We Need to Talk

As a young white girl, Mosely grew up in a southern state in a conservative family and environment that was strongly Southern Baptist. She was influenced by the teachings of Jesus as a child, but, as a teenager in the Sixties, she began to find a contrast between those teachings and the reality of her racially segregated church, city, school and neighborhood.

Seeing this disparity, while watching the violence of the Civil Rights struggle on television, she found herself at odds with the thinking of most of the people she knew. She chose to live a different life and follow her own path in the face of rejection and condemnation. She persuaded her parents to support her insistence to go to college, instead of secretarial school. When she was a senior in college in 1968, she gave her first speech on segregation in her family's Southern Baptist Church.

She describes her path toward becoming an ally with Black people in her hometown, being harassed at work, at her apartment building and being afraid to be seen in public with her Black friends.

She met and married a Black man in her hometown in 1971 and shortly thereafter they left to make their home in Berkeley, California. She asserts that changes in the attitudes and misconceptions about the "other" is what it will take to heal racism. Her description on the illegitimacy of slavery and the healing of hatred present a fresh way of looking at what many have failed to see.