The March on Washington of 1963 is remembered most for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Barber, now director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, admires King immensely yet is critical of those who “water down the March on Washington to one man, one speech.”
“There are Jews, Quakers, some predominantly white congregations that are pro-civil rights and pro-LGBT community — that care about immigrants and women’s rights and voting rights,” he said. “Any efforts today that are not engaging all these issues on an every day basis is not truly moving in the spirit of the March on Washington.”
Currently, there are large numbers of Black pastors in two different categories, according to Robert Franklin, professor of moral leadership at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. Some of them, Franklin says, engage energetically in social-justice activism, envisioning themselves as “prophetic radicals” in the tradition of King.
One notable trend in recent decades has been a rise in the number of multiracial congregations across the country. King’s former church in Atlanta,Barber suggested King would be pleased by that. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s “was not just Black male clergy in the south,” she said. “It was women who decided to march and not get on the buses . It was white people who decided to pick up Black people in their cars and drive them to work. All the everyday, ordinary people who participated in this southern freedom movement.”“Let’s look at ‘Black faith’ instead,” she said. “It’s both inside and outside the church.
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