“Church was an unknown experience, except when sitting on the steps of a little wooden black church in Mississippi, listening to the music. I set about living daily my Christianity. I had the Scriptures and a book of the Fathers from Fr. Joseph. I took each point and started practicing,…

“Suddenly the Supreme Court announced the desegregation of education facilities, the first to be Ms. Arthurine Lucy at the University of Alabama that fall. A handful of us formed a protection group to surround her to classes. Mobs with broken down cars and shotguns sticking around. Students were acting like mobs. On the…

“Suddenly, I got a letter from my draft board. I was a patriotic American and never thought about these issues. But somewhere I read: don’t kill, don’t even hold onto anger; if you live by the –gun, you perish by the gun. I presented myself to my draft board in…

“My last year of high school—my family were gypsies and I had a different school every second year it seems—I decided I had to confront the cruel issue of racism, try to stand in another persons shoes, so to speak. Editor of the high school paper, in the days before…

“All through my boyhood, I must say I loved the South in certain ways: the easygoing life, my mother’s deep sense of hospitality to others which led to my own natural sense, the sounds of things – like a swinging screen door or rain on the tin roof of a…

Born in Louisville, Mississippi. “I think of that of sort of the beginning of my work for hospitality; mother was always receiving people, somebody having trouble coming through; there was that sense of looking after people; it was kinda like everyone was welcome” ” ‘Be good, keep on being good.’…