Nuanced Conversations Podcast
Welcome to Nuanced Conversations Podcast, where we dive deep into the complex and often overlooked aspects of today's most pressing topics. Each week, we bring you thought-provoking discussions with experts, innovators, and everyday people who offer unique perspectives and insights. Whether we're exploring the intricacies of social issues, science, culture, or personal development, our goal is to move beyond the surface and engage in meaningful dialogue that challenges assumptions and expands understanding. Join us as we navigate the gray areas and uncover the richness that lies in nuanced conversations.
Nuanced Conversations Podcast
The Calling That Couldn't Be Denied Part 1
Dr. Tellis Chapman takes us on a remarkable journey through American history as seen through the eyes of a sharecropper's son who became one of the most influential voices in Black preaching. Growing up in segregated Pascagoula, Mississippi during the turbulent 1960s and 70s, Chapman's story illuminates both personal resilience and our nation's struggle toward racial justice.
From a modest three-bedroom home shared by ten family members (and frequently extended to community members in need), Chapman witnessed the painful transition from segregation to integration. As one of the children chosen to desegregate the local school system in third grade, he navigated racial tensions daily while watching how sports sometimes bridged divides between Black and white youth. His recollections of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination—and the "eerie quietness" that followed—provide a powerful window into that pivotal moment in American history.
Most striking is Chapman's revelation about the infamous "Mississippi Burning" murders of civil rights workers. Contrary to Hollywood portrayals, Chapman explains that Native American hunters witnessed the killings and informed local pastors, including his mentor Dr. Richard Sylvester Porter, who then told federal authorities where to find the bodies. This untold perspective highlights how much of our civil rights history remains misrepresented or completely unknown.
Chapman's spiritual journey proves equally compelling. Though basketball talent might have led him to college athletics, a persistent calling interrupted those plans. The story of accepting this calling from a phone booth with his last coin—and his father's initial dismissal followed by acceptance—marks the beginning of what would become nearly 45 years in ministry and social justice work.
Listen as Chapman traces his family lineage back to slavery, shares stories of remarkable ancestors, and reveals how his experiences shaped his commitment to overcoming injustice. Whether you're interested in American history, civil rights, spiritual journeys, or simply compelling human stories, this conversation offers profound insights that will stay with you long after the episode ends.
Welcome to Nuance Conversations, a podcast where depth meets dialogue. Hosted by Dr George E Hurt, this show explores the great areas of life where faith, wisdom and real-world complexities intersect. No easy answers, just honest conversations that challenge, inspire and inform. Get ready to lean in, listen closely and explore the nuance. This is Nuance Conversations.
Speaker 2:Greetings and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Nuance Conversation podcast. I am your curator and your host. Creator and curator of this safe space. We call this Nuance Conversations because we are safe and comfortable operating in the gray, not just in the black and white, which most realities lie in. My name is George Hurt and we have special guests here. We say that every week, but this week I want to stress that a little bit more and be fair. That you would understand.
Speaker 2:But this is a man that, unbeknownst to him at the time, introduced and craved my passion for preaching. In my teenage years I would wake up, I would set my alarm clock and manipulate that tape deck to wake up to his sermons, and it was his passion that I, it was his preaching that gave me a passion for what I later learned to know as expository preaching and gifted in the area of not just communication but what we'll talk about a little bit here in this episode celebration and the uniqueness of in the black preaching culture, which we would label as hooping, and then the connection and ties that our families have my mom with his down through the years in the southern region and that being developed all the way from Detroit to even now in Los Angeles, tremendously, tremendously busy preacher, pastor, leader, advocate for social justice, and so for him to make time to be with us today, we are grateful we speak of none other than the newly minted Dr Tellus Chapman. Doc, how are you feeling today? I'm feeling great.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show.
Speaker 2:No, thank you for being here. Tell us a little bit about your background, something maybe people didn't know about, not just where you're from, but growing up. I know you grew up in a preacher's household.
Speaker 3:Kind of walk us through those early days of your life. Well, mississippi born and Mississippi bred, started preaching at the age of 19 and grew up deep south, segregated southern United States, which perhaps instilled in me a passion to overcome injustice and inequality in the world. Other than that grew up deep south with Jackson State, graduated, married, moved to central Mississippi and from there to Detroit, mississippi, and from there to Detroit. I've been pastoring the Galilee Baptist Church now nearly 40 years in the next few months. Other than that, it is my passion to affect social injustice, the white-balling of black America in my circle and among my preaching colleagues. So it has made community and society a little bit better.
Speaker 2:Wow, I can't wait to get into more of that. Well, maybe let's back up a little bit. Only child siblings growing up.
Speaker 3:I am the seventh of eight children. Seventh of eight Six boys, two girls, son of a preacher and the most wonderful homemaker in the world, who just turned 94 on November 16th.
Speaker 2:Wow. By the way, god be praised yeah.
Speaker 3:And close-knit family. Just, I mean, if anyone would have a brother or any sister, I would recommend they would have one like mine.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What was the context of the home growing up, as it relates to just the dynamics? Was it like a 16-bedroom house with 20 toilets? No, no, no, no, no, yeah. What is it like growing up with eight, seven, we grew up in a three-bedroom home.
Speaker 3:Of course, master bedroom, if we could call it that, it was for my mother and my father, the brothers, I mean. We slept in the two other rooms along with my grandfather, who moved into our home in his latter days. We slept two to a bed, four to a room, and sometimes on the floor or on a couch someplace, because it was always some cousin, uncle, aunt and their families who was always at our home and sometimes somebody in the community who didn't have any place to go. Wow, also stayed in our home and we gave up our beds for people who were in need, not just one time, two or three, but several times. I recall sleeping in a chair on a couch because mama said we got to take in so-and-so. Wow, and that's the kind of home loving home. My dad was a pastor, itinerant preacher as well. He was also a sharecropper whose pay wasn't very well.
Speaker 2:What is a sharecropper A?
Speaker 3:sharecropper is a person who farms land that belongs to someone else and divides the crop with the landowner at harvest time, and it was sort of like an even exchange and the person who was the sharecropper would sell their wares or their goods for profit, so to speak.
Speaker 3:So that's we, my parents. Well, my dad was a sharecropper. My mother was always a homemaker and his pay was basically food, you know, in what they call the form of what they call pounding the preacher. So it wasn't much money. It was like, you know, peas, greens, you know corn, rabbits, squirrels, sugar cane cakes and what have you. So our freezer was always full of food and we generally fed the community because we didn't have any room to put those kinds of goods at the end of revival weeks and things like that. And our family, you know, was pretty much received among you know neighborhood, because we were in a segregated area and, as time would progress, we didn't know it. But my father, you know, had several friends who happened to have been white, who were in seats of power, with whom he worked to help transform our city into a more amalgamated and diversified black and white community.
Speaker 2:What's the name of that exact city?
Speaker 3:Pascagoula, mississippi. That's 30 miles east of Biloxi, mississippi, 30 miles west of Mobile Alabama, of Mobile Alabama, this area was. It was not severely and harshly segregated, but a place where Ku Klux Klan marches were oh wow, bonfires, ku Klux Klan rallies white only, black only, or colored only, then colored only, signs posted and the like, but also witnessed desegregation. In fact, our family was one of the few families who desegregated the public school system. We were bused like a couple of miles one way to the white schools to help affect a better community in the place where I grew up. Help affect a better community in the place where I grew up.
Speaker 2:How was schooling? What grade did you start being bused to? Third grade, the white schools, third grade, and how was that experience? Third grade.
Speaker 3:It was eye-opening and surprising, and I would say surprising because the older white community was impervious and somewhat disingenuous towards receiving black people moving into their neighborhoods, coming into their school systems, getting into the public political arena. But the younger generation kids, you know, we played, played ball together and sat and ate together in some cases, and got to know their parents. They got to know our parents and sometimes we would visit each other. If you would remember the movie, remember the Titans? Same case scenario in the area where I grew up, the younger generation who played sports and venues of the sort was the means by which our communities came together. More so, and in fact the CAA, what we call the Christian Athletic League, encouraged the ballplayers to visit each other's churches, and that helped to a certain degree.
Speaker 2:So that's the kind of environment that I grew up in, as a part of yeah, were your siblings bused there as well, or were you there like almost by yourself as you went to those schools? My older.
Speaker 3:My three oldest siblings graduated from all black school and the fourth oldest, along with the remainder of us, went to the segregated schools when I was in the third grade and of course they didn't experience the diversified student body as we did. We had got in a lot of fights. You know, and I have nothing against you know, the white demographic and I have nothing against the white demographic. But growing up and trying to get along, and in some cases you hear a word that's offensive, you see a gesture, I saw a gesture that was offensive. Those were fighting words and fighting gestures. So we fought and kids fight and kids are mean in general.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but it was a racial thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, gotcha.
Speaker 3:Now it's like you're cracking on kids. Crack on each other, they laugh at each other because there's so much more that comes into the context of public schools. Now you have kids who mimic other kids because they're gay or because they are, you know, awkward looking, so to speak, are relatively different, but then it was a black and white thing.
Speaker 2:Really so. This is all the way to high school.
Speaker 3:This continued. I would, yeah, I mean desegregated school system, oh yes, all the way through high school. But I mean the friction and tension between black and white. I would say it sort of eased by the time I got to high school.
Speaker 2:And you talked about playing together and being friends and meeting each other's families as well. Was that just mixture? Throughout the whole process, there's some people you got along with, you play with, and then other people. It was sort of that cruel racial treatment.
Speaker 3:Both and those who were staunch antagonists to racial harmony never changed.
Speaker 2:Never stopped, even through high school.
Speaker 3:Even through high school. In particular, those who took the hoods off and put on suit and tie sat on city councils, county commissions, etc. So theirs was a covert kind of operation, whereas those who were blatant, they were just raw and blatant with their expressions of anti-colored, anti-black, and of course now we're identified as African-Americans, but nevertheless it subsided, you know, as time progressed.
Speaker 2:And this is the 60s 1960s, 1970s 1960s, 1970s, 68 King is assassinated. Do you remember that moment? Do you remember how the area reacted to it, how your family reacted to it? Can you take us there?
Speaker 3:I recall in our home we had a space where the TV was and everybody gathered in that room and little did I know. My father and King knew each other well, in fact they called each other on their birthdays. He was not a marcher or a public protester. He would always take a diplomatic approach to a racial disharmony or any type of injustice in our city or in our town. He would go sit in a boardroom and talk with these people, with the superintendent, with the city council, et cetera, to make sure that the black voice was heard in our community and made a lot of difference.
Speaker 3:But to your question, that was a quiet, still angry, nervous kind of day and I recall my father saying, when the silence was broken, he said I knew that boy was going to get killed. Those were his words. Now he was a grown man, they were both the same age and they just called each other, but they weren't boys. You know what I mean. So he said I knew that boy was going to get killed. So he said I knew that boy was going to get killed. And that was a I guess the best. I could describe it as being a state of shock and a welcome to reality kind of situation, because the white community, who knew better, knew that it was an injustice to the African-American community and certainly a smear on the faces of those who had any integrity about humanity, whereas those who were, you know, enthused about King being assassinated. You know they could have cared less, but it was quiet around our town for a good while when Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Speaker 2:Eerie, quietness, eerie yeah.
Speaker 3:Because we didn't know what else that would precipitate, or what that would precipitate among those who were anti-desegregation. Did that mean that now we're going to see more of white supremacy? Does this mean our people are now, all other people are now willing to change, in that they saw this level of violence which followed four little girls being killed in a church, followed by, along with that, medgar Evers shot in the back, and the list goes on and on and on. Will this account for people or instigate people to do better towards each other and, I think, for the most part, outside of the covert activities of those who express their racism through the stroke of a pen and public policy, publicly? It got better.
Speaker 2:It shifts things. Yes, yeah. Yeah, you talked about your grandfather staying with you all. This is your maternal grandfather or paternal, my father's father, father's father. Yes, how far back can you trace your family?
Speaker 3:I went as far back as slavery, really. Yes, I did our family history, did a documentary on it, oh really. And eventually I found the white family who owned our family and I mean they received me. Well, I did a bit of video recording, documented it as such. Yes, I went as far back as my grandfather's grandfather.
Speaker 2:Is that on public? We can watch that somewhere.
Speaker 3:It is not in a public documentary per se, but it is recorded and written prepared for documentary.
Speaker 2:Well, our media company might want to jump on that. Yes, yes, I think I see where you're going with this.
Speaker 3:And I would welcome that with open arms because our stories need to really be told as of how we fared. And I'll just give you one story. My grandfather's grandfather was a slave and his slave owner and his slave owner's brother, you know, had neighboring properties, counties Chasper County, newton County and my father's grandfather met a girl on the other plantation so he would slip off right and go see her. So they noticed he was missing on one occasion. So they sick what they called the nigger dogs on him and they found him in what they call a muscadine harbor. Like you're familiar with grape vines, etc. Call a muscadine harbor. Like are you familiar with grape vines, et cetera? Well, muscadine, they grow on a much stronger vine. And he would hide out in this muscadine harbor. And they found him.
Speaker 3:And so this master says to him his name was Moses. Moses, if you can come down and beat the dogs, we'll let you go free, we won't whip you. And he leaped out I'd forgotten how many were in the pack of dogs, but he found a vine. He began to swing on the vine coming out of that Muscadine Harbor and swung out. He spotted what is called a feist. It was a small yap yap yap dog and landed right on top of the dog, caught the dog by the tail and began beating the other dogs with that dog, beat the pack of dogs and threw the feist down. By the time he was done, feist dead and bloody and dead. And so the owner says, okay, moses, damn, you, go on, go on. Yeah, so that's the kind of so he got his freedom.
Speaker 3:They didn't whip him. He was still a slave. Yeah, yeah, okay, I got you. He would get a chance to go back to his slave quarters without being beaten, and my point is it was that kind of resilience that kept him and his people alive. Yeah, that's amazing. So, yes, as far back as those times, late 1800s, and even at the gravesite, so many different. You know names that came up in our oral tradition and converse about what my great-grandfather was like. You know no education and owned several acres of land, dispersed it among his children, you know, et cetera. That's the kind of history and heritage that I have because of people like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so much rich history that's lost in our blood is, like you said, resilience, and our blood is fortitude. It's always confusing to me when I see, you know movements like hebrew, israel, like spark up. Not that I don't understand why they want to maybe want to make that connection or their passion and things but our history is so rich, like just afric-American history, african descendants of slaves, if we want to be more technical about it but not all of that is accessible to us.
Speaker 3:So many stories. There is a documentary now and I don't know what the licensing here conveys and restricts, but Henry Louis Gates is doing this Tracing your Roots documentary series of celebrities, so to speak, and to hear their stories and the contributions that their forefathers and mothers, patriarchs and matriarchs, made to American history, and how they survived through the centuries, and to see their sons and daughters become, you know, outstanding politicians, actors, ballplayers, journalists etc.
Speaker 3:There are hundreds of thousands of stories untold, just like my story that you know. That's where they're being heard and observed.
Speaker 2:Your spiritual consciousness. Where is that? I know your dad's a pastor. Are you the kid that was just pristine clean, going to Sunday school teaching.
Speaker 1:Sunday school. I was not.
Speaker 3:I was not.
Speaker 2:What is the spiritual consciousness awakening for you? I?
Speaker 3:would have to attribute that to my mother. My father was such a dominant pastor in the town, I mean, so that's a given and his expectations and standards that was required of me and my siblings, that was a given. But in terms of my spiritual development, no, and I would have to attribute that to my mother. Watching her charisma, how she handled herself, how she handled herself around other people, how she dealt with other people and the principles upon which she stood and the teachings that she instilled in us. So my formation is largely attributed to her, and this is not to exclude the other.
Speaker 3:You know elders within our community, because everybody in my childhood held every child accountable. I mean you had old ladies sitting on the porches and you know getting in everybody's business and calling home and telling your parents what you did. So I was not that pristine, you know, innocent little child. I got in trouble quite a bit, I got in fights and you know any little other thing that I could get away with. You know I did it. But the discipline of my mother and father and others in the community, you know, they sort of like a person who's gotten out of drowning waters and then you get the drowning waters out of the person who's gotten out of drowning waters. So they had to get that drowning stuff out of me and I eventuated.
Speaker 3:I guess I came into my social justice consciousness in my earliest years of pastoring, under the tutelage of the late Richard Sylvester Porter. The unique story behind him and in all actuality he was the civil rights leader in East Mississippi Medgar Evers gets the press and that Medgar Evers says this is not to demean the works of Medgar Evers, but his assassination and him becoming a martyr is what really put him on the map. And I don't mean to, you know, inject some, you know, trump-like analysis by demeaning or belittling the contribution that he made to social justice and voting rights et cetera. But Richard Sylvester Porter literally was my inspiration towards social justice. Daddy wasn't in, my father was a great influence my mother gets most of the credit for my spiritual formation.
Speaker 3:But when it comes to my consciousness, because I'll give you a story Sure, the movie Mississippi Burning reveals that when those civil rights workers were killed, that the sheriff deputy's wife told the feds where those young men were buried. Now, that's the Hollywood version, right? So these young men met at Reverend Porter's church. His church was the headquarters in Meridian Mississippi, which is where they met before they left to go from Meridian to Philadelphia. It's like, oh, maybe a 90-minute ride, something like that. Nevertheless, the deal was that they weren't—the agreement was, if they weren't back by a certain time, then they knew that something was wrong. Right? So they go from Meridian Mississippi to Philadelphia, mississippi, to register voters. They are intercepted by these Klansmen, they are killed and they're buried in a dam.
Speaker 3:Here is what happened. There were some Native Indians hunting in the woods that night. They saw these men kill those young brothers and bury them in that dam. They told Dr Killingsworth—I can't remember Dr Killingsworth's name now Dr Blankenship these were men who were from Columbia, mississippi, along with Dr RS, richard Sylvester Porter. And when they told them where these young men were buried, dr Porter and those two other pastors told the feds where those men were buried and that's how they found them. Wow, that's a unique story. This is the kind of presence I had in my life growing up as a young pastor, seeing him interact, you know, with the, with the public, from a social justice vantage point, and he just instilled that in me. So I'm a confluence and a product of a lot of individuals who affected my life in this kind of way. To your question, my formation was spent hanging around my mother, you know praying and watching her cook and you know being around the house a lot, helping, listening, learning, watching and this is how I become who I am spiritually.
Speaker 2:Preaching. When does the preaching pool happen? When does the preaching pool happen? When?
Speaker 3:does the preaching pool happen? I, I, I, when I was maybe 10, 9, 10,. In retrospect I could see now that the calling was on my life then. But you know, you know, 10 year old, you know, becoming interested in little girls and playing barefooted in the streets, in the yard, playing ball. I became an outstanding ball player in high school, Will have played in college, but I started preaching, like what, three days before spring training Baseball, basketball, basketball, Basketball. So yeah, three days before spring training at Jackson State, I started preaching and I've been doing it now almost 45 years.
Speaker 3:So I sensed that around age 9, 10, and I didn't understand it, nine, 10, and I didn't understand it. And at that time, when preachers would come to do revivals at our church, uh, where they would stay in a home, preachers in those days stayed in the home of their hosts. Um, and I just fell in love with, I guess, the preaching vibe and the way they carried themselves. I had a great admiration because my other brothers did as well. But I was in choirs like two or three at our church Masonic Choir, along with one of my older brothers, will have sung quartet, but my father wouldn't allow it because he didn't think I would be available to the church.
Speaker 3:I'll give you a story. Once I was in the tournament Gulf Coast tournament, I can't remember the title of it right now and our revival was going on right and we're playing Gulfport, the team on the Gulf Coast right and was beating these guys, and my older brother, two years older than me, in the stands, said Daddy said you got to come to church, you all got to sing. Tonight I'm on the court, man, and I'm balling. Daddy said you got it and he sent him over there to get me.
Speaker 3:So my brother, that one, now, that brother could come up. He could sell a box of matches to a man in a burning house, which means he could lie with a straight face and I declare he'd make God believe him and God know he's a liar. So he, let me finish the game and went back and we got there in time. But I told my father he had a flat. Now I told my father wouldn't have, you know, wisdom enough to check to see if the spare in the trunk you know had been damaged off the tire on the car was removed. But nevertheless, you know, my father said for him to take me off the basketball court.
Speaker 3:So I could sing with the junior choir at the church.
Speaker 3:So he could care less what I was doing. You get into this church, that's what I was doing, you get into this church, so. But his preaching style was such, so unique. He was a narrative type of preacher. He became the character in the story and I was always admiring of his style as a preacher. And then, when I went off to college 1979, stayed with one of my older brothers. I became a watch care member, a member on the watch care at the Shady Grove Baptist Church under Dr James C Matthews, who was a powerful, powerful preacher, and in converse with him, spending time around him, I came to understand more about God's mysterious ways of calling and that he does not affect every individual the same way.
Speaker 3:In the event of their understanding or coming into fruition of their calling. In my freshman year I remember after church one Sunday, it just seemed like it was like dusk, but this is like early afternoon. Freshman year of high school, college, college. Yeah, I got out of church one Sunday after eating and I found myself walking up to the college campus from my brother's home. It was like a block away and it got dark, but it was like early afternoon. So something is not right here.
Speaker 3:So on my way back I get to a phone booth and this calling, calling, calling. You know, yield, yield, yield to this burning, this urge, this, whatever that was, that was prompting me to surrender my call to preach. I had one dime. I had one dime in my pocket or a quarter, put it in the phone and called my dad and I said I believe something is on me to preach. He said that ain't good enough and hung up on me. He said said that ain't good enough and hung up on me. He said ain't good enough. I called him back. Um, I don't know how I got another quarter, whatever I might have borrowed, I can't remember, but I do remember calling him back in that phone booth and I said dad, I gotta preach. He said preach, he said when you're coming home, and the rest is history, and I think it might have been. I had some tests and I had to do for some courses, and it was like a week, two weeks later or something like that, and I went home and I preached my first sermon.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on Nuance Conversations. We invite you to return next week as we continue this dialogue. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this conversation with others who may find it valuable. Until next time.