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Across the Threshold
A place where I could not go, or stay
I’ve lived with crosses all my life, from the sanctuary of the Methodist church I was raised in to the enormous water tower high on the hill overlooking both our neighborhood and the city itself.
A water tower on whose face someone had erected an enormous cross — a cross that glowed white in times of joy and safety, but blazed red whenever some horrible accident befell one of our citizens.
And this was Bessemer, Alabama, in the 1960s — home of virulent Klansmen (part of the mob who killed Viola Liuzzo and attempted to bomb Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to death at the AG Gaston Motel in Birmingham in the year of our Lord, 1963).
Our Methodist church refused black members — the congregation almost ran our minister out of town when he authorized entry for a peaceful black family one Sunday. So I have to wonder:
When the cross on the water tower blazed red, was it ever for the horrible death of a black person, someone who may or may not have been beaten and lynched?
As a southerner, I almost literally grew up listening to hymns like “The Old Rugged Cross.” But when I heard The Allman Brothers Band for the first time, and…