Baltimore’s Black churches have held a prominent place in the community for decades, and the intersection of these houses of worship, their leaders and local politicians have shaped the course of Maryland history.
Kevin Slayton, a Maryland public affairs professional and ordained minister, explores the importance of these connections in his new book, Politically Preaching, a self-published work that casts a critical eye on the role of today’s Black pastors and urges them to reclaim their role as sounders of trumpets for justice.
Politically Preaching is informed by Slayton’s educational and life experiences. Through his book, we are reminded that Baltimore has long produced Black leaders who have turned their experience in the pulpit and in leading their communities into political platforms. Hiram R. Revels was a pastor at an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore at the outset of the Civil War, before moving to Mississippi to become the first Black person elected to the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction. A century and a half later, Rafael Warnock was preaching at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore before being tapped to lead historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and then going on to become a Georgia Senator.
In between, generations of pastors spoke out on issues of the day and lent their support to politicians seeking office.
“The preacher was expected to negotiate the landscape of politics in the local community,” Slayton writes. “The preacher was to speak cogently to the powers that be without fear or intimidation…The preacher possessed the power to influence his congregation in matters related to issues of public policy. And yes, the preacher held a certain level of influence on the local political scene.”
Slayton explains how Black churches are a vehicle for both pastors and politicians to reach thousands. But he also shows that they are not all-powerful. In Baltimore, he posits, community organizations are the most influential local groups and the first stop for politicians and candidates. But churches come second.
Additionally, pastors aren’t always as involved and as activist as they once were, he said, and the communities around Black churches don’t exemplify the benefits of the social programs that the politicians who visit them often extol.
Slayton comes from the world of social justice, working as public policy director for the Public Justice Center, as a program officer with Associated Black Charities and now with the Maryland Center on Economic Policy. He has guided politicians such as Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume.
Along the way, he earned a Master of Divinity degree from Howard University in Washington, DC and a doctorate from Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York. Slayton offers critiques of Black churches and the politicians who visit them, but also sees great value in the relationships. He wrote Politically Preaching, he said, because he wants to continue to be a guide to that world.
David Nitkin: Let’s talk about the evolution and status of the Black church in politics.
Kevin A. Slayton Sr.: There has historically been – from post-Reconstruction, and moving through to the late 60s to present time – this intimate relationship between the African American church and electoral politics.
In the preface of the book, I introduced the reader to the Sunday morning, two weeks after the shooting of the nine people at Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina… And the idea that there’s a white guy in this worship service, and the white guy is Joe Biden. Obama doesn’t go; he sends Joe Biden. And you know how news changes so fast. What we saw here and in Baltimore and around the world of that worship experience, which was very emotional, was about 15 to 30 seconds of film, just a snippet, for a day or maybe two.
But citizens and residents of the state of South Carolina, they saw those loops for possibly an entire month. And so politically speaking, you fast forward: Who loses New Hampshire and Iowa and the Democratic primary and keeps moving forward? Most folks would have bowed out. But I think Biden knew, ‘If I could just get to the church in South Carolina, they may very well save my political career.’ And how it evolves is we hear Jim Clyburn sort of testify to this: “Joe knows South Carolina. But South Carolina knows Joe.”
And that is sort of like the entry I want folks to get. There has been this salvific space for the Black church, uniquely positioned for electoral politics. You have these cyclical visits by political leaders that don’t occur in mosques, temples or synagogues. But they routinely happen throughout Protestant African American congregations.
DN: Much of your focus is on Baltimore, but you talk about how this Black church influence extends into the White House.
KS: John DiLulio is the first person to serve, as we know, in this capacity as a sort of a faith-based liaison for a political office. And he does that for George H.W, Bush. In 1988, he is the first person to serve in that role. And moving forward, you have a number of politicians who recognize the influence of the Black church, and of voter turnout, etc. But there is still this desire to have what I would call ‘the nod’ from local leadership. The way I sort of approach it there is I argue that there’s no way you get to a President Barack Obama without the influence of the local black preacher, who is Jeremiah Wright.
Politics is local, and no one comes from the outside, into east or west Baltimore, certainly not the southside of Chicago, unless someone validates them on the inside. And we can watch this engagement, this dance, as politicians will enter those sacred spaces. And the pastor, recognizing the laws that prevent them from endorsing will say something like this: ‘I can’t tell you who to vote for. But this is who I’m voting for.’ And that signals to the congregation that this is our person.
And so many politicians go there seeking that. But what we’ve seen in Maryland, over the years, there have been different clergy-led groups who would make official endorsements, and folks will wait to see who they’re endorsing.
DN: This can’t come naturally to all politicians.
KS: I left the Rawlings-Blake administration because I wanted to go into ministry after lobbying. I spent years in Annapolis lobbying, and trying to merge the two worlds. So I worked with different politicians. And one of the first I worked with was Peter Franchot around the Stop Slots campaign. Peter is Catholic, and entering this atmosphere was uniquely different for him. So there were some conversations we had to have about how do you engage this space? How do you make yourself look authentically present in that moment? I think more so now, regardless of race, they have to sort of do that work and do that calculation.
DN: But Baltimore is at the heart of it all for you.
KS: In the book, I talk about how Baltimore sort of uniquely created this relationship. You go back to 1968 and the election of Judge Joe Howard [a former federal judge who became the first Black judge elected to what is now the Circuit Court of Baltimore.] What I found most fascinating about it was [law professor and political advisor] Larry Gibson, who is just an amazing individual, and he was maybe 26 or 27 at the time. And Larry still has in his possession the hand cards they gave out for that campaign. And what they did was they put them in every single African-American church on the east and the west side, with a bull’s eye on it. And they told them to single shot [or vote for just one person out of a group.] So Judge Joe Howard comes out at the top of the voting list. And there’s a guy sitting at the table with these clergy who are doing this by the name of Parren Mitchell. And Parren says, ‘Well, hell, you did it so well for him do it for me next year.’ [Mitchell was then elected to Congress in 1970]. And ever since they have run that same playbook, that that level of influence on electoral politics, I think it’s still evident. And it’s evident in the fact that, as we see in this cycle, candidates will still flock to Black congregations.
DN: How does the concept of the separation of church and state come into play here?
I propose in my book that post-Reconstruction is the first time we hear the language of separation of church and state, not so much as a legal term, but as literally one of the first dog whistles. And it basically says preachers need to stay in their lane….
During the Clinton administration, language was created, known as charitable choice. And the goal, in a nutshell, was to sort of unblur the line of what we know as separation of church and state. A lot of faith communities were afraid of violating or crossing that line. What charitable choice language basically said was that you can now engage with government agencies and reap financial benefit through grants, as long as you are willing to not do two things: proselytize and try to recruit folks to your faith, or to discriminate about how the resources were used.
But charitable choice created this unintended competition: the church down the street gets a grant to do that type of work. And so it sort of silences, that prophetic voice within that faith community.
DN: In the book you talk about preaching as an art form. Can you talk more about that?
KS: There is no other place where we tend to get our information for politics. For our community in particular, it has been the way information was disseminated. So for the Black preacher, who emerges through slavery, who’s been provided this theology, they have to find a way to take these stories and make them useful for their audience. So you’ve got to find a way to tell the Exodus story in a way that folks see themselves. One of my professors, Joseph Evans, always said that the Black preacher preaching is either blues, or jazz.
And what the Black preacher has been able to do is to take the blues, which was the reality of segregation, oppression, etc, and then somehow make its way through the blues, in order to get to a place where it will be reflected in what we know as jazz. Jazz was nothing more than improvisation. So we took what was handed us, and then we were able to improvise in a way that each person recognized they had to get a piece and do their own piece, you know, to make it better. But in the end, they had to come together.
So preaching had to do every week, it had to be a place to sort of lift the spirits of people who had who had been feeling the blues all week. It did beyond just the preaching; it also did it in the gathering, because for many of those folks, outside of that space, they were ‘boy,’ or ‘girl’ or disrespected in other ways. But when they came into that place, they had position and authority. They were chair of the deacon board, they were president of the choir. They became somebody in those spaces.
And so preaching had to embody the scriptures in a way that allowed folks to see themselves in the text. And the best ones at it, they’re able to do it and to make folks for at least a brief moment escape their realities and sort of see a place where there was justice, there was fairness, the crooked places were made straight. They saw a better day through through effective preaching.
