In 1957, the white mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, showed courage by standing up for nine black students trying to integrate Central High School.

Defying segregationist Gov. Orval Faubus and an angry white mob, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann urged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send U.S. soldiers to quell the violence.

“Situation is out of control and police cannot disperse the mob,” Mann said in a telegram to Eisenhower. “I am pleading to you as president of the United States in the interest of humanity, law and order and because of democracy worldwide to provide the necessary federal troops within several hours.” 

To enforce the school’s desegregation, Eisenhower sent 1,200 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard.

But Mann paid a steep price.

He endured hate mail and death threats. White supremacists burned crosses on his family’s lawn. He lost his insurance business and any hope of a political future in Arkansas.

Sean Richardson, youth minister for the Bammel Church of Christ in Houston, recalled Mann’s experience as he preached on the Sunday after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

“See, typically in history when people have chosen to side with those who are oppressed, they themselves get treated as those who have been oppressed,” Richardson said in the video sermon, which came amid national outrage over Floyd’s death and coast-to-coast protests against racial injustice.

The black youth minister’s mention of Mann, who moved to Houston in 1961 and lived there until his death in 2002 at age 85, was no mere historical footnote.

Richardson traced the late mayor’s lineage to the present day — to an 18-year-old Bammel youth group member named Trevor Mann.

No doubt, Trevor’s place in American history — at least at this point in his life — pales in comparison to that of his great-grandfather, whom he met as a baby. 

But Trevor, too, showed courage in the face of racial prejudice.

Read the rest of the story.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. God and guns: In a multimedia report for Religion Unplugged and Newsweek, Paul Glader and Michael Ray Smith delve into how “American churchgoers are packing heat and opening a new era in Christendom.”

The fascinating deep dive opens with a dramatic scene from a Colorado Springs, Colorado, church as a “life safety team” trains to avoid falling victim to a shooter.

2. The last anointing: “This is a story about ritual,” tweeted New York Times religion writer Elizabeth Dias. “About its power. About its denial. And about the raw, intimate, and often spiritual way humans process death.”

The front-page Sunday story — about Catholic priests anointing the dying with oil in the midst of a global pandemic — is exquisitely told by Dias with equally remarkable photography by Ryan Christopher Jones.

3. The songs and Scriptures of George Floyd’s Houston funeral: Much news coverage of Floyd’s funeral seemed to be all about the politics, as noted by GetReligion’s Terry Mattingly.

But if readers knew the right places to look, there was exceptional coverage of the religion angle to be found, including Kate Shellnutt’s spot-on piece for Christianity Today.

Continue reading “History Repeats: Great-Grandson Of Little Rock Central Hero Shows Courage” by Bobby Ross, Jr., at Religion Unplugged.