KATIE COOK
Reflections on My Life as an Ally
First, I apologize for the length of this reflection. I could have included a lot more, but I didn’t think you’d want to wade through it. My story begins in the 1950s. I think I chose myself as an ally to African Americans before I ever knew what that word was or what it meant.
My first realization that racism existed in my small Texas Panhandle town was in a movie theater, when I looked up and saw that all of the black people were sitting in the balcony. I asked about this, and my parents explained it when we got home. My father had played on an integrated baseball team from the time I was an infant (1953), and I was surprised that other people didn’t just DO things with Black people. They explained that there were a lot of people who didn’t think the way we did, who thought Black people weren’t as good as white people. When we watched the March on Washington and Dr. King’s speech on television, they told me that some people hated Dr. King. Part of their message was, “We want you to do the right thing, but it’s not going to be easy.”
My next chapter came in the sixth grade (1962), when our schools were integrated, and I was ostracized and punished by most of the white girls for treating the Black girls the same as everybody else. I was actually trying to treat them a little better, to make up for the others. Some of you know me well enough to know that that threat just made me dig in my heels.
When I got to college in Waco, I joined the Ninth Street Baptist Mission in a mostly African American neighborhood, and I spent my next five years ministering in that mission. My first youth group as a minister was made up mostly of people of color. In 1974, I took some of them back to my home town to do a Vacation Bible school in “the flats,” on the “bad” side of the tracks. (I’m not going to tell you what some people called the neighborhood.) My youth, coming from their impoverished neighborhood, were appalled at the living conditions in “the flats.” At one point, I took my youth, who were accustomed to eating in any restaurant they chose, to one where I had waited tables in high school, and the people came running out, waving their arms, and saying the restaurant was closed. It wasn’t, and I hope to God my youth didn’t know that. It then occurred to me why the African American cook ate in the kitchen when I was serving. That broke my heart—for my youth, and for the cook, who was incredibly good to me, in spite of my cluelessness.
In the summer of 1972, I “did” my summer missions tour with the Home Mission Board in south downtown Kansas City, Missouri. With my glow-in-the-dark blonde hair, I was the only white person in a 50-block radius for pretty much the whole summer. I lived with a Black woman, Mrs. Ealy, whom I loved. My partner for the summer, Regina, was a young Black student whom I also loved. And I attended Pleasant Green Baptist Church, an African American church. Mrs. Ealy would say, “We pleasant, but we ain’t green,” and smile slyly at me, as if to say, “Not even you.” The people I met that summer were honest about their bad experiences with white people and with the system, but they seemed to understand that I was there to try to help, in my own feeble way.
In all of these steps on my journey, I learned more and more about my own privilege, and I am forever grateful for the people who treated my clueless self gently. One of those was Rev. Robert Gilbert, a pastor in Waco with whom I worked in the ministerial alliance and on Habitat for Humanity committees. Robert was the first African American graduate (in 1968) from Baylor. By 1992, Robert was so disabled that he needed a “ghost writer” to help him write the one book he thought he had left in him before he died. He asked me to do it with him, and we finished all of the interviews that year. In it, he talked about some of his experiences with prejudice.
Robert died before I was finished with the manuscript. I then worked with his wife to finish the book and get it published in 1993. Last April, Baylor placed a statue of Robert in front of the religion building. His son—who is the Dean of the Howard University Divinity School in Washington, DC—and I worked hard together to get a second edition of Robert’s book out before the statue unveiling, and his family made sure I was there on the front row to see it. I wasn’t expecting it, I didn’t deserve it, but they overwhelmed me with love.
Somewhere in the early 1990s, I was president of the ministerial alliance, and I organized an interfaith Martin Luther King, Jr. worship service. I did that for several years. I got threatening phone calls.
In 1994, when I first attended the Summer Conference of the Baptist Peace Fellowship (aka “Peace Camp”), I was leading the youth with Jackie Saxon, who is now the Executive Minister for the American Baptist Churches of the Midwest, and who is also African American. Back in Peace Camp in 1994, we couldn’t get the kids’ attention, so I blurted out, “My name is Katie Cook, and this is Jackie Saxon. We are identical twins, separated at birth.” That got their attention, and, to this day, Jackie is my Twin. We travel together and room together at meetings. People have even joked with us all these years, pretending they can’t tell us apart. I trust with every fiber of my being that, if I step out of line in terms of race relationships, Jackie will let me know in no uncertain terms. And she is not the only one.
I continue to try to learn about my own privilege, about systemic racism and unconscious hidden racism, but I don’t do it to weigh myself down with guilt. Penance, yes. But I don’t think it is productive or right to flagellate myself; I think I should use that energy to continue to learn to be a better ally.