black church | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Podcast • September 30, 2009

Whose Words These Are (5): Jericho Brown

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jericho Brown. (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Jericho ...

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jericho Brown. (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3)

Jericho Brown was born and raised in Shreveport, but did his growing-up in New Orleans. Library daycare introduced him to Shelley’s love poetry; the black church introduced him to call-and-response testimony and poetic performance. Fresh out of Dillard University, Jericho wrote speeches for New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. But poetry kept calling. In his new book, Please, Jericho channels the powerful voices of the great girl singers of pop — Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Minnie Riperton and others — to write his unique strain of love poetry. Jericho teaches poetry at UC San Diego; he is spending this year in Boston, as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Q: Give us a signature poem.

A: “Track 5: Summertime, as performed by Janis Joplin.”

Q: How do you see yourself in the great poetic chain of being?

A: I always hope to be the love child of T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. [They] had my aunts Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück raise me, and then I got old enough I went to a college with only one teacher: Jean Valentine.

Q: Who lives in your poetic neighborhood now?

A: Katie Peterson. Dawn Lundy Martin. James Allen Hall.

Q: Who are the ancestors you have to live up to?

A: Langston Hughes. When I write and do the things I do all day everyday I wonder if he would be proud. Are these the things he would patron in any way? His essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” was freeing for me. His legacy is one I aspire to everyday.

Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums?

A: Daniel Minter — look at his images. He is amazing. I hope that my poems sound like what Daniel Minter’s art looks like.

Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet?

A: Singing.

Q: Who are your favorite singers?

A: Donny Hathaway. Freddie Jackson, Jeffery Osborne. Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross. I like singers who have a story attached to their singing. Not just biography, but a story.

Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet?

A: My favorite color is orange. I try to get that color out in all of my poems.

Q: What’s your motto?

A: “The world is ugly but it is our job to make it sexy.”

Podcast • January 30, 2009

Obama and the Prophetic Tradition: Brown Bag (II)

Barack Obama’s connection to the “black prophetic tradition” is the open question here in conversation with Anthony Bogues, the Jamaica-born chairman of Africana Studies at Brown. In breaking through the skin-color barrier in American politics, ...

Barack Obama’s connection to the “black prophetic tradition” is the open question here in conversation with Anthony Bogues, the Jamaica-born chairman of Africana Studies at Brown.

In breaking through the skin-color barrier in American politics, how much does Obama bring with him of a distinctive African-American moral vision and something of an alternative version of American history? The peroration of Reverend Joseph Lowery‘s benediction that had the new president nodding and tapping his foot exalted the humble in the official story — black, brown, yellow and red — and humbled the exalted in hoping that “white will embrace what is right.” This was the prayer that nearly stole the show on Inauguration Day, that confirmed for many the glow of a blessing on a new era.

Tony Bogues reminds me that Martin Luther King Jr. had a different view of the Founding Fathers and something more than a lawyer’s take on the United States Constitution.

When you read King’s 1967 speech, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” it strikes me that King has a definition of the Founding Fathers not as gentlemen who promulgated the end-all of all constitutions but, in fact, a Constitution in which African Americans were outside the pale of humanity… When King speaks of an American renewal, he says “you must be born again,” not on the United States Constitution. He says you must form a new contract, a new compact that will include elements of the Constitution but which has to go beyond it… That to me is a really different tradition that the black church has been very much involved in…

Professor Anthony Bogues in conversation with Chris Lydon for Open Source, January 27, 2009.

Barack Obama’s liveliest connection to that tradition was rudely interrupted in his break with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago where our new president worshipped for 20 years. But is there anything more fascinating about the Age of Obama than his elaboration by word and deed, day by day, of our civic and spiritual renewal?

Podcast • May 19, 2008

Glenn Loury: The Missing Voice of Jeremiah

Are we supposed to be hoping that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s hair-raising 15 minutes of fame are over? The black polymath Glenn Loury and I are puzzling in conversation here about all that the YouTube ...

Are we supposed to be hoping that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s hair-raising 15 minutes of fame are over?

The black polymath Glenn Loury and I are puzzling in conversation here about all that the YouTube and network frenzy left out — the blessed insight and fellowship of black church life in America, but also the radicalism of its perspectives.

It’s commonly observed in the black church that the Sunday morning worship time is the most segregated hour in American life. It’s been my white-guy experience, all the same, that the African-American Christian church — with its manifestly, audibly distinctive roots in slave history and modern ghetto experience — lives out the most open and exemplary, all-embracing and anti-tribal God-consciousness I’ve ever imagined.

Professor Glenn Loury of Brown is a child of the South Side of Chicago, well known for his sometimes wayward path toward the mountaintop of university economics. He tells of his own redemptive engagement with the church, and his own searing confrontation with Jeremiah Wright. His disappointment here is that the “prophetic witness” of the black church was so zealously bound, gagged and anathematized in the political and media caricatures of Reverend Wright — as if we could not bear to know how differently the South Side of Chicago thinks and talks about, say, the Middle East, or the fate of Native Americans, or the US Constitution’s long compromise with slavery. “How could those three quarters of a million African-American descendants sitting on the South Side of Chicago not have that history vividly in their minds, and how could it not be reflected in the spiritual witness and inspirational preaching that would come out of their churches?”

The think that worries me, Chris, more than that the black church will be somehow denigrated and lose respect (because I don’t think there’s any keeping the black church down, okay?)… The thing that worries me more than that is that the root of this “prophetic voice” that comes out of the African American church — “America, you’re not as good as you think you are… America, you’re not so high up on that city on a hill that you’ve constructed for yourself that you cannot go wrong…” You know, the capacity to be critical — My fear is that that voice will be somehow rendered unacceptable, that the need for a presidential candidate to establish for the broad mainstream of the American people that he is not some kind of radical… will somehow bring with it the conclusion that the critical context out of which it came was itself illegitimate, ridiculous, absurd, … not worthy to be considered for another moment; let’s move quickly onto the next case.

Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury, in conversation with Chris Lydon, May 16, 2008

Podcast • January 26, 2008

MLK Jr. after 40 years: a Fraternal Memoir

Michael Haynes is my touchstone of the abiding power and fascination and the profound earthly-heavenly mystery around Martin Luther King Jr. In 1951 Haynes and King broke in together as apprentice preachers at the historic Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, and they stayed in close touch until King’s assassination 40 years ago, come April 4. Haynes is greatly under-cited in the King biographies, it seems to me. In our conversation Haynes makes a lively, loving witness on Martin, the young Ph.D. student, asking: “Where are the girls that would set my heart on fire,” until the church secretary introduced him to Coretta Scott at the New England Conservatory. But Haynes was also intimately connected with the man who knew, at the end, that his days — maybe his hours — were numbered, and who embraced his destiny in defiance of “longevity,” in submission to God’s will, with an open willingness to lay down his life to cure a cancer on American life. “The highest and deepest and best of the love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ had permeated this man,” Haynes says.

When these two young public theologians met, King, at 22, was the designated heir of an Atlanta church dynasty, just entering doctoral studies at Boston University. Haynes, the son of Barbadian immigrants and the brother of “Charlie Parker’s favorite drummer,” Roy Haynes, was a year and a half older than King and still in seminary. In 1951 he was the minister to youth at Boston’s oldest, most established black church, with Beacon Hill roots back to 1805. Big-league baseball had just been integrated but the black-rights movement was embryonic when Haynes first encountered King, and I’ve often wondered where this pre-civil rights generation got their defining assurance that things could change, things must change. They found it in each other.

He had grown up, Haynes remembers, with a “burning awareness that a cancer was eating at America. I think for any black, North or South — realizing there were strictures, there were limitations, that we’re still being kept out and separated — there was something grossly wrong with that separation, and these walls, these barriers needed to be broken down. I think a lot of young leaders, probably including myself, were waiting for God to appoint a Moses. The time was just right, and Martin was that man who was going to lead us to a promised land… It’s tragic when a body has a cancer and doesn’t know it… Dr. King made that diagnosis very clear to America.”

In 1953 King invited Haynes to join him in ministry and struggle in Montgomery, Alabama, but Haynes stayed in Boston, to win election to the Massachusetts Legislature and to pastor the Twelfth Baptist Church for more than 40 years.

Rev. Michael E. Haynes

For almost half that span, I have been his blessed and grateful parishioner. I make an inadequate note in this conversation that on the enflamed subject of religion in American life these days, the amazing grace of African-American church life is a vastly underrated treasure. The Haynes example at Twelfth Baptist is a Christianity that is Scriptural but not literal; faith-based but never fantastical; community-rooted and bathed in black history and black culture but never provincial or tribal; socially activist but not partisan, much less ideological; moral but not moralistic. Barack Obama in his King Day speech showed himself as an apt child of the church and its preaching tradition. Typical of Haynes’ delicate balances is the line he quotes to me here: “God forbid we should get so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.” But on the subject of Dr. King, the special joy of listening to Haynes comes in hearing not balance but the seamless fusion of their spiritual and political imaginations — of radical Christ-centeredness and the nth degree of tough-minded love and courage.