Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992 TAG: 9201170356
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ARCH PARSONS THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
IN 1992, BLACK CHURCHES FLEX THEIR POLITICAL MUSCLES
This is another decisive year in American politics, and the nation's black church - the oldest, largest, wealthiest and most influential private institution in the black community - has been flexing its political muscle:In New Orleans, an alliance of black ministers led a voter-turnout drive against the Louisiana gubernatorial campaign of former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke. Despite winning 55 percent of the white vote, Duke was swamped when black voters turned out in record numbers to give 96 percent of their support to his opponent.
In Pennsylvania, Sen. Harris Wofford cited Philadelphia's black vote as a decisive factor in his improbable win over former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. Wofford courted that vote assiduously, attending services at a black church every Sunday of the campaign. The last such visit was a rally at the Bright Hope Baptist Church, where the pastor over a flock of 6,500 was also no stranger to politics - the Rev. William Gray III, who recently resigned from Congress after becoming the first black majority whip.
In the presidential race, one of the first things Virginia's Gov. Douglas Wilder did after announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination was to go to a reception at the home of the Right Rev. H. Hartford Brookins, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Shortly thereafter, the bishop, a key backer of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential bids, switched his support to Wilder, who called the black church's role "pivotal." (Wilder withdrew from the presidential race Jan. 8.)
The black church has had politics in its heart ever since slavery, when itinerant preacher-politicians risked their lives to organize "invisible" churches at secret meetings on Southern plantations.
But even after emancipation and the right to vote, the church remained the means of entrance into the nation's political life, says William Nelson Jr., an Ohio State University black studies professor who wrote a 1988 analysis of the black church's role in politics.
During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, such ties only got stronger. Under the leadership of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the black church became the "institutional center" of the movement, and later, two of King's lieutenants sought and won elective office: the Rev. Andrew Young, former mayor of Atlanta, and the Rev. John Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia.
Today, a third of those lieutenants, Jesse Jackson, continues to show that the black church's role in politics is stronger than ever.
\ Suppportive congregationa
\ But the base of the relationship is not the clergy but the congregations, which form a large, active voting bloc that gives political candidates "immediate weekly access" to more than 20 million people, according to the Right Rev. John Hurst Adams, a bishop of the A.M.E. Church and the founding chairman of the Congress of National Black Churches.
Most of that number comes from the two largest denominations - the 13.5 million Baptists and the 3.6 million-member A.M.E. Church, which together make up more than half the country's black population of 31 million.
But the numbers are only part of the church's electoral power. A University of Michigan study of the 1988 presidential election found a voter registration rate of 80 percent among blacks of voting age who were regular churchgoers, compared to a two-thirds rate among the general population. Among registered voters, 70 percent of black churchgoers voted, compared to 59 percent of the general electorate.
Most of these votes - about 90 percent - go to Democrats.
Along with the votes often come contributions.
No one knows how much black churchgoers give to campaigns, but fund-raising efforts organized with the help of the black clergy tap into congregations that give more than $1 billion a year to their churches, according to a 1989 study by the National Research Council.
It is here that churches must walk a fine line along the constitutional separation of church and state. Contributions to campaign funds never come directly from a church, because that could violate the church's tax-exempt status. But the financial links are clear enough, either through special collections for candidates after church services, candidates' use of church membership rolls for mailing lists or fund-raising dinners arranged by church-affiliated organizations.
But the money and votes might not be so readily available to politicians without politically active pastors.
At the New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington, the Rev. Walter Fauntroy is a veteran of many a campaign, including a few of his own as Washington's former delegate to Congress. As he walked down a street near his church one day before last month's elections, member Olivia Burroughs, 71, stopped him to ask, "What are we voting for next Tuesday? I don't understand all this stuff."
"Don't worry," Fauntroy replied, "I'll explain it on Sunday."
The "stuff" was a referendum proposal to hold assault-weapons manufacturers and dealers liable for damages caused by the weapons. Fauntroy was one of the 125 members of Washington's Interdenominational Ministers Alliance, whose efforts had put the item on the ballot. With an enormous get-out-the-vote effort by the district's black churches, and a 12 percent voter turnout overall, the initiative passed by a large margin.
Burroughs is a registered Democrat. Though she hasn't decided whom she'll support for the presidential nomination, she said she'll probably end up following the guidance of her pastor.
"They do pretty much as I want them to," Fauntroy said.
Another active pastor is Gray, the former House leader whose congregation at Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia helped boost the electoral fortunes of Wofford.
Gray estimates that 90 percent of his members are registered voters. In addition to providing a political base for his six terms in Congress, the church has helped elect three of its members to the Philadelphia City Council and two to the Pennsylvania Legislature.
The political power of such churches, and the political careers of some of their ministers, have prompted questions about where the black church stands on the doctrine of separation of church and state.
The answer from most black ministers is that as far as the black church is concerned, the doctrine is an unaffordable hindrance to black political progress.
"The idea of separation of church and state," said one minister quoted in Nelson's study, "is a foreign notion imposed on us by 18th-century Europe." And Nelson himself concluded that, "coming to fruition in a society where the overarching issue for the black community was survival, the black church could not afford the luxury of maintaining a strict separation between the sacred and the secular."
But ministers do take pains to at least appear to keep the two realms separate.
When Philadelphia's new mayor, Edward Rendell, attended a Sunday service at Bright Hope just before his election, Gray introduced him to the congregation as "my dearly beloved friend" and "a good man" - but never gave him a direct endorsement. It was doubtful that anyone in the congregation missed the implicit message.
Analysts agree that the black church could still have a major impact on the coming campaign.
In the general election, the church's importance will depend mostly on voter turnout; on whether the black electorate shows more enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee than it did for Michael Dukakis in 1988. There's little doubt, however, given President Bush's record on civil rights, that the black vote will dip much below its 90 percent preference for Democrats, analysts say.
With that in mind, the candidates might do well to heed the warning of Mary Frances Berry, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a black history scholar: "Every person who runs for office should know you have to go by the black church."