Religious summit unites faiths

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2001 by Petrie, Phil W

More than 150 clerics representing diverse faiths and denominations attended the NAACP's sixth Religious Leaders Summit Oct. 29-30. Christians of many denominations joined with Jews, Muslims and Sikhs at NAACP national headquarters in Baltimore to learn how the faith community could help to implement the NAACP's fiveyear strategic plan.

Methodist bishops mingled with Roman Catholic priests, who communed with officials from the Rev. T. D. Jakes' Potter's House and Dr. Creflo Dollar's World Changers Ministry.

"This was the best summit we've had," said the Rev. Julius C. Hope, NAACP religious affairs director and chairman of the summit. "It was historic."

Historic, too, is the linkage between the faith community and the NAACP As President and CEO Kweisi Mfume said at a summit luncheon, with an alliance of churches, the association marched against the film Birth of a Nation, in 1915. Four years later, in what historian Rayford Logan called "the nadir," there were 650 lynchings in the United States, and the NAACP joined with the African Methodist Espiscopal church to demand anti-lynching laws.

As early as World War I, the NAACP joined faith leaders in pressuring the War Department to establish training camps for African American soldiers. In World War II, the NAACP was instrumental in forming the nation's first African

American air force unit, the famed Tuskegee Airmen. In concert with the faith community, the association petitioned both President Harry S. Truman and Congress to integrate the Armed Forces. On Aug. 27, 1948, in part because of the success of the Tuskegee Airmen, the services were integrated.

Despite this history, however, the association's five-year strategic plan is the first such instrument in the organization's history, and its schemes for economic, political and social empowerment could be better served with the faith community as partner.

So religious leaders were invited to Baltimore.

First stop was a town hall meeting at New Shiloh Baptist Church, where approximately 300 people heard 12 panelists grapple with the subject: "Healing the Aftermath of Hate: Why Terrorists Won't Succeed." Opinions and comments ranged from the right ("For the sake of security, I can accept some profiling") to the left ("Profiling was dead wrong before Sept. 11, and its dead wrong after").

The next morning, the clerics attended workshops stressing better communication between the faith community and the NAACP. The Rev. James Lawson Jr., pastor emeritus of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles and an icon in the Civil Rights Movement, said special attention should be paid to the criminal justice system. "It is a manifestation of racism," Lawson told members of his workshop. "Our penal system is the most blatant form of Hitlerism in the society."

By day's end, religious leaders of sev

eral faiths and denominations had hammered out action items for publication - a bible, so to speak, for guiding the partnership of the NAACP and the faith community in implementing the five-year strategic plan.