RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Jubilation, pride and relief permeated pews and pulpits at predominantly black churches across the country on the first Sunday after Barack Obama's election, with congregrants blowing horns, waving American flags and raising their hands to the heavens.
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(Photo: AP Images / Steve Helber)Worshippers leave the Hungary Road Baptist Church after services at the church in Richmond, Va., Sunday, Nov. 9, 2008.
"God has vindicated the black folk," the Rev. Shirley Caesar-Williams said as a member of her Raleigh congregation, Mount Calvary Word of Faith Church, brandished a flag and another marched among the pews blowing a ram's horn.
"Too long we've been at the bottom of the totem pole, but he has vindicated us, hallelujah," the Grammy-winning gospel singer cried. "I don't know about you, but I don't have nothing to put my head down for, praise God. Because when I look toward Washington, D.C., we got a new family coming in. We got a new family coming in. And you know what? They look like us. Amen, amen. They look like us."
In the historically black New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Obama buttons and T-shirts were as prevalent in the pews as colorful plumed hats, while in a church in the former capital of the Confederacy, a young girl handled a newspaper with a photo of Obama and the headline, "Mr. President."
At Los Angeles' oldest black church, ushers circulated through the aisles with boxes of tissues as men and women, young and old, wept openly and unabashedly at the fall of the nation's last great racial barrier.
And on the day that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called "the most segregated day of the week," black and white Christian clergy members asked God to give Obama the wisdom and strength to lead the country out of what many consider a wilderness of despair and gloom.
At Hungary Road Baptist Church in a working-class suburb of Richmond, Va., the service was part celebration, part history lesson, led by a pastor who had felt the sting of the Jim Crow South. The Rev. J. Rayfield Vines Jr., pastor of the predominantly African-American congregation, paused briefly as he recalled the indignities he endured but did not bow to while growing up Suffolk, in southeastern Virginia.
"I was there when you had ride in the back of the bus," Vines said under a simple cross illuminated by eight light bulbs. "I was there when you went to the department store and you couldn't try on the clothes. I was there when they had a colored toilet and a white toilet."
The pastor said he shared his humiliations Sunday to help give those "who had not tasted the bitterness of segregation ... an idea why we all shouted."
Inside Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, member Sheila Chestnut, 61, proudly wore a rhinestone Obama pin on her suit lapel.
"I am so happy," she said. "I cried so much. I never thought that in this lifetime I would live to see an African-American become president of these United States."
When the Rev. Calvin Butts invited the congregation to stand up "and give God praise for the election," several hundred churchgoers rose as one, lifted their hands and gave a sustained cheer, then chanted, "Yes we can! Yes we can!"
At Apostolic Church of God on Chicago's South Side, less than two miles from Obama's home, jubilant Sunday services were peppered with references to the election and calls to be grateful for his victory.
"We thank the Lord for this second Sunday (in November) after the first Tuesday," Dr. Byron Brazier said to resounding applause and cheers from the mostly black congregation. "This is a wonderful time to be alive."
Obama spoke at Apostolic on Father's Day in his first address to a congregation after leaving his longtime church, Trinity United Church of Christ, following inflammatory remarks there by his former longtime pastor and others. Continue >>
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blue, who has mocked or joked about "black folk" as you put it? We simply used a portion of a quote from the article and pointed out the irony of it with regards to obama.
blue, plus what do racial problems in Africa have anything to do with us electing a man who believes in murdering unborn babies to include those who survive an abortion by saying he will support the freedom of choice act and who supports an organization that was founded by a woman who was an advocate of the same pure race ideals as Adolph Hitler?
blue, while some mission teams come for a short period of time our long term missionaries serve four year terms and many make a career of it and serve for 20 or more years in some cases. And they live on the economy.
Right.. and I am sure they have lived their with their families for decades and experienced real racial oppression in their own context, right? I am sure these 'missionaries' build their hospitals and such and then catch their first-class church-payed airline tickets back to CA, right? More importantly, they don't vote! Helping address the needs of poverty is nothing compared to the ancestry of racial oppression that continues to affect minorities to this day. There is no need for 'Christians' on this site to mock and joke and make fun of "black folk" unless they experience the 'drop off' themselves.
Where I live, poverty is color-blind and Christianity is the minority.
blue, we Southern Baptists do just that we have International Missionaries in all of these countries already who are meeting both the physical and spiritual needs of those suffering in poverty in these countries, they have built hospitals and porvided medical and educational help as well.
I would *love* to see all you white Christians (I am white too, however) dropped off in the middle of Rwanda or Congo or Zambia.. Then, live there in poverty for a few decades and when you're old and tired - your children poor and still struggling from the suppressive 'drop off' decades ago - I'd like you all to vote. There is a white candidate and a black candidate. Without looking at the issues, only evaluating your hard lives, go vote. Are you REALLY going to vote for the Christian? What is the white candidate is - Oh no! - not Christian? Racism, whether it is for or against a candidate, lingers in the most inadvertent ways. I see people on here mock black churches for this win, probably sitting back in their leather chairs; home for the day after 4 hours of white-collar work. So while you wealthy Christians call it 'biblical illiteracy', I call you socially ignorant.
Enough said.
believer,
You are something knowledgeable! I researched Margaret Sanger and was astounded by the words coming off the pages. I find it bewildering where, why and how things began.
Daniel Paul,
Ouch.
"God has vindicated the black folk,"
Question. Vindicated means "freed from any question of guilt". Is Obama the new Jesus of the black church?
"God has vindicated the black folk" by allowing a black man who supports Planned Parenthood to become President, an agency that was founded by Margaret Sanger who was an advocate of pure race thinking which is why she targeted poor and/or minority neighborhoods to place her clinics.
"God has vindicated the black folk,"
By putting in a pro-abortion, anti-American, pro-homosexual black man? Is that truly vindication?
--It's a sad day when Christians turn away from the teaching of the word of God, The Blble, for hand out and turn their backs to the unborn .. There is a price to pay for our sins, May God forgive us, some of us tryed to protect our children, but today evil has the uper hand. Gods will be done, He has a very Good reason for alouding this.
I can understand why black people feel jubilant that Obama is the new president, as having reached a mile stone. But do they all agree with his politics? Is race more important than the difference between right and wrong? I blame it perhaps on biblical illiteracy for people of faith, whether black, white, or latino to have voted for Obama while he stands for all kinds of abortion on demand, gay rights that trump the right of parents', etc. The Scriptures tells us that without righteousness, government can't prosper:
(Pro 20:28 NASB) - Loyalty and truth preserve the king, And he upholds his throne by righteousness.
When will we stop looking at ourselves like white Christian,black Christian or hispanic Christian? Men look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart (I Sam 13). God is not into race, but into hearts. He wants to see hearts that seek Him first. We need to start seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness instead of trying to prove races are equal (in the eyes of God we are all equal...as it should be for us Christians).
Cog
According to the words of Rev. Shirley Caesar-Williams, who are the weak and who are the strong?
Is it not God who sets up and tears down powers and authorities?
Is God's will accomplished according to color, or for the glory and honor of God?
wrhalver, the 1 Cor. 1 passage was in reference to my first sentence, God using marginalized people (God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are)
As I mentioned the Matthew passage is eschatological (the here and not yet)
The honeymoon won't last long. Buyer's remorse will set in soon.
The Obama's transition team is filled with Washington insiders from the Clinton era.
So much for "change"; it is much of the "same old, same old." It is simply payback for Clinton's support.
The sad thing is that churches have compromised their biblical values in supporting a president-elect who is extremely anti-biblical in his abortion policies.
These pastors & churches are share in the responsibility of the shedding of unborn babies' blood.
We are to be ambassadors here, passing through. I think all of us forget this.
Cog
The verse you suggest as being in 1 Corinthians is actually in the Book of Matthew:
Mat 19:30 But many who are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.
Also, your use of this verse is not correct. You are attemting to correlate the Last and First to being positions of status in this world.
The true interpretation is that many who hold great positions of authority here on earth will not have the same reward in Heaven. And many who hold more humbled positions on earth will be well rewarded in Heaven.
The Kingdom of God is not of this world. This is why true Christians can see it and the world cannot.
I guess it is historical, however, I don't see how God could bless someone who is so pro abortion. I don't believe how a Church could praise God for putting a pro abortion person in there. It seems that their heart is "at any cost" we want to be vindicated. Why dont the Blacks support the Black pro life members of government.
The Bible is full of God redeeming marginalized people. 1 Corinthians 1. The statement The first shall be last and the last first is eschatological. Black people are not just thankful for Barack Obama but that God is so great that he can take a people that have been down for so long and then place one of them in the highest office in the Land! It is not just a political or social thing but a Kingdom of God thing!
"God has vindicated the black folk,"
It is stunning to hear this coming from a prominent Christian voice.
The Kingdom of God is not about the vindication of color.
I'm sorry, but this just adds to the overall confusion.
My church is in more of a mode of prayer than jubilee. So they did do a wide scope of all churches I see.