We should never forget that as necessary are dates and places in history, so people are equally, if not more so. Such as the offspring of the master and his enslaved housekeeper, children born some twenty-five years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Had they not found a haven to thrive, these children, who grew up to become my grandparents, would have been unable to accomplish their incredible work in urban African American communities across the United States and Canada. The refuge to which they were led was the Mennonite church, an organization whose alignment with Jim Crow laws of the Antebellum south belied any notion of racial egalitarianism. Lastly, had James Lark not been ordained as the church’s first Black bishop, a position that allowed him to appear to be a vassal of the church rather than a defender of injustice, had any of these things not happened, Flight of the Mourning Lark would not have been written.
