ROBERT S. GRAETZ, JR. (1928-2020) served Lutheran churches in four states, always with a ministry dedicated to what his friend Martin Luther King, Jr., termed the beloved community. In retirement, he remained active with numerous progressive organizations and in civil rights causes. With his wife, Jeannie Ellis Graetz, he led study tours of Deep South civil rights sites for U.S. and international students and visitors. The Graetzes lived permanently near McArthur, Ohio, but, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, they accepted a 2005-7 appointment as ambassadors-in-residence for the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture at Alabama State University, Montgomery, Alabama.
When Lutheran Church officials sent a young, white West Virginian to Montgomery, Alabama to serve as the pastor to an all-Black congregation in the summer of 1955, they could not have foreseen that he and his family would be thrust into a second American Revolution six months later.
But Robert Graetz wasn’t unfamiliar with the relationship between race, religion, and racial discrimination in America, and when he and his young wife, Jeannie, and their two children moved into the Deep South, they were comfortable, happy, and soon welcomed into Montgomery’s Black community. Among the friends they made were Raymond and Rosa Parks, and when Rosa Parks’s arrest triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Bob and Jeannie were some of the few white people who supported the first broad-based civil rights protest of the twentieth century. Although white domestic terrorists bombed the Graetz home twice and threatened Bob and Jeannie’s lives often, the Graetzes never wavered.
Recounted in rich detail here, Bob’s time in Montgomery, including these harrowing experiences, shaped a long ministerial career that never failed to emphasize equality and justice issues. In addition ls,
![A White Preacher's Message on Race and Reconciliation: Based on His Experiences Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/6/4/5/2_7156246.jpg "A White Preacher's Message on Race and Reconciliation: Based on His Experiences Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott [Paperback]")