................................................103 11 / Open Doors...................................................................................... 111 12 / Race Relations Pioneers.................................................................... 123 13 / Moving On...................................................................................... 135 14 / Out of Chaos....................................................................................147 15 / Reflections........................................................................................157 Notes.......................................................................................................161 Bibliography.............................................................................................163

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Missing Pieces Mrs. Broadneck, my biology teacher, was coming at me fast, nostrils flared. It was because of something I’d said. I knew I couldn’t get past her to the door, so I went for the open window. I figured it was about a 12-foot drop to the ground, not too bad. I jumped and rolled—didn’t break anything.

Then I avoided school for the rest of the day. Business as usual.

It was 1960 in Greenville, South Carolina. I was a fourteen-year-old black teenager throwing myself around in a world that didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know that in twelve months’ time I’d make a different kind of jump, one that would save my life. But before I get into that, let me tell you some more about myself.

My name is James Richard Abercrombie. I go by my middle name, Richard, but most people call me Rick or Ricky. I was the fifth of eight children—six boys and two girls—and we were all encouraged to attend church on Sunday.

By “encouraged” I mean that my parents, Charles and Lillie Abercrombie, made it a rule for their children that if you didn’t go to church on Sunday, then you weren’t allowed to go anywhere or do anything for the rest of that day. But if you did go to church, then you could pretty much do whatever you wanted that afternoon and evening. So I went to church.

Somewhere in the process of this religious coercion, I came to enjoy church and Sunday school, and I embraced Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. We had a color glossy picture of Jesus—the Scandinavian-looking Jesus image that has been made so popular over the years. The picture was framed, but not behind glass. When I was about nine years old, on some 1

CROSSING THE LINE: A MEMOIR OF RACE, RELIGION, AND CHANGE

occasion in which I was filled with gratitude, I felt compelled to kiss that picture. Shortly afterward, on considering my own unworthiness compared to the high station of Jesus, I took a wet towel and reverently wiped the picture where I had kissed it. That particular show of reverence didn’t end well for the picture, which was pretty much ruined by that wiping, but my love for Jesus was sincere.

As I grew older, however, I began to question what I had been told about God and religion. It was like pieces of the puzzle were missing. Whenever I looked up into the night sky or watched a sunrise, I felt that there had to be a Creator, but I also thought that I wasn’t being told the truth about that Creator. For instance, I wondered how God could—in all of His divine mercy—be OK with people being tortured in hell for an eternity because of some bad decision they made while on Earth. At times, I wondered if the whole God idea was like Santa Claus—something adults told their kids to get them to behave and that somehow the adults just never confessed that the whole thing was all make-believe. There was also the problem of religious teachings I’d heard on the nature of the universe.

When I was growing up, my friends and I were all about space travel.

Our interest was fueled by daily news of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Often, when I was walking outside, especially at night, I’d gaze up at the sky. I felt the endlessness of the universe, and I would imagine the fabulous worlds that might be discovered in the cosmos. When I shared my ideas about the infinite universe with Reverend Ferguson (who was working as a substitute teacher for my science class) he disagreed. He told me that, according to the Bible, the universe had an end. I asked him, “But if a spaceship could travel a million miles an hour for a trillion years, it still wouldn’t come to the end of the universe, would it?” He said with complete confidence that, according to the Bible, it would. I asked, “What would that end look like?” He said, “There’d be a wall.” I asked, “What would be on the other side of that wall?” He couldn’t tell me. His insistence that we lived in a closed and limited universe didn’t ring true to me, so I had no use for Reverend Ferguson after that.

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MISSING PIECES

There were other religious teachings that didn’t make sense to me, such as that in all of humanity’s long history, Jesus was the only divine Being Who had ever walked the planet. Why, I wondered, would God have abandoned the human race before and after the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth? I was perplexed by the teaching that the only people going to heaven were certain Christians. What about all the other good people in the world? The millions of Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and everybody else? How about the people who had never even heard about Jesus? And I was disturbed with the apparent rule that black and white people had to attend separate churches. And schools.

And restaurants. Where was that in the Gospel?

Why Won’t He Fix It? I was born during the time of government-enforced racial segregation (often referred to as Jim Crow laws), but I didn’t notice segregation that much when I was a little child. My world was small, and I was surrounded by a large and loving family. I was also embraced by our neighborhood, Nicholtown, which was an area that measured about ten-by-ten blocks in the city of Greenville. My family knew all of our immediate neighbors and, for the most part, their yards were my yard. If I did something mischievous a half block down the road, my mother would know about it before I got home because there were always neighborly eyes watching out for me. But once I got old enough to venture out of Nicholtown on my own, at around ten or eleven years old, the restrictions and dangers of segregation came into focus, and I felt its hostility.

The Abercrombie children were taught the basic facts of survival for black kids in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. My mother, who never said an unkind word about anyone, voiced it in her gentle manner. She said, “You’ve got to feed white people with a long-handled spoon. Be kind, and give them what they need, but don’t get too close.” This instruction, lovingly offered for the purpose of protecting our lives, was based on years of experience in the Deep South.

There were lots of dos, don’ts, and facts of segregation. Some I was taught, and some I just knew. I knew that all the kids I went to school with were

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CROSSING THE LINE: A MEMOIR OF RACE, RELIGION, AND CHANGE

black. I knew that all my teachers were black. Anytime I rode on a bus with white people, I knew I had to sit in the back. I knew that my big brothers and I could walk up Ackley Road to the stop sign safely enough, but I also knew that past the stop sign—the Eastover white area with the ice cream store—was hostile territory. The line of segregation was invisible, but we knew it was there. If we walked past the stop sign, white kids would likely call us ugly names, and we knew we had to leave or we’d get hurt. I knew that my friends and I could walk through Cleveland Park at the bridge but that we were not allowed to stop to play there, even though the park was right next to Nicholtown. That was tragic. Once my little brother Phillip asked my mother, “Momma, does God love everybody?” She said, “Yes, Phillip, He does.” Then Phillip asked, “Then why won’t He fix it so I can play baseball in Cleveland Park?”

I got my first job outside of Nicholtown shortly after I turned thirteen.

I shined shoes every weekday after school at the Airport Barber Shoppe on Pleasantburg Drive. The Barber Shoppe was a white establishment, but shining shoes was a colored person’s job, so I got hired. Often my employer would send me over to the café across the street to get coffee and sandwiches for the barbers and the customers. The café was a white business, too. The first time I went on this errand, I placed the order and then sat down on a café chair to wait for the food. The white staff immediately told me that I could not sit down. I had to stand and wait until the order was finished. They all looked at me like I should have known better. So I stood up and waited, as I did with each order thereafter. While everybody acted like this double standard was normal, that I should stand and wait while a white take-out customer could sit and wait, this rule and others like it made no sense to me.

One day I got to the Barber Shoppe late, so my employer fired me. Of course, I was mad about that. As I was leaving, I stopped and took a long look at the café across the street. I couldn’t help it. I strolled across Pleasantburg Drive, entered the café, and gave the waiter a big order. Coffees, sodas, doughnuts, sandwiches. They were used to me getting several things for the Barber Shoppe clientele, but this order was especially big. Then I sat down in a café

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