The Fight for Justice with Dr. John Perkins
On today’s episode of the podcast I had the honor of interviewing Dr. John Perkins. He is one of my heroes. He’s a civil rights activist, Bible teacher, bestselling author, philosopher, and community developer. He has touched so many people's lives and been part of shaping the civil rights movement.
I'm delighted to be here! I think America is in a dilemma where they want to have the conversation, but fear is overtaking us and we are acting out of that. Now we’re afraid of each other and have made hate the communication instead of love and dignity. The purpose of man’s existence on earth is to know God, know yourself and to make God known. Only humanity can reflect the image of God here on earth. And that image would be that we love one another because love is of God. The thing is that we are to reflect this God that we have come to know so they can come to know too. We’ve got to create a new language, a language of love.
So Dr. Perkins, let's start with your story. I would love to hear just a piece of it. I know you can’t tell it all, because that’s 89 years worth! But talk a little bit about where you grew up and what it was like with school.
Yeah, I was born in 1930. My mother’s name was Maggie and my father was Jap. They had six children that I know of. I was the youngest, and seven months after I was born my mother died of starvation. My father dropped us off at his mother's house - my grandmother Emeline had been the mother of 19 children. We were not typical Christians. We were sharecroppers and bootleggers. Bootlegging in those days was pretty much whiskey and homebrew. But it was more than that - we sold merchandise too. Basically things people had stolen and needed to sell quickly. I was not exposed in the early days to Christianity - that would come later in life.
I want to stop you right there because not many people alive can talk about what it was like back in that day. Where did you live and talk a little bit about sharecropping and what that meant for your family.
We were in Mississippi. So the first 17 years of my life, I was growing up in different sharecroppers around this little town called New Haven. We grew up on a good-sized plantation, not like the Delta plantation. These were plantations of 500 or 600 acres. You would have up to 10 or so sharecroppers on that place and so it would be a pretty concentrated rural community. We lived about three to five miles from a school. I remember the first time I got a book and I went to a drugstore to buy my pre-primer book. I grew up with this massive, from the time I can remember, feeling like I needed to learn… the plantation was a family environment with the other sharecroppers. We grew up with cousins, and we had folk lore Christian values. But we were not that much a part of the church. When I started school, when I was six years old, the school for black folk was about five months. School for the sharecroppers was less than that because we would finish a crop together around November, then half of December, then January, February, and by March sharecroppers were cutting fence line and not going to school. So we would go for four or five months in a one room schoolhouse. The white folks had big yellow buses, but we had to walk and those little white kids would hang out the window and spit out at us. We grew up in that environment. I'm so convinced, I think the salvation was that I never believed the lie that white folk told the black folk and the black folks told the white folk. The white folk told us that we were inferior. And they told us that they were white and superior. That is classic what racism is in life and if both people believed that lie, then you got a culture formulating that is a lie.
So how did you not absorb that? How did you live a different narrative?
We lived on a plantation with the plantation owner and he had boys that were older than me and he had boys that were the same time as me and I could play ball with them. We played together. We got to know each other. We got to play together. Your child is gonna come to the next door neighbor’s and say, let's go, come out and play with me. If ladies were going down the street with a white kid or the black kid, the black kid wanted to go play with the whites and the whites wanted to go play with the blacks. Unless, they hold their hand and tell them not to do that and then the kid is going to say, “why?” and then they’re going to get a brainwashing. I never believed that brainwashing. I heard it, but I grew up in the day when Jackie Robinson came along and they say now that he opened the doors for black people to be involved in athletic, national, sports. No, he did not open a door. That's too narrow. He took the fence down and made a playing field that they played on together. So a lot of the foolishness that we were told was based on that racial inferiority. If I went to the church, because the church was a steward of that, the church was the one that held that gap in. In a society, and I’m teaching broadly now, whenever there is a chain and a conflict of society, you’ve got to deal with the religious belief first. Our religion believed it was alright for blacks to be separate from white and that we were inferior in the society. We still ought to know better, but we have never affirmed the constitution, which is the best interpretation of the Magna Carta, of any law that has ever been written before in the history of man. The America constitution is the best. It's the best. “We hold these two to be self evident, that all humankind was created equal.” That is one human race that all comes from Adam. That’s why you have genealogies in the Bible. Everytime there is a genealogy, you’re telling them where we came from. We were created to reflect God here on earth and he needed no other reflection. Don't make any other reflection. One God, one mediator between God and man, and that man is the incarnation of Christ here on earth. He was the express image of the invisible God. To know God is to know the reflection that was brought in Jesus Christ and to know the humanity that reflects that God is our job. And it’s the church’s job to keep that reflection going. That reflection is one time and for all committed to the church and so we’ve got to come back there. That's our crisis today. It’s a lack of greeting. We’ve got a bad language. We’ve got a language of hate. I did not think five years ago we could be where we’re at now. We’ve made hate the standard. We lost diplomacy, we lost patience, we lost that space between when we see people until we get close enough to know them. We build walls between us, we build family walls, we build up ghetto walls within our society. That needs to be told to all of us, and we’ve really got to tell each other together. We’ve got to talk about it. We’ve got to get rid of the terms white church and black church, white gospel and a black gospel. There is one gospel and that one gospel is revealed to us through the one God and the one God is revealed as Jesus of Nazareth. That’s supposed to be good news. We’ve accepted a water down religion. Evangelical religion has been held captive by one political party, and that one political party thinks it’s better than the other political party, and everything is mashed in there together. Neither one of those reflects God. We think today we’ve got to have one of those.
It’s becoming deeper to me as I get closer to God. I can see it a little clearer. I need to confess my sin every day and the blood of Jesus Christ, God's son, keeps on cleansing me from all sin. The Bible says that if any people- white people, black people, any people - and the people that are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face, God said he will hear you from heaven, forgive you, and heal your land. One of the things now as I get near the end, I'm loving people. When I see white people, I love them. When I see an asian person, I’m so glad that they’re alive. It feels so good to be loved and it feels so good to give love. Love is of God and we need the churches here to steward that, and to be our coming together, learning from each other, worshipping together. He loves us all and when we fall in love with him, we’ve got a friendship going. He calls us to be friends...We don't realize that we have been deceived. We’ve got to get over that deception and come back to loving. I see that is happening in the multicultural churches, and I see it’s happening in suburbia more than ever. I think they feel the isolation. They’re calling it guilt, and they’re calling it privilege. They’re realizing we need to share our privilege and love each other. Our privilege is that God loves us. He created us, and if we abide in him, and he in us, he will give us some resources and we can use those resources to create more resources to love each other well in our society.
Dr. Perkins, talk about when everything changed for you and when you wanted to fight for justice and you knew this was going to be part of your life.
When I got out of the service, I’d gotten married to Vera May two years and then I went into the service and then got out. We started our family. I love the little children’s song that brought me to Jesus. When my three year old son went to good news club and came home singing, Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red, brown and yellow, black and white, they all are precious in his sight. That was in California. I don’t think we could’ve sung that song in Mississippi. At that time, the national guard was trying to get black kids in Little Rock, Arkansas into the schools. When my son came home singing that song, being taught by white and black women together in our neighborhood, I said if there’s a God who loves me enough to send his only begotten son into the world to die for me, I want to know that God. That’s all you gotta say. God is calling us, all we’ve gotta do is listen.
And so your connection to salvation and justice were simultaneous?
It was simultaneous but I didn’t know it was. The motivation for justice is that God loves us so much, he doesn’t want us to hate each other! Justice is God’s love. I hear these people going around talking about social justice, criminal justice, and it’s just all effects of the gospel. That’s the way it enters our society in terms of touching us, but justice is God’s love! For God so loved the world that he created humanity. He didn’t want us to perish. This way of us cutting up justice has become injustice within our society. Justice is knowing this loving and redeeming God who came in the person of Jesus Christ. Salvation is to be saved, to be secure, and to go to Heaven. When you’ve got salvation, you’re secure. You’re in his hands and no one can pull you out of the father’s hands. I feel sin is pulling me all the time, and I think the more you love God, the more conscious of sin you become, so I feel him more and more. I’m finishing my series of books that I’m going to call my manifesto, and this has to do with the virtue in pain and suffering. I think that is joy and gladness. We’re going to use the premise in writing it where James says, “count it all joy when you fall into suffering.” We’ve bought into religion that says we’ve got to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Dr. Perkins, talk a little bit about the injustices you've seen since your childhood, then I want you to talk about forgiveness too. This is something you preach and write about, yet those injustices are real and what did it look like to seek forgiveness and choose that?
I was converted in an environment when they learned to see change. I was converted in 1957. The missionaries were coming back from Europe to a different world. Colonization was being confronted there. Africa for the African. Egypt for the Egyptian. They wanted the colonizers to leave...The United Nations is now developed and they were trying to decolonize the world. I started my family and I got this burden for how I’m going to feed them. How was I going to feed this big family? I bought a big house when I came to Jesus, and I wanted Vera May to fill that house up with children. There were people around me who nurtured me. Let me fast forward, three years after I converted, I felt this call to leave my big job that I worked myself up to, and to come back to Mississippi. That was in 1960. June 9th, I landed back in Jackson and I began to live among the people. I felt their pain...The art of being a Christian is to be friends. I got a book, They Call me Friend. We asked the question, what did Abraham find when he found the most high God? He found a friend. What did the disciples, those revolutionary disciples, they were looking for a Messiah. Jesus said don’t call me master or teacher anymore, call me friend. When I was in the Brandon Jail in 1970, when I was beat and tortured along with 19 students from the college, there was two whites in there with us. But when I was being tortured that night, that’s when I saw God. I said to God, Lord help me get out of this jail. I want to preach a gospel that is stronger than my blackness. I want to preach a gospel that can win these people who were tortured. That’s when I got the will. You need some will. You’ve got to get some passion for the people you want to win. You can’t go to hating them. We’ve got to go there believing in their inherent dignity. If they’re hungry, feed them. If they don’t have clothes, cloth them. If they don’t have a house, find a house for them. Put them in your own house. I’m not against those things, but it has to be holistic. We’re so broken up in pieces that we’ve lost the wholeness of the gospel. We’ve got holes in our gospel.
Dr. Perkins, that’s what you've spent your life doing. That holistic care and community development. I want to ask a question specifically, because I think when people are listening, they want to know what to do. So, I want you to speak to all of us about what we can do and how you have seen that holistic care come together.
Trying to be compassionate is the quest to end the pain of others. Jesus solves that problem. When that pain begins to be your pain, then together y’all decide that you want to live among them, love them, plan with them, learn from them, start with what they know, build on what they have. We’ve got to go to the people and feel their pain. How do we enter that pain? I’m telling you I have lived these years in Mississippi, 59 years, you know what I have gained? I’ve gained friends. I’m a pretty rich guy because the greatest riches is friends. I’m now old, I’ve gotta have my colon removed, I’ve got some cancer in my lungs, but you know what I got? I’ve got friends. When I go to Heaven, I’ll see my mama. She’s been waiting on me there. I know what I want her to say, but I also know what she’ll say. I want her to say, you’ve done well. But here’s what she’ll say: what did you do for people like me? That’s what motivates me. Gratitude for Jesus dying. I can ask that question David asked of the Lord: “what can I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?” And David said, “I’ll take the cup of salvation.” I’ll take the cup of suffering. That’s what Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane. There’s a cup for all of us, and that cup is living into people’s pain. People say to me, why do you feel so good about saying this to your mama? When I stood before the Senate nutrition committee back in 1968 and that's what I talked about. Out of that talking, the WIC program was born. That’s to find mothers, when they have conceived, and get them some food and some milk.
Dr. Perkins. I just texted my good friend that has given her life also to reconciliation and her name's Latasha Morrison and she said, “Jennie, Dr. Perkins has shaped generations.” I know that you probably don't even realize the legacy that you've left. But what do you hope and pray that your legacy is?
I think what I would say is that passion and gratitude for your own redemption. Think of what you are thankful for, and those people who enter into the lives of others have been touched somewhere. They've been touched. They might have been in a hospital bed talking to somebody who was sick and that very person touched down. We've got the capacity to be touch. Unless we become so stone-hearted. God has the capacity to love us. He said he did not come to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. We’ve got to find something we are grateful for. God has given us some of the means to take this good news of the gospel to all the world. I think that should be our consecration. The question you’re asking is a good one, and I think all of us should be asking that question... God called us to try to live that witness. And what is a witness? A witness is someone sharing the love of God in the power of the Spirit and leaving the results to God. Most of the people I hear who tell me about something I’ve done, I had never met them to remember them. A doctor a few weeks ago took me to the hospital. He came to pick me up, and come to find out, they had a procedure they were going to do to get me well. He had read my book when he was a ten year old boy, and that had motivated him to go to medical school. Last week, he was on his way to join Navigators and now he wants to be a doctor with Navigators. Do you hear what I’m trying to say? We want your audience is to become engaged, and they have to be engaged around the felt need of a person they’re engaged with. Otherwise it’s superficial. If you get to know people, now you can relate to their pain. If you’re a Christian on your job, and you have shown some concern, and praying for a few people, and they get in trouble, they’re going to ask you to pray for them. It starts with us touching each other. That’s why Jesus went around touching people. That’s why people got on their knees, like the woman who had been with pain for 17 years, and Jesus said power went out of me when she touched me. So I think people are looking, and I think we will find some methods. Don’t go around looking for methods, go around looking for people to touch.
It has been an honor to listen today. My son is an African American and I could weep at how you have built a better world for him. And you’ve built a better world for us. Thank you for your work and your life and your faith and how it's encouraged as today. It was such an honor to have you here.
