A White Preacher's Message on Race and Reconciliation: Based on His Experiences Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott

When Lutheran Church officials sent a young, white West Virginian to Montgomery, Alabama to serve as the pastor to an all-Black congregation in the summer of 1955, they could not have foreseen that he and his family would be thrust into a second American Revolution six months later.

But Robert Graetz wasn’t unfamiliar with the relationship between race, religion, and racial discrimination in America, and when he and his young wife, Jeannie, and their two children moved into the Deep South, t...