Preaching Peace : Churches: The Los Angeles riots that followed the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case “can happen any time in any city,” a minister says at an interfaith service.

Religious leaders from around Ventura County prayed for peace Sunday and urged their congregations to examine why racism continues to divide American society.

The Los Angeles riots that followed the Rodney G. King beating verdicts “can happen any time in any city, including Ventura,” the Rev. John Baylor of the Olivet Baptist Church told 100 participants, most of them white, at an interfaith service at Ventura’s First Christian Church.

Baylor, who is black, said he has experienced racism several times in Ventura County. “The folks who are crying in Los Angeles are crying here, but we don’t hear them,” Baylor said.

In Oxnard, the Rev. Broderick Huggins told the 450 St. Paul’s Baptist Church members, most of them black, that the jury in the Rodney King case returned not-guilty verdicts because it viewed the evidence “through the racist pathology of European ancestry.”

Because none of the jurors were black, they could not understand what it is like to be taught to be afraid of police officers, to be followed in department stores as potential shoplifters and to be stopped by police in white suburbs simply because of their color, Huggins said.

“These 12 jurors could not relate to the feelings of exclusion,” Huggins said.

In Simi Valley, where the verdicts were delivered from the East County Courthouse on Wednesday, the Rev. Myles Gentzkow of the mostly white Simi Valley Community Church asked congregation member Claretta Kerns to describe her emotions when she heard the verdicts.

Kerns, who is black, said she felt a “sense of hopelessness and despair,” because she has relatives who live in South Los Angeles, the area most devastated by three days of rioting, looting, arson and random violence.

She repeated the words of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and asked the audience to take them to heart.

King talked of a day when people would be judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character, Kerns told the 500 in attendance.

“What’s important now is that we start to rebuild,” Kerns said. “We need to rebuild the cities not like they were before, but better.”

Although the religious leaders said they found the jury’s conclusion stunning, they called for peace instead of destruction in its wake.

“All of us have been touched by the events of last week. All of us need to come together now,” said Gentzkow, who is white.

Huggins told his congregation that violence is not the solution to racism and urged them to focus on positive responses, such as teaching a better self-image in the black community.

“We must do it God’s way, because if we live by the AK-47s, if we live by the shotguns, we die by the AK-47s and shotguns,” Huggins said.

Huggins also told audience members that voting is an effective way to bring about change, and urged everyone to register to vote.

He called President Bush the “high priest of hypocrisy,” saying that Bush “agonized” over whether to veto major civil-rights legislation last year.

L.A. CHURCH SERVICES: A1