A few years later, Huckabee took the pulpit of a small but growing church in Pine Bluff, Ark., and started a Christian radio and TV station, which aired his Sunday sermons. One day a listener contacted him. He was a black teenager and was interested in attending services at Huckabee's church, but worried he wouldn't be welcome; Immanuel Baptist Church had been all white since its inception in the 1890s. "Of course you can come, I told him," Huckabee recalls.

The minister prepared his flock. "I hope that nobody has anything except warm feelings," he recalls telling them. "In fact, if he is not welcome, I don't want to be here either." The speech didn't go over well among some church elders, who threatened to fire him. Several members quit in protest. But most of his parishioners stood with him, and in the years that followed, the church slowly integrated. "I grew up with a lot of people who really resisted integration," Huckabee tells NEWSWEEK. "The more I listened to them, the more I became convinced that racism was an incredible evil." Rex Nelson, who worked for Huckabee when he was governor, says his racial awareness "comes from being raised poor … He knew what it was like to look up at other people who were looking down on him." (Huckabee later carried these lessons to the statehouse, where he pushed to end racial disparity in drug sentencing and urged compassion for the children of illegal immigrants—a position that put him at odds with some in his party.)

All I have to say is this, "It's a window pane."