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Jeff Niese

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I was an Evangelical Christian, a new Christian. But I was really working out my own issues. And one of those issues at Williams I had heard of some anti-Semitism and some housing discrimination but I didn’t pay any mind, “That was long ago.” And then I became embroiled in a struggle on that and […]
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I grew up in Northern New Jersey. I did not feel like I fit in the Williams culture because neither of my parents completed college. My dad cleaned furnaces so I could go to Williams. A friend of mine one day comes over to my dorm room and says, “Hey, you’ve got to go to […]
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In Folkston, Georgia, I was living with a white family that was from New Mexico originally, so they were not native racists, if you will, but I was working on an OEO [Office of Economic Development] project on the wrong side of the tracks and one of my jobs was to raise money or beg […]
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After Southern Georgia and Appalachia were really rough and I was totally drained, I was prepared that Iowa was going to be easy, like middle class prosperous farmers, which it was by and large. But my opening night in Iowa, when we got there, J.O. Neikirk drops me off at the farm and it’s probably […]
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Living in Detroit and being known as “Whitey” in the ghetto, that was kind of cute. I borrowed the teenager’s bicycle once to go down to the store to get some milk and lettuce and something for dinner. I did not have a bicycle lock so I parked the bicycle in the front entrance way […]
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Jay Haug and I, we both learned a lot about our Christian faith because of Gaudino pushing us. He used his illness as a way of teaching but I think with Jay and me he was using it more as a way of testing our faith. You know, he would ask, “Well are you praying […]
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My home-stays were in the poorest county of Georgia, the poorest county of Kentucky and the poorest neighborhood in Michigan. When I got involved in extension work and community development, I was called to the poorest county in Lower Michigan, a community with a large rural black population. And I worked in one of the […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
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Final Note
credits