Integration comes one church pew, and $5, at a time

They sang hymns and waited for their now-famous bishop to make his entrance with all the hype of a rock band's star singer.

About a dozen white folks came, most of them forgoing the controversial $5 that Bishop Fred Caldwell offers - from his own pocket - just for coming to Greenwood Acres Full Gospel Baptist Church.

When he strode through a side door of the wood-paneled sanctuary - once part of Shreveport's first black bank - the crowd rose, straining for a look at the bishop in his black-and-white designer suit and signature alligator shoes.

"Does God see color?" Bishop Caldwell asked. Many in the mostly black crowd of nearly 500 fell into his trap and shouted, "No."

They should have known better, after years of Sundays with this man who loves trick questions. His answer? Yes, God sees color. But He celebrates diversity, too, while people sometimes use color to divide. Mr. Caldwell proclaims segregation "a sin," and a problem in Shreveport.

Of course, it's a problem for much of this region, and for the nation. Caldwell is launching an assault on a stubborn fact that sociologists have written about for years: that the church, as a cultural conservator, is the most segregated institution in society. And the $5 blitz - offering whites $5 for Sunday services and $10 for Thursday evenings - comes in a city that, many suggest, never confronted the Civil Rights movement in the same way as, say, Jackson, Miss., or Selma, Ala.

"The most segregated hour of the week is 11 on Sunday morning," Caldwell says. "This is not about $5. It is a way to force people in this community to take a good look at ourselves and begin to change." Caldwell is now a celebrity in this city of 200,000 long split between whites and blacks. By road or rail it is the halfway point between Jackson and Dallas, built along the Red River where plantation houses still rise from sugar cane fields now dominated by chemical plants and casinos.

The $5 offer - which has landed the town in newspapers from Los Angeles to London, and on TV shows around the world - is more than a novel way to fill pews, integrate congregations, and save souls. It's also the battle cry of a man who admits he grew up hating "white folks" in a place where racism lingers from a slavery-tainted past.

In Caldwell's eyes, this is one of those Southern cities where the 1960s Civil Rights movement never quite took hold and the power structure was never forced to change.

"Shreveport is one of the last strongholds of the Confederacy," Caldwell says before Sunday services in his spare office, all dark wood and green carpet. "Racial prejudice here runs deep." He's not just talking about pickups with Confederate battle flags, he says, but the flags that still wave on lawns of official buildings downtown - and the "attitudes" of those driving the trucks and working here.

Loretha Bradley, a Full Gospel churchgoer, calls Shreveport "a masked society," where people "give lip service" to not being racist - then live segregated lives.

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