Writing the Book Part 1: From Classroom to Community

How did I manage to write another book?  Life is so full. Sometimes I can't believe it's finished.  I wanted to share about my process of writing Ordinary Heroes for Racial Justice: A History of Christians in Action .

Teaching a 3-3 course load, caring for four young children, and trying to meaningfully invest in friends, family and community means you have to stack the plates that are spinning.  This book also gestated alongside our fourth child, who was born in between research trips.  

How did I stack plates?  My first strategy was to teach what I wanted to write (and my department chair allowed me to do this).  I developed a course on race, justice, and reconciliation in US history, reflecting my own bias: towards the positive.  I study race in America which is a heavy history, but my inclination is to see the cup as half full.  This means I've spent much of my study looking for people who were pushing against what seems to be the general thrust of Christianity and race in America towards division and subsequent inequality.  In this class, I tried out different people on students whose lives could be used to illustrate larger themes (this is one way historians think about the usefulness of biography).  This strategy meant that I could be learning about people who might become subjects in my book while teaching.

I landed on four case studies: Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Clarence Jordan, John Perkins, and Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church.  These four people or groups represent geographical diversity, could help me cover much of the twentieth century, and were a mixture of Black and white actors.  I realized as I held them together that their stories could be used to illuminate not how race and Christianity have worked in US history but also that the Great Migration was central to their experiences.

The Great Migration was the movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban north.  In my training in urban history, the study of those dynamics had been central.  I had concluded that the movement and its implications had profound implications for race and Christianity in America.  These four case studies could also illustrate those dynamics.

Underlying that first plate-stacking strategy was prayer.  Any research project is, perhaps at its core, an opportunity to seek God.  Sometimes the steady focus that research and writing require can help form in us the ability to pay attention and look for God, as Simone Weil observed.  It really felt like God was leading this research project. 

Prayer may have led to success in the last strategy, finding time.  I applied for grants like I had applied for jobs in 2012 (when I had written 52 individual cover letters).  I used all my scheduled writing time searching for possible grants and applying for them.  Two came through.

In October of 2019, I applied for research money and a semester of funded research leave from an endowment at Wheaton College in honor of John Stott.  Those funds often support international travel, but partly because Covid soon limited that type of research, I was granted the money.  My aim was to visit the places I was studying for an extended time so I could understand them better, even though my work deals with the past not the present.  In my application, I wrote:

"At first glance, from a professional historian’s perspective, my proposal might seem odd.  After all, I’m not an anthropologist.  Historians’ method does not require us to go to a particular place and be with the people.  We go to archives and sift through the ephemera of the past. Sometimes the archives are in the same place our story is, but often they are not. . . .

"And yet, I am convinced that to make a place and a people come alive across the ages on the pages of a book and in a classroom, one must have been in that place, at least for a short season (although longer is better).

"I wrote much of [my] first book, One in Christ, which is about interracial, Catholic organizing in Chicago, while I was living in Chicago in a black neighborhood and attending an intentionally interracial church.  Although I was more than five decades removed from my subjects, I inhabited the same places as them, walked the same streets, rode the same train routes.  And, as a white person living in a black neighborhood, I was more in tune with the intercultural dynamics across race, class, religions, and regions (when southern migrants moved to Chicago) that were happening among my subjects.  I was writing and researching in the place I was writing about.  While I was living fifty years after my book ended, and on the west side rather than the South Side, living and breathing as a white person in a black neighborhood shaped my work, giving it a greater urgency and a greater depth, I think.

"Now I live in Wheaton.  I moved here to make having a family and working full time work, but I do not feel the constant press of living in a racialized world anymore.  When I lived in the city, I could not avoid it because racially I was the outsider.  Now, in Wheaton, I have to be intentional to acknowledge and press against the racialized environment because I am white and can easily fit in.  Rather than having the urgency of the need for reconciliation and justice in my face daily, even if I do not want to see it, I need remind myself of that urgency. I anticipate that spending time in Mississippi will rekindle some of my urgency, and connect me further God’s work of fostering reconciliation, justice, and flourishing."

That grant enabled me (and for much of the time, my family) to stay in Mississippi for 6 weeks and in Georgia for 6 weeks.  That experiential learning made those places come alive, and they also made it so my kids have lived in places very different from Wheaton for an extended time.  They also made the book be something that I wrote while in community with those who are living out the inheritance they received from the people I was writing about.

More on the purpose for the other grant next time.