Race and Reconciliation in Cedar Grove
Wednesday, July 07 2010
by Jessica Jones
Grace Hackney and Vallee Taylor
Jeremy Loeb: The farming town of Cedar Grove, North Carolina has been home to both African-Americans and whites for generations. But until recently, many people in the community preferred to keep their social and religious lives separate. Jessica Jones has the story of how a tragedy changed that.
Jessica Jones: Pastor Grace Hackney is a tall woman with a gentle smile who loves being a minister. But Hackney didn’t follow her calling until later in life, after working as a teacher and raising two children. She graduated from Duke Divinity School seven years ago. Her first assignment was to serve as the pastor of the historic congregation of Cedar Grove United Methodist Church.
Grace Hackney: Coming to this part of Orange county, after having lived in northern Chatham county and going to school at Duke, I thought I had a good sense of what life in North Carolina was like, but I didn’t. It was like coming to a different country. This is a very different part of North Carolina.
Northern Orange County is a place of both great wealth and great poverty. Many families there have owned vast parcels of land for generations. At the same time, there are desperately poor people who live in old trailers and barns without running water and working toilets. When Hackney arrived in Cedar Grove, it was also very segregated. Even though blacks and whites were neighbors, they rarely socialized with each other. And they certainly didn’t go to church together.
Grace Hackney: We had an African-American man that showed up the first or second day I was here as pastor, and there were people in the parsonage, it was offices then, and no one invited him in. And I went out and spoke to him and he was looking for work and I hired him on the spot to weed the flower bed in front of the parsonage without asking anybody. He started befriending the congregation, started coming to church and he ended up in jail in hillsborough and I went to visit him and the lieutenant at the jail questioned me, he questioned my credentials. He said I know that church in cedar grove. They wouldn’t have a woman pastor, and they certainly wouldn’t have a black person in their church.
But Hackney didn't stop trying to get to know everyone in the community. One day she was outside Cedar Grove’s tiny post office, which is right next to her church.
Grace Hackney: And I saw an African-American man standing there looking at the church building and it was Valee Taylor. and I went to him and introduced myself as the pastor. I did that often at the post office. That’s how I met people.
Hackney didn’t know anything about Valee Taylor or who he was. Taylor, is a retired probation officer. He was wearing dirty work clothes because he’d been working in his garden that day, and he was driving his old beat up pickup truck to deliver extra vegetables to people who needed them. So Taylor was shocked when Hackney spoke to him.
Valee Taylor: She said my name is Grace Hackney, I’m the new pastor at Cedar Grove United Methodist Church, I would love you to come, I welcome you to come, and surprisingly I’ve never had a Caucasian pastor to approach me and invite me to their church.Grace Hackney: I remember saying to him, Valee, as a white Christian and as a United Methodist, I feel like I owe you an apology because we have not always done rightly by African-Americans.
Back in 1800, African-Americans made up nearly one-fifth of the Methodist Episcopal Church. But they were denied full equality from the very beginning. When white Methodists began backing away from criticizing slavery, black parishioners formed separate African Methodist churches. The majority white Methodist churches that remained were segregated until 1968, when the United Methodist Church was formed. Grace Hackney carried the weight of all that history on her shoulders as she talked to Valee Taylor. But that’s not what Taylor remembers.
Valee Taylor: She made the mention of souls, she asked me about- what do you think the kingdom of heaven looks like. She said it’s all souls it’s no color. It’s stuck with me to this day.
One of the first things Valee Taylor did after that conversation was to call his mother to tell her what happened. Generations of his family have lived in Orange County, where his grandfather was the largest landowner with a thousand acres to his name. Taylor’s father is a retired army officer who spent two tours in Vietnam. His cousins include prominent doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. But no one in the family could remember a white minister in Orange County ever inviting them anywhere. The Taylor family owns a hundred-acre tract about a mile down the road from Cedar Grove United Methodist Church. To get to Valee Taylor’s house, you turn past a little convenience store that sells everything from canned vegetables to minnows and worms for fishing. For years, crack dealers had loitered there to sell drugs and even get high in broad daylight. But a new storekeeper named Bill King had rented the building and set up shop. Taylor says he was chasing the drug dealers away.
Valee Taylor: He was a fair man but he was a very stern man. When he told them to leave he meant it- you left. He was like a one man army. It wasn’t a crusade, he’d just say take it on down the road and that was it.
Residents of Cedar Grove started shopping at the store more often. They let their children ride their bikes there to buy sodas and ice cream. And Taylor noticed that Bill King let people who were short on cash buy food on credit.
Valee Taylor: He was a man of I’ll say meager means but he would share what he had with people who weren’t fortunate enough to buy what they needed to survive, and he would allow people credit even though he had signs all over the store saying no credit don’t even ask, if you needed it he would be there for you.
King was white and his wife was black. Everyone admired King’s work ethic.
Valee Taylor: The way Bill treated people, a lot of people started loving him knowing that he was trying to provide for his family. He suffered from Crohn’s disease. He was very sick, but he always wanted to have a convenience store, that was his lifelong dream, even though he was sick, he never missed a day of being at work. The only time when he would leave and somebody else would work would be when he had to go to the doctor.
Taylor used to drop by the store on his way home just to chat with King. One afternoon, Taylor was resting at home when the phone rang.
Valee Taylor: A friend of mine called me from Durham and he said they just killed that man down at the store. And I said what you talking about man, I was just down there earlier I saw him. He told me what channel to turn on the TV and I saw bill’s younger daughter on TV talking about how her father had died.
On June tenth, 2004, Bill King was shot in the back of the head as he was closing up shop that afternoon. Police found the drawer from the cash register outside the store, but they couldn’t find the weapon that was used in the murder. They couldn’t find any suspects either.
Valee Taylor: I personally felt helpless, and I think the community felt so helpless with him dead. What can you do? You depend on law enforcement to find the killer, but you know they can’t but do so much. They questioned everybody, they did a neighborhood sweep, they talked to everybody. They traced every car they knew that was at that store and it just came up a big zero.
The following week, Valee remembered the conversation he’d had with Pastor Grace Hackney a few months earlier. Since the murdered shopkeeper was white, Taylor thought it'd be a good idea to get a white church involved.
Grace Hackney: Valee came and knocked on the door of the parish house and it was the first time I had seen him since that time at the parking lot. And he said you told me if I needed anything to knock on the door. I said I did, come in. Vallee said we would like for your church to help us raise money for a reward to find the person who killed bill. You know, a poor shop owner in a rural community- this is the facts- they’re not going to get the same attention that a rich shopowner is going to get if they’re shot in the head. That’s just the facts.
Hackney and Taylor spoke for a few hours about how scared people in the community were— after all, the killer was still out there. They decided that offering a reward wasn’t the right response, but they knew the community needed something. So Hackney visited Bill King’s wife, Emma. Emma didn’t have enough money for a funeral- and she’d already had her husband cremated. They decided to hold a vigil in the store’s parking lot, on the two-week anniversary of the murder.
Grace Hackney: And so I invited her to bring photos, and she brought his ashes, and we set up a little table with the cross and candles and then we just waited to see who would come. and well over a hundred people came, black, white, Latino, rich, poor, churched, un-churched. I don’t think anybody had a camera, but I don’t need a photograph to remember it. It was just amazing.Valee Taylor: It was very moving, I cried. Tears came to my eyes to see the whole community, black and white, come together. We had black preachers that spoke, we had white preachers that spoke, and you could feel the presence of a higher power.
To both Taylor and Hackney, it was a sign that Cedar Grove's segregated history could actually come to an end- that the town was finally in a place where race and class didn't matter.
Valee Taylor and Grace Hackney: We are here, this is Cedar Grove, and we are together and we are going to move on from here. And I think that’s where I told Valee and where I felt just really strongly that this was a picture of the kingdom of heaven on earth. This was what the kingdom of heaven looked like.
Jeremy Loeb: Coming up- how that vigil inspired Valee Taylor and his mother to take action.
Jessica Jones: We’ve heard how Valee Taylor came to the vigil held by Pastor Grace Hackney, and how so many people in Cedar Grove- rich and poor, black, white and Latino- were there. Taylor brought his seventy-six-year-old mother, Scenobia, with him.
Valee Taylor: My mother grew up here, and she’s seen this community go from the Ku Klux Klan- when we were growing up we had crosses burned in our yard. We’ve been shot at as children during integration, she’s seen all that, and at that vigil I think she was able to see a new world being born, a new community, a very new community of different colors and shapes and sizes.
At the time of Bill King’s death, Scenobia Taylor was feeling troubled. She had recently purchased more than a hundred acres from her brother before he died. She was bothered by the fact that no one in her family’s generation used their land for anything but themselves.
Scenobia Taylor: My father, he gave land for a school. My grandfather, he gave land for the church, and for people to be buried. And here, Papa, at one time he had a thousand acres. And then here we all have all this land here. And then what do we do with it? We not doin’ nothin.’ I wanted to do something like you know my grandfather and my father did you know. and I just pray, and I were praying and I said Lord, please show me, give me a sign or somethin.’
Not long after the vigil for Bill King, Scenobia Taylor got the sign she was waiting for. She dreamed that God told her to give some of her land away to feed the hungry. Pastor Grace Hackney had also been dreaming about a fruitful place, owned by the community. At the time, Hackney’s church was studying the story of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. The story is that during a time of war when planting a field wasn’t customary, God told Jeremiah to buy land in a place called Anathoth and plant crops to feed his community. It got Hackney thinking about the hunger that existed in Cedar Grove. Her church began sponsoring community discussions about how food and faith should be linked. At this point Valee Taylor was already talking to local ministers, both black and white, about how his mother wanted to give land to the community. After much prayer and discussion, Scenobia Taylor decided to donate five acres of prime land to what was historically the whitest, richest church in the community- Cedar Grove United Methodist.
Scenobia Taylor: Now you know I had some blacks they asked me why would you give this to white. But you know in the sight of God, we all is one.
The Taylors started talking in earnest about their vision. They wanted to build a garden to honor Bill King's memory and name it after Jeremiah’s field in the Old Testament where anyone- black or white, rich or poor- could come to a community garden and get food to eat. But such a generous donation to a white church didn’t go over well with some people in the black community.
Valee Taylor: You know, people said what have they done for us, ain’t never did nothing for us, and we’re not looking to the past, I was able to see the vision, we’re looking toward the future, we’re trying to build Anathoth Garden, I guess, in our community starting there- a community of giving.
Taylor says his mother’s pastor approved of the idea. But some members of the Taylors’ extended family started organizing. Their grandfather had worked hard to amass a thousand acres despite the Depression and terrible racism. They weren’t about to see five acres of it go to a white church.
Valee Taylor: They attacked my mother real hard, tried to make false accusations and it all came because she was giving five acres to that church.Scenobia Taylor: You know, with my family, you know it’s not only white that’s prejudiced, it’s black too that’s prejudiced. They don’t see things like they should.
Because the five-acre tract was originally land Scenobia Taylor bought from her late brother, two members of her extended family filed a lawsuit against her. They claimed she acquired the land dishonestly. They didn’t return calls for this story. In the meantime, Pastor Grace Hackney was having trouble too. The discussions she was sponsoring about food, faith and farming were controversial. The idea of starting a community garden that could help feed the poor didn’t sit well with everyone.
Grace Hackney: Among some folk there was a racist perception not just against African-Americans, but against maybe the poor white that there’s this laziness, that if you want to grow your food why don’t you just grow your food, or you know, I invited so and so to pick beans and they were just too lazy to pick the green beans.
Hackney was making waves in other ways too. Vallee Taylor says everyone in Cedar Grove was talking about it.
Vallee Taylor: Some of what I was hearing was her taking getting the land from a black person, her inviting the black community into her church. There was a consortium of two black churches and two white churches and they were meeting together on a consistent basis, going back and forth, preaching in each other’s church.Grace Hackney: Change is hard, and I heard some of the typical responses to joint worship between African-Americans and whites. Their music is not like ours, we worship differently- those are of the common things we hear.
And some members of Hackney’s church questioned why she wanted to accept a donation of land from someone who was black. At this point, Hackney and the Taylors weren’t sure if they could make their plans happen. Hackney started spending more time with Scenobia Taylor, who owned the land.
Grace Hackney: And I remember having a couple different conversations on the phone and I remember sitting with her at her house and her words were “the devil on my back,” and that she didn’t realize it was going to be this hard, and I shared the fact that I had difficulty as well and we prayed together.
Vallee Taylor told Hackney that if anyone gave her any trouble, members of the black community would stand behind her.
Vallee Taylor: I knew some of her struggles as far as what you hear on the street plus the little things my mother would tell me. I knew that it was not going to be easy on either side.
Grace Hackney and the Taylors struggled through 2004 and 2005 to gain more consensus in their communities for the project. Hackney says in her church, there was a quiet majority of parishioners and supervisors who ended up supporting her.
Grace Hackney: My district superintendent said to me “just keep your face pointed toward Jerusalem, where God’s calling you to go, and everything else will be taken care of.” I had a lot of folks who stood behind me in this congregation, and people would leave church with tears in their eyes saying thank you for having the courage to say that.
By 2005, the council of Cedar Grove United Methodist Church decided to approve accepting the Taylor's land and starting a community garden, as long as the church didn’t have to pay to keep it up. As for the Taylors, their extended family members who were suing to take the land away- eventually dropped their lawsuit. A groundbreaking ceremony for Anathoth Garden was held in November of that year. Today, Anathoth is less of a community garden than it is a small organic farm, thanks to grants from the Duke Endowment and lots of community effort. There’s a greenhouse, a children’s play area, a meditation garden with native plants, and of course, two acres of crops.
Grace Hackney and Valee Taylor: We have garlic and then asparagus, squash and carrots, turnips, cilantro, different types of lettuces which are almost done- more onions, strawberries, oh these are sweet potatoes. What’s this Vallee? Looks like peppers to me.
It’s late afternoon and there's no one else in the garden today. But nearly every morning there are volunteers who are busy planting, weeding, and cultivating what’s grown under the watchful guidance of a garden director and interns. Anyone can join- five dollars a year and two hours of work every week earns people the right to take home as many vegetables as they need. Hackney says it’s nice to be in a place where everyone is welcome.
Grace Hackney: It’s accessible and there’s no judgment, and there’s no proselytizing. It’s a living witness of how we embody and receive this life that God has made possible for us on this planet.
Hackney and Taylor are sitting on a big deck near a pavilion where garden members hold community potlucks every week. But Hackney won't be spending much more time here. She's moving away from Cedar Grove to become the pastor of another church.
Valee Taylor: I hate to see her leaving at first, but then the more I've prayed over it and I was wondering if it had to do with us giving her this land, then I kind of came to reckoning that she's carrying the word on. I don’t think her work is done.
Hackney says it’s time for her to move on, though she has mixed feelings about leaving.
Grace Hackney: In some ways it's going to be hard. In other ways, I really do feel like I've done what God has called me to do here, and I have to trust that God is calling me to go somewhere else.
Hackney’s new post is at a United Methodist church in Bahama, in Durham County. She says she’s looking forward to finding out what’s in store for her there. Meanwhile, the work of Anathoth Garden will continue. Visit it almost any morning and you'll find people of every color and background planting, weeding and cultivating hundreds of pounds of vegetables that will be distributed back into the community they're grown in.
Jessica Jones, North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.
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