Right after WWII my step father began his career as a young white pastor in a black parish in Tulsa.
The Reverend Doctor Lutze's career spanned seventy years. That first parish in Tulsa led him through Selma and organizing voter registration campaigns in the South. To his angry demand in 1966 that the Christian Church stand up and finally publish a statement on race relations, that he then wrote himself.
"To Mend the Broken" was the book. It remains the best view of where we are today as it was then, I published it at The Motley Moose in full the day he died five years ago.
What a sadly ironic title to see against this vicious Breaker standing on the same ground. Leading the first packed throng of nationalist rage since the beginning of a pandemic that will kill more Americans than the Civil War. In the city where the first wealthy black community since Reconstruction was burned to the ground in 1927, when the first use of aerial bombing of American citizens destroyed nationwide the hopes of a generation.
Where Rev Lutze once quietly rebuilt trust. On the day the last state freed the last slaves in America.
To break the mended.