I spoke with an African-American woman the other day.  She hesitated, but she finally said that most books about the civil rights weren’t written by white people.  I told her that, having done my research, and from a white guy’s perspective, it was my opinion that through my lens, white people actually gained more.  Now, I want to be careful how I say this.  Looking back, of course, black people gained a tremendous amount.  They got to sit in restaurants.  They got legal rights.  But what we got changed our hearts and attitudes.  We got a whole new view of what a righteous society looks like, what institutional justice looks like.  And, from a Christian perspective, looking at a whole new race as brothers and sisters.

On your Web site, you talk about the paradox of Southern culture in that time period.  What do you mean by that?

It’s hard to believe that in the same era (generally speaking) when Faulkner was crafting works of genius, Martin Luther King was pleading for racial reconciliation.  During the days when Sam Phillips was inventing rock and roll, when he was introducing the blues to a whole new audience—producing the music of B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf Burnett, Ike Turner, Jackie Brenston, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley—black students were being jailed for ordering coffee at the Woolworth’s lunch counter.  As Flannery O’Connor penned enduring works of fiction, Georgia governor Marvin Griffin was vowing to stop the 1956 Sugar Bowl, to prevent Georgia Tech from playing a Pittsburgh team that fielded one “Negro” player.

This was an era when Southerners were, at the same time, creating the best of the world’s culture—and the worst. And the fact is, we’d have never had the one without the other. We now realize that it’s because of our once-segregated society that we now know the thoughts and theology of Martin Luther King, Jr.  We also know that it was a long history of racial oppression that gave birth to the blues.  And, without a history of racial strife, we’re never enriched by the “Christ-haunted” and guilt-inspired fiction of so many great Southern writers.  The worst of Southern culture spawned the best. This is the paradox that sends Jack Hall down a career path he never envisioned.

How did you become so fascinated with the Civil Rights?

I’m 56.  In my first book, Safe at Home, the backdrop is baseball.  We were at an Atlanta Braves game and Jackie Robinson was being commemorated.  A week or so later, we were in Asheville, N.C., for a minor league game, and I started to wonder who the first guy was to play baseball, and what life would have been like for him.  I started looking into it and found some great sources and ended up writing the book.  It’s the story of a fictional black player who was the first to play on a minor league team, told through the eyes of a white sports writer. 

Life for those guys was brutal.  It was lonely and discouraging and disheartening, but they persevered.  They were not educated or sophisticated, but they knew they were doing something that mattered.  Think about this:  the first time Americans saw black and white people working together toward a common cause, in public view, was on the minor league baseball field.  In fact, I believe that the first time an organized demonstration of civil rights took place was at a minor league field in Greenville, Mississippi, where they were protesting their seating.  This story deals with real people and real events, but it came from my curiosity about the breaking of the color line of sports in the South. 

Were you involved in the integration of schools?

For the most part, I was too young.  But I do remember standing outside on the sidewalk of my junior high school in Central Florida when the black kids were bussed in for the first time.  I remember standing outside to watch. 

Was that the germ?

It might have been, but I think it was watered and fertilized in Atlanta—a city where race is a more visible and prominent issue.

You’ve spoken about the hope for people to have a dialogue.  Is there anything else you hope people will take away from Crossing the Lines?

I want people to enjoy the book.  I want to be a good writer and have people enjoy the experience, and I hope I have put together something good enough to draw them into the story.  I care about the aesthetic quality of the work.  Beyond that, I hope people will take away the story of it, as well as the pervasive nature of the civil rights nature of the unselfishness of what it means to us. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the early leaders of that movement loved white people.  What they set out to do was not merely win rights for black people.  They met to change people, to renew institutions, to come against “powers and authorities.”  King knew that as long as one person was mistreated, the entire system was unjust.

There’s an episode of the book where John Lewis and John Nash are jailed for sitting in at a Nashville lunch counter.  They don’t have room for them in the jail, so the police tell them to post bail.  They refuse.  The police lowered the bail to $5 and still they refuse.  Their goal wasn’t to get out of jail.  Their goal was to change an unjust system.  By paying the $5, they knew that they were contributing to the system.  To have paid the fine would have been to recognize the law, which was unjust.  And they weren’t going to participate in that system.  It wasn’t, “I want my rights.”  It was, “We must change the entirety of the way this system works.”

What is your next book?

I’m about 50,000 words into a book that is much different from my first two.  It’s not race related.  It deals with the use of gifts, the use of fame and what we do with talent and celebrity and thinking through the reasons those things exist.  It’s the story of a young woman who becomes a pop music star, from being a high school girlfriend of the football player in a small town in the North Georgia mountains.  She is thinking about what that means and why she has that ability, and as kids look at her and want her autograph and want to be close to her, she has to think why this happens and what she should do with it.


Click here to read an excerpt from Crossing the Lines.

Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith magazine.  To learn more about Richard and Crossing the Lines, please visit www.richarddoster.com or www.davidccook.com.