Show Notes
In this follow-up episode of Nuance, Case continues his conversation with historian Dr. Karen Johnson, author of Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice. Building on the previous discussion of everyday Christians who worked for justice, this episode explores how discipleship shapes moral courage, how churches can renew civic life, and why racial justice belongs within the Christian calling to love our neighbors well.
Dr. Johnson reflects on how historical formation shapes Christian faithfulness over time, explaining how ordinary believers have learned to act without certainty of outcomes, trusting God rather than control. Through stories of figures such as John Perkins, Clarence Jordan, and the ongoing witness of Koinonia Farm, the conversation highlights how public faithfulness has often grown out of community, hospitality, and costly obedience rather than comfort or recognition.
The episode also examines the church’s role in moments of social tension, including conversations around immigration, racial identity, and national belonging. Dr. Johnson draws on Christian history to show how these debates are not new, and how the church has struggled to hold together evangelism, discipleship, and social responsibility without fragmenting the gospel. Throughout the discussion, she emphasizes the importance of faithfulness over outcomes, patience over certainty, and humility in the face of complex moral decisions.
This conversation invites listeners to consider how Christian public witness is formed through long obedience, communal life, and trust in God’s work across generations. It offers a hopeful and historically-grounded vision of how churches and ordinary believers can participate faithfully in the public square today.
Watch Part 1 of this interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CQ04aO5tI4
Episode Resources:
Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice: A History of Christians in Action: https://www.ivpress.com/ordinary-heroes-of-racial-justice
Karen Johnson’s website: https://www.karenjohnsonhistory.com/
Learn more about John M. Perkins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Perkins
Learn more about Koinonia Farm: https://koinoniafarm.org/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Last week, we talked about ordinary Christians who help bend the American life toward justice in the reference to what Dr. Martin Luther King said. Well, today we’re going to take the conversation a bit further. How discipleship forms courage, how churches can renew civic life, and how racial justice is part of our calling to love our neighbor well. I’m Case Thorp, and welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square.
Well, my guest from last week is here with us again, Karen Johnson. She is a historian and teacher at Wheaton College and author of Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice. Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice, published by InterVarsity Press. Karen, thanks for sticking around for another episode.
Karen J. Johnson
I’m happy to be here. Thanks, Case.
Case Thorp
Well, we had a great conversation last week. If you missed it, be sure to go and catch it. And today we’ll continue the conversation. Let me encourage our listeners and viewers, subscribe, leave a comment, share this episode, send it to a friend or someone else, leave a comment. Your engagement really helps us to reach others who want to hear about hope and clarity in today’s world. Well, so Karen, picking up from last week, how did you go about picking the different ordinary heroes? I’m sure there were too many to fit into your text. What was the criteria by which you used to zero down onto some?
Karen J. Johnson
Good question. It was definitely a process of narrowing. As a historian, I’m, I guess, freed in the sense that we don’t try to write histories about everything. History is definitely a particular discipline. But there’s always the question of significance and who’s most important and how do we choose to include them or not. And I chose people that were part of my own story, is probably what it comes down to. I wanted to write a book that had me as an actor, not because I think my story is all that important, but because I was trying to show how people do history and also how studying that history can shape us.
Catherine de Hueck, who is the first person in the book, she was a refugee from the Russian Revolution who eventually had fled during World War I to England and then to Canada and then made her way to Harlem, which was a stopping point, an ending point for the great migration for many African-Americans from the South. And she founded an interracial settlement house there. And she was an actor in my first book, One in Christ. And then the next person in the book is John Perkins, who is an African-American evangelical. And he’s someone who came to the seminary where I was. I was at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for my masters. And it was there that I was first learning about and understanding race. And he came and he spoke and he captured my imagination. He’s one of the reasons my husband and I moved into the Austin neighborhood when we got married. And so I wanted to write more about him.
He captured my imagination because of his call to relocation. He fled the South just after World War II, after his brother had been murdered by a white police officer. His family said, got to leave. And he had had a bad taste for Christianity, both the black church and the white church in the South. Moved to California, found relative freedom there and advanced economically, got married to someone back from Mississippi, Vera Mae. And it was through the witness of his son Spencer, who was going to Sunday school, that John became a Christian. Vera Mae had been a believer. She looked back later and said, what had I done marrying someone who wasn’t a Christian? But she had. And he developed a vibrant faith, was involved in a black church, but also was mentored by white Christians. And that was the first time with them, but also with the workers, white workers at the places where he had been employed, where he had a relationship of equals with white Christians. And these men, they were businessmen, mentored him.
And he felt a call to return to Mississippi when he was preaching in a jail and it was all these young black men who were imprisoned. And he thought, for some reason, that wasn’t me. It could so easily have been me, but the Lord spared me. And so he went back South and wanted to preach the gospel, which when he initially went, it was all about evangelization and the personal relationship with Jesus, but he quickly began to realize that the call of the church was so much larger, needed to evangelize, but also have social concern, develop communities and work for justice. And so I wrote about him in the 60s. Clarence Jordan, I first found him when I saw a production of the Cotton Patch Gospel.
Dr. Perkins is, he’s amazing. Like his testimony, his historic testimony, the faithfulness of his life is incredible. And I had the gift of getting to meet him in person when I was down doing research in Mississippi.
Case Thorp
We’re going to put a link to learn more about John in the show notes. So folks go check that out. Okay.
Karen J. Johnson
Yes, and his daughters are carrying on the ministry as well, and I would just commend them.
Yeah, Clarence Jordan wrote the Cotton…well, he translated scripture and it’s known as the Cotton Patch Gospel. And after he died, I can’t remember the name of the guy who translated, but Harry Chapin wrote the score. They turned it into a musical. And so it portrays, this is just the gospel, the life of Jesus, and it’s a musical based on Clarence’s translation of the text. And I saw that in graduate school and I thought, I want to learn more about this guy.
Case Thorp
What’s unique about his particular translation?
Karen J. Johnson
He sets it in the South at mid-century. So Jesus is a white man who’s come to minister to the white church. He’s speaking, Clarence saw a lot of connections between the racial dynamics among Jews and Gentiles and Romans and Jews and comparing that to the racial dynamics of the South at mid-century. And so what he wanted to do, his sense was that Christians had put Jesus up in a stained glass window and they weren’t dealing with his humanity. And what would it look like if Jesus were, like if his actions, things that were happening in the scripture were breaking news. And he tried to bring Jesus close to home. So Jesus is born in Valdosta, Georgia, and he goes up to Atlanta.
Case Thorp
Come on, Karen. Valdosta. Dosta! My Yankee friend.
Karen J. Johnson
Valdosta, thank you, I said it wrong.
I actually didn’t make it down there. Well, and his name is Jordan, not Jordan. I had to learn that as a Yankee.
Case Thorp
Yes, well, I wonder, what was his first name you said? Clarence. Well, there was a very famous Clarence Jordan, but it said Jordan in Jimmy Carter’s administration.
Karen J. Johnson
It wasn’t Clarence. It was his brother Robert, I think. Robert was a judge. And there’s this line, I think it’s Barnett who writes about this, but he says at one point Clarence and I believe it was Robert, I’m going have to double check. They were talking and Clarence’s, the Koinonia farm was being persecuted. This was after Brown versus Board of Education and it was this interracial farm and the white Christians were upset by the farm and Clarence was asking for help. And he said, you know, didn’t we both, weren’t we both baptized at the same time? Like, don’t we follow the same Jesus and doesn’t Jesus call us to the cross? And his brother said, I’m not willing to get up on that cross. But Clarence understood the church to be Jesus’ hands and feet. Like the incarnation for him was both Jesus being born in a manger or a feeding trough as he translates it, but it’s also the church and what is the church doing today. And we should be the picture of Jesus.
Case Thorp
It’s Hamilton Jordan.
Karen J. Johnson
It was Hamilton. Yes. So that was his nephew. Thank you. So his brother, maybe we want to, well, his brother was part of the Georgia government and he was a judge and it’s his nephew Hamilton who was working in, thank you, in Jimmy’s campaign also. And he was talking with Clarence about how great Jimmy Carter is and Clarence said, Jimmy, he’s just a politician. But this was before, because Clarence died before Jimmy was running for president. This was when Jimmy Carter was running for governor, I think, of Georgia.
Case Thorp
Governor. Okay, so then the other person you highlight here, I’m looking at the table of contents.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, it’s Rock Church and Circle of Red Ministries.
Case Thorp
That we talked about in the last episode.
Karen J. Johnson
We did. And I wrote about them because we are part of the church and part of the ministry volunteering. My husband worked at the school that the church helped facilitate and run. Go ahead.
Case Thorp
Well, what I appreciate is that you do the individuals, but then you do highlight a church that’s leaning into the racial justice conversation. And I, as a pastor working with so many congregants, see why the different reasons people come to a church. Some, I think, have a much more pure, beautiful biblical desire to be in fellowship with God’s people, to worship and grow in scripture.
I see some that are looking for friends, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, you could say fellowship in a more biblical sense, but they’re looking for a place to belong. Others are looking to be a part of people active in their faith. Those that love our local mission and global mission, they want to be a part of a group doing that. And on the whole, my tradition, I think, needs to lean more into active cultural change.
In fact, that’s why I try to emphasize faith in the public square so much, rather than the church as a country club without the valet.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. And part of that may come…tell me what you think. I think part of it actually comes from being American, where we live in like the richest country in the world in time. And so much, everything that we have can cater to our comfort. And so it’s easy to sort of expect church to operate in that way as well. And we found just worshiping at Rock Church when we were members there, it took a long time to feel comfortable. And Pastor Raleigh used to say, if you ever feel comfortable, you should leave.
Because you need to be pressed. Like if you’re a mature Christian, church is not about your comfort. And I think the gospel undoes a lot of our comfort. Like we’re not called to that. We’re called to the cross. Yeah. And it’s so hard to, at least for me, like I live in the suburbs. I get to do work that I love. So much of that is comfortable. And so I just want to question that all the time and see like, Lord, am I being faithful? And I do think right now He calls me here. And so this is the work I do.
Case Thorp
I was a mission pastor and did global work for 12 years out of First Pres Orlando. And one observation I had was that so much of the radical poverty that you see in some places is managed by our government and the major social welfare system and such. So you go in most churches around the world, you step right outside the door and there is immediate human need.
And here you got to go drive and find it in some places. And so it introduces you to the plight, the realities for some folks. So doing local mission kind of becomes an extra add-on to one’s discipleship if you’re interested and if you have the time, as opposed to knowing we can lean into and meet human need. But then I even get more excited about the institutional level.
We’re right downtown Orlando. The Orange County mayor is on one side. The Orlando mayor is a block over there where the business community is right here and the major arts center is a block away. To me, our steeple standing tall is so important. And it’s expensive to be here, but we’ve got to institutionally keep reminding the rest of the institutions that we’re here. But I want to make sure that there’s action and kingdom building behind that steeple so it’s not just a symbol, but the reality.
Karen J. Johnson
That’s beautiful. Yeah. And you’re not using your situation to advance like your own comfort or desires, but seeking to serve and bless others. That’s beautiful.
Case Thorp
Well, let me shift to the immigration conversation. So that clearly is such a hot topic right now in our national conversation and a hard one for many and lots of Christians on various sides of the debate. And so I want to read a passage that you write and then talk about it more. Okay. So on page 45, you write, “in the late 19th and early 20th century, as immigrants entered the United States, they worshiped in national parishes, which intended to reach specific national or racial groups. These immigrants’ identities were fluid. When Sicilians and Tuscans, who identified themselves by their region, came to the U.S., they became Italian. In America, to be Italian was to be one of the many white races. This identity was changing, however, and by the 1930s, as Catherine,” and here this is in the chapter on Catherine de Hueck, you mentioned a moment ago, “as Catherine was moving into Harlem, the many different white races had largely become whites, the white race. When the great migration began in the 1910s, though, Italians worshiped at Italian speaking parishes, Poles in a Polish speaking parish, and Irish in an English speaking parish.” So immigration, I mean, has frequently been an issue and a topic of the American experience. What are some lessons we can learn about immigration in that time and the way race played into it to what we’re going through today?
Karen J. Johnson
What a good question. So I talk about immigration in the book really just in the context of the late 19th century and the shift from the white races to the white race. At the same time, I see a lot of resonance with what happened 100 years ago. So to give a little context, starting in the late 19th century, immigration to the US increased greatly, but people were coming to the US from southeastern European countries. And those who were already here, who identified as Anglos, were deeply concerned about the racial bloodlines of the United States. And the language they would use would be to talk about the purity of the racial stock. And so by the 1920s, 1921, 1924, the US had passed immigration laws that developed a quota system that was based on the 1890 census. So they went back to a time when the US looked a little bit more like they wanted it to look. And they said, we’re going to allow a certain proportion based on what the national origins were of people in the US in 1890.
Now, of course, there was resistance to this legislation. There were especially people from urban districts who had many immigrants who were saying, you know, these are hardworking Americans. And it seems like there’s always the tension for Christians to sort of open our doors or to turn inward and protect. And I think it becomes really difficult when you think about nations being different than the church. I draw here from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. He was a public theologian mid 20th century. And he talks about how institutions can never be completely moral because they have to draw boundaries. And so nations do need to do that, but Christians, perhaps the individual he says, can become fully moral. And so I think we really need to adopt a posture of neighborliness, which is what you saw among some white Protestant Christians in the late 19th, early 20th century. But those people became known as the social gospelers, and they were also reading higher criticism, which was very prominent in Europe and higher criticism was reading the Bible differently than it had been read previously and that it was assuming that miracles don’t happen, which is obviously, well, maybe not, but it’s a post-enlightenment perspective. Yes. And it’s sometimes crazy to me that people across time and around the world imagined so much more spiritual activity than we do today and I wonder how much are we blinded. I think about The Screwtape Letters and C.S. Lewis’s depiction of what the devils are doing in the mid, again, the mid 20th century, their job is not to scare people but to make us think they don’t exist.
Case Thorp
Well, my son, real quick, is in eighth grade at the Christ School right here on our campus and they are reading The Screwtape Letters and I love it. I’m so glad that they’re doing it. But the other day, I shouldn’t put this out there in public, but he was frustrated with a teacher and he was like, she’s just like one of the demons in The Screwtape Letters. I’m like, Brooks, Brooks, that’s not nice. Let’s don’t say that about our teachers. Sorry.
Karen J. Johnson
I love that book. Yes, yes, it’s no, but it’s a powerful book and it’s a powerful portrayal. So all that to say the social gospelers were trying to make their faith relevant. And then the people who were defending the fundamentals, this is leading to the fundamentalist modernist divide also happening in the 1910s, 1920s. So the same time there’s all this conflict over immigration.
Case Thorp
And I went to Princeton Seminary that split over fundamentalist and social justice. Gospel, social gospel.
Karen J. Johnson
There you go.
This is your history. Yeah. And it ended up being, which like evangelicals later in the 20th century will look back and it’s the fracturing of the gospel. You’ve got some people who are just focused on personal relationship and others who are focused on the social implications of the gospel. And we need the whole thing. And I think that’s the question when I think about immigration today. It’s complicated, but we need people sort of from all sides seeking to embody the holistic, like all of the gospel. And we’re not always going to agree and there’s probably not one right solution, but the disposition needs to be one that is holistic.
Case Thorp
I see that in Gen X and millennial pastors, not to pat our backs here at First Pres, but I came as the mission pastor 20 years ago. Just before that time, this church had had a nationally recognized pulpitier who was very well known on television across the southeast and known for that strong preaching that brings people to Christ. But for me, I had never heard of him.
And the first thing I heard about this church was when an associate pastor with whom I was serving in Baton Rouge came back from the Citrus Bowl, which is one of the big bowl games. And he said, y’all, I got up early and I was walking around downtown and there was this church with a breakfast for the homeless. And there were 200 homeless individuals in the fellowship hall and it was First Presbyterian Church of Orlando. So later when the mission position was available, I thought, my goodness, now there’s a church that knows how to balance salvation and bringing people to Christ plus being active to meet real human need. And I see that more and more and it’s to me a healthy combination. I hope it grows. Even with the institutional emphasis we have at the Collaborative and the desire for the public square, we do as much spiritual formation work and a desire for personal discipleship for sure.
Karen J. Johnson
And then there’s layers. I think John Perkins is helpful here. There’s layers of the work that the church can do. And I appreciate your emphasis. It’s not just individuals, but it’s like us as a body. And there’s the institutional church. There’s also the communion of saints. But Perkins really emphasized, like, we have work of evangelism and discipleship. That’s part of it. There’s also feeding the hungry and visiting those in prison. And then for him, there’s also like, why are people hungry in the first place? And his solution was sort of twofold. One, it’s community development. We need to strengthen individuals and strengthen communities so that people grow in their capacity to thrive, but also are able to thrive. And then there is justice work. And for him in the 1960s, that was, like, African Americans need to be able to vote. And so he was deeply involved in the voter registration drive. And so we can celebrate all those.
Case Thorp
There was a, when I got here, I was supervising a man who was (I should not have been supervising him) I was 28 and he was in his 60s. But he tells me the story how he walked across the Selma Bridge, the bridge in Selma with Dr. King. And he was a college student and his parents weren’t out and out racist, but they were not wanting their son to be an activist for sure, and he was told not to leave the college campus. Well, he disobeyed and he went and he said the picture of the crowd coming over the bridge was on the front page of the newspaper. And there he was and his parents saw it and threw a fit. But today we’re proud of that that man in our church was a part of that movement. But boy at the time that was a courageous stepping out.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, it was. But it also made a difference. I mean, that walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the news stations interrupted their regularly scheduled program, which I think was a view of the Nuremberg trials movie, a movie about the Nuremberg trials. And they showed this. So Americans across the nation, and especially white Americans, saw this and they thought, what is going on? And it helped promote and make the Voting Rights Act possible. So little acts can make a difference.
Case Thorp
I’ve just finished a book called The Gospel Walking. How do we walk our faith in and through the world? And that’s where last episode we talked about Ida B. Wells in her work. I learned, and I’m curious if you knew this, that the marching to Selma was a three-day affair. And it was John Lewis who led the first day. Dr. King was not there. But then he came on the second day.
And after several hours of worship, which was the practice, they would worship and praise God and pray and spiritually get ready, not knowing what they might walk into. And as they came up over the bridge with Dr. King at the front, he stopped. And then he turned around and led them back down the backside of the bridge. And it was hugely controversial in the African-American community because they thought, wait, wait, wait, what are you doing? We thought we were going to prove ourselves again. But I think that just highlights for me. It’s easy to look back and have hindsight. It’s so much more emotional and fraught with difficulty and options and tension in the moment that you never know if they’re going to be lauded for heroic moves later or seen as big mistakes.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, and I think often we want to sort of know the end from the beginning, but we don’t. And so you have to make the best choice you can with the knowledge you have sort of given your constraints as a human. And yeah, we don’t know what will happen. I think though a question or sort of a frame I often come back to is, am I being faithful? And there’s also great freedom, I think, when you think about justice work or evangelizing or sort of the whole gamut and that it’s ultimately God’s work and we’re joining God in that work. And so it’s okay if we mess up and we don’t do what maybe would be best because, and it’s also not, we’re not the only ones who are responsible. Like God could fix everything, right, if He wanted to, and He chooses to wait. And so, we’re joining Him in His work and I just find freedom in that.
Case Thorp
On the back of your book you have a quote from Bren Dubay who’s at the Koinonia Farm and I’m curious, this is the farm where Clarence Jordan…that he started, so I’m sure you’ve been there and tell me about how they’ve continued and how things look today.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, so they continued to have a farm where people share things in common. For a little bit, they went off, they called it off the Common Purse and people got modest salaries, but now everything is held in common. And they practice hospitality. If you go to their website, they’ll say, visit. And they genuinely mean come visit. And if you go, there’s places, houses you can stay in.
And they eat a common meal together and pray together at midday. And they do a lot of work with immigrants, with people in prison, not as much along racial lines now, in terms of like explicit black, white conversations and advocacy. Although Clarence was never, he just lived. He wasn’t trying to change laws necessarily if that happened because of what he did.
He was not opposed to that. I think it was a very Baptist way of understanding change. He was deeply committed to the individual. And yeah, they continue to be a place of hospitality. I had the gift of spending probably about two months there actually reading, there’s archival material on Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm up at the University of Georgia. And they also have a closet that is full of material. And the first time I went, it was too haphazard to let anyone come in the second time. They allowed me in and it was just a treasure trove of material. So, and my kids all came, my husband, he’s a teacher, so we have flexibility in the summer. And they just love it. They love it. So they still produce pecans and they sell homemade goods, you can go and buy them as Christmas gifts. And they use the money to bless their neighbors.
Case Thorp
Sounds a lot like Shane Claiborne and The Simple Way. You familiar with Shane? I knew him in seminary and even marched with him once. I’m as establishment and as waspy as you can get, so I think some folks might be surprised to hear that. But I do care about such things and I have so enjoyed watching his career unfold and follow him on Twitter.
For friends that don’t know, The Simple Way is a similar community in urban Philadelphia, and they have a common life together, a number of families, and do a great deal of advocacy and protest for certain issues from a faith perspective. One of the neatest things they do, I think, is, and look, I have my political disagreements in some ways, but I love the faith to action sort of commitment there, but…Karen, I love how they will take literal swords and take them into their workshop and make them into plowshares. And that comes from scripture. And this is so capitalist of me, but like, I want to buy one.
And that’s so hypocritical, rather than go find my own sword and make my own plowshare. But I want to tokenize financially what they’re doing. I’m such a hypocrite. I appreciate these movements. Even if we might have our theological or political differences, the witness that keeps us on our toes to consider another way and a view.
Karen J. Johnson
And I think like as much as you’re saying, I’m a hypocrite, like maybe, but maybe not also. I think there’s multiple ways to bring God’s kingdom. And this is some, feel free to push against this, but I think even about my first book on Catholics in the civil rights movement and in Chicago, 1966, Dr. King came to Chicago, joined the movement there and was marching. And he was protesting against Mayor Richard Daley and the person who Daley had appointed to serve as the director of human relations was a guy named Ed Marciniak, who had for the past 25 years been working for open housing. And the marches in Chicago were protesting the lack of open housing in Chicago, which was complicated. And there were all these Catholics who actually were organizing and helping to organize the marches. And so you’ve got Catholics who are standing sort of outside protesting, and then from the outside, looks like sort of people who are opposed to one another. But you’ve got the people on the outside protesting and marching, and then you’ve got someone who’s chosen to work within the system and bring change that way. And you kind of need both voices.
Case Thorp
Well that very vividly reminds me of a moment in my office. There were young people in an organization called Food Not Bombs here in Orlando, and they would serve the homeless food in the park, Lake Eola Park, and do this night after night after night. Well, it began to be a huge crowd and left behind a huge mess. And of course, the city was not thrilled. And they, the city, passed ordinances that you could only feed up to like 12 people trying to allot for families having a picnic, but not 200 homeless in the park. So Food Not Bombs leadership went around downtown to get the churches on their side and they met with me. And I’m telling you, Karen, the Lord gave me this language in the moment because we have our own homeless ministry and do an unbelievable amount of work and to put millions of dollars into homeless work started full downtown institutions, right?
But I don’t know that he could see that. All he saw in me was a stuffy, puffy, rich church. And God gave me this phrase where I said, some of us are activists and some of us are advocates. And I would say we’re more the advocates to go call the mayor, sit down, cut a deal, or build an institution to answer this social issue. But yet, if there aren’t the activists out there pushing the system and calling attention to the issue, and maybe that helps me realize on the immigration debate, there doesn’t just have to be one answer. There doesn’t have to be one Christian answer. I named this podcast Nuance because I was so disappointed with a number of the reactions to the pandemic and George Floyd. And so there’s nuance in all of this.
Karen J. Johnson
And I think you’re absolutely right. And you want to let other people hold a mirror up to you, whether it’s people in the past as you study Ida B. Wells or any of the people in my book or these activists that you’re talking to. Like I always want to listen and ask them the question, like, who do you say I am? Are there things I need to do to change or my church or my institution?
And at the same time, this is one of the central tenants of my own discipline of history is that there’s complexity in the past. And when we study someone, is why I’m comfortable with using the language of heroes, is that these were regular people who did really significant things in their contexts, but they’re also not perfect people. You know, what do do with Clarence Jordan, never marching in the civil rights movement in his hometown and thinking that was wrong? Is he a sellout? Or maybe he should have marched, maybe, I don’t know but he didn’t or I sort of came to understand him as he’s offering a third way. There are people who oppose the movement. There are people who were advocates within it and there are people like Clarence who were trying to create space who believed with it but didn’t support the means. And so there’s complexity in that and that’s not popular now, we want sound bites so we can easily condemn one another.
Case Thorp
Black and white is so much easier than the gray. Well, complexity in Ida B. Wells, because of her popularity as a journalist on the lynching issue, leaders of the suffragist movement, the women leading that movement got her involved. And she was quite prominent in the national women’s movement, but then they all had a big falling out because she said we need to also advocate for women of color. And the National White Women’s Establishment said, well, we’ll get to that later. Let’s start with the right to vote and then we’ll get to black issues later. And maybe they would have ever done that or not. So she has a big falling out and you know, it’s not simple or easy.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, it’s not. And I think Black women had faced the same sorts of questions just after the Civil War, too. They should be able to vote also, not just Black men. So yeah, it’s always… And I can also admire… So I think about the 1964 Democratic National Convention when…
Case Thorp
In Chicago. No, that was ‘68 where all the fires were.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, that was the ‘68 one. This was in… Where was it? Was it in Atlantic City? It was not in the South.
But Mississippi had an all-white primary. And so no Black people could vote. And that summer, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee developed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was open to anyone. And they wanted to send their own delegates to the conference. And so they show up at the conference, or at the national convention. And President Johnson, who was the candidate, was really concerned that they were there. Now, he had been an advocate for civil rights legislation, but he also is a politician and he’s trying to sort of keep everyone happy. So he wants to seat the regular Mississippi delegates and he wants to give the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party the at-large seats.
And those members of Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, including Fannie Lou Hamer, who is a famous black activist, Ed King, a white minister, they said, no, we didn’t come here to get at large seats. We want the main seats. And they refused to be seated. And it just led to conflict. And you asked, this is something I ask my students, like, should they have taken the seats?
Or was it right that they acted in a principled way? And from their perspective at that time, that was the right thing to do. So that was the choice that they made, but it’s complicated.
Case Thorp
Tell me, you mentioned your students. Tell me about students today and the sort of questions they’re coming in with.
Karen J. Johnson
Wheaton has wonderful students. I think they’re thoughtful. They genuinely want to learn. They’re often thinking about like, what are the implications of the past on the present? Sort of what should I do in light of what I’m understanding? And as a historian, this book that I did is sort of pushing into places that historians don’t always go. We tend to be descriptive and not normative. So they’re asking those sorts of questions. But I think they’re also asking questions about complexity. And they’re asking questions that are dealing with their own specific contexts and that account for place and space. And I think they really want to understand the whole, all of the gospel and what its implications are for us today.
Case Thorp
Whole gospel.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, I mean, and there I’m speaking sort of out of the trajectory of history of the fundamentalist modernist divide, which separated. And then sometimes as they learn that history, they realize, I’ve been shaped by it. Like, this is why there’s separate donations. Like, do we give to the Evangelism Fund or the Social Action Ministry? Like, we’ve sort of divided those in our churches versus perhaps it’d be better to see them as one.
Case Thorp
Right. Well, our church went in 2012 to the EPC from the PC USA. And I remember at the time when I would help walk through the last 150 years and show these streams developing, light bulbs just went off for everybody. And they got a better sense of the why and how could we get here. And to see even within the PC USA, those various streams and bodies working things out to the point where it was not workable anymore. And knowing our history, knowing our history really matters. Karen, thank you. This has just been fantastic. I really appreciate you writing this book and helping us along. So last time you told us where folks could connect more with you and your work. Tell us again.
Karen J. Johnson
Sure, I have website, KarenJohnsonHistory.com, and I’m also on Facebook and Instagram.
Case Thorp
Do you have another book in the works? What’s next?
Karen J. Johnson
Good question. I don’t know yet. I’m toying with a couple ideas, but we’ll see how the Lord leads.
Case Thorp
Well, when He leads and you’ve got that published, let us know. We’d love to have you back again. Friends, please pick up her book, Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice from InterVarsity Press. We will have links to this and a number of other things in our show notes. Well, friends, that’s all for today. If something in this conversation stirred you or your imagination, maybe challenged your assumptions, share it with that one friend. Learn more about our work at thecollaborative at wecolabor.com. That’s wecolabor.com. Drop us an email and we’ll send you Zeitgeist, our latest journal with essays on faith, work, and culture. Want to thank the Stein Foundation for making this episode possible. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
