“I’m living at the doorway of heaven….aware that any day could be my last. Joy is all around me. My heart overflows with gratitude for this joy. It has not diminished over time. It grows more radiant each and every day, with the promise of heaven set before me.”—John M. Perkins

I read a tattered copy of John Perkins’s With Justice for All as a newly regenerated teenager in the 1990s. It had an indelible impact on my young Christian mind. If I had known that some twenty years later he would become a personal mentor and cherished friend, it would have been an unthinkable blessing.

John Perkins (1930–2026), or “Brother John” (as he let me address him), was born into the sharecropping world of rural Mississippi, during the Great Depression and the worst of Jim Crow segregation. He lost his mother to malnutrition when he was seven months old. At the age of 17, he held his big brother—a decorated veteran of World War II—as he died, fatally shot by a racist town marshal. After a civil rights protest in 1970, Brother John was arrested along with nineteen black Tougaloo College students. He was tortured and nearly beaten to death in the Rankin County Jail.

When he first shared these stories with me, I could still hear the gravelly pain in his baritone voice. Born nearly a half century after Brother John, I was raised in middle-class Orange County, California, in the 1980s. How could I possibly find common ground with a man who had such a radically different experience of America?

Turns out, lo and behold, the Jesus who set out to save sinners from every tongue, tribe, and nation is all the common ground we needed to form bonds of profound friendship and brotherhood. In Christ we were truly “one blood,” as Brother John was so fond of saying.

Meeting Brother John

Several years ago, as I was writing a book about Christianity and social justice, one of Brother John’s best friends put us in touch. To say that he warmly embraced me, a no-name among many vying for his finite attention, would be an understatement. After years immersing myself in the work of critical race theory—with its tendency to treat individual image-bearers of God as exemplars of their vicious or virtuous group identities, thereby inspiring suspicion, resentment, and self-righteousness—talking with Brother John came like a rush of water to my joy-parched soul.

In our conversations, I learned more of his story. After he’d been beaten by the police, he spent months recuperating in the hospital: “It would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to answer hate with hate. But God had another plan for my life, a redemptive plan. Jesus saved me . . . He saved me from what could have easily become a life of hatred and resentment.”

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