The Demands and Promises of Integration with John Blake

The son of a Black father and a White mother, John Blake grew up in a deeply segregated, Black neighborhood in Baltimore with a great mystery - who was his mom? Until he was 17, all he knew about her was that she was White, her name was Shirley, and her family hated Black people. Meeting her, at age 17, began a journey of racial understanding and changed his life. Mr. Blake has been writing about race and religion as a reporter for over 25 years, and over those years he has come to discover that facts don't change people, relationships do. His relationship with his mother and her sister, his father's relationships on the decks of a Merchant Marine ship, the multi-racial community he formed through church - these relationships across difference are what led to changes in racial attitudes for his relatives and for himself. Creating these relationships was demanding. Finding understanding with his White family who harbored ill will towards Black people was demanding. Yet the promise of these relationships to change hearts and move people towards understanding made it worth the effort. This is the power of real integration. This is the power of community, It's demanding, but the promise is great, and, as Mr. Blake argues, the only way we can move towards becoming a true multiracial democracy. Mr. Blake's story taps into all of our themes for this season. His is an incredible story teller, and his stories have the power to shift hearts. The relationships he builds through being in proximity and community with people who are different are the seeds that bloom into greater racial understanding. He calls on us to work to create spaces where Gordon Allport's Contact Theory can exist, and, we would argue, the best place for that to happen is in our public schools. And, finally, he shows us the power of hope to sustain us through hard times, with the knowledge that progress is being made, even if we don't always see it. He chronicles it all in his memoir, More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mot