Sometimes writing a news story is not sufficient to convey the importance of an event. This is one of those times.
The emotion of what I witnessed in Little Rock, Ark., today cannot be conveyed in a cut-and-dried news story. It requires interpretation.
The scene was the Statehouse Convention Center in historic downtown Little Rock — the city known for white supremacists blocking the Little Rock Nine from integrating Central High School in 1957.
The occasion was the annual gathering of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, created in 2003 and named for the pastor emeritus of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, now deceased.
The timing was one month into the presidency of Donald Trump, who is waging a campaign against all people of color, overturning civil rights protections and firing federal employees — a huge proportion of whom are Black — by the tens of thousands.
An ice storm had paralyzed Arkansas the day before, and some roads still were not passable. The temperature outside was 22 degrees. The deck seemed stacked against us.
We had gathered in a conference center ballroom to hear a message from Jeremiah Wright, one of three founders of the Proctor Conference and the pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Even casual observers will know his name because once upon a time he was pastor to Barack Obama and became ensnared in public controversies in 2008 when Obama was running for president. I won’t take the space here to rehash all that; you can read about it at the link in this paragraph.
Wright, now 83, is a larger than life figure in the Black church in America. Not only did he grow Trinity Church from 90 people to 8,000, he advanced theological education for Black Christians and elevated the training of Black pastors.
What most folks don’t know is that in 2016, Wright suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed, dependent on a wheelchair and with a weakened voice. So it was that rather than preaching to the conference himself, he enlisted another co-founder to preach his sermon for him. That son in the ministry is Freddie Haynes, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
Thus, before the expectant crowd, Wright sat bent over in his wheelchair, draped in a clerical stole, and Haynes stood at the pulpit to proclaim the word. He joked that Wright had said he could “Haynes-ize” the sermon if he wanted, but added there’s no way he would mess with a masterpiece.
The biblical text was from Daniel 3. That’s the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refusing to bow down to the golden idol King Nebuchadnezzar had created. In a rage, the king sent the three Hebrew boys to die in the fiery furnace. Yet the three were protected by God and not harmed.
This sermon was delivered one day after Trump’s White House posted an image of him adorned as a king and celebrated a Trump executive order that says he alone gets to interpret the law.
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