Description In his memoir, "Plantations, Protests, Pulpits: Lessons from the Phases of My Life," Pastor Harry Blake recalls his childhood on Plantations in Arkansas and Louisiana.
I was born there in 1934..
The young couple moved 19 miles away to Lake Village, Arkansas where Daddy worked as a tenant farmer on the Leland Plantation.
Daddy joined them in toiling those fields then in 1927 joined one of the black overseer\'s daughters in marriage.
A white man there had leased about 100 acres of land to a black man whose children and children\'s children worked on the land.
My Daddy was born in Mississippi, but he moved to Portland, Arkansas after the death of his first wife.
I once saw an angry white man threaten to kill him (he could\'ve done it too), and Daddy didn\'t flinch.
My father never showed emotion.
Whatever he was feeling -- excitement or terror or both -- no one would\'ve known it.
And what must my father have been feeling? He\'d already lost his first wife and child during a birth and had likely resigned himself to not ever being a father.
Married at the fertile age of seventeen, Miss Doll had remained barren for seven years.
Though still a young woman, her conception must\'ve seemed as miraculous as God\'s blessing of Abraham to Sarah.
Excerpt from The Early Years on the Plantation Lying on a handmade mattress filled with white stuffing from the cotton patch, Miss Doll willed herself to bring me into the world.
It concludes with reflections on the sudden passing of his wife, Norma Blake.
The book also includes a series of letters to activists, parishioners, pastors, and his family.
Martin Luther King, Jr.\'s lieutenants with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and he reflects upon the 60 years he has spent as a pastor.
He reminisces about his time as a young man serving on the Civil Rights battlefield as one of Dr.
Description In his memoir, "Plantations, Protests, Pulpits: Lessons from the Phases of My Life," Pastor Harry Blake recalls his childhood on Plantations in Arkansas and Louisiana
