In A High School in Georgia the vice-principal walked with arms outstretched toward a teenager with a gun who had already shot and wounded several fellow students. As the vice-principal approached, the boy released his gun and broke into tears when the older man embraced and hugged him. See The Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1999, p. 15 . Imagine the courage it took to step forward into an obviously dangerous situation. Yet moral courage and love proved to be weapons powerful enough to disarm the teenager, and also at least to begin to dissolve hatred, fear, and whatever other motives had impelled his actions.
An elderly black Baptist minister in Oklahoma who also served as state director of the NAACP, challenged the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist hate group, to a debate. The KKK member behaved with hatred and contempt toward the minister, calling him every imaginable derogatory name and subjecting him to vicious verbal abuse. The minister consistently responded with kindness, patience, understanding, and courtesy.
When the minister died, the small church was packed with six hundred people, and the one who gave the eulogy was this (now former) grand dragon. He told how the minister's behavior in that debate had changed his life. He said, in essence: "When I hated him, he loved me right back. When I slandered and abused him, he was compassionate, understanding, and patient." As a result, the man left the KKK. Love was the weapon that conquered hatred, prejudice, and intolerance and transformed a life. As reported by J. C. Watts, nephew of the minister Wade Watts .
