How former NBA star Charles Barkley became a role model

Inside Macedonia Baptist Church, a well-kept brick building at 7944 Charles Barkley Ave., a spirit of gratitude is raising the roof that Barkley built.

It's the Sunday before MLK Day in this small, predominantly white town of roughly 12,000 residents located almost 20 miles east of Birmingham and divided by train tracks that symbolically distinguish the black from the white side of Leeds. Local historians call Leeds "historic yet progressive." The description encompasses a few flattering and unflattering facts. King stayed overnight here once in 1967. There were separate black and white homecoming queens until the 1990s. Whites have generally treated blacks well while remaining firmly in control of the government. And after the town's only recorded lynching, in 1901, a grand jury miraculously indicted a white man.

Barkley was born in Leeds in February 1963. He was the first black baby delivered in the segregated town hospital, the story goes, because his grandfather worked there as a janitor. Seven months later in nearby Birmingham -- then known as "Bombingham" for a wave of explosions targeting civil rights activists -- four little girls perished when a cache of dynamite exploded beneath the 16th Street Baptist Church.

But all that is a distant memory today at Macedonia Baptist Church, where there are many thanks to be given.

To begin the service, the congregation recites Psalm 107 in unison: "O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endureth forever." A deacon at the lectern says, "We thank you for all blessings, spiritual and physical..."

This being a Baptist church, Southern-accented shouts of "Thank ya!" immediately float up toward a half-dozen sparkling chandeliers hanging from the new roof Barkley paid for as part of a $160,000 renovation gift.

About 60 people are here, mostly elderly, with a sprinkling of young folks. They are wearing suits and jeans and dresses; shined shoes and work boots; pinstripes, plaid and velour. Every person in the building is black.

" ... for our food, our clothing ... "

" ... for the mind you have given us ... "

A tall woman enters and walks down the side aisle to the second pew; her cascade of auburn curls matches the accents on her stylish cream-and-white dress. Barkley's mother, Charcey Mae Glenn, is here to give thanks unto the Lord.

The band -- just a keyboard and an electric bass -- starts playing. Ms. Charcey, the first on her feet, raises a manicured hand to the sky. The powerful choir can be heard four blocks down Charles Barkley Avenue, in the housing projects where young Charles was raised by his mother and grandmother, Johnnie Mae Edwards, the rock of the family.

Ms. Charcey now lives smack between the projects and the church, right there on the street named after her oldest child, in a house that started small and was added on to several times over the years. She can look out her window and see the basketball court behind the projects where young Charles played.

A huge part of Barkley's life is rooted in these few blocks. He is seen here often, doing things like taking his mother's garbage cans to the curb, driving her to the grocery store, or relaxing on her porch with various NBA stars.

A few white people live in the neighborhood now, but it was strictly black in the 1960s. The train tracks a half-mile away enforced the line. Leeds is 14 percent black and 79 percent white with a median family income of about $50,000 and a poverty rate of 17 percent, economic statistics indicating that Leeds fares better than Alabama as a whole. However, substandard income and poverty statistics for black Leeds residents show they do not share in that relative prosperity.

The congregation inside Macedonia Baptist is unconcerned with statistics on this Sunday. Praises soar from the choir, then the music subsides. A collection plate is passed. The sound of clinking coins fills the room.

The Rev. Randy E. Moore, a large, gray-haired man, walks gingerly to the pulpit. He has presided here for 23 years. His sermon today is titled "Marching Orders."

"Marching orders are for soldiers, not for sightseers," Moore utters in a weakened voice. He talks about marching in obedience to authority. He uses police officers as a metaphor. Guns give police power, but badges give them authority. God, he says, has the ultimate sovereign badge of authority. Then he calls baptism "a Christian act of civil disobedience."

"If you are not satisfied with the government," he pleads, "with being oppressed, with being profiled -- get baptized. Y'all gon' pray with me?

"Don't brawl, that's the way the world does. Don't burn the city that you live in. Be baptized. If you want to protest, be baptized." Moore's voice has lost any trace of infirmity, rolling over the nine rows of wooden pews in waves of intensity and volume.

His marching orders have been heard. Ms. Charcey and the rest of the congregation rise to their feet, give their final thanks and exit into the sunshine.

This is the church Barkley was raised in and still attends during his frequent visits home. It's the church that sustained Ms. Charcey through years of cleaning white folks' houses as a single mother, cooking for their children as she worried about being able to feed her own. And this sanctuary delivers a message that could have been heard in 1815 or 1915 in black churches across America.

When the world does you wrong, don't fight the world. Lift yourself up, toward the Lord.

Given the choice to live in any house in any neighborhood in America, Ms. Charcey and Johnnie Mae dug in a stone's throw from Macedonia Baptist Church and a short glance from their old apartment in the projects. This is where Barkley and his family are from, and this is where they felt they belonged.

A new house, in a new neighborhood, behind a gate, flanked by neighbors with no connection to her past, her struggle or her church offered little appeal to Ms. Charcey. She is respected and needed in Leeds.

In his Atlanta Compromise speech, Booker T. Washington advised blacks to spurn fleeing the South and their familiar surroundings.

“I want us black people to realize black lives matter all the time. ... We kill each other a lot more than white cops kill each other. We don't have respect for each other.” - Charles Barkley

"To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' Cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded."

On Ms. Charcey's way out of the church, a group of children surrounds her. She pulls a plastic bag from her purse and gives them all candy. Once outside, she remembers how young Charles would clean the house when she was at work, take care of his two younger brothers, then lie across the bottom of her bed when she got home from working two or three jobs. She discusses what Leeds was like in the 1960s, using words like "hard" and "rough."

Ms. Charcey says that the white families she worked for in the 1960s and '70s treated her wonderfully. They gave her food from their gardens to feed her children, let the children come to work with her when she couldn't afford a baby sitter and even paid Charles to do yard work when he was old enough. Barkley's childhood household harbored no resentment toward white people.

"That's how mama brought us up," Ms. Charcey explains. "No bitterness."

No foolishness, either, or tolerance for bigotry. Ms. Charcey shares that, when young Charles was one of the first black students to integrate the elementary school and a group of angry white people gathered menacingly outside the building, Grandma Johnnie Mae escorted Charles to school -- pistol in purse.

As she talks, Ms. Charcey gazes down the hill at the projects, a row of one-story, reddish-brown dwellings. She almost seems transported back to the time when she and her mother, who worked in a meat factory, endured long hours of menial labor to provide for their three boys, one of whom died of drug-related health issues at age 42.

"Thanks be to God," she says, "if it hadn't of been for the white man giving me jobs, because I cleant houses and cooked, and did all of that. If it hadn't of been for them, I wouldn't have had a job back then."

This strikes at a theme repeated by numerous people in Leeds, and by Barkley in his four books. In a town less than 20 miles from where sheriff Bull Connor terrorized civil rights marchers in Birmingham, there was little vicious, hard-core racism. Each side knew its place, its own side of the tracks, and they got along pretty much fine.

Joe Becker serves as a Leeds historian at the American Legion and the Masonic Lodge. That's the white lodge; black folks have their own.

"I'm a little ashamed or embarrassed -- I don't know a whole lot about that side of town because I've never spent any time over there," Becker admits. "I didn't have any business over there, and I just knew not to go.

"I never saw 'em," he continues. "I'm 65 years old, and I'm of that generation where I wasn't around any of the black folks and they liked it and I liked it."

Today, on Becker's side of the tracks, there is commerce. Chain stores, shops and restaurants dot the streets, especially right off the interstate. There is a decent downtown, with lovingly maintained century-old buildings, markers for the three natives awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, a cement plant that has employed generations of residents, white and black, a mall, a Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World and two new schools.

Leeds does have a historic marker honoring a black man -- the legendary ex-slave strongman John Henry, reputedly buried nearby. His memory resides on the white side of those consequential steel ribbons.

On the black side, a convenience store or two separate the old houses from the older houses. There is what appears to be an abandoned fire rescue post, and some sort of power plant. A community center took over the Leeds Middle School building when the town built a new school on, yes, the white side.

Charles Miller, who grew up near Barkley's projects, says some of his white friends were afraid to come to his side of town, fearing they might get shot. He vividly remembers his white basketball coach scolding him for looking like a "thug" because he wore his cap backward. Miller, 22, describes his overall experience growing up in Leeds as wonderful.

"Of course, being black, I experienced some things that other races wouldn't," he adds. "And to some people, that can make or break you."

At one end of Charles Barkley Avenue stands the government housing, with bikes on front porches and clean yards. Thaddeus Bridges answers a midday knock at a door. The 23-year-old is visiting his girlfriend but accepts an invitation to chat about the neighborhood's most famous former resident. He agrees with some of Barkley's views on taking responsibility instead of blaming the system.

"There's nothing wrong with a particular race pointing out their own problems," Bridges says. "It's like, when another race does something or says something, it's defense mode. And that's fine, defend your race or whatever. At the same time, you gotta turn around and say, hey, we do need to straighten up. What they say might be the wrong way they seeing it, but at the end of the day, we do need to straighten up and do better."

Barkley's critics might call this young man's views an anomaly, attribute them to youthful ignorance and dismiss them as a minority within a minority.

That would be wrong, alleges Dr. Carl Marbury, one of Leeds' most celebrated black natives.

Born in 1935, Marbury graduated from the historically black college Alabama A&M, got a master's degree at Oberlin in Ohio and a Ph.D. from Harvard, then returned to his hometown. He has taught at schools all over the Midwest and the South and served as president of Alabama A&M.

"Barkley's views, as far as I can see, a lot of black people think that way -- 'You got to get your thing together,'" Marbury shares.

Although many high-profile black activists justifiably focus on politics, police or correcting systemic issues, he declares, "In the South, many black people are still just trying to survive. They're not even at that level."

A 2014 Pew poll supports this view, stating that 43 percent of black respondents said racial discrimination is the main reason black people can't get ahead, whereas 48 percent said blacks who can't get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.

The Rev. Moore is part of that 48 percent. After the service, in his cramped church office, he mentions Barkley's comment that Eric Garner had resisted arrest before being choked to death by police.

"I admire him for getting up and saying what somebody should have said," Moore says. "There are consequences to our actions."

Half a mile from Barkley's projects, concealed inside a metal-sided industrial building, is a classy banquet hall called Venue 24. It sits a few yards from the tracks, but still on the black side. The neighborhood has been integrated -- including by a resident bold enough to hang a Confederate flag from a front window of his little house.

The proprietor of the Venue is Kenneth Washington, a city councilman for 26 years, during many of which he was the only black person elected to Leeds' government. He's watching the Green Bay Packers give away a Super Bowl berth to the Seattle Seahawks. Gary Clark, a police officer and chairman of the local NAACP, is here. So is 85-year-old James McKinney, who remembers having to take a test to vote in the 1950s.

Washington, 57, grew up in Leeds. He chopped wood for the stove and used the privy out back. He carried water from the well for baths and shared the bath water with his sisters, then they slept in the same bed. As the first black person hired at a Leeds grocery store, in 1973, Washington earned 90 cents an hour.

He feels Barkley's truths as strongly as the lash of his mother's belt when he stayed out past dusk. Washington is a taciturn man, patient enough to wait decades for a decent life. Yet talking about the predicament of the black community slowly gets him riled up.

"You wouldn't even have thought about years ago going down and burning down the black store," Washington grumbles. "I don't care how much hell they raised in Birmingham, with that bombing.

He remembers his generation having different priorities. Although Washington and his companions disagree with Barkley's use of words like scumbags -- "He should stop and think," Washington says -- they support his larger points.

"We all depended on one another. Now they don't. This is what Charles is saying," Washington insists. "I applaud what they're doing for Michael Brown. But I lost a child myself. In the struggle of that, I'm pissed off at this part here: We don't care about what's going on in our own community. There's some rotten police. What about the rotten people killing us in our community?

"The march should be about them."

Barkley often discusses how his grandmother, who marched with the civil rights movement in Birmingham, taught him about the sacrifices that allowed him to attend elementary school with white children or play college basketball at a lily-white university.

But how much did the Movement, and the sacrifices, really change things in Leeds?

Segregation was outlawed, but the train tracks remained as the racial dividing line. Searching for jobs, the town's black population shrank from 28 percent in 1960 to 14 percent today. Only 2 percent of Leeds businesses are owned by black people, compared with 15 percent statewide.

When two forces pull in opposite directions, sometimes you don't go anywhere.

Barkley, though, has gone far. First to Auburn University, then the NBA, and now into millions of homes every day on TV and the Internet.

Why? Because in high school, after going unnoticed as a chunky, 5-foot-10 underclassman on junior varsity, Barkley grew six inches over the next two years, then shocked college recruiters with a dominant senior season that ended in the state semifinals.

Herbert Green, a former Auburn assistant coach, stumbled across Barkley in a Christmas tournament featuring 6-9 Bobby Lee Hurt, the top-ranked player in Alabama. Barkley dominated Hurt, finishing with 24 points and 20 rebounds, and was instantly on the major-college radar.

"The first four shots that [Hurt] shot, Charles didn't block them. He knocked them up in the stands. Absolutely knocked them up in the stands and got everybody's attention," Green says. "The next day I was sitting up at his grandmother's house before the sun got up."

For years, emboldened by his athleticism and passion, Barkley swore he would play in the NBA. But the baby fat and his modest stature made the promise unbelievable. That half a foot -- give thanks unto the Lord -- was the difference between Leeds and limousines for Charles Barkley.

Without those six inches, Barkley admits: