Monday, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

In the Heat of the Night is a television drama that ran successfully for seven years. It starred actor Carroll O’Connor in an ironic casting since he had been last seen portraying the bigoted Archie Bunker in the classic program “All in the Family.”

In the Heat of the Night was based on the great classic movie of the same title that starred Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, each winning an Academy award for the story of an African-American Chicago detective who gets enmeshed in the virulent racist climate of the South. The film was a gripping murder mystery that confronted the racist Southern Sheriff Gillespie with the stunned northern detective, Virgil Tibbs. The conclusion of the film offered a hint of reconciliation between Sheriff Gillespie and Detective Tibbs.

The television program picks up at a time when Virgil Tibbs has relocated back down to Sparta, Mississippi and begun working as a detective right there at the scene of his persecution. But in the television program, Sheriff Gillespie is clearly reformed, and Virgil Tibbs has evidently found forgiveness. And this is the essential glue of the story. We all want to believe that people, even the most backward, and ignorant, can be redeemed. And in this show this is exactly what we find, Sheriff Gillespie, an unrepentant racist is transformed through his association and friendship with the sophisticated detective from Chicago.

Everyone can relate to this theme. Not so much for ourselves, but for those in our lives who seem to be imprisoned by their ignorance and hatreds. We hope and pray that they too have an encounter that opens their minds and changes them. At a time when the United States acknowledges its embarrassing historical record of racial animus, combined with the resistence of many in the minority community to assume responsibility for their own redemption, the themes in this television program resonate. And this is especially poignant at a time when we are perhaps on the precipice of electing an African-American man to the presidency of the United States.

It is perhaps in the heat of the election that we may finally move beyond the bigotry and biases that divide us. I want for white America to make the distinctions between the responsible and irresponsible, between those who try and those are refuse to try that mean the difference between valid judgment and ignorant prejudice.