Why Black Preachers Are Better

by Howell Raines

 

Howell Raines is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the former executive editor of The New York Times. He is the author of several books, including My Soul Is Rested and Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis. He is a contributor to Conde Nast Portfolio.

 

Dr. King’s particular genius was his recognition that once he moved the freedom debate in a religious direction, segregation would have to fall. He knew that white Southerners of that time were immune to many finer things, but powerful preaching was not one of them. That’s what the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” is about: reminding white people who had been relentlessly exposed to religion since the cradle that, deep in their hearts, they knew what Jesus would do about the charade of “separate but equal.”

From interviewing Dr. Lowery in 1975 for My Soul Is Rested, I knew that he, like Dr. King, was a student of homiletics, the scholarly study of sermons as vehicles of communication. (For Dr. Lowery’s learned discourse on the history of the black church, see that interview on page 66 of MSIR.) White America got a crash course in black homiletics in the “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s a style that blends every rhetorical trick in giving memorable and entertaining form to a serious message. It uses soaring King James language, theological exegisis, references to the sublime and ridiculous, humor, rhyme and doggerel, snatches of poetry and song. It includes show-off words alongside downhome vernacular.

As was often noted during his lifetime, Dr. King had a predilection for big words. It was more than a trick to make George Wallace look uneducated. It was part of a poetic arsenal that came as naturally to King’s oratory as it had to Lincoln’s. With King as with Lincoln, there was a playfulness. My favorite example in his Lincoln Memorial speech, is his reference to the “curvaceous slopes of California.” It hits the ear like a clunker, but then comes the most deadly description of Mississippi’s physical and moral topography ever coined: “Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.” It’s that tossed-in “molehill” that makes with literary elegance the point that a state “sweltering” in ignorant racism needed to be—and could be—redeemed down to every molecule of red dirt.

As for rhyme in public discourse, it was notably used but hardly invented by Muhammad Ali and the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. I was surprised that Jon Stewart and the usually sure-footed writers of the Daily Show made fun of Rev. Lowery’s rhyming of “mellow/ yellow,” “red man/headman” and so on in the closing lines of his inaugural prayer. They didn’t seem to know that he was playing off the historic couplet about discrimination based on skin color. “If you’re black, get back; if you’re brown stick around.”

Riffing this vernacular reference to skin color into a humorous and memorable closing for one of the most momentous events in American and African-American history was, to me, a signature work of artistry by Rev. Lowery. The comparison that comes to mind is Miles Davis taking a tired melody and investing it with the majesty of the blues.

<end quote found at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-22/why-black-preachers-are-better/2/  >

The following words are my own.

It bothered me that Jon Stewart did not bother to do a little research before he dumped on Rev. Lowery.   I did a little research and found that the quote that begins “if you’re black, stay back” was very hurtful to some (like the N-word) and very comforting to others during the Civil Rights Movement.  The words which jumped out to me were not the ones referring to blacks but to reds, First Americans.  That’s Native Americans for those of you still saying Indian (Columbus thought he was in India and the error has been perpetuated in our language.  “If you’re red, you can get ahead.” 

Rev. Lowery is black not red, African American not Native American.  Therefore, I was all the more moved by someone saying something encouraging to this forgotten group of people, the very First Americans.  [I cannot think of anyone before who has publicly, certainly not with a Nielsen audience this big, said something encouraging to them.]  So it seemed like a kick in the teeth when Jon Stewart made fun of the prayer.

And while we are on the subject of color, have you noticed that when someone is being dismissive that they say things like “It doesn’t matter if you are black, white, purple, or polka dot.” ?  Well there are “black” (actually more like chocolate, and it comes in a wide spectrum of shades and complexions) people and “white” (actually more like vanilla or pink and it comes in a wide spectrum of shades and complexion) people and yellow people (ditto remarks for Asian and Oriental) and red people and brown people (let’s face it, they are the true biracials Spanish copnquistadors mixed with American Indians unless you want to use the word brown to refer to Polynesians who are an admixture of three major racial stocks) but there are no purple people and no checkerboard people and no orange people.  The subject of color is stultified enough outside the circle of anthropologists and ethnologists who can speak intelligently on the subject.

For an otherwise bright guy, Jon Stewart should have done a little research before he hurt people.