Jan Willis at Wat Po in Bangkok in 1981 photo by John Montre

For Willis, Steele and Jarman, their journeys as Buddhists have
been part of a larger journey of emerging from the shadows of
racial prejudice. They continue to deal with it, subtly and not so
subtly, both in the greater society and within the American Buddhist
world.

The world that Jan Willis experienced as a barefoot little girl
playing in the dusty alleys of an Alabama mining camp in the
mid1950's was carefully divided into black and white. The border
lay just a few blocks from where she lived, where the white cottages
began. Forbidden territory. Stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.

"Buddhism offers a method for helping us improve our self-esteem,

because the legacy of slavery and racism is so heavy."

The Klan's shadow lay heavy over the hamlet where Willis was born and raised, a
tangible presence even to a little girl. She saw firsthand the beatings and other
punishments meted out to blacks who stepped out of line-those who committed
transgressions like accidentally stepping on white-owned property while walking to
school or the grocery store, with its "white" and "colored" water fountains. If she
had any doubts about her place in the world, they were consumed in the flames of
the cross the Klan ignited on her front lawn one terrifying night, as Willis, her sister
and her mother cowered in their home waiting to die.

The bomb they expected that night never came, but the Klan's constant threats and
intimidation took their toll. "This unimaginable psychic terror crippled my self-
esteem and the self-esteem of many black people;" Willis would write years later in
her book, Dreaming Me: An African-American Women's Spiritual Journey. "I am a
witness to its scars"

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