Church tour of the South was catalyst for change

Janet Batiste didn't expect the trip to affect her quite so much.

Batiste, 59, a graphic designer who lives in Bellevue, was one of about 40 Pacific Northwest members of the Evangelical Covenant Church denomination who flew from Seattle to Atlanta for a bus tour of civil-rights sites in the South a year ago.

They shared their experiences with Seattle Times readers last January.

Called a Sankofa journey, from a West African word meaning "looking backward to move forward," participants visited such sites as the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where a bombing in 1963 killed four black girls.

Each traveler was paired with another of a different race to room together, share meals and discuss their experiences.

The journey made a lasting impact.

Batiste, who is African American, already knew much of the history explored on the trip and had experienced racism herself growing up in various parts of the country.

But the trip sparked a resolve to speak up when she thought she was being mistreated because of her race. That resolution led to a powerful epiphany.

One time, after returning home, a co-worker did something that made her feel slighted, and she felt that race played a role. She confronted the co-worker even though she was frightened.

"And it was very positive," Batiste said. The co-worker said he understood how she could have thought what she did and expressed regret for putting her in that position, Batiste said. "That was something I really did not expect."

That got her thinking about how she learned to deal with racism — something she hadn't recognized before.

When she lived in Lubbock, Texas, she remembered, her family had tried to enroll her in the elementary school across the street. "The principal said: 'We don't take black people here,' " Batiste recalled. Her family ended up moving to Ohio.

She realizes now "that incident taught me when you're confronted with racism, you're the one that has to make the alteration. You move. You don't confront. You just bear up under it."

For the first six months after the Sankofa trip, she spoke to churches, a school and a retirement center about her experience.

The more she thought about the trip, the more she realized: "You go through something like that and you don't expect to get something from it. You expect the other guy to do some changing. But it isn't only the other guy. You have to take some action yourself."

Other participants say they, too, have made changes since the journey.

Rhonda Egging, 51, a homemaker in Mount Vernon, was Batiste's roommate on the Sankofa trip. They still room together about every other month during meetings of the regional board of their church denomination.

Egging says she's had a lasting "consciousness change" since the journey.

"The whole idea of white privilege — I'm very conscious of that," she said.

Sankofa traveler Rob Mohrweis, a 29-year-old program director of a Christian camp run by the denomination in Yelm, said the camp is working to get people of color in leadership positions among a staff that is still very white.

Camp leaders are reaching out to ethnically diverse churches in their denomination, and members of some of those churches will help teach during a high school retreat at the camp over Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Thomas Robinson, a 59-year-old software engineer in Renton, hopes to expand the discussions on race and justice that are held at his church, the Emerald City Bible Fellowship in Seattle's Rainier Valley.

He's talked with a Seattle Pacific University center that focuses on race issues about having regular dinner-and-discussion groups for people in the area who've gone on Sankofa journeys or other similar experiences.

And Krisann Jarvis Foss, director of conference ministries for the denomination's Pacific Northwest region, is putting together a task force to organize a regional Sankofa-style trip that would include sites of significance to Asian Americans, Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanic people.

She hopes the trip will be offered by fall.

Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com