Black Clergy Backing Occupy the Dream Movement

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EDITOR’S COMMENT: While it’s good to see more people involved and also good to see them encouraging transfer money out of the big banks, dilution of the message is frustrating.  Perhaps the organizers can rally to get things focused on point…  or perhaps this is just the first step, to get people out and then get them all pointed in the same direction.

While the politicians and pundits continue to rant about the lack of a clear message of the Occupy movement, the people seem to get the message just fine — income and wealth inequality driven by government laws and policies that favor those who can’t afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists.

Black Clergy Backing Occupy the Dream Movement

Date: Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 6:51 am
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com

….. The infusion of support from the black community for the Bay Area Occupy movement is considered critical to keeping it alive.

Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” recently addressed the Occupy movement’s lack of poor and people of color in its leadership ranks. In a “report” by one of its correspondents, the show tackled what has become a legitimate issue among the Occupy Wall Street group: That the movement itself has become divided by classism and elitism in its leadership ranks.

The piece said the encampment had been split into “uptown” – led by college-educated white males who have Internet access and meet in the foyer of a Deutsche Bank office building to discuss strategy – while the “others” lived in the “downtown” part of the encampment and were judged to have little interest in setting an agenda and little ability to execute a strategy, even if they had the ideas.

As in most satirical pieces, there is a ring of truth in “The Daily Show’s” observations. One element is that black people have no interest in the Occupy movement, for a whole host of reasons, ranging from “been there, done that all our lives” to the suggestion that black people are too busy struggling to survive to have the “luxury” to take off and demonstrate with a bunch of people who don’t have the interest of black folks in mind anyway.

But it appears all that is about to change.

Previously, several high-profile African-Americans participated in the movement. Scholar Cornel West, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and former NAACP leader Benjamin Chavis visited Occupy encampments and discussed the need to ensure that issues of importance to black Americans were addressed.

Sunday, two dozen prominent black pastors in the San Francisco Bay area amped up the call for participation by launching Occupy the Dream.

The day was marked by a demonstration at the Federal Reserve Bank branch in San Francisco to highlight the growing inequity between rich and poor in the United States.

Occupy Oakland activists have demonstrated at foreclosed properties and have protested at local banks, and many African-Americans have participated in the demonstrations.

But the Rev. Harold Mayberry, pastor of the 2,800-member First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Oakland, said the movement was missing an essential element.

According to the SanFranciscoGate.com (SFGate.com), Mayberry told his congregation that Occupy Wall Street “had the right ideas, but it was without structure. People ask, ‘Why the church?’ No social movement in this country has succeeded without the involvement of the faith community.”

Referring to Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in 1955, “The original Occupy the Dream movement began right there,” Mayberry said. “In a movement, there is no place for wimps.”

“I have addressed the Occupy Movement and its Arab spring origin with my congregation both in Bible Study and from the pulpit,” the Rev. Kenneth F. Irby, senior pastor of Turner Chapel-AME Church in Palmetto, Florida.

“I am more interested in educating them for awareness purposes and not advocating that they actually participate in any particular secular endeavor,” Irby told BlackAmericaWeb.com on Monday. “I am encouraging them to first allow the Holy Spirit to occupy their lives, and then be led by the same Holy Spirit to occupy the needs of the hurting, homeless and hungry in our church, community and country.

“As we celebrate Dr. King’s dream today, on yesterday, I asked everyone that would listen to not use this day a holiday of comfort and convenience but rather to intentionally act as an agent of peace and compassion in this time of challenge and controversy,” said Irby.

Nationally, Occupy the Dream is seeking a moratorium on home foreclosures and billions of dollars for a fund that would create jobs and provide training. …..

“This is a great leap forward to involve local pastors,” James Taylor, an associate professor of political science at the University of San Francisco and an expert in African American studies, told SFGate.com. “The general critique of Occupy is that it has lacked a specific agenda. But this could be a sign of maturity for the movement.”

Next month, the pastors will ask their congregants to withdraw a small amount of money – at least $30 – from their bank accounts and deposit it in either a credit union or a minority-owned bank.

The website reported that if that symbolic move doesn’t generate movement among bankers, Occupy the Dream would ask larger African-American-dominated institutions, churches and black professionals to begin transferring greater amounts to credit unions.

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