How Sankofa Changed One Man’s Life

CHICAGO, IL (September 12, 2006) – Bill Baca read the four-part series of stories in the Seattle Times that focused on local Evangelical Covenant Church members who traveled on a Sankofa trip to the South. Baca knew then that he wanted to become part of the denomination.

“I read these and started doing a search on the Covenant,” he says. The denomination’s emphasis on racial justice and evangelical focus attracted him.

Now after returning from the latest Sankofa trip (August), his employer – a little corporation called Microsoft – wants him to give presentations to his division of 200 employees and a human resources group. An in-house publication also wrote stories preceding and following his journey.

The Covenant began organizing the Sankofa bus trips in 1998. Sankofa is a West African word that means “looking backward to look forward.” The bus trips through the South are designed to be experiential, incorporating visits to significant civil rights sites, including the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four young African American girls were killed in a 1963 bombing. King preached from that church, with its distinctive neon sign.

The accompanying photo shows the historic sign outside the church. To see additional photos, visit Historic Church.

“It took me back to those times – and it transformed me,” says Baca, an account manager. “It was way beyond my imagination. It was way beyond what I expected.”

Meeting a woman who was jailed as a 12-year-old for 45 days was especially powerful to Baca. A young Sandra Mansfield joined freedom marchers in 1963, but she and several other girls eventually were held in squalid conditions and were never charged.

Baca was older than Mansfield when she was arrested, but had no interest in the civil rights movement. “I thought Martin Luther King was an agitator.”

Over the years, his views of the civil rights movement changed dramatically, though a little at a time. During the trip, he held hands with Mansfield while the group sang We Shall Overcome. “It was mind blowing!” he recalls.

Baca has been on the receiving end of ethnic slurs. “I’ve been called a wetback,” he says, but adds he has never experienced the racism experienced by African Americans.

He also has struggled with his own racism. “I was raised in a family to think we were Spanish, and that Mexicans were less than us.” Baca questions how he would have developed had he lived in the South and had been taught that blacks were inferior.

Baca already had been working with groups to fight racism and promote diversity, but the trip has multiplied his desire to bring people’s actions in line with their words. “We say all these things about inclusion and diversity, and then we don’t see it,” he observes.

He prays for the courage to confront people when they use highly offensive racial slurs and phrases. It’s all part of working on his transformation.

To read the four Seattle Times articles, please select the following: Sankofa, Deep South Trip, We Can’t Despair, and About Racism. To obtain more information on Sankofa trips, visit Christian Formation.