United We Stand

It all started right after the l992 Los Angeles riots when a group of us ministers got together. Here we were being looked to as spokespersons and leaders of the African American community, heads of major churches and groups of churches. But we didn’t feel like leaders. We realized that we’d all been so busy responding to issues raised by others that we hadn’t been pooling our efforts to multiply the effect. There wasn’t connectedness or continuity. And we wanted to raise our own agenda.

That’s when we established the Los Angeles Ecumenical Congress. We wanted to reclaim our leadership in the African American community and in the broader community so that together we could exert the most powerful spiritual and moral influence possible. Everything is based on an assumption that there’s a system of morals governing behavior, but it’s only the church that’s really talking about good and bad, right and wrong. And we felt we hadn’t been speaking out as it was our special responsibility to do.

The congress is composed of the heads of about 25 major African American churches in the Los Angeles area. Some of us represent much larger church groups; as a bishop, I oversee 250 churches throughout Southern California. You can be sure that we’ve all had a lot of experience with the kind of things that could monkey-wrench an organization like the congress, so we went out of our way to avoid most of the known monkey wrenches. For example, we didn’t set up a whole new organization that had to be perpetuated or protected. We hold forums for candidates, but we don’t issue endorsements. And although I convened the the group, it’s a group of independent equals.

The congress stands together with other like-minded community groups--white, Latino and Asian--on many issues. We oppose the so-called California civil rights initiative, which is really a misnamed way to destroy affirmative action. We oppose cuts in education at any level, because education is not an expense but an investment. We support an increase in the minimum wage to $5.75 per hour, to give families a chance to stay away from dependence on the government or from a turning to crime. Although most of our churches have extensive programs like food banks to help the poor, we can’t possibly provide enough for all the poor, so we want to be sure enough government funding also exists. Hurting children and the elderly in the name of balancing a budget is morally unacceptable. And while we do not condone criminal behavior, we also oppose brutal and violence misconduct of law officers sworn to uphold the law. That’s why assuring good police conduct is at the top of our agenda.

I was on the committee that chose Willie Williams as police chief of L.A. and he has become a member of my church. The improvements I’ve seen in the five years he’s been chief exceeds anything I’ve seen in my 27 years in Los Angeles. His leadership in community policing and in changing the mind-set about what police should and can do and their role in bringing peace and unity to cour city has been remarkable. He has promoted a feeling that law enforcement is about serving the people, rather than envisioning itself as an occupying force. Yet most of us in the congress perceive him as being attacked from many directions and feel there’s a move to block renewal of his contract.

That something still can be improved doesn’t mean that it’s fatally flawed, or that it hasn’t already improved a great deal. Willie Williams wasn’t even allowed to choose his own executive staff when he first came to L.A., yet at the same time he was charged with bringing tremendous changes very quickly in an organization in which many were extremely resistant to them.

The congress has been meeting with many other groups who believe he deserves praise and support and will fight for his retention. There is a strong new perception that black leadership is undergoing a resurgence here and throughout the country. Actually we’ve never stopped working. What’s changed in Los Angeles is our strategy. We said to each other, “Let’s join together, stop just responding and start initiating!”