Thank you for choosing to walk into my world, the Mississippi Delta. I was born during the era of legal segregation. World War II was over and life in the American South had changed very little. “Jim Crow”—the system that supported legal segregation—was firmly entrenched. It was no different in my small hometown of Glen Allan, Mississippi. It was a cotton community where most of what we did was defined by that world. It was in that world of rigid laws and social restrictions that my life began. The difficulties of growing up in such an environment are well documented, from restricted social movement to hideous acts of racism. Yet it was there among the people I call the “porch people”—ordinary people who used their front porches to welcome our lives, to hold their informal meetings, and yes, to dream about our future—that I also experienced an incredible sense of community. God showed up in the unselfishness of the ordinary people who became extra-ordinary leaders in the stories that I would write into best-selling cultural biographies.
—Prologue, When Little Becomes Much
When a small book by the name of Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored tumbled out upon the table of public scrutiny, author Clifton Taulbert had no idea how God would use his small offering.
Like the boy with five loaves and two fishes, a brown-bag lunch in the hands of Jesus became a feast of contentment and hope for thousands.
In this simple telling of how unknowing obedience to God had a global impact upon untold numbers of lives, Clifton Taulbert once again shares the themes of life and faith and hope that transformed his future.
No matter how small an offering you have, when you follow that God-nudge in your heart, you will begin a journey that takes little and turns it into much. From Glen Allan, Mississippi, to the Capitol building and beyond the seas, follow author Clifton Taulbert’s story of what God can do with a small bag of food for the hungry heart.
