Recently, I've been doing research on Max Ward Randall, and on two other people who came from Readstown and later became missionaries in Africa. It strikes me as extraordinary that between 1950 and 1990, three different people (Randall and another man in the Church of Christ, and a woman in the Lutheran Church) grew up in tiny Readstown and traveled to Africa to serve as missionaries.

Moreover, the research I've been doing on Randall leads me to the conclusion that he was a true pioneer in racial tolerance in the ministry in this nation. In the late 1940s, he became friends with a number of black ministers in Kentucky and other states of the South. He preached in black churches and he even became a leader of a group called the Negro Ministerial Association. His association with black clergy seems to have helped pave the way for his journey to Africa in 1950.

Via amazon.com, I've been able to purchase a copy of his 1955 autobiography. My wife has a follow-up book from 1960 in her family's collection. It is fascinating that Randall makes so little of his obvious racial tolerance and  his efforts to encourage racial understanding. Perhaps he assumes that it will be just understood by the reader, or perhaps he feels that the mid 1950s is not the right time to spotlight his opinions.

His book also describes Randall's association with another missionary, Garfield Todd--a native of New Zealand. By the middle 1950s Todd and Randall are both serving in what was then called Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe). Randall mentions, but makes little of, the fact that at this same time, Todd was also the Prime Minister of S. Rhodesia. In fact, in 1957, Todd was ousted as Prime Minister by Ian Smith, an avowed racist who eventually took Rhodesia out of the British Commonwealth and declared an illegal unilateral independence rather than incorporate blacks into government. Smith considered Todd to be too pro black and eventually placed him under house arrest. Todd eventually secretly aided the black resistance movement in Zimbabwe, and ended up in jail for this activity. After Zimbabwe became independent with a black run government in 1980, Todd was for a time a Senator in the new state. He was in the 1970s given a medal by Pope Paul VI and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Almost none of Todd's politics makes it into Randall's book, but it is clear they are fast friends.

It is fascinating to contemplate upon this largely unknown pioneer in racial tolerance, born and raised in Vernon County. A member of the same denomination as the right wing hate monger, Gerald L.K. Smith, Randall's home church of Readstown was just four miles from Smith's home church of Sugar Grove. They certainly had many mutual acquaintances and perhaps even met each other.  They were certainly aware of each other, although one man's career somewhat predates the other. How sad that Smith's influence, while minimal, does live on in right wing groups such as Aryan Nations and the Posse Comitatus. Randall's influence is far more subtle, but present nonetheless, in the memories of people such as myself who heard and saw him here in Readstown, and elsewhere around the world. He delivered the Memorial Day speech in Readstown in 1957.  I remember the movies he showed in Readstown grade school. I remember a dapper man in a trenchcoat and snap-brim hat (significantly no racist pith helmet for him, even in Africa in the 50's; as an aside pith helmets were later specifically forbidden for Peace Corps volunteers in Africa because of their association with colonizers). He flew a plane. He taught the children of Readstown how to sing African songs. He founded missions through Rhodesia and South Africa. All in all, he presented quite an exotic and appealing vision of what US nationals could be doing overseas.