A Slow Healing Process

More than 30 years after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, issues involving race and religion remain flash points in America.

That point was underlined in Los Angeles this week when Episcopal leaders demanded that police apologize for the handcuffing of an African American parish priest during an incident last month.

Police officials defended their officers’ actions, insisting that race played no role in the incident. Regardless of whose account of the dispute is proved, the angry reaction to the case underscored the volatility of racial feelings.

Healing the nation’s racial wounds is a goal that many religious denominations have declared a priority. But human rights and religious leaders concede that faith communities have a long way to go in redressing institutional and individual racism.

The day before the Canoga Park incident became public, the president of the National Conference for Community and Justice--the organization formerly known as the National Conference of Christians and Jews--was in Los Angeles appealing for increased efforts by churches, synagogues and mosques to press efforts for racial reconciliation.

Sanford Cloud Jr., president and chief executive officer of the group, said that individual congregations, clergy and denominations that have spoken out against racism must do more.

“Collectively as a country we have not yet labeled racism as sin,” Cloud said. Moreover, he said, even the mind-set of good people must change.

“It is not enough to remain secretly anti-racist,” Cloud said. “You have to have a mind-set to engage people in ways [you] haven’t before.” Cloud made a similar plea to a breakfast meeting of business leaders at the Jonathan Club.

Cloud, who last October, at the request of President Clinton, convened a summit of 43 religious leaders at the White House to reinvigorate clergy on issues of race, may seem as if he were preaching to the choir. Clergy and churches, especially from the African American community, led the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. More recently, even predominantly white denominations have asked forgiveness for racism in their midst. For several years, brotherhood among men was a major theme at rallies of Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian men’s movement.

In Southern California, clergy of all races have long viewed their cooperative efforts at outreach and multiracial and multicultural understanding as a model for the nation. A 15-year-old “sister parish” exchange between Temple Isaiah in West Los Angeles and the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central Los Angeles is but one of many examples. The two congregations have pulpit exchanges, cooperate in food programs for the hungry and share a legal aid clinic.

“There’s always more to be done,” said Rabbi Robert Gan of Temple Isaiah, who is also president of the Inter-Religious Council of Southern California. “It is a continuing issue, especially in L.A., where we have so many varieties of peoples, cultures and faiths interacting together.”

But there have been setbacks as well. Promise Keepers, for example, has recently placed more stress on the theme of men being good husbands and fathers--the group’s original cause--than on the idea of racial reconciliation and brotherhood. Some Promise Keepers said the move was made because some of the group’s predominantly white supporters grated at the suggestion that they might be prejudiced and objected to asking forgiveness for the sins of previous generations.

Promising efforts to break down the walls of racism among major Pentecostal denominations may also be running into trouble. Almost five years ago, a major white Pentecostal association disbanded amid great celebration and joined with major African American Pentecostal denominations to organize a new multiracial association, the Pentecostal Charismatic Churches of North America.

They called it the “Memphis miracle,” so named because the founding meeting took place in that Tennessee city. Now, one leading African American clergyman from Los Angeles who celebrated that day said the promise has been so short-lived that he is calling it the “Memphis moment.”

“I don’t think that there was a significant long-term effect from my perspective that grew out of it,” Bishop Charles E. Blake of the West Angelus Church of God in Christ said in an interview. “We did not join together in living out the implications of the oneness that we celebrated.”

A Racial Divide Over Politics

Part of the problem involves politics. Although Pentecostalists of all races are theologically conservative, African American Pentecostalists tend to be politically liberal and believe that government programs are needed to right wrongs. White Pentecostalists are generally politically conservative and are suspicious of big government, Blake said.

But more than that, Blake said that while many black Christians will join churches pastored by white clergy, far fewer white Christians will join a church led by a black minister. Finally, he said most African American Pentecostal churches are in the inner city while their white counterparts are in the suburbs. Geography alone, he said, leads to differing views on where ministry is needed.

This great divide in perceptions has contributed to distrust and suspicion by African Americans of the larger society and has led many black churches to do what they can within their own spheres of influence, according to the Rev. Eugene Williams, executive director of Los Angeles Metropolitan Churches, a group of 37 African American congregations.

“We think that very little will be accomplished in the short run by playing the race card either way,” Williams said. “Protests are important, but won’t change [things]. Likewise, we have prayer vigils. They’re nice and necessary. But we’ve got to develop measured policy responses,” he said. One such response to get at the underlying disparity between African Americans and whites, he said, is a program pushed by black churches to have high school equivalency programs operate in their parishes.

The importance--and political practicality--of local action is what the Pentecostal association has decided on, spokesman Ronald Williams said in Los Angeles. While he said that taking stands on national political issues was not practical, progress has been made in successful local efforts. Recently, for example, Pentecostal churches in Tulsa, Okla., joined with the Convoy of Hope, based in Springfield, Mo., to give away three semitrailers of food to more than 5,400 people. The effort was part of the new Pentecostal association’s four annual national conferences, this one in Tulsa.

Cloud agrees on the importance of local action. “Whatever we do in the United States, we have to link it locally,” he said. “Cross lines to pray together and engage one another in a setting that is peaceful and comfortable and protected, in many ways a safe setting,” Cloud said.

Blake, as bishop of the largest African American congregation in Los Angeles, also has a suggestion for white clergy. In an interview, he told of an incident brought to his mind by the handcuffing of the priest in Canoga Park.

Blake said that he and his wife and son were just driving away from a Beverly Hills restaurant after dinner when a white policeman spotted him, made a U-turn and followed the bishop for several blocks before stopping him. Blake said the officer questioned them for five to 10 minutes and explained that he stopped them because they were not wearing seat belts. But Blake has no doubt that he was stopped because he is black.

Perhaps the white policeman was a member of a church, Blake surmised. “It is not our responsibility to teach the parishioners of white pastors and the white community justice, righteousness, peace and love,” Blake said. “It’s our job to deal with the people we deal with and it’s their job to deal with the people they deal with.”