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60 years after the civil rights struggle, do black rights really matter in Birmingham, Alabama? An Irish publisher encounters suspicious minds, infinite patience and amazing grace in a battered community
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s a white man entering a black church in America, it’s hard not to cast the shadow of Dylann Roof, the crazed racist who joined a bible study class in a famed African American church in Charlestown, South Carolina, in 2015 and proceeded to shoot dead all nine of his ‘fellow-worshippers’. And in Birmingham, Alabama, of course, those suspicious minds might be even more acute given that blowing up black churches has a long and sorry history here, earning the city the sobriquet ‘Bombingham’. Those murderous white supremacist attacks would culminate in the September 1963 blast at 16th Street Baptist Church which left four children dead, propelled the black civil rights battle onto front pages worldwide and forced the President Lyndon Johnson to introduce a long-delayed civil rights act a year later. And yet, here at the Movement Fellowship Church on the outskirts of Birmingham, I am given the full Prodigal Son works by beaming
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ColdType | March 2022 | www.coldtype.net
parishioners filing in for Sunday service. While face masks hide the smiles, I sense a joy and generosity here reflecting the comfort and sanctuary which the African American community has traditionally associated with the Lord’s house. I am here to attend worship with an old buddy of mine via the Rev Jesse Jackson, Pastor Kris Erskine who serves a working class, black congregation which has known – and knows – its share of sorrows. He has been forewarned that I am the world’s worst Christian but is rolling out the red carpet nevertheless. “We share commonality”, he writes me, “I strive and fall short u
He has been forewarned that I am the world’s worst Christian but is rolling out the red carpet nonetheless
on a daily basis.” Truth be told, while not a person of faith, I have never failed but to be uplifted at a religious service and, equally importantly, I know it makes my 93-year-old mother proud to hear I have been to church – even 4,000 miles from home in Ireland. Yes, it is a long way from Sunday mass at St Teresa’s in Belfast’s Andersonstown in the seventies. For starters, we didn’t have gospel singers like the Barnes family on stage, and certainly not wearing yellow stilettos! – and then there is the high-octane, impassioned, sweatsoaked, soaring, and ultimately redemptive sermon of Pastor Kris, against a rising sea of Amens and full-bellied cheers from the faithful. This is sermon as adrenaline shot to the soul. “I am challenging you to praise God”, Pastor Kris exhorts the faithful. “Some of them died for you to sit in a church today. Some of them died so you could sit in the church and have the comfort of not worrying about a bomb going off at Sunday school taking the lives of
