Pioneering pastor and civil rights leader John Perkins left the world Friday, but his family and friends say his Pioneering pastor and civil rights leader John Perkins left the world Friday, but his family and friends say his light will long remain.
“He will always be remembered as one who tried to get the races to come together,” said Constance Slaughter-Harvey, who represented the pastor after he was tortured by Mississippi law enforcement officers in 1969. “Anybody who could take that kind of beating and be so forgiving is an extraordinary man.”
Perkins, 95, died under hospice care. His funeral service is set for March 21 at the New Horizon Church in Jackson.
His family shared a picture of him holding hands with his wife, Vera Mae. The family quoted her as saying she loves him and thanking God for their 74 ½ years of marriage.
John Perkins, right, holds hands with his wife, Vera Mae. The couple wer married 74 ½ years. Credit: Courtesy of the Perkins familyPerkins, who penned the 1976 memoir, “Let Justice Roll Down,” wrote more than a dozen books. His last was “One Life Well Lived,” a book on how to live with purpose and passion.
On March 5, Elizabeth Perkins posted about one of the last moments with her father. She said she sat beside him, took his hand and sang one of his favorite songs, “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”
“As I sang, Daddy gently squeezed my hand, a quiet ‘amen’ in the early morning light,” she wrote. “Even in this season, the love of Jesus still fills the room.
“Daddy has lived a life fully given to God. It has not always been an easy life, but it has been a faithful one, marked by courage, reconciliation, justice, forgiveness, and hope.”
The John & Vera Mae Perkins Foundation works to raise up young leaders dedicated to reconciliation, she wrote. “We believe reconciliation is still possible, communities can still be restored, and the love of Christ still transforms lives.”
Born into poverty in New Hebron in 1930, Perkins’ mother died of malnutrition, and his father left his life years later.
His brother, Clyde, fought in World War II and enjoyed freedoms he had never experienced before in segregated Mississippi.
Like many other Black veterans who returned home from that war, he became a victim of violence when an officer gunned him down.
After Perkins’ family warned him he might be next, he left the state, one of about 6 million African Americans involved in the Great Migration from the South to other parts of the nation.
He landed in California, where in 1951 he married his wife and where their son, Spencer, was later born. Drafted into the Korean War, Perkins served in Okinawa, Japan, for three years before returning home.
One day in 1957, Spencer came home singing, “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” The song moved Perkins, who became a Christian. A year later, he was ordained as a Baptist minister.
In 1960, he and his family, which had grown to include four children, returned to Mississippi. A year later, he started the Mendenhall Ministries, which gave birth to a church, a daycare center, a youth program, a cooperative farm, a thrift store, a housing repair ministry, a health center and an adult education program. His wife ran a daycare center that later became part of the Head Start program.
In the past, the young people who made it out of the community never returned, but Perkins encouraged them to get their college degrees, said the Rev. Dolphus Weary, who worked with and succeeded Perkins at Mendenhall Ministries and later became executive director of Mission Mississippi, a ministry dedicated to promoting racial reconciliation among Christians in Mississippi. “He instilled in us the idea of coming back.”
In 1965, Perkins organized a voter registration drive in Simpson County, drawing the ire of the powers that be.
Four years later, he led a Christmas boycott in Mendenhall to protest white businesses’ refusal to hire Black employees. Officers jailed protesters, and when Perkins went to bail them out, they brutalized him.
Constance Slaughter-Harvey, at her law office located in the building that once housed her parents store, the Six Cees, the first Black owned business of its kind in Scott County. Slaughter-Harvey purchased the building in 1977 and converted it into her law office in Forest, Wednesday, Mar. 2, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today“They beat John, cut his hair with dull scissors and stuck a fork up his nose,” said Slaughter-Harvey, who became the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1970.
As a result of that torture, he suffered a heart attack and part of his stomach had to be removed because of ulcers.
Despite that torture, Perkins bore no malice against those officers, Slaughter-Harvey said. “I’ve always respected his extraordinary forgiveness. He had an impact on my life and so did his wife, Vera, and their children.”
Doug Huemmer, who spent nights in jail with Perkins in 1969 and 1970, said while Perkins was involved in work some described as civil rights activities, his work should be viewed as in the tradition of the Great Protestant Reformation ministers, such as John Calvin, Martin Luther and George Fox.
Perkins sought to eliminate racism, corruption and sin in the white and Black American Protestant Church, Huemmer said. “John and I shared the belief that we have a great country, but we have succumbed to a spiritual decadence that is destroying the American character.”
Quoting a prominent university professor, he said, “In America, we could have built a Chartres Cathedral. Instead, we built Las Vegas.”
In his final conversation with Perkins, he said the pastor told him, “Complete submission to God is the beginning of wisdom.”
In 1978, Perkins became friends with Klansman-turned-minister Tommy Tarrants, who later served for a dozen years as president of the C.S. Lewis Institute. Books and the narrative, “The Preacher and the Klansman,” detailed their lives and friendship.
Perkins began to speak at churches, colleges and conventions across the nation. He served as a religious adviser to Jimmy Carter and other presidents who followed.
He later established the Christian Community Development Association, which focused on bringing the love of Christ to America’s most impoverished communities. “Other people became dedicated to what he had taught because they saw that it works,” Weary said.
Perkins’ teaching also helped lead to the 1992 creation of Mission Mississippi, which encouraged Christians to cross racial lines to develop friendships.
Weary led the organization for more than a dozen years. “We’re gonna be together in heaven,” he said. “Why can’t we be together on this earth?”
After Spencer’s unexpected death at 44 in 1998, the Perkins foundation created the Spencer Perkins Center to serve under-resourced children and families in west Jackson. The center also provided affordable housing to low- to moderate-income families.
John Perkins’ daughters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, serve as co-presidents for the Perkins foundation.
His memoir inspired the band Switchfoot to write “The Sound (John Perkins Blues).” The pastor’s “life of service and compassion is a tangible demonstration of what it means to live a life of love,” said band co-founder Jon Foreman. “Love is the loudest song we could sing. Louder than racism. Louder than fear. Louder than hatred. John Perkins said it right, ‘Love is the final fight.’”
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