Prologue
1970
“Didn’t you know what Rev. Shipp believed when you hired him? Didn’t he preach about it?” the reporter asked.
“Yes,” she replied without giving her name, “but we thought that was just preaching. We didn’t think he was gonna do anything about it.”
2021
On a clear day in July, I am driving into Wake Forest on NC Highway 98. The day is hot, but the humidity is uncharacteristically low, so I roll the windows down and turn off the AC. Listening to a CD of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, I ponder the story that brings me back to a town I thought never to revisit. I am just beginning to write about what happened to my family here in 1969 and 1970. About the Christmas party my brother and I planned twelve days before Christmas Day. About the friends who accepted our invitation, both Black and White, as well as those who didn’t. About a church, concerned more about public opinion than God’s love, who put the gospel they professed to believe to a vote.
Ridgecrest Baptist Church still sits beside Highway 98, its tiny steeple pointing sharply into the sky as if to pin it in place. Next to the two-lane 55-mph road that connects Wake Forest and Durham, it looks exactly as it did in 1969 when my father, Rev. J. Wesley Shipp, was pastor there for nine months. Before he was dismissed for practicing what he preached.
The highway is different from the one I remember. Since the 1980s, the twists and turns of the road I knew lie buried deep beneath the waters of Falls Lake, a reservoir formed when the Neuse River was dammed. A remnant of old NC Hwy 98 dead-ends into a white metal gate, beyond which the road has been turned into a gravel-covered walking trail. Here and there, gray pavement emerges from beneath the gravel, but yellow and white center lines, almost transparent, now lead to where the old highway disappears beneath muddy water.
The country road that coiled around old homesteads has been superseded by a streamlined two-lane highway straight into town, level as far as the eye can see. Where there were once gently rolling fields of tall golden grasses, dotted here and there with sometimes abandoned farmhouses, there are now clusters of oversized residences with tiny lawns, sitting smugly behind manicured hedges and black iron railings. The new communities are reminders that what was a cozy seminary town of 4,000 when my family lived here, is now home to about 55,000 people. Wake Forest has become a bedroom community for Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, which form between them what is known as the Research Triangle.
A lot has changed—but Ridgecrest Baptist Church looks exactly the same as it did more than fifty years ago.
Headed toward town, I drive past the church and turn left onto Stony Hill Road, looking for a modest red brick ranch-style house that no longer exists, torn down to make way for Hasentree Hills, one of the new housing clusters. Instead there is a narrow lot to the side of the road, with patchy grass and dirt studded with rocks and debris. The black iron fence that circumscribes Hasentree cuts right through the middle of where the living room used to be.
The house that is no longer there was the parsonage of Ridgecrest Baptist Church. For two months in 1969, it was my family’s home. Although it is gone, it nevertheless still stands at an intersection in my memory between innocence and experience. The carefully curated innocence of Whiteness. The bitter experience of racist violence.
Its absence haunts the shoulder of Stony Hill Road.
1969
I was 15 going on 16 when my father, a student at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, was installed as pastor of Ridgecrest. About six miles west of town, Ridgecrest had split from another well-established church about seven years before, and they were struggling. Under my dad’s leadership, attendance went up. Offerings increased. The congregation was so pleased that they pulled out plans for a new parsonage, previously shelved for lack of funds, and began building it that summer. By late August, the house was finished, and in September we moved in.
A month later, my mother pulled me into the kitchen. It was late afternoon, and I was just home from school. The days were getting noticeably shorter. The sun was already sinking behind the trees. She sat me down at the table to talk to me about the party my brother and I were planning for December.
“Some people are going to be upset,” she said, “that you are inviting Bettie and Jean, William, Mike and Silas, and Marjorie.” The names of some of my Black friends. “Are you sure you want to invite them?”
Every year since I’d entered high school, I had thrown a party for my friends. Anywhere from 10 to 15 would show up. The seminary duplex where we lived when my father first entered seminary was small, so the party was usually planned for the fall when we could still gather outdoors. We set up volleyball nets in the wide yard over to the side. Dad grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, and Mom spread a long table with condiments and buns, paper plates and plastic utensils. Of course, since the Wake County school system was still largely segregated even as late as 1968, my friends were all White.
That changed in the beginning of my junior year. In the fall of 1969, about nine Black students, also juniors, elected to transfer from all-Black W.E.B. DuBois High School to predominantly White Wake Forest High.
For a number of years, my Christian parents had been teaching me and my brothers that, as the children of one God, we were all siblings—“brothers and sisters,” as they said—regardless of our race or color. That we were equal in the eyes of God. Equally beloved of God. Both of my parents were born in southeastern Virginia and raised in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s and 40s, but the civil rights movement got past the barriers that Whiteness carefully placed around them. In particular, they were shaken by the powerful preaching and example of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Slowly, and not easily, they came to believe that segregation was morally wrong.
I made friends among the Black students. Since we were all juniors, we were in many of the same classes. Plus I wanted them to feel welcomed. We were just beginning to get to know each other when I decided to throw another party, this one in the much larger parsonage. Naturally my new friends were on the guest list.
In October my mother sat across the table from me, asking me if I were sure I wanted to include my Black friends.
“Mom!” I said. “If I can’t have a party with all my friends, I don’t want to have a party at all!”
“Yes, that’s what your father and I thought you would say, and we agree with you. We just want it to be your decision.”
2021
I am staying with old friends, White friends in Wake Forest. They were among the few White people who stood by us in 1969-70, even providing a place for us to live when we were turned out of the parsonage. Even so, when I tell them I’m writing a book about what happened, their response is less than encouraging.
“This place has changed so much since you lived here,” they tell me. “So many new people have moved in.... It isn’t the same town anymore.
“No one remembers what happened back then.”
One of my former classmates from Wake Forest High invites me to a cookout at her house. Everyone there, including our host, is Black, except for me and one other White friend.
After eating ourselves silly, we gather in the family room and plop down into comfy chairs. The mother of one of my classmates points at me and says, “Oh! Is this the girl that had that party?” Everyone nods.
“Do people still remember the party?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” another friend answers. “They remember. They act like they don’t. But they remember.”
In every church that my father pastored in the years after Wake Forest, he hung a poster on the wall of his study. The left half was goldenrod yellow, the right half was pitch black. A jagged line divided them, and across the poster were written these words:
Faith means
walking to the edge of
all the light you have
and taking
one
more
step.
Every word but the last was printed in bold black against yellow. The final word, in vibrant yellow, stepped over the line into the black.
My parents lived these words. Again and again, they walked to the limit of their understanding and took one more step in faith. They were living examples to me and my brothers of what it means to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).
The story of what happened in Wake Forest five decades ago is a well-worn and well-lit path by now. Our family has told it so many times, to others and among ourselves, I could almost imagine that I know everything there is to know about it. But when I look at what is happening in the world and interrogate my own Whiteness and racism, I know there is more to learn.
I want to follow the story that I think I know so well up to that jagged line and cross over into the unknown. Grapple with my memories. Examine the way that Whiteness has privileged and sustained me, as well as the ways that I have used that privilege to sustain Whiteness. Uncover what has been pushed aside or willfully forgotten, hidden or erased—like the modest house on a country road that no longer exists, no longer bears witness to a past many would prefer to forget.
In 2008, twelve years before my father died, our first Black president was elected.
“Dad! Dad!” I almost shouted into the telephone.
“I know, I know,” he said through his tears. “I never thought I would live to see this day.”
It was easy in that moment to imagine that the story I have to tell was a relic of the past, no longer relevant.
I wish. I wish it were that simple to uproot racism and White supremacy.
So, here I am. In Wake Forest, on NC Highway 98. A road I no longer entirely recognize, partly because the road has changed, and partly because I am no longer the same. A town hurtling toward the future without reckoning with its past. A house whose absence haunts me, and a church frozen in time.
The road stretches before me, and behind. To go forward, I must go back to the events of the past and even beyond, to the roots of my family’s history.