"She was poor, but she was honest."

One of the most profound lessons I learned on our ACU Freedom Ride came from Dr. Bernard Lafayette--a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, a founder of SNCC, an original freedom rider, and close associate of Dr. King.

The lesson came at the end of Dr. Lafayette's talk to our students. He was trying to bring home one more story about the foundations of nonviolence:

As a new student at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville Lafayette was trying to find some music to study to in his dorm room. But all he could find was this gawd-awful hee-haw hillbilly music on the radio. No matter what channel he turned to all he could find was twangy, country redneck music.

Frustrated, he was about to switch off the radio. But decided to stop, ignore the sound the music, and simply listen to lyrics. And this is what he heard:

She was poor, but she was honest,
Victim of a rich man's pride,
When she met that Christian gentleman, Big Jim Folsom
And she had a child by him.

Now its the rich that get the glory,
It's the poor that get the blame,
It's the same the whole world over,
Now ain't that a dirty rotten shame.

Now he sits in the legislature
Making laws for all mankind,
while she walks the streets of Cullman, Alabama
selling grapes from her grapevine.

Now its the rich that get the glory,
It's the poor that get the blame,
It's the same the whole world over,
Now ain't that a dirty rotten shame.

For Dr. Lafayette it was an epiphany. When he stepped past the music to attend to the lyrics he found an experience he could identify with. It was a lament. It was the blues. This wasn't a strange and alien music. Despite the surface, this was a music Lafayette knew only too well. And this revelation suggested to Lafayette that whites and blacks might have more in common than not. Underneath there was a shared humanity, a shared experience of suffering. Dr. Lafayette concluded his story with these words to our students:

Change is going to come when we understand the sufferings and experiences of other people. That country music was nothing but white folk's blues. They were singing about the sufferings they were experiencing in life...

We have to appreciate other folk before we can expect them to change.