The Rev. J.C. Harris is the longest serving pastor in Iredell County. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. when the two were both young preachers in the 1950s and ‘60s.
On Easter Sunday, Harris’ sermon drew a parallel between the Easter story and tendency of people to only call on God when the chips are down.
“I don’t do a lot of that kind of preaching anymore,” Harris said, “But I used to.”
He was referring to the kind of preaching that has dominated the headlines and news programs for the past two weeks or so; the kind of preaching some have viewed has hate-filled, anti-American and, to say the least, inflammatory; the kind of preaching that has gotten Sen. Barack Obama in hot water via his association with a preacher who has recently been preaching it.
Among the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s comments were those in which he compared Obama’s plight to that of Jesus Christ.
“Jesus was a poor, black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture controlled by rich white people,” Wright said.
In another sermon, Wright talks about a conspiracy he believes in which the U.S. government developed HIV as “a means of genocide” against African Americans.
Then (the government) wants us to sing ‘God Bless America,’ Wright says in part. “No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people…God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human…”
Harris said he got passionate when he preached, but maybe not quite that passionate.
“Well, I never used that kind of language that Jeremiah Wright has used - all that ’G-d’ stuff - but we talked about the need to change,” Harris said.
Skip McCall, an officer with the Statesville branch of the NAACP, said the church has long been the place in the black community to get that message out, and Wright’s words may be a reflection of that era.
“The black church has always been at the center of the black struggle,” McCall said. “And some of what Rev. Wright said certainly came from that struggle.“
Harris agreed.
“The pulpit has been free to black pastors,” he said. “There are certain things white preachers can’t talk about, but the connection was made a long time ago between the black preacher’s pulpit and the fight for equal rights.“
And Harris knows what that fight is all about.
He said he was thrown in jail less than a month after taking over the reigns of the First Baptist Church in July 1962 for eating at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant on U.S. Highway 21.
“They said blacks weren’t allowed to eat there, and 16 of us were arrested for trespassing,” Harris recalled.
Harris’ short time in jail would have coincided approximately with Obama’s first birthday.
And because of Obama’s youth, Harris said, the senator should never have let race become a factor in his campaign.
“Barack is not a civil rights guy, and he should have stayed away from the whole race issue,” Harris said. “He keeps getting himself in deeper every time he opens his mouth about race.”
Harris said the fact that Obama has allowed his association with Wright to hurt his campaign shows how politically green he is.
“If he had more experience, he would have known how to deal with this,” Harris said. “Barack Obama knew what Wright had said and he should have come out on this before the media did.
The media has made more of this than it should have been, but Barack let himself get sucked in.”
Woody Woodard, president of the Statesville branch of the NAACP, agreed with Harris in that the story has gotten too much coverage.
“It’s basically a non-issue that these big news organizations - Fox, CNN and some others - have tried to make into a big issue,” Woodard said.
But he is not an apologist for Wright’s statements.
“We have a right, based on the treatment we’ve gotten in the past and still get to maybe a lesser degree, to tell it like it is,” Woodard said.
Like Harris, Woodard clearly remembers the segregated South.
“We talk about the goodness, and there are a lot of great things about this nation - it’s the greatest nation on earth - but there have been some things that have not been so great,” Woodard said.
He also believes Wright’s words have been parsed too finely and out largely out of context.
“You can narrow it down to what you want it to be,” he said. “You can take two or three words out of the whole sermon and turn them into what you want to hear.“
Sheila Boatman is a 45-year-old black woman who operates a nonprofit organization in Rowan County. Boatman said she has lived in many parts of the country and listened to sermons by a lot of black preachers.
She has also been following the Obama/Wright fracas.
“One thing I’ve learned is that you have to make a division between what your preacher says and what you actually believe,” she said. “Some things you have to let go in one ear and out the other, and some things will impact your spirit. I think Barack has been able to make that division.“
McCall said one good thing that may have come from an examination of Wright’s sermons is talk.
“It has stimulated the conversation on race relations,” McCall said. “We are not going to be able to come together completely as a society until we are able to talk openly and honestly about race relations.“
To which some may say, “Amen.”
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Posted on 03/24/08 at 09:51 AMCopyright (c) 2008 Media General. All rights reserved