bringing some color to a little texas town

A Texas Town Nervously Awaits a New Neighbor

GREENVILLE, Tex. - "Blackest Land, Whitest People." Until the mid-1960's,
those words were painted on the water tower and on a sign near the square in
this North Texas town, a once-segregated cotton-ginning center. Joe A. Bobbitt,
the county judge in Greenville, still has photographs of the water tower and the
sign on the wall of his office here. "It's part of our infamy," said Judge
Bobbitt, 59, seated in a large red leather chair stitched together by inmates of
the Texas penal system. "If you try to hide history, then you cannot change."
The people of Hunt County, a largely rural area of which Greenville is the
county seat, are about to get a rare opportunity to break with the past. The
Redeemed Christian Church of God is a fast-growing evangelical church with
mostly black adherents but that espouses a multicultural mission. Founded in
Lagos, Nigeria, in 1952, it is building its North American headquarters on the
outskirts of Greenville.
The church's goal, according to its mission
statement, is to establish parishes within five minutes' driving distance of
every family in every city and town in the United States. It is now about 250
parishes closer to its goal.
The church has paid more than $1 million for
about 500 acres of land in Floyd, an unincorporated community of about 100
people, almost all of them white, a few miles from Greenville.
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