Race, Love and the Struggle We Must Win

When the Rev. John Perkins was 15, his older brother was killed by white police officers while he was waiting in line to buy movie tickets. Twenty-five years later, Perkins himself was jailed and tortured for protesting segregation. Those experiences helped to shape his understanding of the toll racism takes on both blacks and whites, and he has been a fervent advocate for reconciliation ever since.

He shares those stories and more in his recently released memoir, Dream With Me: Race, Love, and the Struggle We Must Win, and explains how they shaped his belief in reconciliation through greater political and social engagement and compassion.

Throughout the book, the 86-year-old social justice leader brings an incisive account to the persistence and perniciousness of racism in the United States, while providing prescriptions for dismantling it.

Perkins spoke with YES! about the relevance of our radicalized history in the US, as well as civil rights victories of the past to the resistance to the Trump administration, and his indefatigable hope for a better world.

Amanda Abrams: Where did your inspiration for the book come from?

John Perkins: I started writing this book as sort of a reflection. I was seeing signs of what I’d been dreaming and longing for in the new multicultural churches — churches like Fellowship Memphis in Tennessee, and Quest Church in Seattle, [which] are gospel-centered and ethnically diverse.

But my hopes and dreams got a little shattered [when Donald Trump was elected for president]. Eighty percent of evangelicals — my own group that I’d given my life to — [supported] a person who had no history of evangelicalism.

I’m still dreaming and hoping, of course.

Were you angry, and are you still?

I still want to be loving and receiving, and I still want to be hoping for the evangelicals, and hoping for Trump, and hoping that we can live together across these ethnic barriers, but it doesn’t look good.