From Freedom Riders to Flash Mobs

Fifty years ago, the Freedom Riders changed America.

From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South.

Trained in the techniques of non-violence, the Freedom Riders challenged Jim Crow laws that called for the separation of blacks and whites by riding interstate buses through the South. The Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along their journey. In Mississippi, the Freedom Riders were sent to prison.

On September 22, 1961 the Interstate Commerce Commission issued its order to end segregation in bus and rail stations that had been in place for generations.

Last night, as I watched the documentary, The Freedom Riders, I was in awe of the courage of the young men and women of all races and religions who faced violence and death in the fight for civil rights for all Americans. I was proud of the strength and resolve of the men and women who faced death so that America could live up to its ideals. I felt gratitude for the sacrifice of people who faced beatings, violence and the very real possibility of death so that future generations would not have to suffer the indignities of segregation and racism.

But as I reflected on the images of the Freedom Riders and our forefathers who faced hate-filled violent mobs, I thought of the new mobs that threaten our young people today.

Now the images I see on the news are not Freedom Riders facing white mobs of hate, but flash mobs of young people beating innocent victims.

43 Lessons I’ve Learned in 43 Years

On Sunday I celebrated my 43rd birthday. By chance if I had forgotten my age, my daughter reminded me with a wonderful homemade card with a big 43. But I think I’m going to claim my Wii fitness test age of 35. That was a pretty good year. I am thankful to God for allowing me to celebrate another birthday. As I get older, I find birthdays as a time of not only celebration but also reflection and contemplation. In thinking about my four decades and three years on this earth, I thought about some of the important life lessons I have learned.

So I wanted to share some of those thoughts. These thoughts, lessons, truths and sayings are not necessarily in order of importance or in the order learned. This list is also not comprehensive, but just 43 that come to my mind at this time based on my 43rd birthday. They are things that have been learned by observation, experience and listening to the wisdom of others (sources noted in parentheses). Although they are lessons learned, truths taken to heart and ideas that I live by, I’m still striving to live and walk in the truth of them every day. Step by step. Day by day. Year by year.

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned and truths that you know? What have the years taught you? Here are some of mine.

Bird Sense

Like a bird that wanders from her nest, so is a man who strays from his home. Proverbs 27:8 (Amplified Bible)
 
Outside of my living room window robins have taken up residence.

They built a nest there last year and have returned. I’m reminded of their return most mornings when I enter my living room and I hear the thump of the bird running into my window.

“Crazy bird,” I think to myself and sometimes say out loud.

The bird, the Daddy Bird I assume, keeps flying into my living room window, apparently thinking someone is coming near his nest when we walk through the living room.

I see him bringing worms to the Lady Robin as she sits on their eggs. He protects and provides for his nest.

Then I started thinking, this bird isn’t so crazy after all. If only some humans had bird sense.

I sit at my computer and click on Facebook and look at a video a friend has shared from Judge Mathis. A man in an orange pin stripe suit with nine children by five different “baby mommas” is being sued for rent and cell phone bills by a woman who is pregnant with his tenth child.

And I think to myself again, some folks don’t have bird sense.

Going in Circles

“Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have all the people give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the people will go up, every man straight in.” Joshua 6:2-5

Have you ever felt like you’re wasting your time?

You’re doing what God told you to do but you don’t seem to be getting anywhere or making progress? You’re just going around in circles. Covering the same ground. Doing the same old thing.

Do your daily tasks seem meaningless and ineffective in the grand scale of things? You see others doing “great” things. Winning great battles and receiving accolades and you’re just marching around in circles.

I’m sure the children of Israel must have felt like that while they were walking around the walls of Jericho. And that is how we may feel sometimes in our life. Perhaps God has you in a season where you just seem to be going in circles.

The Power of One and a Little Encouragement

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!
Psalm 133:1

This past weekend my husband and I attended a music festival in a large football stadium. Thousands of concertgoers enjoyed the music of various artists.

During the break between acts on Saturday night while the stage crew was preparing for the next performer, the sounds of “Flashlight”, a classic from the 70s group Parliament that gets folks to the dance floor, played in the stadium.

The energy of the crowd had died down as we waited for the next act, but when the music started to play, one man in our section got up and started to dance. He was working it, smiling, having fun and getting down. The folks in our section of the stadium started to encourage him.

The Truth at Last

An excerpt from Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood

By Nichole Christian

Years after my daddy died, I finally laid down my superhero image of him too. Two decades after spreading his ashes, facts I’d never known about Daddy began to surface and collide with the fiction I had cherished as a child. It turns out Daddy was more human than I could ever see.

It’s funny to me now the way I once romanticized a man I knew so little about. And sometimes I cringe, thinking of the many nights, the many ways I prayed death upon my mother, while forgetting and forgiving Daddy, who’d gone AWOL first.

He had ducked out of their marriage not long after doing the honorable thing and marrying my pregnant mother. By the time I was fourteen, they were both dead, departing one after the other—first her (by a drug overdose), then him, with just nine months between them.

About the Book and Prologue

About Dear Dad

This project was inspired by my essay for National Public Radio’s This I Believe series and is itself a compilation of true narratives written by a group of journalists and writers I assembled for this project. Men and women from various walks of life and various generations, they are black, white, and Hispanic. A good number of them have written for some of the nation’s best news organizations—the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Time magazine, and others. All of them write in the pages that follow about the impact of fathers, and fatherlessness, on their own lives. This comes at a time when the focus of a national initiative and even President Barack Obama have sounded the clarion call for responsible fatherhood amid a continuing crisis of paternal absenteeism.

Fatherhood is a subject that deserves our attention. A key component of that critical socializing agent known as family, “father” is important to us all.

So what better time than this—than now—to lend to and perhaps spur the national dialogue on fatherhood, to raise to the light images of the best of our fathers, and also examples of some failed or flawed fathers, with the hope that from each may be gleaned a more perfect model to which all fathers might aspire? And there seems no better way to examine fatherhood and to extract lessons from the past in the hope of creating a brighter future than to follow the reflective journeys of writers who remember their fathers lovingly, poignantly, vividly, at times longingly, even sometimes with disappointment.

Through the prism of our collective lens, these mini-memoirs recall time we spent with our fathers, or in some cases, the lack thereof. And each seeks to provide insights on the best of fathering, if not also hope for the millions of American children who today face growing up in homes with no father present.

Absent but Always Present

An excerpt from Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood

By Monica Fountain

My father never went on a school field trip. Never came to a football or basketball game where I was shaking my pom-poms in what he still jokingly describes as my little “bobtail skirt.” He didn’t attend the school musical or the play I wrote in high school. When he did come to the school, he usually wasn’t there for me.

 Instead, he was helping a single mother get her wayward son back in school. Or he was fighting the local powers that be, protesting to get more black teachers hired for a school enrollment that was increasingly black and a school staff that was stubbornly white. He was often marching off to school board meetings or rallies and organizing the community for another civil fight. Or he was protesting the number of black boys being expelled and suspended—my father’s days and nights filled with meetings and causes and prayer.

Celebrating Fatherhood

My husband, John W. Fountain, sometimes quotes Chris Rock about fatherhood. Chris Rock says if fathers are lucky, they might get the big piece of chicken. On Mother's Day, restaurants are full. On Father's Day, not so much. Sometimes we take our fathers for granted or don't show them the appreciation that they deserve. Sometimes our fathers are or were not there.

Whatever the case may be, fatherhood is important and should be celebrated. Good fathers need to be appreciated for the love, guidance, provision and protection that they provide. Fathers who are not there need to know the important role they play in their children's lives.

That's what my husband's new book, Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood does. Dear Dad celebrates fatherhood as one of life's most sacred callings. It also encourages fathers who have been good fathers to stay the course and those who may have fallen down on the job to get back up. It is also an encouragement and hope for healing for those who have not known the love of a natural father. It speaks clearly of the love of our Heavenly Father--God.

I am one of 15 writers that my husband enlisted to share their thoughts, memories and reflections about their own fathers and fatherhood. It is the first publication of WestSide Press, a publishing company founded by my husband that is dedicated to telling the stories of the human experience, especially the stories of those who are often unseen and unheard in our society.

This week, as we prepare to celebrate Father's Day, I will feature excerpts from Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood, including my own.

For more information about the book and the writers, please go to http://www.wspbooks.com/. For an autographed copy of the book, you can purchase the book here at At the Well or at the WestSide Press web site. Dear Dad is also available at amazon.com.

If you would like to share your own "Dear Dad" story, go to http://www.wspbooks/ and click "Your Story" for information about writing your reflections on fatherhood.

And if you have a father or special person in your life who has been a father to you, give them more than just the big piece of chicken. Thank them. Call them. Show appreciation to them. Celebrate them. Celebrate fatherhood.