Too Precious to Lose

A moving and inspiring memoir from a former Obama White House staffer, about his rural Maryland family’s untold history, the merger of three churches—one Black, two white—and how a radical embrace of community became their salvation, and his.

“A moving and important reminder of the power of story, service, and faith.”—Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts and author of A Reason to Believe

Jason G. Green was raised on fellowship—literally. Fellowship Lane served as a spiritual metaphor throughout his coming of age. A precocious preacher’s kid, Green felt a call to the ministry but ultimately devoted himself to public service. After working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, the young attorney spent four and a half years serving in the White House as special assistant to President Obama.

However, Green’s government career was cut short by a devastating call. It seemed his beloved ninety-five-year-old grandmother was on her deathbed. At her side, he listened in disbelief while she detailed her life story dating back to her 1918 birth in Quince Orchard, a town that once stood where they now sat, erased by the vestiges of time. How could he have never known the legacy of this robust community that he’d descended from? How could its entire existence have vanished from history but for the memory of a few elders? Green’s historical research uncovered a surprising trove of tales about his newly freed ancestors who built an African American house of worship, and whose progeny, on the eve of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, made the brave decision to create an integrated church. Quince Orchard’s lost story is part of what Green calls the texture in the American fabric: the moral leadership of the Black church, the longstanding resilience of the Black community, and the transformative love of the Black family.

Fueled by a new understanding of his own roots, Green traces his paternal family through a century of life in a single place. Seeking answers to deeply personal, contemporary questions about belonging, he finds that and more truths from the compassionate, communal-led lives of his forebearers.