Unsung Hero

Without the Montgomery bus boycott, we would not know the name "Rosa Parks." Without the people standing before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, we might now know Martin Luther King's Dream. If hundreds of thousands of families with school children had not chosen integration across the South, the "Little Rock Nine" would be a distant memory.

The trails of the trailblazers will fade if their path is not followed by others; every leader requires followers for their vision to become reality. The civil rights movement, in fact all movements that attack injustice, became a movements when everyday people, most whose names will never make it into history books, dedicates their lives to it, sacrificed so that justice would in fact roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

In Pearl, Mississippi, the Jenkins family, faithful Christians, took the opportunity to take a stand for justice and enrolled their children, starting with their third grader, in the public school system, becoming the first African-American family in that town to do so. Their decision made them the target of great hatred; they received threats, a fire bomb was thrown at their home, bullets were fired into their walls. Mrs. Jenkins was a housekeeper, and even her employer was treated to a yard full of white crosses when he refused to fire her. Perhaps the worst terror came from a group of white teenagers who would race their car down the Jenkins' street without regard to the toys of the children playing there, hurling insults and slurs the whole time. One night, as they prepared to spray dust as they turned to leave the neighborhood, the only sputter they heard was their engine as they ran out of gas. The teenage Jenkins' saw their opportunity, as the white teenagers who had so terrorized them became the ones in need of mercy. Rev. Willi Jenkins, their father, came out with a shotgun, wondering what was going on. As he stood on his porch, the driver of the car asked for help. Rev. Jenkins, recognizing the opportunity for justice, chose mercy. Silently, he went to his car, siphoned gas, and filled the tank of the white teenagers, and they left. I don't know if Rev. Jenkins ever marched in a protest or held a picket sign, but can only imagine that his children and grandchildren could not help but be different people, different kinds of Christians, different kinds of Americans, because of his actions.

Mohandas Gandhi, whose sculpting of nonviolent civil resistance transformed the history of the 20th century, and particularly influenced the American civil rights movement, once said, "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always." That's what happened one night in Pearl, Mississippi.