Hope for peace

In the year 2000, Tommy Tarrants and I traveled together to Amman, Jordan, to speak at an international meeting on peace. So there we were: Tommy, a former Ku Klux Klansman, and myself, a black from Mississippi, standing next to a lineup of Nobel Prize winners for peace and reconciliation. The kind of Jordan was there with his delegates too. He said, “When a black man from Mississippi and a white Ku Klux Klansman can become friends, there is hope for the Jews and Arabs.” That was wonderful. But hope has to be in Jesus Christ! The reconciliation came because that Ku Klux Klansman met Jesus Christ and because that black boy from Mississippi met Jesus Christ. It was His death on the cross that pulled this white supremacist and me together. Only because Jesus reconciled us could we stand side by side on a platform next to the king of Jordan as a symbol of hope for peace in the Middle East.


--John M. Perkins in Follow Me to Freedom p 42