Zero Victim: One Black Man's Story of Transformation

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So take your hair removal routine to the next level with Conair Girl Bomb, available at Walgreens. And we continue with our American stories. Pastor and author James E. Ward Jr. came to national prominence after Jacob Blake Jr. was shot during an incident involving the Kenosha, Wisconsin police. What made his response so unique was his call for prayer, peace, healing, and forgiveness. In his book, Zero Victim, Overcoming Injustice with a New Attitude, James Ward describes the pivotal moment in his life while in third grade.

Here's James Ward. You grow up in the South as a kid in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, knowing somehow as a kid that it's black people against white people. The city that I lived in, Tuscaloosa, is physically and geographically split with the Black Warrior River. And you knew that the white kids kind of lived on the north side of the city. The black kids lived on the south side of the city.

And before third grade, I don't really recall having any relationships with white people. It was just the norm of being in the black community. The streets were sometimes dirty.

There was kind of garbage on the streets, cars jacked up on cinder blocks and things of that nature. That was our way of doing things. Even before that, I was fortunate to grow up in a Christian family. I did have the typical praying grandmother that you hear about, but also a praying grandfather. Our family was probably the professional Christian family that you would think of in the sense of the dads involved in church, the moms involved in church. Both my sister and I were involved. And I like to say we were professional Christians in the sense that it's just what we did and what we knew how to do.

But there's also a pitfall in that is that you can do the professional side of church and not have a relationship with the Lord. Something, you know, life changing happened for me in third grade, right at the tail end of the school system being integrated. I remember the day just like yesterday when we were put on a bus and bus to the white side of town. And I thought that was going to be a hostile day. I thought that was going to be a very challenging day going to the white side of town and didn't know what to expect.

I didn't have favorable expectations of that day. But something great that was really interesting to me is as we made that journey across town, across the Black Warrior River, I noticed that the scenery changed. I noticed that the landscaping on the homes that we were passing by was much different than the side of town that we lived on, where there was, you know, dirt in the front yard, no flowers, trees and shrubs were not kept. But as we moved to the white side of town, things were so much nicer. And that bus ride became encouraging to me because I said to myself, I want to live on this side of town. This is where I should be and this is where I want to be. We get to this this elementary school, which was Verna Elementary School, brand new school.

The playground equipment worked. When you walked into the building, the smell of fresh paint, the smell of fresh chalk on the chalkboard. It was just a different experience than what it is that I experienced up until that point. And I'm just thankful that my third grade teacher happened to be a friend of my praying grandmother. She was a pastor's wife from, I think, AME or Baptist Church on the black side of town. But I didn't realize until later that she preceded me in the integration of the school system, that she herself was one of the first black teachers actually working in a white school. And she seems to have, you know, during that time, just kind of taking responsibility for me making the transition well and going into this environment, thinking that is going to be, you know, pretty hostile.

Me and the white kids and there's going to be fights and things like that. One of the things that Mrs. Pitts did, which was so amazing, she would put your name on the board if you if you scored well on a spelling test or something like that. She would always put your name on the board with a star next to it. And I began to notice that my name was on the board often. You know, I kept kept seeing my name on the board for good reasons, you know, not for punitive reasons. And something happened inside me internally when I began to see that my performance was not hindered by the white kids around me. And I began to understand that they were not holding me back. Something changed inside of me that disarmed any hostilities I had against those white kids. And the moment I recognized that they were not against me and they could not stop me from performing well, something shifted in terms of my own self-worth, my own identity, me understanding my own capability. And it changed the quality of my relationships with those kids. So in other words, the turmoil was internal. It was something that I was perceived that was not a reality around me.

And that really became the basis of the zero victim message. A change happened inside me before a change could happen around me or I could say a change inside me. It initiated a change happening around me. So Miss Pitts, she made an incredible impression on my life.

Again, from the black side of town, there was a certain culture that we experienced. But when I encountered Mrs. Pitts, I noticed that she was very disciplined woman. Her posture was very erect. She was one of the kind of women that there was not one hair out of place. She had this salt and pepper hair and there was never one hair out of place. Her posture was erect.

She always had her feet together. She would speak with elegance. She was a very gracious woman, a very kind woman. And to this day, I can remember what it's like to be in her presence.

And that made a tremendous impact on me. I said to myself that she's not like most other women. She's not most she's not like most other black women in the sense that she's so refined and she's so regal. And I saw something in her that I just kind of described to be at the time black excellence. There was a different way of speaking and talking. And really, at that time and even to this day, I think it's unfortunate in some situations, if I'm honest, when black people sometimes speak eloquently and we don't necessarily use the kind of language that we use in the inner cities.

We sometimes are accused of talking white and sounding white or, you know, selling out and all these things, which is most unfortunate. But I look back and I think about Mrs. Pitts, his life, and I see that she was really a forerunner to enter into her space. And she took me on. I think being just the grandson of her of her close friend, I think she took me on as her project to teach me how to integrate.

I think she was teaching me the power of integration and how to develop relationships and how to function in this new space that I was being called to in the education arena. At the time, she seemed to be a lot harder on me than the other kids. And I kind of thought to myself, sometimes it felt it felt as though she was picking on me a little bit. And I look back in hindsight now and she was not picking on me.

She was actually favoring me. I remember my parents were working during that time. I took the bus to school again and the bus would leave pretty much immediately right after school. And Mrs. Pitts would tell me, James, you need to get involved in more activities here at school. I didn't really want to do that. You know, my excuse was that, hey, the bus has to leave at three twenty five. Whatever school lets out, the bus has to leave.

I don't have a have a ride. Well, I didn't know that Mrs. Pitts, you know, she had an answer for my excuse. She called my grandmother without me knowing about it and made an arrangement with my parents for her to bring me home from school every day. So instead of me taking the bus, she made arrangements for me to leave like later on during the day, just so that I could get involved with the math team, you know, with the spelling team. He wanted me to be involved with safety patrol because those experiences would enrich and enhance my life. And that was different, again, coming from our culture growing up.

Most of the times, you know, you want to play basketball, you want to play football, but actually getting involved with the spelling team, the math team, being involved in the safety patrol team. Those were some of the things that that Mrs. Pitts really pushed me to do that at the time I didn't even really want to do. But again, she was cultivating and bringing something out of me and didn't seem to give me any any wiggle room, really, in terms of my behavior and my conduct at that time growing up in the south. You know, it was really kind of a community parenting kind of concept that it was not just your parents and your grandparents that would discipline you. Anybody in the neighborhood could discipline you. I mean, a friend of a friend. And if you got in trouble somewhere that you weren't supposed to be, I mean, you had been corrected and got a spanking three or four times before you got home to get the last spanking from your parents. And that's the way that Mrs. Pitts related to me, that she was right there. She was hard on me. And I can see now that she was cultivating and trying to draw something out of me that would really be necessary in life. And if we're lucky enough, we all have a Mrs. Pitts or two in our lives, black, white, brown, whatever. When we come back, more of this unique voice, this unique story.

Pastor and author James E. Ward continues with his story here on Our American Stories. With the best all-inclusive vacation deals to Mexico and the Caribbean, booking your getaway with cheap Caribbean vacations means you have more freedom. Whether you want to enjoy snorkeling, endless margaritas and more, Cheap Caribbean Vacations has your deal for that.

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Let's pick up where he last left off. So as I fast forward through, you know, my middle school years, my high school years, my mother was active duty military. And her and my father relocated our family from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Decatur, Illinois. And again, going to an area, always being in a space that was, you know, I was a minority. So many occasions I found myself as the only black student or one of just a few black students and really began to do very well with music.

I got recruited by DePaul University to come to Chicago. That continued through my graduate years. The concept of zero victim thinking itself really became crystallized when I began to work for a racially diverse church, but a rather large church on the south side of Chicago. We took what's called an attitudinal assessment. And one of the categories that this attitudinal assessment measured was the degree to which you see yourself as a victim. And so I took the assessment, not thinking much of it.

The results of the assessment actually came back. And in the area of victim thinking, my score comes back zero. And the guy who was facilitating the assessment called me. He says, you know, in my many, many years of giving this assessment, I've never seen anyone score zero in the area of victim thinking. He says, James, everybody has some degree of victim. Everybody has experienced certain things in life that makes them feel like a victim. He says, I had to call you and find out who you were to get your story to understand how this is possible.

I like to say that I'm now certified and is documented that I'm zero victim. I think about Bible stories, one of the Bible stories of Jesus, you know, being on this boat with his disciples entering into this understorm or hurricane or whatever it was. And his disciples felt that they were going to perish.

And the Bible says that Jesus was sleeping. And I really began to understand that even with that story as a great example for me, that Jesus was the only one not fearful about entering into the storm because there was peace inside him. And it seems that the peace in him was superior to or greater than the storm around him. So our church congregation has become known pretty much as the zero victim church family, because I'm always teaching the concept of zero victim thinking because it represents the mind of Christ himself. And so for many years, I've been explaining to our church that as a pastor, certainly that Jesus was a zero victim thinker. So if you imagine that the only innocent man that ever lived suffered the greatest injustice that the world has ever known.

And while in the act of still being victimized or experiencing this injustice of crucifixion and being crucified for someone else's sins and not his own, while the nails are still being driven in his hand, he's already praying, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they do. That is the standard of how we deal for injustice in life. And so I've been teaching this for many, many years in our church. It just so happens that there's two ladies in our church, Janie Johnson, as well as her daughter, Julia Jackson.

And they've been with us from the very beginning. And one day on August 23rd of 2020, I get a phone call from Julia Jackson. And it's Julia saying, Pastor, my son has been shot seven times by the police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, August 23rd of 2020. And immediately we just began to pray that he would live and he would not die. We began to pray for God's peace and God's intervention in that situation. And of course, the world now know, all of America, I should say, now know that incident on August 23rd of 2020 as the Jacob Blake Jr. shooting. And we've all seen the video.

That was Julia's son. And so that connection with Julia and her son being shot brought myself and my wife directly into Kenosha's situation. So this is in the wake of the George Floyd situation. There's riots happening in the street, those storms that I talk about. America was really in a very, very tense place the summer of 2020. We're gearing up for the presidential election.

And so you have this tension between folks on the left and the right, between Democrats and Republicans. And now you have this Jacob Blake shooting on top of the George Floyd shooting. And America was just in a really, really tough position. And my wife and I were drawn into the Kenosha situation because of our connection with Julia and her son, Jacob Blake. I'll never forget on that same evening, we were going to go up the following day to be with her and to spend time in the area to support her. But I remember on the same evening, shortly after her son was shot, she sent a message to my wife and I and said, Pastor, I need another zero victim T-shirt because I want everyone to know that I am not a victim. That lesson is so important for us.

Again, we can't control what we go through, but we can control how we go through it. There was a press conference a few days later, and at Julia's request, she asked me to open the press conference with prayer and to speak a word of calm over Kenosha. And we're expecting that Kenosha is just going to go up in flames because there was so much tension in the nation. And so the very first press conference that was held after the Jacob Blake shooting, I was able to open by speaking just a few words of encouragement to our nation, calling for peace and beginning to speak this zero victim message over our nation.

And it pretty much went viral that the news outlets and folks from across America began to pick up on it. And we began to get hundreds and hundreds of messages from people saying what you're saying is different. You sound different than instead of them. I think, frankly, instead of them saying a black man who was angry and a black woman who was angry, calling for more destruction. We were calling for peace. We were speaking. Oh, we were calling for prayer. I began to hear from people who who were saying that I'm I'm not religious, I'm atheist, I'm not a Christian at all. I'm not a person of faith. But what you're saying about faith and what you're saying about the nation makes sense.

It's logical. We need to hear more. And during that process, I was contacted by major news anchors to do interviews about the Kenosha situation.

And apparently one of the viewers of those interviews was someone in the White House, maybe President Trump himself. And eventually he did come to Kenosha on September 1st of 2020 to hold a roundtable and, you know, called and asked that that we would be involved with that roundtable and working with some community leaders. And we're grateful for the opportunity. We're grateful for the invitation to do that. And we tell folks all the time that we're we're apolitical. We're not on the left or the right. Our nation has become, I think, more obsessed with right versus left instead of right versus wrong. And so we were honored to share that space and to share that stage with President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr.

And if President Biden or anyone else had been in office at the same time, we would serve our president, whoever the sitting president was, to do what we could to impact the nation. It seems anything that can possibly be used to bring division in our nation is being used to divide us. And the soil from which these things spring is always victim thinking.

Victim thinking is being weaponized and being used to divide people. And we've been listening to Unique Voice, James E. Ward's voice. And by the way, he's the author of Zero Victim, Overcoming Injustice with a New Attitude.

I urge you to go to Amazon or anywhere else you get your books and buy it and read it. And when we come back, we're going to talk more with James E. Ward about his story. And my goodness, imagine getting an assessment that you have a zero when asked about attitudinal assessments as it relates to victimhood. By the way, I'm married to a wife who's at a zero and she was molested for five years in the younger part of her life.

And it is an absolute zero. When we come back, learning how to live with, well, what you have to live with and how to do it with peace. More of James E. Ward's story here on Our American Stories. Two in one upgrade for any TV lets you stream your favorite entertainment in brilliant 4K HDR picture and hear every detail with auto speech clarity. Whether you're hosting a party or just cleaning the house, turn it up and rock out with iHeart radio and room filling sound. Learn more about Roku Stream Bar today at roku.com.

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Visit petsbest.com. And we continue with our American stories and the story of James E. Ward. Let's pick up where we last left off. I think that we're in a place in our nation where the narrative says, the cultural narrative says that white police officers are out to get black men. And there's this constant war between white police officers and black men.

You know, there are incidents that are that are most unfortunate that happen in our in our society. I think that when we when we only talk in terms of race and we make things about black versus white, it is such a surface level conversation. For example, you know, even even biologically speaking, the human skin is, you know, something like point zero five millimeters thick. And we're letting something so thin and something so inconsequential as skin color define our lives to such a degree. How can something so insignificant become so significant to define every aspect of our life?

And it's only point zero five millimeters thick. And so I think that having a conversation about race and racism in America is a reality. But it's a shallow conversation if we don't go deeper into the hearts of people, we don't go into the the character of people to really unpack the issues and the evils that reside within people that caused them to relate to each other the way that they they do that are damaging. And that's not beneficial in my in my own life. I can give you several several stories, one of which I was driving home, you know, on a weekday morning, dropping my kids off at school.

And we happen to live right now in the in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, which is, you know, somewhat of a, I should say, an affluent area. I can go through our community for three or four weeks and never see another black man. I'm driving home from from school to drop my kids off on a weekday morning and made somewhat of a minor illegal maneuver in traffic is something that people do all the time. If someone is waiting to make a left turn, you just kind of, you know, slowly proceed around them. And that particular morning, there was a police officer behind me and he pulls me over from making that that maneuver. Now, in today's society, with the narratives that are happening immediately in my mind has to think I'm a black man being pulled over by a white police officer.

And the society has already told me how this encounter is supposed to happen. It's already conditioned my mind to think that this is not going to turn out well, whether I made an illegal maneuver or not. The narrative tells me that this police officer stopped me because I'm black. And so this is just the real the realistic side of dealing with these encounters because of the narrative that's happening in America. So the police officer has a narrative in his head that I'm going to be defiant.

I'm going to be rebellious, that I hate him, that I think the worst about about him. And then I have this narrative in my head that he hates me and he's out to get all black people. But I can say that it was it was I who initiated the change and our interaction by not being a victim. And then he responded. But when the officer approached me in my car and my car, I look him directly in the very center of his eyes, as I would anyone.

And instantly it changes the dynamics of our encounter. I speak to him with confidence. I speak with him with respect. I'm not fearful. I'm not disrespectful. I'm compliant, polite.

I'm cordial. And so immediately the officer was able to pick up that this guy is a quality guy. He's not going to cause me any problems.

There's just a way that it disarmed the interaction. I gave him my license. I gave him my registration. He went to his car.

He came back and says, I'm just going to give you a warning. He saw my registration, saw that I lived in the neighborhood. Hey, I see that you live in this area. And the next thing you know, we started having conversation. And, you know, I invited him by.

So you know what? Any time you're in the neighborhood, why don't you stop by for coffee? I love to have a time to get to know you and your family. So I invited this white police officer over to my home for coffee. So now he's really kind of saying, wait a minute, this is not how this is supposed to go, according to the cultural narrative. He asked me, what do you do? I said, well, I'm a pastor. Oh, my goodness, you're a pastor. He said, you know, I have a really good friend who's another police officer. He's just been diagnosed with cancer. Would you pray for him? I said, absolutely.

I love to pray for him. And so now this encounter with this white police officer that, you know, according to the latest report on the evening news, I was supposed to end with some kind of violent interaction is now ending with a prayer meeting and ending with a positive interaction for me to actually be of service and to be be a blessing to him and to his friend who was going through a traumatic situation. I can give you another encounter that didn't end as well with a white police officer, again, living in the same neighborhood once a year around Thanksgiving. They do a 5K run through our neighborhood and they close down the roads except for the people who live in the neighborhood. I wake up that morning to go to the health club as I as I normally would. And on my way back, there are policemen set up to screen and to make sure that only folks that live in the neighborhood are able to proceed down these roads. And so I come to the first checkpoint.

There was a police officer of Asian descent. I rolled down my window. He says, hello, how are you? Good morning. Do you live in the area?

Yes, I do live in the area right around the corner. I named my street. And he says, OK, no worries. Have a great morning. Just stay over to the left side of the road and keep an eye out for the runners. I get to the second checkpoint and there was a black American police officer.

Same same procedure. I rolled down my window. He says, good morning.

Hey, how are you? Do you live in the area? You know, sure. I live right around the corner.

I named my street. He says, no problem. Be careful. Look out for the runners. Have a great day.

Well, the third police officer was a white gentleman. And I rolled down my window thinking that this is going to be easy. And I say, hey, you know, good morning. I'm on my way home. And he was very rude to me.

He really barked orders at me. You know, do you live in the area? Yes, I live in the area.

Do you have a driver's license? And I'm thinking to myself, I number one, I've gone I've gone through two checkpoints already. And not only that, I've just communicated to you where I live. He asked me, what street do you live on? I had to name my street. He asked me, how far down is your street? I had to explain to him how far down my street was. And then he asked me for a driver's license to prove that I was not lying. I'm compliant.

But at the same time, I'm I'm becoming angry, you know, and I'm not a person who gets angry quickly. But when I watched the cars before me go through his checkpoint and there was no question there, there were no questions. He did ask for driver's license.

He didn't hold them up at all. That's an unfortunate encounter that that happens. We can't deny it. It happens.

But again, I think we have a sin problem and not a skin problem. It was my zero victim thinking my zero victim understanding me embracing this message. The lessons in third grade that prepared me for that moment to not overreact, because that is the moment that if I had responded with anger, that situation would not have ended well for me, even though I'm right.

He's wrong. He has authority that I don't have. So another black man or any person, for example, in that situation, you don't just have to be a black man. Any person, if they had reacted out of anger and out of frustration, the situation would have escalated and become something much, much more disastrous and something undesirable, even from an organizational standpoint. I sometimes teach our leaders and any any CEO, any organizational leader knows that you can't stop people in your organization from offending other people. But you can stop the people in your organization from being offended.

And if you can stop them from being offended, it changes the culture of your church. It changes the culture of your business community. It'll change the culture of your community and your nation.

And I believe that this message right now is something that's critically important in America. We've gotten away from building better people. When we build better people, we'll build better communities and we'll build a better nation.

But the attempt to build a better nation without building better people will be futile. And I believe that the zero victim resource is the thing that we need right now that helps tremendously in building better people so that we can build a better nation. And great work, as always, by Greg Hengler on the production and the storytelling here.

What a voice you've been listening to. James E. Ward and the formative experience in his life comes when he's in the third grade and the fundamental transformation in his life comes from a lady named Mrs. Pitts, who, as he put it, what she had done for him was pick him out and get him prepared for life to become a better person and ultimately a part of a church community and trying to teach people how to become better versions of themselves. That the best way to change a community is to build up people and make them better people. And by the way, the book Zero Victim Overcoming Injustice with a New Attitude is James E. Ward's book.

Pick it up at Amazon for all the usual places. A beautiful voice, a beautiful story. James E. Ward's story from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Chicago. A remarkable life's journey.

A great story here on Our American Stories. Most TVs are smart nowadays, but with busy home screens and remotes with too many or too few buttons, smart shouldn't mean complicated. That's why Roku TV is the smart TV made easy. The customizable home screen puts your inputs, streaming favorites like iHeart and free live TV all in one place. From simple settings anyone can understand, automatic updates with the latest features and much more, Roku TV is more than a smart TV, it's a better TV. Learn more today at Roku.com. Happy streaming.

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