More than forty years ago I was a student at a Christian university near St. Paul, Minnesota. During my last year there several friends and I rented a house on Chicago Avenue in south Minneapolis, a neighbourhood with a racially mixed population. During my studies I was attending a vibrant United Methodist congregation in that same part of the city. Many of the families were mixed-race, something I had failed to notice until a row of parents and young teens stood at the front of the church for confirmation one Sunday. Obviously they felt welcome there, and I cannot recall anyone going so far as even to mention this reality.
Fast forward to the start of the third decade of this century. Minneapolis resident George Floyd was allegedly murdered by a police officer within walking distance of that house we lived in. The uproar following this heinous event brought back all the emotions many of us felt during those long hot summers of the mid-to-late 1960s, when race riots consumed entire districts of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit. I remember the fear I experienced on hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, recognizing that this single event would set off explosive unrest throughout the United States. Indeed it felt as though the country was falling apart. (more…)
