Creating Community: Life and Learning at Alabama State University

9 / Called Home

In the basement recreation hall of the church of my childhood hung a painting of Jesus with all of the children of the world gathered around him, a huge crowd of girls and boys in costumes from many lands. As a child, I grew up gazing at that painting and af¤rming its message: God is love, and Jesus loves all. In my child’s wisdom, I adopted that credo for life. We also sang a song that set the painting’s theme to words, and I sang that hymn loudly, joyfully, and in a child’s clear, ¤rm voice of faith and certainty. “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world; red or yellow, black or white, they are precious in his sight; Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Looking back, I sense that all of my life has been a journey and a preparation for teaching at Alabama State University, a historically black university that seeks to appreciate and uphold its diversity of race, gender, and ideas. I have come home to my earliest and deepest love, to a community of people who seek to be united in brotherhood, come home to my calling. When I arrived at Alabama State University in 1998, just blocks from the Montgomery church of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I found myself in the midst of a powerful legacy that continues to transform me. I ¤nd it dif¤cult to express in words the initial, gradual, dawning sense of humility and awe I felt in response to this proud tradition, past and present. I found that the work begun by Dr. King and many before him is continuing at Alabama State University through the interactions of students, faculty, staff, and the 9 / Called Home Margaret Holler Stephens surrounding community. Together we work toward Dr. King’s dream and our dream: “the day when all of God’s children” will experience equity and justice and the day when “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood” (“I Have a Dream” 86). I was introduced early in life to this ¤ght for justice, for my paternal grandmother had suffered greatly in her native land due to ethnic hatred and oppression, and her sufferings had laid the brickwork of determination in my youthful personality. I willed that I would grow up to ¤ght such prejudice and would help people gain their God-given rights in this often sel¤sh and heartless world. My grandmother, who came to live with us when I was a child, helped to raise me. A favorite childhood game for me and my friends playing on the black-and-white linoleum kitchen ®oor while my grandmother cooked and ironed was to crawl under her skirts and count the layers, for she seemed to wear most of the slips and skirts she owned. I wondered if she wore almost all of her clothes at once because she had been forced to leave her small white cottage in what is now Serbia with only the clothes on her back and a Bible in hand after World War II when Tito con¤scated the homes, land, and possessions of people of German descent. Grandma Holler, though born and raised in Yugoslavia, was of German ancestry. Several generations earlier , Germans had been invited as a group to homestead and farm in then Austria-Hungary because of their industrious ways. A print of this historical migration now hangs on my bedroom wall. Because Nazi Germany had invaded Yugoslavia during the war, my grandmother and others like her had to pay, just as Japanese Americans suffered in our country during World War II. At about sixty-¤ve years of age, my grandmother had walked out of her home at gunpoint (while my aunt and cousin hid in the cornstalks) and was compelled to live in a forced-labor camp where the rich died fast, my grandmother recalled, because they were not used to hard work. She, widowed in her twenties with four little children to rear, knew hard work as a way of life. She survived the camp and ®ed by foot over the mountains of Hungary by night, trailing behind younger ®eeing refugees and catching up by continuing to walk when they rested, thus never resting herself. She walked to freedom. A nephew in Germany saw her name on a list of refugees and took her in until my dad could...