A White Preacher’s Message on Race and Reconciliation

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, they were comfortable, happy, and soon welcomed into Montgomery's Black community. Among the friends they made were Raymond and Rosa Parks, and when Rosa Parks's arrest triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Bob and Jeannie were some of the few white people who supported the first broad-based civil rights protest of the twentieth century. Although white domestic terrorists bombed the Graetz home twice and threatened Bob and Jeannie's lives often, the Graetzes never wavered.

Recounted in rich detail here, Bob's time in Montgomery, including these harrowing experiences, shaped a long ministerial career that never failed to emphasize equality and justice issues. In addition to Graetz's boycott memoirs, A White Preacher's Message on Race and Reconciliation also discusses the human and civil rights challenges we still face today.