Early in our marriage, when my wife Terri was out of town, and I was at home, the doorbell rang. When I looked out, I saw a scary vision: the silhouette of a Sheriff\u2019s deputy, magnified either by his patrol car\u2019s headlights or my imagination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the time, I was a recent transplant to the South, and interracially married, so fearful visions of a stereotypical Southern lawman ran through my head. (Over the years, I\u2019ve probably altered details of this story to make it more entertaining, so let\u2019s say it\u2019s \u201cbased on real events.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In truth, the officer turned out to be a soft-spoken older gentleman with thick glasses, who told me my wife had been trying to reach me and was worried. Due to a comedy of errors in those days before cell phones, I had missed her calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
RELATED: A Baha\u2019i Prayer for the United States Government<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Beneath the comedy, though, we can detect my cartoonish and often condescending perceptions toward the South, which I\u2019ve had to unlearn and encourage everyone else to unlearn, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve now lived in Georgia for a bit more than half my life. I married and raised a family here, became a respected reporter at a community newspaper, and continue to live in the small town of Fort Valley. I wouldn\u2019t stay here if Georgia resembled the cartoonish place many of my fellow Yankees still envision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take, for example, my opening anecdote. It\u2019s unlikely the NYPD would come to check on a husband who didn\u2019t answer the phone for only a few hours. Such \u201cwelfare checks\u201d are no problem around here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve grown to appreciate Southern manners. People still regularly say, \u201cYes, sir,\u201d and \u201cYes, M\u2019am.\u201d Day-to-day interactions tend to be more civil than in sophisticated Northern cities. People get into conversations with strangers, even strangers from New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I\u2019m trying to change a flat tire on the side of the road, it never takes long for someone to stop and assist me, even completely take over the job. Yes, that person might have a bumper sticker with a Confederate flag and the slogan \u201cPride, Not Prejudice,\u201d but they never showed any prejudice toward me and my Black wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, Southern hospitality is a real thing. If you\u2019re a guest at a Southern home, you\u2019ll never lift a finger. You\u2019ll likely leave smiling, belly bursting with ribs, collard greens, and cornbread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What you\u2019ve heard about Football Friday Nights is true. It\u2019s a quasi-religious experience. I regularly attend those \u2018services,\u2019 where Black and White people gather and cheer their players of any race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my time in Georgia, I\u2019ve made many friends \u2014 Black, White, Latino, and lots of other nationalities and ethnicities. The Baha\u2019i teachings <\/a>ask us to love all people, so I get along with liberals, conservatives, and Christians of many denominations and growing numbers of people of other faiths or those with no faith. The South is more diverse today than many outside the region might think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Has the American South, then, become a paradise of mutual tolerance, where only the content of our character matters? Far from it \u2014 but neither has any other region of the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve painted this rosy picture to accentuate the positive, with some hope of modifying the uninformed views of my Northern urban compatriots. I ask everybody to see my chosen home as a place where the good, the bad, and the ugly, and everything in between, can all co-exist and be true at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What of the bad and the ugly? The Civil War, slavery, and Jim Crow continue to cast long shadows over the Southern landscape. Across many social categories, such as poverty, crime, health, and education, Southern states exist at the wrong end of the rankings. There are exceptions, such as the recent great improvement in Mississippi\u2019s reading scores that PBS called a \u201cmiracle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The word \u2018persistent\u2019 pervades discussions of all the problems listed above, along with an attendant sense of despair leaking from between the lines. But a transformative vision, as we saw in Mississippi, can change despair into rejoicing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although the Civil Rights movement fought its battles on the legal and social fronts, it was a transformative religious vision that inspired many of those warriors, who prevailed against mass arrests, water cannons, and police dogs simply through persistence, faith, and justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I and my fellow Baha\u2019is are warriors against hatred, too. We confront not mob violence, but ignorance, racism, entrenched attitudes, and that rarely-acknowledged despair. Each day, we recite a prayer<\/a> from Abdu\u2019l-Baha<\/a>, written especially for the Baha\u2019is of the Southern states, that declares each of us, in our \u201clowliness and weakness<\/strong>,\u201d is \u201coccupied with the greatest undertaking<\/strong>,\u201d determined to \u201craise Thy word among the masses and to spread Thy teachings among Thy peoples.<\/strong>\u201d Our battle is to do our part to fulfill Abdu\u2019l-Baha\u2019s call for America to lead the world spiritually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only in the past couple of years have I paid attention to the transformative vision of the South that Abdu\u2019l-Baha gave the Baha\u2019is over 100 years ago. Abdu\u2019l-Baha visited the United States in 1912. During that trip, he celebrated the nation\u2019s energy, dynamism, prosperity, optimism, and freedom; he also urged the nation to overcome racism or face dire consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few years after that historic visit, he sent a series of letters to the Baha\u2019is of the U.S. and Canada, focused on guiding our work of spreading the Baha\u2019i teachings and principles of love, unity, and justice. Many of those letters addressed the Baha\u2019is by geographic region. (In that formulation, the Southeastern States comprised Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n RELATED: How Can the United States Establish Equity and Equality?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n