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The Black
Church: Three Views
Excerpts from Time essay (April 6, 1970)
For most of white America, the black church is an
alien segment of the nation's culture, hidden behind the plain
facades of large brick churches, the rude clapboard of country
chapels, the salvation-emblazoned windows of tattered
storefronts.
It is a montage of impressions, some real, some misleading
the low-moaning spirituals, the clapping and the shouted amens;
the phenomenon of a father Divine and the curious charisma once
possessed the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell; the prophetic,
nation-shaking philosophy of a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the pragmatic, neighborhood-building politics of a Rev. Jesse
Jackson. There are almost 16 million black Christians in the
U.S., and by far the majority find their faith and spiritual
comfort in churches and denominations of their own making. These
churches were the first black institutions in the nation: they
are still, by every measure, the largest.
Today they reflect the struggle of U.S. blacks for their
rightful place in society, and the leaders of those churches
differ widely in the role they see for the Black Christian in
this struggle. But whether radical, conservative or moderately
liberal, they generally agree that the black church holds a
unique place in American society.
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The Conservative View
Reverend Joseph Jackson, pastor of Olivet Baptist
Church on Chicago's South Side and perennial president
of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. (He claims
6,000,000 members.)
Jackson bitterly opposed martin luther King's civil
disobedience campaign, and has so vigorously quashed
liberal opposition within his denomination that half a
million members left in 1961 to form the progressive
National Baptist Convention, Inc. He was one of the
few black leaders to endorse Richard Nixon (with little
effect) in the last election; outspokenly dedicated to
"law and order" he won the "Patriot of the Year" award
from the Ultra-Right winger Bill James Hargis in 1968 |
Though he is broadminded in some areas of theology (he
is a graduate of liberal Colgate Rochester Divinity School),
Jackson has a view of the Negro recalling the old-fashioned
suffering servant image from Isaiah. Christianity, he argues,
permits protest against unjust laws but not rebellion against
civil order. "The difference between Negro Christian and white
Christian," says Jackson, "is the meaning of the cross
of Jesus Christ. our forefathers were cross-bearers. They
believed in it. You can't build a great church preaching hate,
envy, and revenge, and sending the people out on the street
after the sermon mad at the world. No matter how nonviolent,
civil disobedience lays the ground for civil hatred and the
desire to destroy. They took from the civil rights struggle the
religious faith that went with it."
| The Militant View
Calvin Marshall, pastor Varick memorial
Church, Bedford-Stuyvesant, whose congregation basically
middle class, is chairman of the Black Economic
development Conference.
Its field director, James Forman, stunned U.S.
churches and synagogues last year with a Black manifesto
demanding "reparations" of $500 million for
the years of suffering that blacks endured at white
hands, and the years of neglect by white churches. |
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At 37, the strapping, bearded 6-ft. Marshall is a magisterial
figure in the pulpit. On his clerical robes, he wears the
cross-in-the-hand button of the National Committee of Black
Churchmen and the black, red and green "liberation"
colors--which are evident elsewhere in the church: on a
prayerbook, on the altar, and on the wall.
"We need the church to be a spiritual organism where the
Spirit of God goes out into the broader community and reorders
and restructures that community. That's what Jesus wants, that's
what the Gospel is all about."
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The Liberal View
Samuel L. Williams, pastor of the 650-member
Friendship Baptist Church and chairman of Atlanta's
Human Relations Committee, is academic dean at Morehouse
College in Atlanta. he is a minister in the progressive
National Baptist Convention, which split from Jackson's
group.
Williams, like his former pupil, Martin Luther King,
espouses a basic integrationist philosophy. "The Judaeo-Christian teaching is simple on the unity of
mankind. Those in the black movement who are moving toward
separation are wrong.
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"We have been criticizing the white Protestant for
separation. If they were wrong, I don't see how the black
militants can be right. What sense does it make in the last
quarter of the 20th century for a person to get in a corner all
by himself?"
"White America would rather see this nation destroyed
than give up white racism. the worst institution in America
today is the white church. It has more hypocrisy per square inch
than any other. And no impression I have received in the past
five years has made any difference."
posted 2/28/03
Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry
Manuscript)
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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update 28 July 2008
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