Trussville Public Library
“Higgs also told the story of the encounter that changed his life shortly after he came to Birmingham. Crossing the street from his church to invite a couple he had seen unloading their car, he realized the couple was black.
‘I came face to face with my history,’ Higgs says in A Recovering Racist, a new documentary produced by Short and Slay. ‘I was paralyzed there in the road. I knew that God was telling me to invite these people to church. It was in that moment that I became a recovering racist.’”
In 1984, the Rev. R. Lawton Higgs, Sr. had a religious epiphany standing in the turn lane of 8th Avenue N., in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I discovered that my beliefs were incompatible with God’s call to love one another,” he says. In that moment, Lawton became a “recovering racist,” and in the years to follow, he founded a multicultural, multiracial church in the heart of downtown Birmingham, Alabama, ministered to the homeless, and became an advocate for the poor.
This hour-long documentary tells his story and challenges viewers to reconsider their thoughts on race, justice, and grace.
A Recovering Racist Documentary 