by UrbanFaith Staff | Apr 3, 2015 | Feature, Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) As Good Friday services began here, Christian and Muslim leaders preached unity a day after a horrific terrorist attack at Garissa University College left 147 students dead, most of them Christians.
Al-Shabab, the Somalia-based Muslim insurgency, claimed responsibility for the massacre that began around 5:30 a.m. Thursday (April 2) as Muslims students were at mosque for morning prayers and Christian students were still asleep in their dorms.
The masked attackers — strapped with explosives and armed with AK-47s — stormed the dorms, took some hostages and gunned down others. When Kenyan security forces struck back, the attackers detonated explosives. Security forces killed four militants.
The Rev. Peter Karanja, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, said the government and those responsible for security must start asking hard questions about what ails Kenya’s security system.
“It is our conviction that the folly of our homeland security is systemic and cannot be given cosmetic solutions,” said Karanja, who urged the international community to help confront these groups.
Anglican Archbishop Julius Kalu of Mombasa, a coastal city in southeastern Kenya, said the terrorists wanted to divide the country along religious lines.
“This must be resisted,” said Kalu while urging leaders to move to end religious, political and ethnic divides.
Muslim leaders here condemned the attack and disowned terrorists, terming them as criminals using religion to commit crimes.
“The Muslim community in Garissa County strongly condemns barbaric acts committed against innocent university students,” said Abdullahi Salat, chairman of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims. “Our heartfelt condolences go to the victims’ families.”
“This is an international war and can only be won if everyone takes part,” Salat added.
The clerics insisted on heightened security in all parts of the country, and asked the government to rein in social media, which they suggested was contributing to raised tensions.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, sent a telegram to Kenya’s Conference of Catholic Bishops to express Pope Francis’ condolences. It said: “His Holiness condemns this act of senseless brutality and prays for a change of heart among its perpetrators. He calls upon all those in authority to redouble their efforts to work with all men and women in Kenya to bring an end to such violence and to hasten the dawn of a new era of brotherhood, justice and peace.”
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Apr 1, 2015 | Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON (RNS) When “The Bible” miniseries premiered two years ago, controversy swirled around its depiction of a dark-skinned Satan who some said resembled President Obama, as well as its portrayal of white main characters in the Moroccan landscape.
Left to right, Babou Ceesay as John, Greta Scacchi as Mother Mary, Chipo Chung as Mary Magdalene in “A.D. The Bible Continues.” (Photo by Joe Alblas/LightWorkers Media/NBC)
Fast-forward to the premiere of the sequel, “A.D. The Bible Continues,” on Easter Sunday (April 5), and you’ll see a decidedly more multicultural cast, the result of “honest” conversations between black church leaders and the filmmakers, Hollywood power couple Mark Burnett and Roma Downey.
“For too long religious programming has neither reflected the look of biblical times or the diversity of the church today,” tweeted the Rev. Barbara Williams-Skinner, a Maryland-based black activist, writer and scholar. “We made this point to Mark and Roma after #BibleSeries, and quite frankly they listened. I’m glad for that.”
Now, in a partnership with the 12-part NBC miniseries, an African-American Christian publishing house will host online resources to help viewers connect the holy book to Africa.
“The discussion about biblical characters is not just limited to portraying them as European; there are some other considerations that need to be brought into it,” said the Rev. Melvin Banks, founder of Urban Ministries Inc., a 45-year-old organization that serves some 10,000 predominantly black churches.
“These resources that we are bringing to bear allow for this kind of discussion to take place.”
It’s a long-overdue conversation, said Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the first woman bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “Many still have the Charlton Heston image in their minds and many still deny that there was a black presence in the Bible,” she tweeted on Monday (March 30) in an online conversation with Burnett and Downey hosted by Joshua DuBois, the African-American aide who directed the White House’s faith-based office.
Developers hope the online curriculum — including podcasts and artwork featuring Jesus and other biblical characters as people of color — will tap into the #BlackLivesMatter movement that has sprung up in the wake of recent deaths of unarmed African-American men at the hands of white police officers.
“Our desire is to connect the biblical stories with African and African-American history and let that help us to address many of the issues that our people face currently, especially young people but all age levels,” Banks said.
Burnett and Downey, who met in February with Banks at UMI’s Chicago headquarters, have emphasized the changes they’ve made in “A.D.,” which picks up with Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection and traces the life of the early church.
“We spoke to a lot of the African-American church leaders and really took to heart about how society looks, and how it would have looked at the time (of Jesus) with Judea being the crossroads of different cultures,” Burnett told Religion News Service in an interview.
He cited a number of characters portrayed by black actors, including Mary Magdalene and the apostles John, James and Philip.
“It’s a very, very diverse cast, and appropriately so,” said Burnett, who noted the significance of the choice of Chinese-Zimbabwean actress Chipo Chung as Mary Magdalene.
“Jesus chose to reveal his resurrected self to a woman, and in the case of ‘A.D.’ that woman happens to be a black woman, and I think that speaks volumes about our society,” he said.
His wife was even more direct in the Twitter conversation with DuBois. “The actors playing James, John, Mary Magadalene & more are simply amazing. This isn’t token diversity. They’re just GOOD,” said Downey, best known for her role on “Touched by an Angel.”
Banks, who said he was concerned about some of the depictions in the earlier series, said the presence of more people of color reflects the biblical history. His ministry’s online discussion will include questions about the portrayal of Mary Magdalene in “A.D.”
“All of the knowledge that we have of the Middle East says that there were people of color as a part of that whole makeup,” said Banks, whose ministry was one of the first to feature people of color in its Bibles and Christian education materials. “Therefore, to portray Mary Magdalene as African-American would be consistent with the geography of that area, as well as John the apostle of Christ.”
The online discussions will feature the work of a multicultural group of scholars — including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, and United Methodist theologian Thomas C. Oden.
Banks hopes churches will use UMI’s questions and research during Sunday school and midweek Bible studies after watching the episodes. Individuals can also download study guides and commentaries.
One week’s discussion will center on the Ethiopian eunuch, described in the eighth chapter of Acts and featured (as a black man) in the series.
“That brother went up to worship, and he heard from Philip that the messiah was the one promised in the Old Testament,” said Banks. “He not only accepted the Lord himself; he went back to his native country of Ethiopia and he spread the word.”
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by UrbanFaith Staff | Mar 10, 2015 | Feature, Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
SELMA, Ala.(RNS) With the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday this weekend, America was reminded how this small city helped bring sweeping change to the nation.
But while Selma might have transformed America, in many ways time has stood still in this community of 20,000 that was at the center of the push that culminated with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat, was the poorest county in Alabama last year. Selma has an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent; the national rate is 5.5 percent.
More than 40 percent of families and 67 percent of children in the county live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average. The Birmingham News called the region, known as the Black Belt because of its rich soil, “Alabama’s Third World.”
“Selma sowed, but it did not reap,” says James Perkins Jr., who became the city’s first African-American mayor in 2000. “So many of the benefits that went to other places in the South and around the world since the Voting Act of 1965 did not come to Selma. I hope this 50th anniversary will help Selma begin reaping some of those benefits.”
The world’s eyes were again on Selma this weekend as tens of thousands of people, including President Obama and his family, came to commemorate the marches here that raised the nation’s consciousness and led to the end of discriminatory practices that largely excluded blacks from the ballot box.
As America honors the heroes of 1965, many are expressing grief over how Selma has weathered the past half-century.
Not long after blacks began making political headway here after passage of the Voting Rights Act, this city’s economy collapsed.
Craig Air Force Base, which hosted undergraduate pilot training, was closed in 1977. The base housed about 2,500 people and contributed millions of dollars to the local economy.
After the marches of 1965, white flight began. About 10,000 white residents have left Selma in the past three decades, leaving it 80 percent African-American.
The city’s downtown, which sits along the Alabama River, has a bucolic charm from afar, but it is pocked with as many vacant buildings as occupied ones.
“It feels like nothing new has come here in decades,” says Hubbert Fitzpatrick, 65, who grew up in the area and now lives in Houston. “It’s a little bit sad.”
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson points to the old home in Selma of Amelia Boynton Robinson, who played a key role in the 1965 marches, as a tragic symbol of what’s become of Selma. Her home was where a group of congressmen, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders gathered to write the first draft of the Voting Rights Act.
Now the home sits boarded up, indistinguishable from the many other vacant houses in that neighborhood.
“We really should be focused on protest rather than celebration,” Jackson says. “We are under attack in this season.”
David Garrow, a historian and author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” says he decided to skip this week’s events because Selma has become “a symbolic holiday for celebrities” rather than a solemn commemoration of the goals of the Selma campaign — including the need to fight poverty.
Instead, the celebrations in Selma have the effect of “reducing history to a photo opp,” Garrow says.
“The focus should be on investment and economic development in places like Selma,” Garrow says. “The focus should be on what we can do for Selma, not what Selma can do for us.”
(Aamer Madhani writes for USA Today. Reporter David Jackson contributed this report.)
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Mar 5, 2015 | Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
(RNS) They were just four of the thousands of Americans who came to Selma 50 years ago, heeding the call of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for people of conscience to join in protesting the plight of African-Americans in Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement.
The four marytrs — a Baptist deacon, a minister, a Unitarian laywoman and an Episcopal seminarian — are largely unknown, but they’re being remembered for sacrificing their lives for the rights of others.
The names of all four are etched in the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., along with 36 others — starting with Mississippi minister George Lee, who died in 1955, and ending with King, who was assassinated in 1968.
“The gravity of his call for justice in the South became punctuated even more graphically by these deaths,” said Montgomery historian Richard Bailey.
The Baptist deacon: Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jimmie Lee Jackson was a 26-year-old deacon of his Baptist church in Marion, Ala., and had been involved in local protests. (Photo Credit: Southern Poverty Law Center)
“His death is what really precipitated the march from Selma to Montgomery,” Bailey said. Jackson was a 26-year-old deacon of his Baptist church in Marion, Ala., and had been active in local protests.
“He actually attempted to register to vote about five times before his death,” said Brandon Owens, staff research associate at the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University.
Jackson was fleeing police who attacked protesters after a peaceful demonstration. He was shot inside a Selma cafe at the hands of an Alabama state trooper while trying to protect his grandfather and mother on Feb. 18, 1965, and died eight days later.
Angered by his death — a pivotal scene in the recent film “Selma” — some protesters wanted to lay Jackson’s body at the foot of the Alabama Capitol.
“They did not do that in actuality,” said Janice Franklin, project director of the civil rights center. “But that was the original message that they wanted to send, not only to Alabama and the Capitol, but also to send a signal around the world that blacks were being killed here in Alabama trying to vote.”
In his eulogy for Jackson, King called many — including his fellow clergy — to account: “He was murdered by the indifference of every white minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of his stained-glass windows.”
In 2010, former trooper James Bonard Fowler pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor manslaughter charge in Jackson’s slaying and was sentenced to six months in prison.
The Unitarian minister: the Rev. James Reeb
The Rev. James Reeb, father of four and Unitarian Universalist minister. (Photo Credit: Unitarian Universalist Association)
“Four men came at us from across the street,” recalled the Rev. Clark Olsen, now 81 and living in Asheville, N.C. “One of them was carrying a club and swung it at Jim’s head.”
Reeb, Olsen and another white Unitarian Universalist minister had just met and decided to eat dinner together on March 9, 1965, after the second, aborted “Turnaround Tuesday” march. All three had headed to Selma to answer King’s call for ministers to join him there. They were about to return from supper to the church where there was a meeting with King when the white men shouted at them: “Hey, you niggers!”
Reeb, a 38-year-old father of four, was taken to a Birmingham hospital and died two days later.
His trip to Selma wasn’t the first time he worked to improve the lives of African-Americans. He had taken a job with a Quaker organization in Boston to work on housing issues.
“He felt it was appropriate to live among the people he was working with,” Olsen said. “He was just a very committed person this way and wanted to do good in the world and right some of the wrongs in our society.”
King preached Reeb’s eulogy, and hours later, President Lyndon B. Johnson mentioned Reeb’s death and the violence of Selma when he addressed Congress to introduce the Voting Rights Act: “Many were brutally assaulted; one good man, a man of God, was killed.”
Three white men were charged in Reeb’s death. All were acquitted.
The Unitarian laywoman: Viola Liuzzo
Viola Liuzzo, 39, a mother of five, drove her 1963 Oldsmobile to Selma and had planned to stay for a week. (Photo Credit: Unitarian Universalist Association)
“Her affiliation with Unitarians did influence her decision to drive south,” said her daughter, Sally, of her mother’s trek from Detroit. “However, even if she was not involved in any church, she would have went anyways; that is who she was. She loved her country and knew segregation was not right; she wanted a better world for her children.”
Liuzzo, 39, a mother of five, drove her 1963 Oldsmobile to Selma and had planned to stay for a week. “She came here because she was civil rights-minded,” said Bailey. “She wanted to help.”
She died on March 25, 1965, shortly after the conclusion of the last of the three marches from Selma. She was killed by shots fired from a car of Ku Klux Klansmen — who spotted a white woman and a black man in a car together — as she drove another civil rights worker from Selma to Montgomery.
Her decision to come to Alabama, after hearing King’s call for ministers and others, was a continuation of her earlier work on social justice.
“Before becoming active in civil rights, she was an advocate for education and economic justice reform and was arrested twice — in both cases requesting a trial to publicize her cause,” according to UU World magazine, a publication of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
One of the four white men in the car was an FBI informant. The other three were sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy but were not found guilty of murder.
The Episcopal seminarian: Jonathan Daniels
Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels of Keene, N.H. (Photo Credit: Religion News Service)
“He pulled me out of the way and the bullet hit him instead,” said Ruby Sales, now 66, recalling the day, Aug. 20, 1965, that Daniels saved her life and lost his.
They had just been released from jail, where they were held with other civil rights workers who were protesting the exploitation of black sharecroppers by white plantation owners in Fort Deposit, Ala. Daniels, 26, and Sales were in a group of people who stopped at a store to buy a soda. A white special deputy sheriff aimed a gun at Sales, and Daniels took the shot.
Daniels, the valedictorian of his class at the Virginia Military Institute, had left his Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Mass., and headed to Selma, like others, answering King’s call after the first “Bloody Sunday” march. But unlike many who left, he stayed and worked on voter registration in Lowndes County and also pushed for the integration of a white Episcopal congregation in Selma.
“He was not there because he had no other options in life,” said Sales, founder of the SpiritHouse Project, a social justice nonprofit in Atlanta. “He was there because he chose to be there.”
Montgomery historian Alston Fitts, who was a Harvard grad school classmate of Daniels, said the white seminarian worked hard to not respond to hate in kind. He defended white Southerners to his Northern friends as “imperfect Christians.”
King said of Daniels, according to a VMI website: “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.”
The white man charged in his death was acquitted. In 1991, Daniels was recognized as a saint of the Episcopal Church and is remembered each Aug. 14. His Cambridge alma mater and Episcopalians from Atlanta and Alabama plan to mark the 50th anniversary of his death with a pilgrimage to the site of his slaying in August.
== 30 ==
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Mar 4, 2015 | Headline News |
c. 2014 USA Today
(RNS) The images of that day in 1965 were quickly seared into the American consciousness: helmeted Alabama state troopers and mounted sheriff’s possemen beating peaceful civil rights marchers in Selma, Ala., as clouds of tear gas wafted around the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
On March 7, 1965 — a day that would become known as “Bloody Sunday” — 600 marchers heading east out of Selma topped the graceful, arched span over the Alabama River, only to see a phalanx of state and local lawmen blocking their way on U.S. Highway 80.
The police stopped the marchers, led by Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and ordered them to disperse. Then they attacked. Lewis, one of 58 people injured, suffered a skull fracture. Amelia Boynton Robinson, then 53, was beaten unconscious and left for dead, her face doused with tear gas.
Photos of that terrible day were seen around the world. Historians credit the beatings, and the public outrage that followed, as a catalyst for the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
“The marchers thought they would only be arrested,” says Gary May , a history professor at the University of Delaware and author of “Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.” “They thought there would be no major trouble. That night, the film of what happened reached New York, and ABC broke it at 9 p.m.
“People across the nation were shocked at what they saw. LBJ called it a turning point in American history. He compared Bloody Sunday to Gettysburg and Lexington and Concord.”
That day on the bridge was the culmination of a long chain of events, says Alston Fitts, a Selma resident and local historian. He chronicles the history of the city in his book “Selma: Queen City of the Black Belt.”
The Dallas County (Ala.) Voters League and the SNCC had been trying for a year to register blacks to vote. The focus of the struggle was the county courthouse, where protesters went in a vain effort to register. Confrontations occurred when Sheriff Jim Clark denied them entry to the building. It was his mounted possemen on the bridge that day in March 1965.
“A local judge had entered a ruling that outlawed any meeting of more than three people where voting rights were being discussed,” Fitts says. “Leaders in the Selma movement invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma to take part in the movement. They knew the involvement of Dr. King would bring national attention to Selma. And they knew he would bring expertise on how to stop the stifling tactics being brought to bear against the movement.”
But King was not part of the Bloody Sunday march. In February, King had become “discouraged” about the efforts in Selma, May says. “There hadn’t been the event that would capture the attention of the press and consciousness of the country.”
That changed on Feb. 16, May says, when C.T. Vivian, one of the movement’s leaders, had an altercation with Clark on the grounds of the courthouse. Then, on Feb. 18, Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a state trooper during a nighttime civil rights march in Marion, a town in neighboring Perry County. Jackson died a few days later.
“That was the impetus of the first march, the Bloody Sunday march,” May says. “Several members of the movement in Selma wanted to carry Jimmie Lee Jackson’s body to Montgomery and deliver it to Gov. George Wallace,” a virulent civil rights foe.
Robinson, a Selma activist then known as Amelia Boynton, had helped SNCC protest against white registrars who kept blacks from voting. Her home was used as a headquarters to plan the march.
After the beatings, “the nation came to Selma,” Fitts says. “The suffering of those marchers crossing that bridge into ‘enemy territory’ captured the attention of the country.”
King led a “symbolic” march to the now-infamous bridge on March 9, then led a full-scale march on March 21 from Selma to Montgomery after U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ordered protection for the demonstrators.
At the start, there were 3,200 marchers, according to the National Park Service. Marchers traveled 12 miles a day, sleeping in fields before reaching Alabama’s capital city on March 25. By then their ranks had swelled to 25,000.
In August, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.
“Of course, the Selma-to-Montgomery march was important, but Bloody Sunday was the critical mass,” May says. “Many people dropped what they were doing and came to Selma in the wake of the attacks and beatings that occurred that day.
“It put the voting rights bill at the top of the agenda in Washington. It accelerated everything.”
(Marty Roney also reports for the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama.)
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