Saints and Sinners by Lawrence Wright — Read

WIFE OF ANTI-RACIST CLERIC IS ATTACKED, I read in the New York Times as I flew home from Los Angeles a few days after Easter. Margaret Railey, the thirty-eight-year-old wife of the Reverend Walker L. Railey of Dallas, was beaten, choked, and left for dead on the floor of their garage. Her husband found her unconscious body when he returned from studying at the library shortly after midnight on April 22, 1987. The police had no leads in the case. "Dr. Railey, who is white, has been an outspoken critic of racial prejudice in this city," said the Times. According to the executive minister in Railey's church, Gordon D. Casad, Railey had received a series of threatening letters in the preceding weeks and had preached the Easter sermon wearing a bulletproof vest.

It took a moment for the realization to sink in that this bizarre episode had taken place in my very own church, First United Methodist on the corner of Ross and Harwood in downtown Dallas. This was the church I grew up in and angrily ran away from and retreated to on several guilty occasions. What I always had hated about my church was its instinctive fear of confronting society. But here was a minister who had spoken out against racial injustices and inequality in a city where such things are rarely said aloud. Here was a man threatened with death in that same sanctuary. And here was a man whose wife was strangled into what the doctors called a persistent vegetative state, for no other obvious reason than that someone wanted to punish Walker Railey for preaching love, tolerance, and truth.