Thanks for your witness and devotion to justice — Rev. Nibs Stroupe, Oakhurst Presbyterian Church (Decatur, Ga.), Oct. 21, 2014.

After almost four years in Georgia, I am back in the Washington, D.C., area. Back home. The Georgia experience was one of incredible professional and personal growth. We lived and worked in a place where Old South racism mixes in a toxic civic cauldron with New South neoliberalism. Structural racism and privilege permeate all levels of Decatur, Georgia, society from city hall to city streets.

Decatur’s residents have shed their white hoods and replaced them with social media accounts and middle class respectability, PR firms, and false choice urbanism. For me, it was a rare opportunity to go from being an unwitting participant observer in a gentrifying neighborhood to an advocate for economic and racial equity.

The Decatur experience was transformative. I will use what I learned to be better: a better historian, better citizen, and better person. This week I began that journey on a walk with Rev. Jeffrey Thames, founder of Hope Restored, Inc., a Silver Spring, Maryland, nonprofit with a mission to work with the homeless and to open up the pipeline from incarceration back into the community.

http://youtu.be/LDEYc0iH5YQ

© 2014 D.S. Rotenstein

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