Biography
Dr. John M. Perkins is President of the John M. Perkins Foundation for Reconciliation and Development, in Pasadena, California. He was born into a Mississippi sharecropper's family in 1930 and dropped out of school in the 3rd grade, but this remarkable, self-educated man went on to become a Ford Foundation Fellow, a lecturer at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and listed in Who's Who of International Intellectuals. 

John Perkins has dedicated his life to the service of God on behalf of people everywhere in spiritual and economic need. He is an ordained minister and community leader, known world-wide for his creative solutions to some of our globe's most pressing problems. John has been awarded three honorary doctorates for his humanitarian service. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"I'm in Debt - I have a Debt to Pay" 
The title of my message today is from Paul's Letter to the Romans 1:14 where Paul says, "I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel....."

Paul is talking about a debt; he feels a sense of debt. Of course, he is not talking about working for his salvation or working to get to heaven. He is really talking about a debt of gratitude to God for the wonderful redemption that was worked in his life on that Damascus Road.

I feel the same sense of debt the Apostle Paul felt. Let me share a little of my sense of debt with you. As I share the gospel and God's love with another, I feel I am somehow paying the debt of gratitude that I owe both to God and to society for what He worked in my life.

I was born in Mississippi in 1930. My mother died when I was just seven months old and my father gave the five of us away to his mother, who had been the mother of nineteen children. I grew up in Mississippi. You know what Mississippi was like prior to 1964. I guess you can understand that better if you read Dr. James Silver's book, Mississippi, the Closed Society. In the book, James Silver says that everything in the black man's environment prior to 1963 was designed to make him feel inferior, to make him feel he was a nigger. If he accepted that, he was supposed to play the role of Sambo. He was expected to be happy as he lived in his misery. He was not supposed to use his energy and creativity in any way to get himself out of that condition; he was supposed to be happy. One of the ways he was supposed to do this was to make the white people around him happy. I grew up in that kind of a situation.

I dropped out of school somewhere between the third and the fifth grade and I never went back to school. I began to be educated when I was a boy of about eleven years of age. Education, to me, is more than just the accumulation of academic knowledge for a degree. To me, education is that process by which you begin to understand what is going on around you and are able to get some skills to deal with your environment. I take education from Genesis 1:26-28, where God says to Adam that we are to subdue the creation. All resources were given by God and we are to take our intelligence and turn that into technology and use that for the highest good of the total creation, not just for the greedy, selfish few.

I began to be educated when I was a boy of about eleven. I was away from home and I needed a job. I grew up during the time of great migration, when blacks were leaving the south and going north for better opportunities. Many of the kids stayed in the south on the plantation with a parent. In the summertime they would get a chance to visit their mother or father in the north. Those kids who had mothers, fathers and an opportunity, would leave. Some of us who were very poor did not have an opportunity to go. So, going away was something very special.

Since we were so poor and could not go way, when summer was over we would lie and pretend that we had been. The kids began to catch on and we had a little thing in our community. If you went away in the summer, you had to buy something to convince the kids that you had really been away.

One summer I had a chance to go away. This is when I began to be educated. I got a job so that I could buy something to convince the kids that I had been away. I found a job hauling hay for a white man. I expected to make $1.00 or $1.50 for the day's work. At the end of the day, the gentleman gave me fifteen cents. That was the beginning of my education and understanding what was going on around me.

I didn't want to take the fifteen cents and felt that I was worth more. I expected to receive $1.00 or $1.50 for the day's work. Back in those days in Mississippi, the worst thing you could be was a smart nigger. If I would have thrown the fifteen cents on the floor, I would have been branded as a smart nigger. I took the fifteen cents and went home. I felt so bad and began to ask myself what happened to me that day.

I began to understand the system in Mississippi. I was, in fact, a slave in Mississippi. I took the fifteen cents and asked myself, "What does this man have that I don't have?" As I began to look around me, I realized that he had the mules, the wagon, the hay in the fields. He had capital. Maybe that is why we call our society capitalism. He had the means of production. All I had was my needs, my wants and my labor. I realized I did not have any of that under my own control.

Then I began to see what I had to do. If I was going to succeed in this society, I had to get the means of production. I had to get the mule, the wagon, the hay in the field. My values were not under my control. My value was under the control of my people back in the community who were telling me that in order for me to have work, I had to buy some consumer items to show them. My worth was not in myself as a person. My worth was in things outside of myself. That is when I began to understand the situation we were in and when I began to think about leaving Mississippi.

My grandmother gave away three of the kids. She kept me and my oldest brother. He went into the service during World War II, was wounded in Germany a couple of times, and returned home. He was home about six months and was killed in a racial incident in Mississippi. That was before they even started keeping count of black folks who were killed in Mississippi. There had never been a white man found guilty of bodily harm against a black person until 1964 when Vernon Damon was convicted. You can imagine what it was like back in Mississippi. After that I left Mississippi and made my way to California.

My folks were not religious people and I rejected the Mississippi style of religion. It was too much of a contradiction to me. They would talk about a God who had made the heaven and earth; we were all going to heaven to be together, but we couldn't be together down here on earth. Churches would announce, "Revival today, everybody welcome." I knew that if I would have gone, there would have been a riot. To me, it was too much of a contradiction.

I also rejected the black form of Christianity. I saw it as an emotional way of giving people satisfaction while they lived in a miserable situation. I did not see how black folk could use that religion to change the condition around them; I rejected religion as being unreal.

I ended up in California. In 1957, through the influence of my son going to a little Sunday school and inviting me there, I came to know Christ as the Lord of my life. I gave Him my life. There is a verse of scripture that really changed my life and that verse is found in Galatians 2:20 where Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."

That morning for the first time in my life I really felt loved by God. You see, I grew up without a mother and a father. I grew up without those stabilizing forces in my life that gave me the certainty of love. Part of my own motivation in life was to get those things that I thought would make me deserving of love. I never really felt loved. That morning when I heard that God loved me and had sent His only begotten Son into the world to die for me, I felt loved. I gave my life to Christ in the best way I knew how.

Three years later He led me back to my home state of Mississippi. I ended up in the little rural town of Mendenhall, Mississippi. I began to see the problems in this little town of Mendenhall that we are faced with in our urban communities today. There were so many young people dropping out of school; so many of our girls in their early teens were giving birth to babies. People would leave that little ghetto and not come back. That was when I began to see the problem and the possibility that we could do something to change the condition in Mendenhall.

I remember the night I was convicted that we needed to do something in this town. I said to my wife, "Honey, if we are going to make a difference in Mendenhall, this is what we are going to have to do. We are going to have to stay here long enough to help some young people come to faith in Jesus Christ. We have got to help them to love themselves, love their community and then to go off to school and get education with a purpose, education that is relevant to the environment around them, and then come back to this community and live in it and change it."

That is when God began to give me a vision of indigenous leadership development. We began that process. The first thing we developed in Mendenhall was an important principle of community development. That important principal was that somehow we had to get the young people to come back to the community and live. We have been convinced that the best people to solve the problem are the people living in this situation, giving them the information, the incentives, and the motivation to help them get educated and to take responsibility for their own lives. I have been in debt to that for the last thirty years. I hope that you feel that same sense of debt.

Interview with John Perkins
Interviewed by Orley Herron

Orley Herron: John, tell me about race relations across America. What are your insights as a Christian?

John Perkins: I don't think race relations are very good. I don't think the Christian church has had a good understanding of its mission to race relations. I think the government has done better than the church. Any achievements that we have in race relations cannot be credited to the church, so we should never give the church credit. I would still suggest that 11:00 o'clock on a Sunday morning is probably the most segregated hour of the day.

I see race relations as getting worse. I think David Duke would have had a fair shake in Louisiana. He could have been elected the senator there. His own party didn't endorse him. People like Louis Farrakhan are gaining real popularity around the country. I really don't think race relations are in good shape in this country.

Herron:  John, you returned to Mississippi. Did you return with any bitterness? Tell us about coming from Pasadena back to Mississippi where your brother was killed.

Perkins: I think that the love of God that entered me in 1957 really began to overshadow some of the past bitterness. I think my raw ambition in California to succeed in life called me to forget and not to be as concerned. I came back into Mississippi. I was locked in the Brandon jail and almost beaten to death by whites. After that beating, I had to go through about a year of really healing. I discovered that a lot of the bitterness in my early life had been buried. It had never been dealt with. I had to overcome that.

Herron:  John, as a white person, what can I do to better race relations?

Perkins: If prejudice is the root of racism, then prejudice is judging someone before you know them. The only answer to that problem is to really get to know people. I think that the most important thing that we can do is really make an attempt to get to know people.