Tomorrow is World Communion Sunday and I’m remembering three courageous women — Bettye Poole and Ida Hannah, two blacks students at Mississippi’s Tougaloo College, and Julie Zaugg, a white student from Oberlin College who was studying at the Tougaloo — who together tried to integrate Capitol Street Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi on World Communion Sunday in October 1963.
The women were denied entrance by the ushers. Women they then moved to try to pray together on the front steps of the church they were arrested on grounds of disturbance and private property trespassing.
At the jail, Julie Zaugg was confronted by a police officer who pulled a church offering envelope from his pocket and told her, cynically, that if she really wanted to worship at Capitol Street she ought to be willing to send it some money.
Zaugg looked down to see that on the envelope taken from the Capitol Street at the time of the arrests there was a picture of a communion table, displaying the elements of the Lord’s Supper, surrounded by — curiously, and apparently unnoticed by the police officer — several hands reaching for the wine. “The hands were of different colors: black, pink, and white.”
This, too, is the word of the Lord.