Black Baptist leaders put demands to Bush
Groups unite on opposition agenda

By Manya A. Brachear
Tribune staff reporter
Published January 29, 2005

NASHVILLE -- Leaders of 15 million black Baptists on Friday called on President Bush to pay as much attention to democracy at home as democracy abroad, issuing a list of demands that they say better defines America's moral values.

After an unprecedented assembly of four historically divided Baptist groups, presidents of each denomination declared their opposition to the war in Iraq and to the nomination and expected confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general.

They also called for a higher minimum wage, discontinuation of recent tax cuts, investment in public education and reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some provisions of which are up for review in 2007.

"We have power in terms of black registered voters across the country to impact who sits in the White House," said Rev. Stephen Thurston, president of the 3 million-member National Baptist Convention of America and pastor of the New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago's South Side.

I'm pleased these folks could get together and agree on something and don't want to discourage them at all. I like their statement, their goals.

But as a practical matter, I think politicians and government officials would rather lose the support of 15 million Black people they don't feel the need for than to appear in any way to accede to their demands.

Now, the actual actions taken by these four Black Baptist groups I seriously approve of, have no doubt about that.

During this week's sessions, delegates passed the plate to endow two historically black colleges, fund care for African AIDS victims and provide tsunami relief in Somalia. The money will be distributed from a newly opened bank account shared by the four groups.

Americans take race and religion more seriously than anything but profit. So being Black and Baptist, they should never have had so deep a schism that their meeting should be newsworthy at all. Now unified, literally for the first time in almost a century, they can become a constituency to be reckoned with.

But I'm concerned a bit about statements like this

Rev. Major Lewis Jemison, president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, said the church must take its cues from that era.

"The history of the civil rights movement shows how potent the black church is," Jemison said. "If we take the time to do what our mothers and fathers have done, we can get things done."

only because our mothers and fathers were seriously winging it. In 1967, Dr. King wrote in an article for the NY Times

When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change...

The nettlesome task of Negroes today is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that the government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naïveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of good will that it implored us for our programs.

We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although our actions were bold and crowned with successes, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of inexperience.

And the end result of it all has been changes that (though they benefited Black folks) has been of greater benefit to the mainstream than Black folks, as well as language and a social framework that has made approaching equality more difficult.

The fact is, we need an effective White Studies program. What we're calling White Studies nowadays is pretty useless to Black folks. Black folks need to learn that Black folks need to learn about white folks.