Charles County Sends Racists a Fitting Message

When Smith Chapel in Charles County was defaced with racist graffiti last month, Pastor Lucius Ross responded the following Sunday with a sermon titled "What to Do When Hate Hits Home."

His message: Love your enemy.

"Throughout our history in America, black people have maintained a sense of forgiveness and compassion, and our church is not going to let something like this make us lose it," Ross told me recently.

And so our complex national conversation on race continues -- in this case, with an asymmetrical dialogue between a small black church in Pisgah and ghostly vandals who lurk in shadows and speak with spray cans.

In a recent speech at a Black History Month celebration, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called on the nation to talk more frankly about race. He need not worry.

The channels of racial communication have never been more open, carrying messages sent by sermons and speeches, symbols and signs, Internet arguments and televised debates, often generating more heat than light, to be sure, but always reverberating with reminders of America's history of slavery and racial oppression.

Few places in the Washington area go at it like Charles County, which has the fastest-growing black population in the country outside the Atlanta suburbs. Last month alone, vandals left racist messages not only on Ross's church but also on a high school, two elementary schools, a recycling center, an auto repair shop and a stop sign.

But the responses have been as encouraging as the graffiti was appalling. "Our church has been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from the community, blacks and whites," Ross said.

Ross told me that he and other church leaders want to make sure that students at schools hit by vandals get the support they need. "The one thing we want them to have is a sense that people care about them and their security," he said. "We just can't let them assume that evil is running everything."

County Commissioner Edith J. Patterson (D-Pomfret), who represents much of the area where the graffiti was found, declared that the incidents "only brought the community together." She's right in a way.

And yet, long before this recent spate of public racism -- even before the racially motivated arsons in 2004 that destroyed several unoccupied homes owned by blacks in an upscale residential development -- many county residents were engaged in truly enlightened conversations about race.

In 2000, Ross and other United Methodist pastors began discussing ways to heal a long-standing rift between their black and white congregations. His 40-member church, on Poorhouse Road, was founded 107 years ago after blacks were barred from joining United Methodist churches with white congregations.