I’m 95 Years Old, I Died & What Jesus Exposed About Black People Will Shock You
My name is Thomas Henry Coleman. I am 95 years old and I need to tell you something before I die.
“3 months ago, I collapsed on the bank of the Kahaba River outside of Birmingham, Alabama. I had gone fishing the way I had gone fishing every Saturday morning since 1962 by myself. Just me and the water and whatever the good Lord was willing to send my way. Only that Saturday morning, what God sent was not a base. It was a heart attack.”
“8 minutes and 37 seconds. That is what the paramedics wrote down. 8 minutes and 37 seconds with no heartbeat.”
“My neighbor Calvin had driven past on the road above the bank and saw me slumped against the old oak tree I always sat under. He called 911 and ran down that embankment and started CPR on a man who by every medical measure should not have come back. But I came back and what happened in those 8 minutes and 37 seconds is why I am sitting here talking to you right now.”
“Because while my body was on that riverbank with Calvin’s hands on my chest and the Alabama summer heat pressing down on everything, I was somewhere else entirely standing face to face with Jesus Christ. And what he showed me, Lord have mercy on this old man. What he showed me about black people goes against everything I believed my whole life. Everything I was taught from the time I could walk. Everything my daddy told me. Everything my church confirmed. Everything this city of Birmingham built itself on for a hundred years.”
“I am recording this now because strange things have been happening since that riverbank. My computer shuts itself off when I try to type this out. My phone went completely dead twice in the middle of sentences and the battery was full. And two nights after I got home from the hospital, I woke up at 3:00 in the morning and something was in the corner of my bedroom. Something dark. Something that moved without making a sound. Something that did not want me talking about what I saw.”
“But I am 95 years old. My heart has already stopped once. Could be tomorrow. Could be next week. My doctor tells me to take it easy and I tell him I will take it easy when I am finished saying what I need to say because I stood before Jesus Christ and he gave me a message and if I die without delivering it I will have to answer for that silence and I have been silent about enough things in my life. I am not going silent about this.”
“So let me start at the beginning uh because you need to understand who I was to understand what Jesus showing me what he showed me actually means. You need to know where I came from.”
“My name is Thomas Henry Coleman. I was born in 1929 in Bessmer, Alabama, which is just outside Birmingham. My daddy worked at the TCI steel plant. hard man, quiet man, worked 12-hour shifts six days a week and came home smelling of iron and coal and exhaustion. My mama kept the house and raised me and my three sisters and made sure we were in the pew at First Baptist Church of Bessemer every Sunday morning without exception.”
“We were white. And in Alabama in the 1930s, 1940s, that meant something. It meant a whole structure of the world had been arranged for your benefit and presented to you as the natural order of things, as God’s design, as simply how it was and how it should be.”
“I I want to tell you honestly how that structure worked in my life, not to excuse it, to confess it, because confession is what this is.”
“I grew up on streets where black people stepped off the sidewalk. When white people approached, where the schools, the churches, the water fountains, the hospitals, the restaurants, the everything was separated, where the separation was enforced not just by law, but by violence. Where the clan marched openly and respectable, white men looked the other way.”
“I want to be clear that my family was not violent people. My daddy never raised a hand against a black person that I witnessed. My mama was polite to the black woman who came to help with the laundry every Tuesday. We were raised to be courteous, but courteous is not the same as right. And polite racism is still racism.”
“Mike, I remember being eight years old watching a black man get arrested on the street for something I could not see clearly from where I stood. The police were rough with him. The white men around me laughed. And I laughed, too, because everybody around me was laughing. And at 8 years old, you do what the people around you do.”
“I remember being 14 and hearing one of the deacons at First Baptist say from the pulpit that God had ordained the separation of the races that integration was a threat to the Christian family. And I believed him because he was a deacon because he had a Bible in his hand when he said it. Because every adult in my life nodded along. That is how you absorb a lie. Not through one dramatic moment of choosing it. Through 10,000 small confirmations delivered by everyone around you until the lie feels like air. You breathe it without noticing.”
“I graduated from Bessmer High School in 1947. Got a job at the same steel plant where my daddy worked. Married my wife Francis in 1952. She was from Tuscaloosa. Pretty woman. patient woman, a woman whose faith was genuinely deeper than mine, though I would not have admitted that at the time. We had five children, lost one daughter to a fever when she was 18 months old. That grief never fully healed, but we had our church, we had our community, we had our life, and our life was completely separate from the lives of black people in Birmingham. separate neighborhoods, separate everything.”
“I knew the names of the black men who worked alongside me at the plant. I spent 40 years working next to some of them, but I never knew their families, never sat at their tables. I never once walked into their neighborhoods except when business required it. And even then, I kept it quick and kept my distance.”
“When the Birmingham campaign happened in 1963, when Dr. King came and the fire hoses and the police dogs were on every television screen in America, I was 34 years old with three children and a mortgage and a life I was not about to have disturbed. I remember watching the coverage. I remember the images of young black people being knocked down by water from fire hoses of the dogs. And I remember what I thought. I thought they should not have been provoking things. I thought Bull Connor was too rough. But the demonstrators were asking for trouble. And I thought integration was going to destroy everything stable in my world. And I was not prepared to examine whether what I was calling stable was actually just unjust.”
“I am ashamed of that now. I should have been ashamed of it then.”
“Then on September 15th, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed. Four little girls killed on a Sunday morning in my city in Birmingham, Alabama. And I remember people in my neighborhood saying they were sorry it happened, but there was always a butt. They should not have been pushing so hard. Things were moving too fast. That kind of tragedy happens when people stir things up. Four little girls in a church on a Sunday morning. And I said, ‘Amen to the butts. Lord, forgive me. Lord, have mercy on this old man.’ I said, ‘Amen to the butts.’”
“All right, I want to stop here and say something to anyone watching this who is black and has been listening to me describe my life so far. I know what it costs to hear this. I know that sitting through another old white man confessing his racism might feel like very little at this point in history. You have heard the confessions before. Most of them led nowhere. I hear that. But I am asking you to stay long enough to hear what Jesus showed me. Because what he showed me was not just about me. It was about you. About what he sees when he looks at you. About what he told me to tell you. Stay with me a little longer.”
“Now, let me tell you about the fishing. June 8th, 2024 was a Saturday. I had been at that same spot on the Kahaba River for 62 years. Same oak tree, same stretch of bank. It was my thinking place as much as my fishing place. The water moving the light through the trees, the stillness of early morning before the heat arrives. I was 79 days past my 95th birthday. I had outlived Francis by 4 years. She passed in 2020, and that loss had done something to me that I am still working out. She was the better part of everything I was. And when she left, she took a lot of what made life feel organized.”
“I was sitting against that oak tree with my line in the water at around 7 in the morning when the pain started. Not gradual, sudden like something in my chest decided all at once that it was done cooperating. I tried to call out. There was nobody near enough to hear. The fishing rod slipped out of my hands and then I was gone.”
“My I want to describe what happened next as carefully as I can because I have spent 3 months trying to find the right words and I am not sure I have found them yet. But I will tell you what I can.”
“I was aware that I had left my body. I could see myself against the base of that oak tree the way you see something through a window from outside. This old man, white hair, the fishing rod in the grass beside him. The kahaba moving past like it had been moving past for a thousand years before I arrived and would move past for a thousand more after I was gone.”
“And the peace, I need to tell you about the peace because it is the most important immediate detail. There was no pain. The crushing pressure in my chest was simply gone. And in its place was the kind of quiet that most people never experience in this life. Not the absence of sound or a presence of something else. Something that made sound unnecessary. You know how sometimes at dusk in the summer in Alabama the light goes golden and everything gets very still and for just a moment the whole world feels like it’s exactly where it is supposed to be. that feeling but 10,000 times more complete and permanent. Not a moment that would pass, a reality.”
“And then I was moving, not walking, just moving towards something. And the something became a someone. And I knew before any words were spoken, before anything was confirmed, before there was any visual recognition that my human mind could attach to, I knew. The same way you know your own name when someone speaks it. The same way you know the smell of your childhood home the moment it reaches you decades later. A recognition that comes from somewhere deeper than the thinking mind.”
“I was in the presence of Jesus Christ and I fell. Not pushed down, not frightened into falling. My legs or whatever I had instead of legs in that place simply gave out in the presence of something that large and that real.”
“And he said, ‘Thomas,’ just my name. In a voice I will spend the rest of my life running out of words to describe. quiet, certain, warm in a way that warmth in this world is only ever an echo of. And in the two syllables of my name was every year I had lived, every choice, every Sunday morning sitting in that pew while the deacon talked about the curse of Ham. Every time Francis had tried to pull me towards something more honest, and I had let comfort win instead. All of it known, all of it held, none of it used against me.”
“He said, ‘I I brought you here because you are going back. You still have something to say. But before I send you back, I need to show you something you have been wrong about your entire life. Something that is still wrong in my church. Still doing damage. Still dividing what I died to create as one.’”
“I said, ‘Lord, I know I have not been a righteous man in all things.’”
“He said, ‘That is not what this is about. This is about a lie that was put inside you before you were old enough to know it was a lie. A lie that infected the church before you were born. And I need someone who has lived inside it for 95 years and seen it clearly to say what it actually is.’”
“He said, ‘You grew up in Birmingham. You watched what happened at the 16th Street Baptist Church. You saw what this city did to its own children. The world will not dismiss you. Use what time you have left. Tell them.’”
“Now, I need to stop here for a moment because I know what is happening in some of you right now. If you are white and you were raised anything like I was raised, something in you is getting tight right now looking for the exit. Looking for a reason to say this is too political or this is not what I came here for. I understand that I was that man for 90 years. But here is what I want to ask you. If Jesus Christ, the one you claimed to follow, the one whose name is on your church’s sign, the one you have been singing about your whole life, if he personally showed you that something you believed was built on a lie, would you want to know it? Even if knowing it cost you something, even if it required changing things that had been comfortable for a very long time. because that is the exact question he asked me on the bank of the Kahaba River. And I said yes because when you are 95 years old and your heart has just stopped and you are standing before the most real thing you have ever encountered in your life or your death. Yes is the only honest answer.”
“So here is what he showed me.”
“He showed me my own life first, not the edited, comfortable version I had been carrying in my memory. The complete version with every detail present and accounted for. He showed me the black men who worked alongside me at the TCI plant for 40 years. He showed me their names, names I knew but had never used, with the same warmth I used the names of my white co-workers. He showed me their faces with the specific look they wore when they received instructions from me. Respectful, careful, and the look of men who had learned that their survival in that workplace depended on managing the feelings of white supervisors. I had been a supervisor for the last 22 years of my career.”
“He showed me a man named Robert Earl Johnson who had worked in my department from 1971 until I retired in 1985. Robert Earl was the most technically skilled man in that department. Everyone knew it. The work showed it. His numbers showed it clearly. I never promoted him. Not once. When supervisory positions came open, I promoted men who were less qualified than Robert Earl Johnson because they were white and promoting. Robert Earl felt like it would cause problems and I was not interested in problems.”
“Jesus showed me what Robert Earl knew. He knew every single time a position went to someone he had trained. Every single time when he said nothing because he understood what saying something would cost him. He had a family, children in school, a mortgage. He had learned from a lifetime of experience exactly where the lines were drawn and what happened to black men who crossed them. He came in every day anyway, did his work, did it with a precision and a consistency that was, if I am being completely honest, a kind of testimony. A man choosing excellence in a situation specifically designed to tell him his excellence did not count.”
“And Jesus showed me what Robert Earl’s excellence looked like from where he stood. He saw a man of extraordinary dignity carrying an extraordinary weight and doing it with a grace that should have shamed the people who put the weight there.”
“He showed me Francis, even my Francis who had been trying to get me to see something clearly for decades, who had said to me after the 16th Street Baptist bombing, ‘Thomas, those were children, not demonstrators. Children in a church on a Sunday morning. This is not complicated.’ And I had said something about how it was terrible, but and she had looked at me with those eyes. She had the eyes that saw right through whatever I was trying to hide behind. And she had not said another word, just looked at me. She knew. She spent four decades knowing and trying to bring me along toward the truth. And I spent four decades finding reasons not to go.”
“He showed me my children, five of them, what they learned from watching me without me ever sitting down to teach it explicitly. The assumptions that went into them through the smallest signals. I who I spoke to warmly and who I spoke to correctly. Who I saw as a full human being and who I processed as a category. My children absorbed every bit of it and some of them passed it to their children. three generations of a lie I had never chosen but had chosen to keep.”
“And Jesus said, ‘This is how the lie travels. Not through dramatic choices, not through people who consider themselves hateful, through inheritance, through the daily unexamined choices of people who consider themselves decent. The lie does not need hate to survive. It only needs comfort. It only needs people who find it easier not to ask the question they already know will cost them something.’”
“He said, ‘You are the end of a chain, Thomas. You have the chance to be the last link, but only if you are willing to name what has been in you.’ Why? Because naming it is the first step to releasing it.”
“And I wept. Standing in the presence of the most real thing I’ve ever encountered, I wept for 95 years of not seeing what Jesus saw. For all those mornings on that riverbank, sitting in Alabama with my fishing line in the water, telling myself I was a good man when the evidence said I was a comfortable man and those are not the same thing.”
“And then he showed me the history. Not the version I grew up with. Not the version that was in my Alabama school books. The actual history.”
“He showed me the ships. I am going to ask you to stay with me through this part. Because this is what changed me most fundamentally. He showed me what the middle passage actually was. the ships, the holds below deck, the conditions, the darkness, the weeks of it, the people chained together below the waterline, the deaths, the bodies thrown overboard, the sounds and the smell. And he showed me himself in it. He was there on those ships, not watching from a distance, not observing from above, present in it the way he was in the tomb of Lazarus, the way he was in the garden before the arrest. Jesus does not observe his children’s worst moments from the outside. He enters them. He was in those ships. He was present in that darkness with every person who cried out in that hold.”
“And he showed me what he felt watching what human beings did to other human beings in those ships. In the name of commerce, in the name of progress, in the name of Christianity. I cannot fully describe what I saw in his face when he showed me that grief does not cover it. A love so fierce and so protective and so wounded by the choices of people who claim to follow him while doing this. That is the closest I can come.”
“He showed me the plantations of Alabama, the cotton, the tobacco, the work extracted from human bodies across generations, the families separated on auction blocks, the children taken from mothers, the systematic destruction of every structure, language, family, culture, community name that might give a people enough stability to resist what was being done to them.”
“He showed me the faith, and this is what undid me more than anything else. He showed me the faith that survived all of that. In Birmingham, Alabama, where I had lived for 95 years, there were black churches on every other corner. I had driven past them 10,000 times without looking and never once wondered what was happening inside them. Jesus showed me what was happening inside them. He showed me the depth of worship taking place in those buildings. The prayer, the preaching, the music, the communal life, the way those congregations had become the center of everything, not just spiritual sustenance, but practical survival, mutual support, community, infrastructure, hope.”
“He showed me the brush arbors. I want to tell you about the brush arbors because I think most white Christians have never been shown this and it wrecked me when he showed it to me during slavery when enslaved people were prohibited from gathering for worship without white supervision. When slaveholders feared that genuine Christian faith might produce genuine liberation, black people gathered in secret deep in the woods. He under the cover of darkness building crude shelters from branches and brush to muffle the sound of their singing so it would not carry to the big house. They risked their lives to worship to worship the Jesus they had found in spite of every effort to use his name against them.”
“The slaveholders gave them a version of Jesus that said, ‘Obey your masters.’ That said, ‘Your suffering is ordained.’ That said, ‘Heaven is your reward for accepting your place on earth.’ And they looked through that counterfeit version and found the real one. The Jesus who said, ‘The first shall be last.’ The Jesus who said, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ The Jesus who said, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners.’ The Jesus who died on a cross because the religious and political establishment of his day found him too dangerous to allow to keep speaking.”
“that Jesus, they found him in the dark, in the brush arbors, in the coded language of the spirituals, where Canaan was not just a theological destination, but a real northern land. And Pharaoh was not just an ancient Egyptian king, but a name attached to real systems. And Moses was not just a figure from the Old Testament, but a name given to real people who came south by night on real roads. They found the real Jesus when the people who claimed to own them had given them a forgery.”
“And Jesus said, ‘Do you understand what kind of faith that takes?’”
“I said, ‘Lord, I think I am beginning to.’”
“He said, ‘What survived in those brush arbors? what was passed down through generations of people who had every earthly reason to give up on me because of what was done to them in my name. That faith is not ordinary faith. What gets refined in a fire that hot is not the same thing as what sits comfortably in an untested pew on Sunday morning.’”
“He said the worship that comes out of that tradition, the music, the preaching, the communal prayer, the ability to find genuine joy in the middle of genuine pain. That is not cultural decoration. That is what happens when faith cannot afford to be theoretical. when you cannot sit in a comfortable pew and nod at the sermon and go home unchanged because the sermon is the only thing standing between you and despair.”
“He said the spirituals were not just beautiful songs and they were the most honest theology produced in America in the 19th century written by people who had no formal training, who could not read, who had everything taken from them and who still got Jesus right in a way that the seminary trained men who defended slavery from scripture never did.”
“And then he said what I believe is the most important thing he said to me in that entire vision. He said the enemy targeted black people in America with such sustained and ferocious force because he was afraid of something specific. You do not dedicate 400 years to destroying something you are not frightened of. The attack is the evidence of the value.”
“He said what the enemy was trying to prevent was a people fully walking in what I made them to be. Or because he knew has always known that if black people in America ever fully stepped into the identity I gave them ever walked in the full authority of the calling I placed on them ever stopped carrying the weight of a world that has spent four centuries telling them they are less. The kingdom of God advances in ways the enemy cannot stop and cannot counter.”
“He said, ‘Tell them that. Tell my black children that the ferocity of the assault is the most backward testimony to their value that the enemy could possibly give them.’ He does not send that level of opposition at something ordinary. He sends it at something he is afraid of.”
“He said the strength that built the brush arbors that survived the middle passage that kept singing when singing was the only weapon left that kept praying when prayer was the only freedom remaining. That strength was not consumed in the surviving. It was passed down. It is in the inheritors. It is in every black man and woman alive today who wonders why the world seems to work so hard to tell them they’re not enough. The answer to that question is this. You are being told you’re not enough by a force that knows exactly how much you are. And he is lying. And he has been lying for a very long time. And the lie is losing.”
“I heard that on the bank of the Kahaba River in whatever spiritual form I occupied while Calvin worked on my body and the Alabama summer pressed down on everything. And I am telling you now because Jesus told me to in and now he also spoke to white Christians. And I need to tell you what he said.”
“He showed me the white church. He showed me the Sunday morning sermons I had sat through for 95 years. The Bible that had been opened in those services, the words of Jesus read aloud from those pulpits. Love your neighbor as yourself. Every human being made in the image of God. Jesus touching the lepers that the religious establishment of his day had decided were untouchable. Jesus making the hero of his most famous parable not a respected religious leader but the despised outsider that his audience looked down on. All of that in plain language. Read aloud from Alabama pulpits while the congregation went home and maintained every element of a system that contradicted every word of it.”
“And Jesus said this is the deepest form of the lie. Not the people who never opened the Bible, the people who heard my words every week and built a theology of separation anyway.”
“He said the people who used scripture to defend slavery were not confused about scripture. They were selecting, taking the verses that served what they wanted and ignoring the ones that would have cost them something. That is not misunderstanding. That is choice. And the generations that came after, the ones like you, Thomas, bear a different kind of responsibility. Not the architect’s responsibility, the inheritor’s responsibility.”
“He said, ‘You inherited a structure built on a lie. You lived comfortably inside it for 90 years. You said amen to sermons that confirmed it. You drove past the evidence of it every day without stopping to examine it.’ And he said, ‘Guilt is not what I’m asking for.’ Well, guilt that produces paralysis is not from me. What I’m asking for is turning. Real turning. The kind that cost something. The kind that moves in a new direction and does not stop when it gets uncomfortable.”
“He said, ‘The white church has resources and reach and influence. For generations, those resources moved in segregated circles and called it the natural order. Imagine what happens when those same resources start moving toward repair, not as charity, as family, because that is what you are.’”
“He said, ‘What would it cost you, Thomas, to go to a black church in Birmingham and sit down and listen? Not to explain yourself, not to perform something, just to listen. to learn what has been happening in those buildings you drove past for 90 years.’”
“I said, ‘It would cost me comfort.’”
“He said, ‘Yes, and comfort has been your primary investment for 90 years. Spend some of it on what actually matters.’”
“Now, let me tell you what happened when I came back. The first thing I knew was grass against my face, then Calvin’s voice, then a siren in the distance, then pain. a lot of pain. The body registering that something significant had happened to it. The paramedics arrived. They stabilized me. They got me into the ambulance. My son Gerald was at my house when the hospital called. He told me later he drove to that hospital at speeds that would have gotten him arrested if anyone had been paying attention.”
“5 days in the ICU. 5 days of machines and monitoring and the silence of an intensive care unit at 2:00 in the morning. And I used those 5 days to lie in that bed and let what I had been shown settle into me.”
“And three nights after I got home from the hospital, I woke up at 3:00 in the morning. Something woke me. Not a sound, a presence, the kind that activates every nerve before your mind catches up. I turned on the lamp and there was something in the corner of the room. Not a person, not an animal, a shadow that was denser than the darkness around it. With intention to it, with direction aimed at me coming from it the way heat radiates from something in the sun was hatred. Pure concentrated ancient hatred.”
“I will not pretend I was not frightened. I was 95 years old with a barely functional heart and there was something in my bedroom radiating malevolence in my direction. I was frightened. But then I thought about the brush arbors. I thought about the people Jesus had shown me gathering in the dark in the woods. I’m risking everything to worship. facing a threat that was not a shadow in a corner, but a physical, legal, armed threat with the full backing of law and culture and still singing, still praying, still holding on to Jesus with both hands. If they could do that with what they were facing, I could face a shadow in my bedroom.”
“I said out loud, my voice shaking. ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, you have no authority here.’ The shadow seemed to grow and something entered my head that was not a voice saying, ‘You are old. You are weak. Your heart is barely working. Stop speaking. This message is not going out.’”
“And I thought about Addie May Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, Carol Denise McNair, 14 141411, Sunday morning, September 15th, 1963 in a church getting ready for the youth day service. And I thought about what I had said after that bombing, about the butts, about every moment I had chosen comfort over truth. And something happened inside me that I can only describe as righteous anger. Not at the shadow, at myself. At 95 years of choosing the comfortable thing over the right thing.”
“I said, and my voice was steady now. ‘My life is in God’s hands, not yours. And even if you end it tonight, somebody else will carry this message because the truth is coming out now. Get out of this room in the name of Jesus Christ.’”
“And I prayed, not the quiet, composed prayer I had been praying for 90 years. something bold, something loud, something that claimed authority in the name of Jesus without asking anybody’s permission for the volume. ‘Lord Jesus, I command this presence to leave in your name. You defeated the enemy at the cross. You have given me your authority and I am using it now. Get out. You have no right here.’”
“The shadow moved the way smoke moves in wind and then it was gone. The room warmed immediately. I sat in that bed until sunrise, shaking, but more certain than I had been in my life. If the enemy was fighting that hard to silence this, what I had to say was more important than I had understood.”
“The next morning, I called Gerald. I said, ‘Son, I need you to help me get this recorded and put somewhere people can find it because I do not know how many mornings I have left and this needs to get out before I run out of them.’ Gerald did not argue. He just said, ‘Yes, sir. Daddy, tell me what you need.’”
“Now, let me tell you what I have done in the 3 months since that riverbank. Yeah, because I do not want this to be only words.”
“The first thing I did when I got home from the hospital was drive to the 16th Street Baptist Church. I parked in front of it. I sat in my car for a long time. I looked at that building I had driven past my whole life. The building where four children were killed on a Sunday morning in 1963. While I was saying amen to the butts. And then I went inside. There was a woman there working in the office. She walked me through the memorial, showed me the photographs, told me the history. I stood in that basement where the girls had been getting ready for Youth Day, and I wept. Not perform grief, not the grief of someone doing something because it seemed appropriate. The grief of a man finally standing in a place he should have stood 60 years ago.”
“I wrote letters, handwritten letters, because at 95, that is the only kind I know how to write. Letters to black people I had known across the decades, the men from the plant. Neighbors I had waved at for years without knowing their families. I told them what happened on the riverbank. I told them what Jesus showed me. I told them I had seen them incorrectly for a very long time and I was sorry. Not the cultural sorry. Not the kind that costs nothing and changes nothing. The kind where you have seen clearly what you did and who you did it to and you stand in front of it with nothing to hide behind.”
“One man wrote back he had worked in my department for 17 years. He wrote that he had carried the question of whether I had known whether I had understood what I was doing when I promoted less qualified men over him for decades and and that the letter gave him something he had not expected to receive. He said it felt like something that had been broken for a long time beginning to mend. I sat with that letter for a long time.”
“I started attending a black church in Birmingham. The congregation meets on Sundays and I walk in as what I am, a 95year-old white man from Alabama with a lot of years to account for. And I sit down and I listen, not to fix anything, not to perform something for an audience, to learn what has been happening in those buildings. I drove past for 90 years without looking inside.”
“The pastor is a man named Reverend James. His grandfather was in Birmingham during the civil rights movement. After my third Sunday, he sat down with me and we talked for 3 hours. I listened for most of it. Just listened. He told me things about Birmingham’s history that I had lived alongside without knowing. Things about his congregation that were extraordinary. Things about the faith his grandfather carried that gave me a completely new understanding of what faith actually looks like when it has been tested all the way to the bottom. I come back every week.”
“My daughter Susan thinks I have lost my mind. She said, ‘Daddy, you do not have to do this.’ I said, ‘Susan, everything you know about how to see black people, you learned from watching me. And what you learned from me was wrong. I cannot undo that with a conversation. But I can show you what the truth looks like while I still have time to show you.’ She was quiet for a while. Then she said, ‘Can I come with you Sunday?’ She has come every Sunday since.”
“So here is what I was sent back to say plain, direct, the way a 95-year-old man running out of time talks to my white brothers and sisters. We were wrong. Not politically wrong. Not culturally wrong in a way that can be explained away by the times. Sinfully wrong. Racism is sin. The violent kind that bombed churches and the comfortable kind that drove past them are both sin. The difference is in the degree of action. The nature of the wrong is the same.”
“Jesus never taught that any race was above another. Not once. Not by suggestion. He went toward the people his culture said to avoid every single time. He made the despised people the heroes of his stories. He touched the untouchable. He spoke to the ignored. And we built the walls back up and used the Bible, the same Bible that contains the words I just described to defend what Jesus would have opposed with everything in him.”
“And he wept. I saw it on that riverbank. I stood before the son of God. And I saw him weep over what was done in his name.”
“But he did not send me back to make you drown in guilt. Guilt that produces paralysis is not from him. He told me that directly. What he is asking for is turning. Real turning. Going toward the person you have been comfortable keeping at a distance. Listening without defending. Learning the history you were never taught. Seeing the Robert Earl Johnson in your life and doing something about it. Because polite is not the same as right. Decent is not the same as just. And 90 years of Sunday morning attendance is not the same as following Jesus.”
“To my black brothers and sisters, I know I have no standing here. I know what white people saying sorry looks like at this point in history. I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking you to receive what Jesus said because those words were his, not mine. He sees you. He has always seen you. He was in those ships. He was in those fields. He was in the brush arbors in the dark. He was at the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15th, 1963 with those four girls in that basement in that moment. He did not look away. He never looks away from his children suffering. He enters it.”
“The faith that came out of what your ancestors endured is not ordinary faith. It is the most refined, the most tested, the most genuine expression of faith this country has ever produced. And it was passed down. It is in you. Every one of you watching this carries something extraordinary that was forged in conditions designed to destroy it and did not succeed. The enemy knows that the attack on you has been so sustained and ferocious because he knows exactly what you carry. And he has been lying to you about it. Telling you that you are less, that you are behind, that you do not measure up precisely because the truth is the opposite. And he cannot afford for you to know that.”
“You are not what the worst moments of your history said you were. You are what Jesus says you are. Royal priesthood, chosen generation, imagebearers of the living God, purchased with blood that was not cheap. Walk in that every day for the calling that is yours.”
“To everyone. Every background, every side of every line that has been drawn in this country. The message is this. Heaven is not segregated. The church on earth is not supposed to be divided. We are family. We have been living like strangers. And the enemy has been counting on that division for a very long time. Because a unified church, genuinely unified, not performatively unified, walking in actual love across every line, is the most powerful force that has ever existed on this earth. That is what Jesus died to create, and it is not too late to start building it.”
“My name is Thomas Henry Coleman. Born in Bessmer, Alabama in 1929. A man who sat in Alabama churches for 95 years while the deacons talked about the curse of Ham and I said, ‘Amen.’ A man who drove past the 16th Street Baptist Church a thousand times without stopping. a man who watched fire hoses and police dogs on television in 1963 and thought about what the demonstrators should not have been doing. A man who stood before Jesus Christ on the bank of the Kahaba River and was shown clearly and completely who he had been and who came back.”
“I do not know how many Saturdays I have left at that river. What I know is that this morning I have this message in me and I’m getting it out.”
“Racism is sin. The comfortable kind is still sin. Black people are made in the image of God and carry gifts that the whole body of Christ has needed and still needs. The enemy attacked them for 400 years because of what they carry. And what they carry has not been diminished. The church is being called to look like what Jesus died to create. Not like what is comfortable, like what is true.”
“God bless every one of you.”
“Thomas Coleman, Birmingham, Alabama, 95 years old. Finally seeing what was in front of me the whole time.”
“Death is permanent. There are no second chances after the last breath. Use the breath you have. We belong to each other. Go act like it.”
