As representatives to the movement from the Mennonite Churches of America, we moved to Atlanta, where we served as founders and co-directors of an interracial movement center called Mennonite House. From there we traveled throughout the South, participating in this spiritually grounded people’s movement.
All during that period, our children, Rachel and Jonathan, were with us. They were often in our arms or on our backs during the marches. They slept through the long meetings, but not before they had been greeted by our friends and co-workers who became their uncles and aunts along the way. And everywhere in the South they shared with us the marvelous hospitality of black and white homes. They eventually grew old enough to participate in such activities as leafletting on behalf of the first African-American mayor of Atlanta. Deeply embedded in them were the songs of the movement and the spirit to which those songs gave witness.
This movement for the expansion of democracy, the breaking of the long-held power of legal segregation and white supremacy, and the reconciliation of a shattered human community cannot adequately be encompassed in the term “Civil Rights.” It reached far deeper than any legalistic category, taking its participants into an amazing human adventure that opened the way to a transformation of persons, communities, a region, and a nation.