In 2006, in an attempt to avoid graduate school and getting a real job, I signed up to do work in an urban setting for a year. This was the summer after my senior year of college and I had been accepted into Candler School of Theology, but I didn’t want to go to school for three more years. So I googled “social justice mission work” and a program called Mission Year popped up on the screen. Naturally, I applied to this program that promised to send me to an urban area affected by poverty in Chicago, Philly, San Francisco, or New Orleans.
I ended up in Camden, New Jersey.
Camden is outside of Philly, but it is in New Jersey, and it makes Philly look like Mayberry from the Andy Griffin show. Okay, not really, but Camden is Camden. It is one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S., it is one of the poorest cities in the U.S., and it is one of the most hostile cities in the U.S. Needless to say, I fell in love with this city and her people.
I lived in a house with six other people. We were six strangers, brought together, to live in a house in a neighborhood in East Camden. We went to church together, we worked together, we ate together, we shared all of our resources; some of us even shared our clothes! It was an incredible opportunity to live in community. It was an amazing place of vulnerability. If you were dealing with crap, then it was going to come to the surface, because we were always in each other’s faces. It was crazy because it was like this weird marriage of seven different people from all over the United States. We were also all privileged white kids who found ourselves in the midst of a community that did not look like us. Looking back, I think, “What in the hell was I thinking?” but it was a beautiful, chaotic, and messy time in my life.
My housemates and I all volunteered at organizations in Camden. I, the only one with a degree in education, and I ended up working at Urban Promise Academy of Camden. UP has a private high school that was basically a home school for students who had fallen through the cracks at the city high schools. I taught consumer math and 10th grade remedial English. My students were teenage mothers and gang members, sexually active, and foul-mouthed; and each one of them was beautiful. I mean, sometimes I really was frustrated with them and wanted to fail them all because they could be absolute twits, but they were beautiful nonetheless and they taught me more than I could ever teach them. I had been this naïve white boy who thought he was going to be a savior to all; but I was the one who was saved.
It was during my time in Camden that I picked up a book entitled, Let Justice Roll Down by John Perkins. This book would change my life forever. In order to spare you a book report, I’m not going to delve too deep into the book. However, I will tell you this: The 22 years that I had lived prior to this moment were deconstructed before my eyes and my perfect little world was shattered.
Let Justice Roll Down takes place in Mississippi, and here I was, in Camden, New Jersey reading about incidents that took place in the town where I grew up. Things I never knew. The way John Perkins was treated by the sheriff in town, the same man who was a principal at the same school I grew up going to. I recognized other names of people who did terrible and horrid things towards people of color and John Perkins himself. It was an awakening for me. It is no coincidence that my friend gave me that book. He knew I was from Mississippi, and he also knew that I had never really learned about the civil rights movement in Mississippi. He also knew that there was so much white privilege that I had never confronted in myself. So when I say that a book changed my life, I mean it.
And that is why I love working here at Lemuria Bookstore, because I can sell people books that may change them. My story seems to be a bit more dramatic because of the period of my life I was in. Yes, the book changed my life, but I was also inserted into a place and situation where my life was going to change. However, you don’t always have to be uprooted from everything you’ve ever known to have your life turned upside down. There are books out there that will change you. There are books out there that will challenge you and make you question everything that you have ever known. Books have the ability to make you a better person, so that you can create a better world around you! Why do you think some of the most repressive and oppressive regimes don’t want people to read? Why do you think that so many schools and institutions have banned books lists? Books change people. I’m a testament to that.
After that year in Camden I did go to Divinity school at Duke University. I held Camden deep in my heart, and I told everyone that they needed to read Let Justice Roll Down. I’m sure I was overzealous in my trying to make people read it. All that being said, reading Let Justice Roll Down instilled in me this ethos that all people matter. When we forget that people matter, we turn them into commodities. Black lives matter. Gay lives matter. The lives of women matter. Peoples’ lives matter.
So, this holiday season, when so many of us celebrated that good in humanity, don’t be afraid to pick up a book that might challenge you. And if you want a suggestion, come see me at Lemuria. I’m sure I can help you find a book that will at least make you think!
Written by Justin
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