Healing and Redemption in Forsyth County, Georgia

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Let's bring the living water to the world. This is Chris Hughes with the Christian Perspective Podcast with Chris Hughes, where we encourage our listeners to engage the culture with Jesus Christ. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds, so enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. A horrible victim of rape, evil racism, something that is a dark blight on the history of our nation in America.

But there's a man of God, and there's a group of believers that love Jesus that are doing something about it. And I'm so glad to talk to my friend Durwood Sneed about it. God bless you, man. How did we even connect to begin with?

I'm trying to figure this out. Wow. Man, a long time ago, there was a guy named Mike Lee. There was a good friend of mine in Atlanta, and he had met you. And when my son Matt moved to Atlanta, moved from China, actually, after growing up in Atlanta, moved to Winston-Salem. Mike said, hey, I know a guy in Winston-Salem. He's a great guy for Matt to connect with. So that's how we got connected initially. And Matt's sitting right here.

He's your son. We've been in Wednesday in the Word together. That's why it's a little bit loud right now. Matt, tell everyone what just happened here real quick. Just tell everybody.

We're just studying 1 Corinthians and talking about how there's no stinging death in Christ. Amen. Wow. It's just a good group. And then your pops is here. What is it like to have your dad come to Wednesday in the Word? It's amazing. Yep. Really a privilege to have him here with us today. So cool.

And when I got your email, I just was like, did that really happen? Like, wow. You hear about the racism, and you hear about the evil and the darkness, but like, what are Christians doing to shine a light? And you're doing something about it, Brother Durwitz. Give our listeners a little bit of background and about this passion, this mission, and maybe there's ways people listening can jump in and help.

Absolutely. So I live in Forsyth County, Georgia, where I've lived for 33 years. Which ironically, we're in Forsyth County of North Carolina.

So there's only two in the nation. So it's kind of fascinating this connection that we've got between the two Forsyth Counties. But I'd heard about some racial issues in our county for a long time, but I really hadn't looked into it.

So about a year ago, just over a year ago, I started doing some research. And what I learned was there was some terrible events that happened in 1912. There was a white 18-year-old girl who was raped and brutalized. The next day, a black guy on her street with very little evidence was arrested. And that night he was lynched. A mob came into the jail and lynched him. Then several other black people on her street were arrested.

A very quick trial and two people were hung after about a three-hour trial each. But the big travesty, even following all that, was night riders went around to every home, every black home in the county, and there were 1,100 black people in the county then, and told them, if you don't leave, we will dynamite your home and you just need to leave the county immediately. So 1,100 black people, every black person in the county had to leave in literally 30 days or they would be killed. So as my wife and I read about this, we began weeping as we began thinking about maybe being one of those families and having to leave for no reason of anything that we had done and to go somewhere where nobody wanted us.

So I began meeting with my pastor, and I'm actually a retired pastor myself, ran missions in our church for a number of years. But we began thinking, praying, and trying to figure out what could we do that could be helpful for the next generation. We didn't do this. We weren't part of this. This is not our responsibility.

However, we feel like we're all responsible for the next generation, even though we're not responsible for the sins of the last. So as we thought about it, we said, what if we could come up with a scholarship for descendants of these 1,100 people that were expelled from the county simply as an act of love, not a part of anything else, not a part of any political party, not a part of CRT or the 1619 Project, and not even being something that would be justice for the people that were offended, but simply one act of love by some followers of Jesus. So about a dozen pastors, including my own and myself, got together, and we launched a scholarship for these descendants.

The cool thing about it is it was simply an idea about nine months ago, and now we've raised about $124,000. We have 15 people that have applied for the scholarship, and we are going through the process right now of evaluating all of them because what they have to do is they have to prove descendants. They have to have a 2.5 GPA, and they have to write an essay about the story of their family, about what happened to their family really afterwards. As I'm reading these essays, I am humbled as I read the stories of these families, but it's also inspiring to see families that actually had to leave the county with almost nothing, many of them with almost no education, and then how they figured out how to live life and actually have their children become responsible citizens that many of whom became professionals, you know, did all kinds of cool jobs and work, administered in their communities, but just reading those inspiring stories is amazing, but we want to encourage the next generation. Many of these kids probably couldn't go to college otherwise.

58 of the people that got expelled were landowners. This is not anything to do with reparations. This is just simply an act of love to try to help the next generation. Yeah, we talk all the time on Truth Talk about ways that your son is doing, about how do I introduce someone to Jesus?

Can you think of something more powerful than walking up to someone you've never met in your life, they're even a different color skin than you, and say, hey, listen, here's a $10,000 scholarship for your kid, and I'm gonna tell you why I'm giving this. I'm giving this to you in Jesus' name, and I'm giving this to you because a bunch of evil people did a bunch of evil things to your family that we live in the same town decades ago, and I just want to do this to bless you. I also want to say I'm sorry. I'm out here.

I didn't do it. I'm sorry about that, and I want to tell you about my Jesus. I mean, Duro, what's neat is there any, I can't think of a more powerful compelling gospel presentation. Well, this is a complete thing of God, and we're just so blessed and humbled just to be part of it. Well, 12 pastors launched this initially. We've invited the entire community to jump on board, and we've had people give that we don't know throughout the community to just say, we just want to be a part of this, but we want Jesus to get all the credit, but we want to invite everybody, whether they're believers or not, to get on board and really try to help, and the cool thing now is we're just having lots of really neat racial reconciliation discussions.

I met with one Rotary Club where one guy was pushing back a little bit of the idea, and he said, hey, why are we dragging up stuff from the past that could be painful? And then another guy in that same meeting who was one black man in that club spoke up. He said, well, I've got a little bit different perspective. He said, if we were doing so well in this county, wouldn't there be more like me here in this meeting?

You're my Rotary brother. At the same time, how do we go about really talking about this and trying to figure things out? And watching those two guys afterward get together privately and just start meeting as brothers to try to really understand each other's perspective is just amazing.

Yeah, that's something. So the name of this ministry, for our listeners to know, they want to get involved. They kind of want to Google it and all that stuff. How do they find out more? What is the best place to point them?

The best place to go is our website, which is called Forsyth, F-O-R-S-Y-T-H, scholarship.com, and it has all the background information. It has resources and even ways to give if anybody wants to give to this effort. So you can give 100 bucks. You can give 1,000 bucks. Okay, so if I give 100 bucks right now to Forsyth this movement, where does that money go?

Tell me about it. Follow the money. Where does it go?

What happens? It goes into a donor-directed fund at the National Christian Foundation that's set up specifically for this, and then every single penny will go to individual scholarships. We're all volunteers that are running those.

You know, it's interesting. In our estates, we leave money for our kids and our grandkids. We plan a little bit for that. Why not leave a little something for someone that our forefathers or forebears have wronged?

Why not do something that's just really reconcilatory in Christ? Again, this isn't politics. This isn't all that other stuff you mentioned earlier, but what a powerful mechanism, and I just want to thank you for doing all this. Thank you so much.

We so appreciate you, and we're excited about what God is going to do, and you can pray for us too, because we're walking one step at a time and looking forward to what God's got next, so thank you so much. What do you see this as being, when I think of this event and this issue, I think of nations where, literally, it's happened in several nations. I think of Uganda, some others, where there was ethnic cleansing and purging, and one tribe was killing, murdering another tribe. In fact, a lady wrote a book, did a video. I interviewed her on my show years ago.

I quoted her in chapter one of my book, Last Words of Jesus. The title of the documentary is called As We Forgive, and this was back. This was in Africa. This is the intense tribal. In one tribe, murder another was a bloodshed.

It was all over the place. I think it was in Uganda, but what led to healing was when people came to faith in Christ, and they started, and all of a sudden, you have members of two different tribes that their families hated each other centuries before and even weeks before, in love with each other and praying together over Christ, and that's the power. Close us with a thought on the power of the gospel to reconcile, whether it's way over there in Uganda or whether it's even right here in Forsyth County, Georgia, or Forsyth County, North Carolina, Winston-Salem. Bear with us, close us out with the power of the gospel to reconcile all races, all people under Jesus. Satan is the divider. He's the one that actually causes us to feel threatened so that we have anger, we have animosity, but the gospel is the reconciler. Jesus is the reconciler. I've never met anybody in the world that you can't sit down across the table with, have a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, just ask about each other's family, and the more you get to know each other, then you start developing a relationship, and that leads to love, and the gospel is the center of all that.

Amen. And if we always say this anecdotally, this little sermon for Christianism, heaven looks a lot different than the church looks today. Well, then what should the church be doing? The church should be going to China, to Africa, to India. The church should be going and reaching people with the good news of Jesus. It's not getting races together just for the sake of getting together, right, Jeremy? It's getting people together to know Jesus and to love them and to meet a felt need, and in some cases, they're stuck because of generations of pain from what happened, and if we have it in our power to do something about it, why not do it? And we need to. James instructs us on all of that, doesn't he?

You know, he tells us that, hey, if you've just got faith that just talks about things, that means nothing, you know, but pure and undefiled religion is meeting the needs of widows, orphans, and those in need, and so we see a need, we just need to meet it because if our faith isn't lived out, then it means nothing. Tremendous. What's the website one more time for your initiative?

Forsythscholarship.com. Okay, and you guys have got to meet Durwood Sneed sometime. Meet his son, Matt, who's amazing. You have how many kids, Matt? Five kids, five blessings. Some adopted, right?

That's right, two adopted and three biological. I love seeing him out. I love seeing the picture of you.

We gave you some tickets to the ball game. I love seeing that picture of your kid. He's got a wonderful, diverse family.

I love it. Loves Jesus, amazing wife, to do all that. You've got great grandkids and a great, awesome son and daughter-in-law, Durwood Sneed. Now, how many Durwood Sneeds are there on planet earth? I mean, how many people with your name? I only know of one other. Oh, really? Come on.

Exactly. Are y'all related? No, at least not that I know of. There's some unique names out there. Abraham is our great, great, great, great grandfather, but yeah.

Connected through him and through Noah, right? So, God bless you. God bless you, Stu. Thank you, friend.