I met a real Christian yesterday. Her name is Oral Lee Brown.
This is a woman who “adopted” a classroom full of first-graders in 1987 and aided them all the way through the Oakland schools and into college.
I was in her office to record her end of an interview with a Boston radio producer. While I was setting up, she was talking to someone on the phone about the effort by the Oakland Association of Realtors to find vacant homes and apartments for Katrina victims. “I don’t want to see any more people in shelters,” she told me. Her group is talking landlords into making vacant housing available at no charge to these people who are coming here from the disaster zone; they have other volunteers who will take the new arrivals shopping for food and clothing when they get here and make sure the have their needs met for as long as it takes. They’re going to try to find jobs for as many as they can, too.
As the interview progressed and I sat there monitoring on headphones, I was moved nearly to tears by Mrs. Brown’s story. She grew up in rural Mississippi, one of nine children; her father was a sharecropper who had some land of his own by the time she was born. She endured violence and raw hatred from the racists of that time and place, and she got out as soon as she could.
A chance encounter with a hungry child on the streets of East Oakland drew Mrs. Brown to a neighborhood school. She was unable to find the child she was looking for, but she wound up making a deal with the entire first-grade class that she would support them in every way she could and pay their way to college.
This page tells much of the story.
She tithes ten percent to the church, because she credits God with her own good fortune in life. She gives a lot of her money, as well as her time and social capital, to the kids – not just that first class, but several more groups of students. A new class will enter the program this month.
As I packed up my stuff, I told Mrs. Brown how moved I was by her story, and I told her how upset I’ve been by “Christians” like Pat Robertson. She agreed with me that he hardly seems to have understood the teachings of Jesus.
This is what Christianity is supposed to be about. It was a great charge to the spiritual batteries.