Prayer for freedom
By TOM PRICE
Mennonite Mission Network
Sunday, July 6, 2003

A quick train ride away from the controlled environment of the Georgia World Congress Center, beyond the commercial sites, lay paths where one can trace the footsteps of living history.

In groups of 40 to 50, Mennonites are emerging from the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority station, in the “Sweet Auburn” community, the heart of Atlanta’s black community in the 1950s and ’60s.

“We invite you to be a part of this tour not only as an opportunity for learning history, but as a people of prayer,” Regina Shands Stoltzfus, an organizer of the daily walks, told several groups yesterday. “Imagine you’re walking as part of your walk with God.”

Indeed, the journey is more than simply a pilgrimage into 20th century history. Signs are evident to even the most casual witness that Martin Luther King’s dream has not been fully realized.

Five men sleep along Auburn Avenue beneath the I-75/85 overpass. Two more rest at the front door of a church, seeking protection from the drizzle. A woman asks for money for food. A homeless man sells newspapers as his livelihood. A garish billboard screams, “We buy ugly houses.”

Still, participants come away with an awesome sense of having been among a great cloud of witnesses. They walk among the stone streets that gave birth to such institutions as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

They get further insight into local institutions such as Georgia State University (one of the most integrated in the South), Grady Hospital (once a segregated hospital serving only blacks) and the Silver Moon Barber shop (the city’s oldest black-owned business).

They walk in the landmark Ebenezer Baptist Church, now part of a King national historic site, see King’s birth site and resting place, and learn of a thriving ongoing church – one of many with vital community ministries.

“Atlanta is a very important site in the history of the civil rights movement,” said Shands Stoltzfus, who as a parent and pastoral leader, didn’t want to see youth come to Atlanta and not realize its significance.

“It’s so powerful to be where these wonderful … civil-rights advocates were walking,” said Andrew Roth, of Lancaster, Pa., who led a tour that included 27 youth and their sponsors from Yellow Creek Mennonite Church near Goshen, Ind.

Stoltzfus, the associate campus minister at Goshen College and minister of urban ministries for Mennonite Mission Network, organized the walks together with her Goshen College assistant, Stephanie Short, and with Sarah Thompson, a Goshen resident who now attends Spelman College in Atlanta. The Plowshares peace studies collaboration of Earlham, Goshen and Manchester colleges underwrote a portion of the Freedom Walk.

More than 2,200 participants pre-registered for the tours, which, despite demand, are no longer open to additional participants because of a lack of tour guides. Yet individuals and groups can easily use the prepared materials for self-guided tours.

“Actually being where Martin Luther King walked makes it seem real,” said Mandy Swartzentruber, a member of Yellow Creek’s youth group.

“It was worth it,” said Maria Yoder (the group’s only African-American), who with Swartzentruber and Natalie Reinhardt was most surprised by the black-white line, a boundary that segregated blacks, denying them the same city services as whites.

“That they [white firefighters] wouldn’t go to ‘black fires’ was pretty bad,” said Andrew Raber, who recalled a tour statistic: In 2002, Atlanta police shot 12 people. Blacks accounted for all five fatalities; none of the officers received more than a minor penalty.

“That shows there’s still racism,” Raber said.