From The Root 3/26/08:
In the wake of Barack Obama's impassioned and eloquent speech on race, forced by his pastor's hateful rants, the black church, the historic back-bone of the movement for equality of opportunity, has gotten a bad rap.
It has been alleged that the fire-breathing oratory -- dripping with hate-America themes, bigoted racial messages and all sorts of dark conspiracy theories –- is part and parcel of the black prophetic church tradition. The defense of Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is that he is not an aberration but typical of the black religious tradition. This is simply not the case.
The black church, from its earliest days, provided the organizing force for resistance efforts during the worst days of slavery and Jim Crow, and later, for the budding movement for civil rights for a beleaguered black population, not just in the South but wherever black Americans lived.
The emergence of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. provides a crucial example of this type of leadership. Countless other ministerial figures provided the organizational platform for the battle against white supremacy. In 1967, even as the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee's Stokley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, along with the Black Panther party, were stoking the fires of confrontational, angry Black Power politics, Dr. King gave a Christmas Eve sermon at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. In this "Christmas Sermon on Peace," King said: "Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone â€Â¦ we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we are all going to perish together as fools."
What a great man we had in Dr. King.
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