Racial reconciliation swirls around the state

By Karen Willoughby, Managing Editor

SICILY ISLAND, CROWLEY, MONROE/WEST MONROE, CALHOUN – In his famous “I have a dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated his hope that one day character would matter more than ethnicity. Some have been content to simply wait for the Civil Rights leader’s vision to materialize.

There are pastors in Louisiana, however, who have decided to do something to make Kings’s dream a reality.   

“This area has been controversial between races over the years,” said James Gass, pastor for the last three years at First Baptist Church of Sicily Island, in Ouachita Baptist Association. “My hope was that if nothing else, this crusade would bring us together on common ground, and I believe it did.”

This spring, churches and groups of churches across Louisiana worked together to bring racial and community reconciliation.

This article looks at four of those events.