Moving My Ass Horizontally Across The South: A Tribute to Civil Rights Activist Rev. Kenneth Dean

I’m sitting in my new house in the greater Nashville area, asking myself, “If a mentor is a ‘wise and trusted counselor,’ and you found Kenneth Dean to be your wise and trusted counselor, why haven’t you followed his advice? In fact, you just moved 1/120th of a degree farther south—in Tennessee.”

It’s not because I haven’t tried to move to the North. I was begrudgingly willing to follow his advice, but it just never panned out. At age 58, it seems increasingly unlikely I will ever “get out of the South and move to the North.”

However, thinking about my failure to fulfill Kenneth’s advice got me thinking about him. Digging into his life, I found more than I learned during our too-short interactions.

Rev. Kenneth Dean entered my life in 2013 at the end of a service I preached at Ecclesia, a small progressive-minded congregation in Maryville, Tennessee. He waited at the back of the college-campus auditorium the church rented. He wanted a private audience.

As I recall, he had been sitting alone. Seeing him waiting, I thought he was a pilgrim seeking spiritual guidance. It turned out Obi-Wan Kenobi had found a padawan he wanted to guide. My poor family had to wait outside, long past our usual lunch start time.

I had lost a job I loved at a university that I could not have loved more. Into my deep pain came this salty-tongued prophet to lick my wounds with empathy and encouragement. I had no idea the caliber of man intrigued by my sermon. His eyes sparkled with curiosity as he asked me questions about my background.

Lo and behold, we had graduated from the same Tennessee Baptist alma mater—to which we both still felt deep loyalty and love.

Kenneth was born in 1935 and grew up in Tennessee. He then moved to Mississippi, where he was one of a handful of white preachers who actively joined the Civil Rights Movement. I learned how involved he was only after his death and reading his obituaries.

Kenneth spent most of his career in Rochester, New York. When he died, Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle ran an obituary and a eulogy featuring a picture from his wedding day in the late 1960s. His best man was John Lewis. Yes, that John Lewis—the Civil Rights leader and confidant of Martin Luther King, Jr., who served in the U.S. Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020.

The obituary stated:

From 1976-1981, Kenneth was Pastor of Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis, TN. Prescott was known for its diversity and commitment to interracial and interfaith progress. Prescott became the first Southern Baptist Church in the mid-south to welcome African Americans as well as the gay and lesbian community into membership, ordain women as deacons, and receive as members persons who had experienced any form of Christian baptism. Kenneth led the church to continue to take prophetic stands for justice in Christ’s name.

A newspaper photo in the 1960s showed Bobby Kennedy visiting Mississippi. Standing next to Kennedy and holding a young Black child was a white Baptist preacher named Kenneth Dean.

I also recently found an obituary I previously missed. It’s on Jackson, Mississippi’s WLBT TV website:

Rev. Ken Dean, a key figure in WLBT’s storied history, has died.
A tireless advocate of civil rights equality and justice, Dean helped form a racially integrated group, New South, to take over WLBT’s broadcast license in 1971.
The FCC found the station did not fairly serve its large African American audience.
Under his leadership, WLBT got the first African American general manager and fully integrated news channel in the country.
In 2013, Dean was awarded a Lifetime Achievement EMMY from NBC for broadcast journalism.

The dude won an Emmy! I had no idea. This great man had taken such interest in me. How I wish I’d done less whining and asked him more questions.

Alas, I was in deep pain when we met. We only had a handful of talks before he died, and one of those talks was over dinner with others when I was at a family therapists’ conference he attended with his wife. I would love to have had more conversations with him to absorb his wisdom and memories.

In one of our private conversations, he was passing through Tennessee and stopped to see me at the university where I had just relocated. Standing in the parking lot, Kenneth said, “I’m glad you’re happy here. But let me tell you something: You are too progressive-minded for The South.”

I started shaking my head before the end of his following sentence. “You are never going to thrive until you move your ass to The North.” He threw his hand up to interrupt the wagging of my head. “Now, hold on. I know you love it here. And, yes, it’s cold up there. But I did it for 30 years, and you can too.”

I listened to that feedback but wanted to get my youngest child through high school in one place. Also, a few years before receiving Kenneth’s advice, I applied for a pastorate at a church in Boston. They said they loved my application but couldn’t afford to pay a living wage to someone with two children.

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and with impending budget cuts, I was provisionally job hunting. I had a great interview with a major university Up North, but the search chair subtly intimated they were trying to diversify their faculty.

Later, a search committee at a major university here in The South invited me to do a sample lecture on diversity. The very white audience took issue with my PowerPoint images. They expressed concern that the newspaper images of Black people being assaulted by police and others might be offensive to Black students.

I contacted a former Black student who said she remembered the same lecture and that it was one of the best she heard in college. She said, “What offends me is white people being too squeamish to look at what happens to my people.”

Thus, because I was not diverse enough for that university in The North and—per Kenneth’s assertion—too diversity-affirming for the one in The South, I started working as an online therapist and freelance writer.

One of my articles was shared by an author Up North. A friend wrote me, “Have you seen what your article is doing after it was shared by Kissing Fish?” I went to check the Facebook page of the book Kissing Fish—Christianity for People Who Don’t Like Christianity. There were favorable comments from all over the world: Denmark, England, Egypt, Pakistan, Sweden and more.

This broad impact has happened despite my career only taking place from as far east as western Virginia to as far west as Nashville. Additionally, they all fall inside or immediately adjacent to the space between 36- and 37- degrees north latitude.

So, here in my new sunroom, surrounded by a grove of shagbark hickories, white oaks, sugar maples, and dense bamboo, let me address you directly, Ghost of Kenneth Dean—as I imagine you standing over there glowing like an after-death apparition of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

While you meant well, you advised me to move to the North based on your experience a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Thanks to the internet, it may not matter where I hang my toothbrush.

Yes, states don’t get much “redder” than Tennessee. But here in Nashville—and thanks to the work of people like you—I recently went to a live-music restaurant where, racially, the clientele looked like the United Nations, and let’s just say not all the couples would have been as welcomed at a Southern Baptist church.

Icing on the cake: It’s not a long drive to the Smoky Mountains, the absence of which feels like losing my limbs.

No, I haven’t moved to The North. While I’m no genius and, to mix movie metaphors, you were a healing Sean Maguire in my own version of Good Will Hunting.

Like Will, I’ve had to move west to “see about a girl.”

Even more than her, maybe you’ve been bested by one who said to a suffering person he healed: “Go home to your own people, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown you” (Mark 5:19, NRSVUE).

It turns out there is still much to do here in The South. After all, amidst a ghastly political climate, even an esteemed group of Southern university professors apparently think students are too squeamish to look at newspaper and magazine images of racial oppression.

So, there is Social Gospel to share and grace to give. Sadly, just as you and others like you have taught us, one of the things Christ offers to save us from is, well, Christians.

Still, you were loving even to those Christians who acted in hateful ways.

So, despite not fulfilling your advice about location, I seek to honor you, Kenneth, with these words, and I strive to carry on your work spreading a practical gospel of Christ-like promotion of justice.

Fortunately, new tools like the internet allow both roots at home and the wings to go not just to The North, but around the globe.

So, take that, you son of a biscuit-eating Baptist. Now, shut your pie hole and pass me some sawmill gravy and sweet tea. We’ve got to fuel up. We’ve got work to do and love to share.