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189 APPENDIX A. Let Justice Roll Down: A Conversation with John Perkins this is an edited transcript of the extended conversation between theologian Charles Marsh and John Perkins that took place at the University of Virginia on April 22, 2009, as part of the Spring Institute for Lived Theology. Charles Marsh (CM): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It’s so nice to have you here for this extraordinary event, one that I’m very excited about; a conversation with an activist, a writer, a pastor, a civil rights hero and a very close friend of mine, Dr. John Perkins.Welcome to all of you. John Perkins (JP): Well, I’m really honored to be here. Outside of my coming to faith in Christ and marrying Vera Mae and her giving me this heritage of eight children and thirteen grands and two great-grands, my friends—I live at the mercy and thanksgiving and the gratitude of my friends. I would consider you folks here to be some of those friends. So I consider being here with you a great honor. You honor me and I like all these other honors, I have to tell the truth about that, but the real honor goes to my friends. It’s been that quality of friendship that has caused me to persevere, that has both freed and restrained me because of their love, so I just thank you for being here and having me. CM: Dr. Perkins, you were born in 1930 as the sixth child to Maggie Perkins, the fifth child to survive, and you were raised on cotton plantations in Simpson County.You wrote in your memoir, Let Justice Roll Down, that your earliest memory is of a winter afternoon, a close gray sky and a small house on a dirt road.In the memory,your grandmother sits inside the house sewing a quilt to keep the children warm.You’re standing in the front yard chopping wood for the fire, occasionally carrying small bundles of sticks to the porch. Your family farmed on halves, moving from plantation 190 Appendix to plantation with the changing seasons according to the shifting demands for cheap labor. And like most rural African American children, you were put to work in the fields picking cotton alongside your grandmother, aunts, cousins, and sisters, waking up before first light and returning home after sunset. From September through November, riding to and from work in large, open-body trucks, as you wrote in the memoir, “just like hogs and cattle.” Can you share with us a sense of what the world looked like to you as a child coming of age in this brutal and oppressive society? JP: Let me see where to start here. I love hot weather; I could have lived in the California desert. I think it’s because of the harshness and the kind of shacks that we lived in. The plantation-type houses that had one board over another board, and when that board would come off the house the ice chickers in the winter would be on the inside of the house as well as the outside of the house, and the misery of being cold, and the misery of standing by the fireplace, all of those things are still vivid to me. When I was writing Let Justice Roll Down, I was talking to an old lady who had been living in the community when I was born.She said my mother died of a disease that had to do with nutrition deficiency and I was sucking her breast, right up until she died. I was probably taking the nutrition she needed for her own survival. When my mother died, a lady down the street who had a milk cow—we didn’t have a milk cow because the plantation owner would not allow his people to have milk cows on the plantation—started bringing a quart of milk for me. I was nothing but skin and bones, and she began to see me recover. We were doing the research, and I said to the old lady,“What happened to her?” And she told me a story about my hometown, about this lady dying a slow death because they didn’t have a doctor, and there hadn’t been a doctor in twelve years in my hometown of New Hebron. I said,“That will come to an end” (because we built a health center there). One of the things that...

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