by Melanie Hemry
As soon as I heard Kenneth and Gloria preach, I knew that they were my spiritual parents.
DATE WITH DESTINY Seven-year-old Creflo Dollar took a deep breath before walking into his second-grade classroom at Kathleen Mitchell Elementary School. A hush fell over the room, followed by whispers and giggles. Racial reconciliation wasn’t a term that Creflo knew or understood. He didn’t understand anything about destiny, either. But Creflo knew about racism and bigotry. He’d learned those lessons long before he reached elementary school. College Park, Ga., his hometown, had been split into two sections for years. It was nice and tidy. One section for white folks. One section for Blacks. For some reason, it was all right for his mama—a Black woman—to cook in the school’s cafeteria. But it hadn’t been acceptable for her children to learn to read in the same school. Until now.
Creflo was the first Black child ever admitted to Kathleen Mitchell Elementary School. He was also the first Black child many of his white classmates had ever seen. He tried not to take it personally. But it seemed personal when every white face in the school turned to stare at him. It seemed personal when the other kids crowded around him at recess and tried to rub the color off the skin on his arms. It seemed personal when they took turns touching his hair with wide-eyed curiosity. In time, Creflo won friends at school.
B VOV :
9
