BAVUAL The African Heritage Magazine Spring 2024

FAITH ISSUE

THE AFRICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE

BAVUAL

BLACK JESUS

10 BEST U.S. CITIES

FACT OR MYTH?

FOR BLACKS TO LIVE IN

UNCLE TOM NOT WHO YOU THINK HE WAS

THE BLACK SCHOLAR WHO INTERVIEWED HITLER IN 1932

PELÉ WHY HE IS STILL LOVED 2 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH

SPRING 2024

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ARE YOU “PASSING”?

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IN THIS ISSUE

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My Take

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How to deal with family and friends you disagree with.

The Drift

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The power of propaganda, and how to combat it.

True Grit Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, the South African lawyer who called Israel to account for its genocide of Gaza before the World Court.

Famous Winters March 20, 1852: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published as a novel, forever bestowing a controversial stereotype on the African American male.

The Times Black women under siege are fighting back hard - and often winning; black celebrities are targeted by A.I. smears on social media.

African Faces of the World The subtle historical war between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks.

Destinations

10 best U.S. cities for African Americans to live in. 2nd of 2 Parts.

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IN THIS ISSUE

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82 86 Saint Bavual’s Revelation Angel Bavual Adisa, killed on a time travel mission to Nazi Germany in 1944, returns from Heaven to see the world of 2044.

COVER: Black Jesus - Fact Or Myth?

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Educate Yourself

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BAVUAL reveals the answer, as well as how Christianity split into two religions: one for blacks, the other for whites.

Two black scholars make history; one for interviewing Adolf Hitler in 1932, the other for facing unfair ridicule over his controversial theories on race.

The Hustle

Marques Brownlee and KSI lead the list of the top influencers on YouTube

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Jocks

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Why is soccer legend Pelé still remembered and loved two years after his death?

Roll of Honor

8 honored men and women, flowers that bloom in spring

Benediction “The Sermon on the Mount” by Jesus Christ

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BAVUAL

THE AFRICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE

Bavual Vol. 3 Issue 2 Spring 2024

Editorial Earl A. Birkett Editor Stephen G. Hall, PhD, Special Editor Associate Editor Kristen Jones

BAVUAL ADISA OUR MUSE

Design & Illustrations Debasish Sarma Editorial Advisor Myeshia C. Babers, PhD Marketing Multitrends International earl.a.birkett@gmail.com

BAVUAL: Swahili for "power, strength, force" ADISA: Yoruba for "one who is clear"

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Earl A. Birkett Founder & President Contents copyright

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My Take How to Deal With

Family and Friends Who Disagree With You Before I begin, let me first say that, when it comes to personal conflict, there are no uniform solutions to handling it. Human beings and their individual vagaries are much too complex to pigeon-hole. That’s largely why it often takes years for psychiatrists to rummage through the psyche of the human mind before they can reach that sweet spot of revelation that would lead to a cure. My motive here is not to psychoanalyze anyone but rather to offer tips that, based on my personal experience, have proven to be somewhat effective in removing the scales from someone’s eyes.

My first advice: never be condescending and never, ever, be judgmental. Disagreements go two ways, and while we are all innately programmed to believe that we are right and the other person is wrong, it’s not always that simple.

There is a phrase going around that says “facts don’t care about your opinion.” True enough, but the conflict arises when one side stubbornly contends that their facts are irrefutable and the other side is not, especially if the dispute is a heated one. Therefore, always remain calm and listen to their points, in spite of how inflammatory they may be. That will help you keep control and become the dominant figure, which will cause them to eventually calm down to meet your emotional level. Calmness and the ability to back up your stance with provable facts will make them think that maybe, just maybe, their argument is unsustainable. At the very least it will make them think, not emote.

Second and more controversial, never be afraid to walk away from the dispute and put them in a time-out. They will at first be insulted and play the age card - “I’m a grown man/woman and you won’t treat me like a child” but ignore it. Again, they need time to blow off steam and think about what they’ve said.

Always re-enforce your action by reminding the person that you still love them but you can go no further to try to convince them without going around in circles. They must now catch up to you.

Third and most sad if it happens, there may be a point when that person says something completely unforgiveable, like sinking into hate speech. At that point, (always) politely remind them that you do not condone hate and immediately separate yourself from them. Such a person cannot be reasonable; it is now is problem that they themselves must solve, either through professional help or a realization that they have transgressed. When they come back to you asking for forgiveness, always grant it and invite them back into the fold. (By the way, this process, which is a prime feature of many religions, including Christianity, is also an African concept called ubuntu, which is described on the Benediction, page 98, of BAVUAL’s Summer 2022 issue.)

Always remember, being wrong can go both ways, and just as you chastise them, they can also chastise you if you are the one who is wrong, so don’t let pride prevent you from admitting your own transgression and apologizing to them.

I have spent most of my life searching for the perfect person; so far I have come up with a donut. Learn to live with the other person’s flaws, just as they’ve learned to live with yours. Just appreciate your mutual strengths. You will both be much happier that way.

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The Drift

The Power of Propaganda And How To Combat It

The early 21st century is one of those eras were one segment of the populace, often led by a demagogic leader, tries to whip enough fear and resentment, nearly always irrational, to rise up against civil society and seek to dominate it, or in extreme cases, eliminate it altogether.

Going back to the pharaohs, history is littered with tyrants who have sought to enslave the masses by telling them lies before brutalizing them. The formula is always the same: eliminate their source of information and replace it with disinformation or misinformation that only they want you to know. After the despot has captured the hearts and minds of the people, he will find it easy to control them by mental intimidation only, at first without the use of an army except to control the few rebels, at least until they can rally enough opposition to force the despot’s ouster.

In 2024, it has become far easier than at any other period in history for the selfishly power-hungry to apply the technique of propaganda as described above to fool the populace into submission, especially the ones who have been taught by family, religion and peer pressure to accept unconditionally the word of authority figures, whether they are right or wrong. Whereas the technology used to be individual wordof-mouth, then public assemblies that can reach thousands, followed by print and electronic platforms- books, newspapers and magazines and radio - that can reach millions, and finally digital mass media - television, the internet and smartphone apps - that can spread a message to billions in an instant. We know the controllers of mass media - corporations that own Facebook, Twitter/X, Tiktok, Instagram, Baidu, cable TV news and programming, among other platforms - that have the power to not only disseminate propaganda but also censor and censure opposition to it.

So, if you don’t own a platform with the virtually unlimited power of a Facebook or Twitter/X, how do you fight the manipulation?

Well, for openers, you can start your own independent platform like BAVUAL to oppose the propaganda with truth, which thanks to affordable presses and even more affordable websites and apps, are mostly not controlled by big money and thus the owner is freer to speak his mind. With very few exceptions, however, your audience is likely to be far smaller and not nearly as effective, especially if it is progressiveleaning.

The second option is to fight the power from inside the monolith. Work your way through a large news organization, be it The New York Times or NBC News, until you gain a position of stature sufficient enough to call out the propagandist’s lies. Of course, the drawback is that you can easily step on enough ties and get yourself fired, like Mehdi Hassan did as a social justice anchor on MSNBC or Don Lemon on Twitter/X when he dared to confront its owner Elon Musk, who promptly canned his show.

The third and most drastic option is revolution. Organize a revolt like past outsiders Zapata, Lenin, Mao, Castro and Che, Gandhi, Mandela, the Iranian mullahs and the opponents of Soviet bloc dictators in Eastern Europe. You might succeed, sometimes at great cost, or you can fail spectacularly, like Alexei Navalny’s fateful challenge to strongman Putin in Russia. You must also consider the fact that the revolutionary can eventually become the new despot, which will necessitate endless revolutionary change - the old “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” But hey, no guts no glory, as they say.

The hardest part of fighting any system of propaganda, of course, is having the will to start in the first place. Being David trying to bring down Goliath seems scary and doomed to failure at first. However, David is not the only one to beat the odds and win. Tigers are often made of paper and all it takes is a little courage, self-confidence and persistence, and also some intelligent planning, to prevail.

Do you have what it takes?

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True Grit

Tembeka Ngcukaitobi A Courageous Stance Against Genocide

By Stephen G. Hall, PhD The events of October 7th, 2023, have transfixed the world’s attention on the Middle East. The surprise attack led by Hamas on Israel has led to an extended conflict. Increasingly, this conflict has engulfed the region and reignited the long running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Israeli politicians have likened the attack to America’s 911 and have feverishly worked to influence world opinion to enable an aggressive response.

Israeli forces have continuously bombed Gaza and engaged in an invasion to rid Gaza of Hamas. Unfortunately, the Israeli campaign in Gaza has an outsized impact on civilian populations in the area. By some estimates, more than 33,091 Palestinians and 1,410 Israelis (as of April 8, 2024) have been killed in the conflict. This situation is compounded by Palestinians trapped in Gaza who have limited access to supplies such as food, water and gas.

International aid agencies have scrambled to fill the breach. World opinion, while sympathetic to the Israelis, has also increasingly shifted to demanding real solutions to ameliorate the plight of innocent Palestinians.

A significant part of this response has been to raise the issue of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the level of human rights. Given the fact that intensive bombing in Gaza has led to the displacement of thousands of Palestinians coupled with high casualties, some have viewed this behavior as genocidal.

One of the strongest proponents of this position is South Africa. Long sympathetic to the Palestinian cause as demonstrated by the longstanding friendship between Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat, founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), South Africa alleged Israeli conduct of the war violated the Genocide Convention. This provision is known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime

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of Genocide ( CPPCG). The convention criminalizes genocide and obligates all parties to pursue its enforcement. This convention was adopted largely as a response to the German participation in the Holocaust, which involved the deliberate extermination of more than 6 million Jews during World War II. The convention was adopted on December 9, 1948.

The South African team consisted of John Dugard, Adila Hassim, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi and Vaughan Lowe. Highly trained and competent, the team’s leading constitutional expert was Tenbeka Ngcukaitobi.

Ngcukaitobi’s presence brought star power to the prosecution.

Ngcukaitobi has been a rapidly rising star in the legal profession in South Africa. Born in 1976 in Transkei, in the Eastern Cape, he studied law at the University of Transkei. He went on to complete two LLM’s, one at Rhodes University in South Africa and the second at the London School of Economics. He worked in legal aid in the early part of his career at clinics in Mthatha and Grahamstown. Ngcukaitobi was admitted to the Johannesburg Bar in 2010.

After a decade of practice in which he conducted litigation on a wide variety of constitutional issues, he achieved silk status in 2020. Silk status simply means Senior Counsel or King’s Counsel, which is a seniority level in countries previously colonized by the British.

He has also represented Jacob Zuma, former president of South Africa.

One of his most high-profile appearances occurred before the Hague. In establishing the basis for South Africa’s allegation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Ngcukaitobi used the statements and activities of the Israeli army, its leaders, legislators in the Knesset and popular cultural figures. In his recorded remarks before the International Court at The Hague, which consisted of a 26-minute oral argument, he emphasized the previous points. He cited calls for genocide from Israeli soldiers who were

filmed calling for the wiping out of the seed of Amalek, a biblical term that refers to the enemies of Israel. He also pointed to the words and speeches of Israeli leadership, especially cabinet members calling for an aggressive war against the Palestinians. Members of the Knesset called for bombing and the creation of a second nakba, an Arabic word translated as “disaster,” and references the initial displacement of Palestinians because of the creation of Israel in1948. The Knesset member argued the new nakba should outstrip the initial displacement, Ngcukaitobi also noted that these sentiments are becoming common among the common citizenry. His argumentation led the court to draw several conclusions in their official ruling. The major points of the ruling are listed below: 1. Israel must take all measures to prevent genocidal acts, as contained in Articles II and III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide..

2. Israel must prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to genocide. The Court stated the following about previous utterances by high-level Israeli officials: 3. Israel must take immediate and effective steps to ensure the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza.

4. Israel must preserve evidence of genocide for purposes of a future investigation if deemed necessary.

5. Israel must submit a report to the Court within a month of the date of the order regarding its compliance with the order.

6. Hamas was ordered to release all remaining Israeli hostages “immediately and unconditionally”.

Ngcukaitobi’s presentation was widely praised.

According to one account, when he returned to Johannesburg International Airport, he was created by a small crowd with a placard that read: “Real Superheroes don’t wear capes. They have LLB’s.”

ADVOCATE TEMBEKA NGCUKAITOBI BEFORE THE HAGUE COURT

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Famous Winters

POPULAR DEPICTION OF UNCLE TOM

March 25, 1852

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is Published, Creating A False Black Male Stereotype

By Kristen Jones There are times when a novel becomes so controversial that it leads to conversation for years to come on its topic. One such novel is Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published BY John P. Jewett in 1852 in two volumes , it was an anti-slavery novel that caused many thoughts to be spoken on the topic of slavery and the reality for African Americans at the time. Stowe, who herself was a Christian abolitionist, wrote the novel depicting the attitude that slavery was wrong but that it could be overcome with the love of

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Christianity. At the time the novel was seen as a vital anti-slavery tool, but it also began the start of the portrayal of subservient blacks being called “Uncle Tom”. Uncle Tom’s Cabin opens on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky as two enslaved people, Tom and 4-year old Harry, are sold to pay Shelby family debts.

Developing two plot lines, the story focuses on Tom, a strong, religious man living with his wife and three young children, and Eliza, Harry’s mother. The novel ends when both Tom and Eliza escape slavery: Eliza and her family reach Canada, but Tom’s freedom only comes in death. Simon Legree has Tom whipped to

death for refusing to deny his faith or betray the hiding place of two fugitive women. Other characters in the story include Eliza’s husband George Harris, Topsy, a young black girl whose mischievous behavior hides her pain; Eva, an angelic, young white girl who is wise beyond her years; charming, elegant but passive St. Clare, Eva’s father; and finally, cruel, violent Simon Legree.

The Widely Misunderstood Novel’s Enduring Significance It is said that the novel was so widely known that Abraham Lincoln coined it the “novel that began the [civil] war”. Winning many accolades, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best selling novel of the 19th century next to the Bible. Stowe, a Connecticutborn teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, wrote the novel as a response to the passage, in 1850, of the second Fugitive Slave Act. Stowe was partly inspired to create Uncle Tom's Cabin by the slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself published in 1849. Stowe was also inspired by the posthumous biography of Phebe Ann Jacobs, a devout Congregationalist of Brunswick, Maine.

Both gave first hand accounts of their life as a slave, as well as their future release from slavery and continuing self sufficiency. Another source Stowe used as research for the novel was American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a volume co-authored by Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters.

Stowe also conducted interviews with people who escaped slavery.

Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial in The National Era, an abolitionist periodical, starting with the June 5, 1851, issue. It was originally intended as a shorter narrative that would run for only a few weeks. Stowe expanded the story significantly, however, and it was instantly popular, such that protests were sent to the Era office when she missed an issue. Initially, the character Tom- called “Uncle” Tom in the Southern fashion of showing respect for an older man - was viewed sympathetically by the novel’s readers. Stowe made him an exemplar of virtue and dignity who is far superior in character to the white slaveholders portrayed. He lives by his Christian convictions, opposing violence despite the brutality that he himself bears. In the mid20th century, however, the long-suffering and saintly character came to be seen as submissive

and spineless. He was taken as a negative example, and to be called an “Uncle Tom” became a deep insult. Times changed into years where the base intentions of the novel were forgotten along the way.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate sensation and was taken up eagerly by abolitionists in the North, while, along with its author, it was vehemently denounced in the South, where reading or possessing the book became an extremely dangerous enterprise. This seminal work was adapted for theatre multiple times beginning in 1852; because the novel, through its use of the themes and techniques of theatrical melodrama popular at the time, made transition to the stage easy. These adaptations played to capacity audiences in the United States and contributed to the already significant popularity of Stowe’s novel in the North and the animosity toward it in the South.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe shared ideas about the injustices of slavery, pushing back against dominant cultural beliefs about the physical and emotional capacities of black people. Stowe became a leading voice in the anti-slavery movement, and yet, her ideas about race were complicated.

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The Times VICTIMS STRIKE GOLD MAGA POLITICIAN GETS $148 MILLION VERDICT FOR DEFAMING TWO BLACK WOMEN Mother-daughter poll workers Freeman and Moss sued Rudy Giuliani - and won January 6, 2021 was a seminal moment in U.S. history. That afternoon, a violent throng of people believing then-President Donald Trump’s lie that he actually won the 2020 presidential election by millions of votes, despite actual evidence to the contrary - in fact, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, defeated Trump by 306-232 Electoral College and 7 million popular votes - stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Their mission, instigated by Trump himself and which thankfully failed, was to permanently stop the quadrennial counting of the electoral votes by overthrowing the Congress and hanging Vice President Mike Pence and any other members who stood in their way in their effort to anoint Trump as president for another term. Before these supporters were stopped, seven people were killed, including a Capitol police officer, and many other police were wounded, some severely. Property was damaged or destroyed and many people inside the Capitol building hid for fear of their lives. The result was the arrest and prosecution of more than 1,200 rioters for various Capitol offenses and the conviction and sentencing of more than 460, the longest being given to Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio (22 years) and Oath Keepers

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SHAYE MOSS AND HER MOTHER RUBY FREEMAN

founder Stewart Rhodes (18 years).

Both are white supremacy groups.

The spark for the insurrection began the day after the November 3rd election, when Trump, at the urging of his campaign team among them former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani - successfully urged Trump to declare that the election was “rigged.” What ensued was a two-month long scheme by the Trump team to replace real elector with fakes ones and to cast doubt on the results by intimidating and framing election poll workers.

The two workers most severely affected were Georgian Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, who were accused, most vociferously by Giuliani, of fraud during the counting of votes at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

Before they were cleared of any wrongdoing in June 2023, after a two-year investigation, the mother-daughter combo endured a hellish existence that included harassment from Trumpers like the ones Kanye West sent to their home to extract a “confession,”

and death threats that forced the two women to abandon their Georgia home and go into hiding.

“There is nowhere I feel safe.

Nowhere,” Freeman said in congressional testimony in June 2022. “I have lost my name and I have lost my reputation. ... All because a group of people starting with number 45 [Trump] and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter."

Thankfully, the story has a partially happy ending. Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani for defamation and emotional stress and in December 2023 won a $148 million judgment against him, which appropriately has upended his life.

RUDY GIULIANI

TWO PROMINENT BLACK WOMEN FACE THE HEAT Congressperson Bush and DA Willis under scrutiny Right-wing zealots, encouraged by the racially-motivated resignation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, the Ivy League institution’s first black (and black female) leader, switched their targets to two other high-profile black women: Representative Cory Bush, A Missouri Democrat who is a highly vocal part of the progressive wing in the House, and Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, who in August 2023 issued an indictment of former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants on 41 felony counts (later reduced to 35, including three for Trump, by trial judge Scott McAfee) under the state’s RICO, or racketeering statute, for elction interference in Georgia in 2020.

The Bell Investigation The Justice Department, responding to investigations by a conservative group, began their own investigation of Representative Bell into whether she mishandled campaign funds, including when she hired her husband, Cortney Merritts, to handle security for her campaign.

Despite Bush being cleared of any wrongdoing by the Office of Congressional Ethics - despite their recommendation to dismiss all allegations against her after concluding that her husband had performed “bona fide” security work and did not appear to have been overpaid, and that Ms. Bush faced a level of threats that justified the work -the Justice Department nevertheless opened their investigation of Bush in January 2024. The congresswoman immediately

CORY BUSH

a statement saying she is “fully cooperating” with the federal inquiry, adding, “Since before I was sworn into office, I have endured relentless threats to my physical safety and life.

As a rank-and-file member of Congress, I am not entitled to personal protection by the House, and instead have used campaign funds as permissible to retain security services. I have not used any federal tax dollars for personal security services. Any reporting that I have used federal funds for personal security is simply false.” (Bush is also being investigated by the House Ethics Committee.)

As of publication, there have been no new developments in the investigation, but it has affected Bush politically; she currently trails her opponent, Wesley Bell, in the polls and in campaign cash on hand, for the August 2024 congressional primary.

FANI WILLIS

had a “conflict of interest” because she conducted a fairly brief romantic relationship with Wade, which they subsequently admitted to. After a two-month hearing with the trial judge, Scott McAfee, no wrongdoing by either Willis or Wade was uncovered, but the hearing did much to embarrass them and sully their reputations with unpleasant details of their personal and sex life and to temporarily make the two prosecutors the accused rather than the defendants in the trial. WIllis called the entire proceedings racially-motivated; many blacks and non-blacks agreed with her. In March 2024, Judge McAfee ruled that Willis could remain as prosecutor if Wade, who was instrumental in securing both the indictments and the plea deals, resigned, which he promptly did. For the moment, the case proceeds but without a definite trial date for 2024 or beyond.

NATHAN WADE

Willis’ Personal Life On The Hot Seat The DA had a surge of momentum with her case, securing pleas deals from four of the 19 defendants, most of whom played lower-level roles in the election scheme, in December 2023, before she hit a nearly critical speed bump the following month. A co-defendant, Michael Rom, filed an ethics complaint with the court against Willis and her special counsel, Nathan Wade, alleging that she

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A.I. DISINFORMATION MACHINE SMEARS BLACK A-LISTERS Social media “Deepfakes” black stars for defamation and profit YouTube videos using a mix of artificial intelligence-generated and manipulated media to create fake content have flooded the platform with salacious disinformation about dozens of Black celebrities, including rapper and record executive Sean “Diddy” Combs, TV host Steve Harvey, actor Denzel Washington and By remixing real news with false information and Bishop T.D. Jakes. allegations, the videos are able to quickly gain traction by appearing to provide new information Many of the video titles and voiceovers have about topics that are already attracting attention.

The flood of manipulated and AI-generated fake pushed fake narratives that stem from recent rape and sex trafficking lawsuits against Combs, content on YouTube coincides with its parent company Google’s forays into generative AI including a high-profile case settled between technology, as well as rising fears about him and entertainer Casandra “Cassie” disinformation efforts targeting 2024 elections Ventura.* Other videos have implicated figures around the globe. YouTube announced in like Jakes in the allegations against Combs without evidence and used manipulated media November that it plans to enforce a new policy requiring labels for synthetic and manipulated to depict the celebrities engaging in lewd acts media in videos. That system isn’t yet in place. and exaggerated displays of emotion in video thumbnails.

NBC News reviewed a dozen YouTube channels posting what appears to be AI-generated fake news content about Black celebrities. Many of the videos it reviewed are clickbait, meaning the YouTube video titles and thumbnails indicate narratives or allegations that aren’t in the videos themselves. Some of the videos have millions of views, and the median number of combined views for each channel was 21 million.

In a statement to NBC News, a spokesperson for YouTube said the platform reviewed and took a number of actions on several of the channels it flagged, “including terminating three channels for violating our Terms of Service, removing additional channels from our monetization program and removing a number of videos and thumbnails.” The content flourished before and after YouTube’s actions.

It can be difficult to distinguish between AIgenerated media and media that is manipulated without the use of AI (sometimes referred to as “cheapfakes”). One out of the dozen channels NBC News reviewed responded to a request for comment. In an email, a person representing the channel, which focuses on celebrity news, said it uses “AI text-to-speech technology” for some videos but denied using AI tools for the scripts being read out loud or the thumbnails. AI-generated voice technology is thought to have been used in a fake President Joe Biden robocall that told New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the January 2024 primary.

A lawyer representing Jakes, the megachurch preacher in Texas who was the target of some of the videos, told NBC News that Jakes is just the latest prominent person to be targeted by fake and false information on YouTube.

A YouTube search for “TD Jakes” surfaces false content that appears to use generative AI tools for The videos about Black celebrities often tie back voiceovers in the first five search results. A deepfake detection expert, Siwei Lyu, a professor of to real, shocking and scandalous events in the computer science and engineering at the news.

University at Buffalo, ran the audio from two of the *In March 2024 Combs came under investigation by Homeland videos in search results for Jakes through an openSecurity Investigations over alleged sex trafficking, sexual source AI Speech Classifier model developed by AI assault, and the solicitation and distribution of illegal narcotics researchers at the University of Seoul in South and firearms. His houses in Los Angeles and Miami were searched under warrant to HMI agents issued by the Southern Korea. The model found that audio from one video District of New York.

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was more than 87% likely to have been AI-generated and that audio in the second video was more than 90% likely to have been AI-generated. YouTube suspended the channel responsible for the content in the search results from its monetization program, meaning it can no longer profit from its videos.

But YouTube channels relying on what appears to be at least partly AI-generated content have only continued to churn out shocking, false narratives about Jakes, Combs and others. Some videos have ads, which indicates that they are earning revenue for their creators. Because some of the fake news videos are able to generate high views and engagement, they are also ranked higher algorithmically in search results and recommended content — YouTube’s and Google’s algorithms are also AI-driven.

A YouTube video posted January 14, 2024, titled “BREAKING NEWS: Diddy Is Found GUILTY & ARRESTED In Tupac’s Case!” has over 100,000 views.

The thumbnail shows Combs, his face contorted in anguish, next to an image of a police officer escorting him by the arm. A Google search for “Diddy arrested” returned the video as the top result.

But Combs wasn’t arrested on Jan. 14. He was arrested in 2015 — not in the murder of Tupac Shakur, but on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon in an incident at UCLA, which is where some of the Jan. 14 YouTube video is from (prosecutors declined to pursue charges in connection with the 2015 arrest, and Combs’ lawyer commented at the time about being “thankful” the charges weren’t pursued).

Lyu also ran the Jan. 14 video through the same AI detection model. The model determined it was over 98% likely to have been AI-generated. Lyu said the AI detection model identifies elements discernible in synthetic audio that aren’t present in audio from real voices.

Kat Tenbarge, nbcnews.com January 30, 2024

African Faces of the World

A Matter of Color The Silly War Over Racial Acceptance

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By Kristen Jones Passing has been a part of American society for years. The opportunity for passing during the colonial and pre-Civil War eras most often resulted from the mating of slave owner and slave followed by additional whitening and inbreeding of mulatto offspring who were then able to slip virtually unnoticed into the dominant society. In the postReconstruction South politicians schemed to legally segregate the races which necessitated defining who was not white using a combination of percentages and the infamous “one drop rule,” condemning those with observable Negroid features to a life of greater hardship. Unlike Brazil, a nation that had a larger 18th and 19th century black slave population than the United States, there was not a “mulatto escape hatch,” as historian Carl Degler termed it, that permitted those with the taint of slavery in their background to be more easily accepted across the spectrum of society. The complex predicament of persons living double lives passing as whites, deliberately or not, permanently or as a temporary convenience, intrigued a surprising number of major authors whose writings gave rise to the by now familiar trope of the tragic mulatto and the unveiled pretender. Among the books that pursued this theme are The Slave (1836) by Richard

by Charles W. Chesnutt, Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen, the satirical Black No More (1931) by George Schuyler, and Colcorton (1944) by Edith Pope. Late 20th century works on passing include Oxherding Tale (1982) by Charles Johnson, Caucasia (1998) by Danzy Senna, and The Human Stain (2000) by Philip Roth.

There are many stories told throughout the years of those who have lived their life under a cloak of mystery regarding their race. There was New Yorker Theophilus McKee, who'd chosen to live as a white man for all of his adult life. That's until he stepped forward to claim a huge inheritance as the only colored descendant of Negro Civil War veteran Col. John McKee. His claim and the court fight with his biracial siblings made national

news. Then there's the sad tale of Elsie Roxborough, a beauty from a distinguished Detroit family who became the first black girl to live in a dorm at the University of Michigan. She tried acting in California, then moved to New York to live as a white woman.

When her disapproving father refused to support her, Roxborough, then known as Mona Manet, committed suicide. Her grieving and equally pale sister passed as a white woman to claim the body, so Roxborough's secret wouldn't be given away. Her death certificate declared she was white.

Racial passing occurs when a person who is classified as a member of a racial group is accepted or perceived ("passes") as a member of another racial group. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a black or

Rachel Dolezal’s “Black Like Me” Experience That some white people identify with black people out of guilt, empathy, envy, admiration, love, profit or perhaps all six is not a secret.

Some whites, mostly well-meaning, take it to extremes, even falsely identifying themselves as actually black. One such recent example is the case of Rachel Dolezal.

In 2015, Dolezal, a white woman by birth, was leader of the Spokane, Washington branch of the NAACP when the local newspaper outed her for falsely claiming to be a black woman.

Considered by many to have an extreme psychosis regarding her race - claimed by her

to be the result of her white parents having adopted four back children - promptly lied about her background, causing her to lose her jobs as NAACP branch leader and parttime teacher at a local university. Since then, Dolezal, who legally changed her name to an African moniker, Nkechi Amare Diallo, has doubled down on her race claim, identifying ethnically as “human” and culturally as black.

Though briefly famous, she has been struggling financially. She lost her current teaching job when the school found out she had an OnlyFans account.

Hildreth and Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown. Postemancipation works that pursued this theme include Maria Lydia Child’s A Romance of the Republic (1867), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), The House Behind the Cedars (1920) BAVUAL SPRING 2024 | 19

brown person or one of multiracial ancestry who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination. In the Antebellum South, passing as a white was a temporary disguise used as a means of escaping slavery. Other instances include cases of Jews in Nazi Germany attempting to pass as "Aryan" and non-Jews to escape persecution.

A phenomenon known as "reverse passing" has also been used to describe a number of instances of racial misrepresentation, in which certain individuals deliberately misrepresent their racial or ethnic background. A similar occurrence has been instances of persons passing or attempting to pass as Native Americans or First Nations people, sometimes given the name "Pretendians", a portmanteau of the words pretend and Indian.

Passing was used by some African Americans to evade segregation.

Those who were able to pass as

white often engaged in tactical passing or passing as white in order to get a job, go to school, or to travel. Outside of these situations, "tactical passers" still lived as black people, and for this reason, tactical passing is also referred to as "9 to 5 passing." The writer and literary critic Anatole Broyard saw his father pass in order to get work after his Louisiana Creole family moved north to Brooklyn before World War II. What motivates someone to disguise their race, gender, religion, etc.? The black experience with passing as white in the United States contrasts with the experience of other ethnic minorities that have features that are clearly non-caucasoid. The concept of passing applies only to blacks, consistent with the nation's unique definition of the group. A person who is one-fourth or less American Indian or Korean or Filipino is not regarded as passing if he or she intermarries and joins fully the life of the dominant community, so the minority ancestry need not be hidden. It is often suggested that the key

reason for this is that the physical differences between these other groups and whites are less pronounced than the physical differences between African blacks and whites, and therefore are less threatening to whites. However, keep in mind that the one-drop rule and anxiety about passing originated during slavery and later received powerful reinforcement under the Jim Crow system.

In today’s society, the issue isn’t as prevalent although it does still exist. Discussion nationwide has continued regarding America’s thoughts on race and what it means to “pass.” Whether or not society will ever accept someone’s reasoning behind their decision to appear to be something they're not is not always a selfish decision.

Society itself can sometimes assume that someone is an identity or race that they aren’t. Are these people put to the same judgment?

To pass or not to pass, it is an individual’s personal choice as long as they are willing to accept the consequences, no matter how dire.

America’s “Black” Presidents The rumors of mixed race among past U.S. presidents have often been used to personally sully them by their political enemies. Questionable research has ensnared Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln,

Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower nearly all of whom have been either sympathetic to black people or at least neutral to them. The claims went nowhere.

However, there have been two notable exceptions.

Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), one of the few presidents to call for black rights well before the civil rights era and presided over a period when the Ku Klux Klan reached the height of its political power and cultural influence, was branded a mulatto by a bogus historian. The claim stuck for many decades until it was ultimately disproven by DNA testing in 2015.

William J. “Bill” Clinton (1993-2001) did the most to advance the status of American blacks up to that time, so supporters and critics alike dubbed him “the first black

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president” and not for that reason alone.

Clinton, a very charismatic man, had the ability to communicate to black audiences (and, facetiously, a playboy image and a backstory that personally relates to blacks on money and marriage matters didn’t hurt).

THE CROSSOVERS

school in rural Sparta, Georgia, and thereafter.

Throughout much of world history, particularly in Western culture, the mere hint of having even a drop of black blood has killed careers and personal lives, causing very light-skinned blacks to associate as white, right up until the time of Barack Obama. Though the “stigma” slightly remains, it is far from what it was in the past. Here are some key examples, past and present: American abolitionist Ellen Craft (1826–1891) escaped from slavery in 1848 by posing as a white lady, using her husband William Craft as her servant. They traveled a perilous route before arriving in Philadelphia. The abolitionist movement received significant attention and support after their escape. They spent over two decades in England after evading slave catchers in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act, where they raised their children and opposed the Confederacy throughout the Civil War.

The Harlem Renaissance and modernism are frequently associated with American poet and author Jean Toomer (1894- 1967), despite his outspoken opposition to these associations.

Toomer wrote Cane (1923), his most well-known work, both while he was the principal of a black

The introduction of the book, which connects the lives of six distinct women together with what appears to be an autobiographical link, has been dubbed “the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation” by sociologist Charles S. Johnson.

Fredericka Carolyn “Fredi” Washington (19031994) was an American-born African-American actress. In the 1920s and 1930s, she was one of the first black Americans to be recognized for her theater and cinema performances.

Washington portrayed Peola, the young lightskinned lady who decides to pass for white in the 1934 film adaptation of Imitation of Life, probably her most well-known performance. Following her final film performance in One Mile from Heaven (1937), she quit Hollywood and relocated back to New York, where she worked in theater and engaged in civil rights advocacy.

After joining the group in 1918 as an investigator, Walter Francis White (1893 -1955) was an American civil rights activist who oversaw the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 to 1955. He oversaw a comprehensive legal defense strategy against racial discrimination and enfranchisement. He also wrote novels, essays, and was a journalist.

Anatole American author, literary critic, and editor Paul Broyard (1920-1990) contributed to The New York Times. Throughout his career, he also authored short tales, essays, and two novels in addition to his numerous reviews and editorials. A few years after his death, it was found that Broyard had “passed” as white while being a Louisiana Creole of mixed racial origin. This sparked intense debate.

A Broadway and movie musical star, Carol Elaine Channing (1921 – 2019) was an African-American actress, singer, dancer, and comedian. Her characters often had a strong sense of expression and a voice that was easy to recognize, whether singing or using it for humorous effect. In 1949’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and 1964’s Hello, Dolly!, Channing created the major parts and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the latter. She hid her true ethnicity in life and it was only revealed years after her death.

Rashida Jones (born 1976), the daughter of music mogul Quincy Jones and the late actress Peggy Lipton, is best known for blending into the white cast of NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

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Destinations

10 BEST CITIES IN THE U.S. FOR BLACKS TO VISIT - AND LIVE 2ND OF 2 PARTS

When it comes to choosing the best place to live, thoughtful consideration is paramount. It even becomes more crucial if you're a black person, as you'll need a place where you can thrive and feel community support.

By Allen Lee Published in Moneyinc.com October 20, 2023

In this article on the best places for black people to live, we've curated the top places to live if you're black. You'll find your perfect spot here whether you're looking to relocate for career growth, quality of life, safety, community acceptance, or just want some change.

From bustling cities to serene small towns, we offer you valuable insights that will help you discover places that can bring safety, happiness, peace, and love.

Raleigh, North Carolina Raleigh is famous for the "Triangle," or "The City of Oaks," which is a great city for wealth building for Black families. Its diverse population and strong educational systems make it one of the best places for Black families to live.

With a lower-than-average cost of living, Ralegh has affordable neighborhoods. The housing, transportation, and grocery expenses are lower than the national average by 2%, 5%, and 8%, respectively. You can use roughly $1,293.7 for monthly costs and $1,337 for rent.

Healthcare and education systems are top-rated, making them an attraction to many. Furthermore, the city of Raleigh city is safe, with crime rates that are lower than the state average. The high-quality schools, medical services, and a safe environment make this city the best place to live with family.

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Orlando, Florida As of July 2022, Orlando's population was 316,081, 23.5% being Black or African American. It's the home to Disney World and Universal, so if you have kids, it might be the place to raise a family. The city is also known for theaters, amusement parks, sports centers, art galleries, and great restaurants.

Besides being a tourist hotspot, Orlando's education system is top-notch, with numerous learning institutions available. It is this world-class education system that boosts Orlando's economy. Orlando has numerous industries such as tourism, technology, advanced manufacturing, aerospace, defense, and much more to boost its economy. The city's unemployment rate was 2.6% in January, and a 6.2% increase in jobs for the private sector.

Orlando's economy will continue to soar with its housing market as people continue to invest.

This place has a thriving community and diverse population rated at 95 over 100. This diversity has seen the city hold multicultural events fostering respect and understanding of different cultures.

The cost of living in Orlando City is reasonable. The monthly cost for a family of four in Orlando is around $4,072.1 without rent.

Housing, healthcare, grocery, and transportation are less expensive, meaning you can do more when living in Orlando.

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New Orleans, Louisiana New Orleans is one of the best cities for Black people to live in. The Black population in Raleigh is 58%, making it the only city in this list having a higher number of Blacks than any other race. With its positive environment and rich history of African-American culture, you can be sure you will relocate to a friendly place where you can live peacefully with your family.

Furthermore, the Blacks have played a significant role economically and culturally for this city to reach where it is today.

New Orleans's education system is higher than the national and state average. Black Education For New Orleans (BE NOLA) is a non-profit organization that supports Black educators and schools for every Black child to ensure each child receives a good quality and culturally affirming education.

New Orleans offers a plethora of good healthcare accessible to most neighborhoods.

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New York City, New York State New York has the largest Black population, which is around 2 million. The city's vibrant job market and diverse industries bring a wealth of job opportunities. It also has a great potential for higher earnings. While the city's cost of living may be higher, 128% higher than the national average, you can offset this with higher earnings.

Furthermore, the cultural offerings, amenities, and diversification make it a desirable place to live. New York is among the best cities for Black singles over 40 because of the many job opportunities, different cultures, world-class lifestyle, and socializing opportunities.

If you're single, your expenses are much lower than those with a family, meaning you can easily afford the New York lifestyle.

When you choose this city, you'll live in one of the safest places in the U.S. New York also has a quality education system, meaning you can advance your studies in the best institution. Being home to the largest healthcare facilities, you can be sure the health services you'll get from here are unmatched.

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Memphis, Tennessee Also known as the "city of music," Nashville is popular for its thriving music and vibrancy. It's also known for its rich history and diverse culture. Its diversity is evident in its cuisine and festivals.

The Black accounts for 27.2% of the 683,622 of its total population. Nashville offers affordable housing and a relatively low cost of living.

Furthermore, it boosts a strong job market, ranking first on the list of top job markets. So, if you're looking for a job, Nashville should be at the top of your list.

The city also offers excellent educational opportunities since the opening of McKee, the first free Black school in Nashville. Healthcare services are excellent in this city as it is home to large hospitals and medical centers, and that's why it's known as "a health services hospital.

Nashville has over 500 healthcare service companies, and the famous Vanderbilt University Medical Center(VUMC) is at the top of the list.

The city's weather is mild; however, winters are cold. Further, the city is considered generally safe, but like any other city, there are crimes from time to time, especially property crimes.

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Washington, D.C. Washington might be a perfect choice if you're looking for the best place to live and start your business. It ranks as the best city for Black entrepreneurs. Washington, D.C., has a thriving job market and diverse population. The city is a backyard for great ideas, innovation, and invention, making it among the best cities for Black professionals.

Washington, D.C., is home to two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and ranks high in education attainment.

The Black population is around 45%, which is the 1st minority group in Washington, D.C. This makes the ratio between Blacks and whites about one-to-one.

Its cost of living is a bit higher, with a single person expected to have monthly costs of around $1593.2, exclusive rent. However, it's not all that bad as you can offset these costs with the higher average income levels.

The artistic and cultural scenes can bring vibrancy into your life and give you the desire to explore more of the city's art appeal and institutions.

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Houston, Texas Houston's population as of 2022 was around 2.3 million. 22.6% are Black or African American alone. This makes the Blacks the second highest race living in this diverse city. Houston has had 1.1 million new residents in the last decade, registering significant population growth.

The city offers a strong job market mostly from industries, particularly oil, and others like health, aerospace, and logistics. Houstons is expected to have around 60,000 job openings in 2023.

One thing we love about Houston is that it has a lower cost of living compared to other metropolitan areas. In fact, it is ranked to have the third lowest living costs, estimated at 5.8% below the nationwide average. This makes it a go-to option if you're looking for affordability. It's also one of the best places for Black families to live, thanks to the quality education, family-friendly environment, and accessibility.

While Houston experiences crime like many other large metropolitan areas, the city's violent crime decreased by 9% and murders by 8%.

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Charlotte, North Carolina Charlotte in North Carolina is among the best cities for Black professionals, all thanks to the numerous job opportunities. The year-over-year employment rate for Charlotte was 4.6%. If you're looking for an occupation, the leisure and hospitality industry is growing tremendously.

For example, in the month of September 2023 alone, there was an addition of 91,000 jobs.

Furthermore, there have been 73,000 jobs added to government jobs in the past year.

While compared with other cities, Charlotte has a reasonable cost of living. Its cost of living is 2% lower than the national average. In addition, Charlotte City records a rate lower than the national average for housing, utilities, groceries, and transportation.

The schools are top-notch and accommodate Black students, and the community is generally welcoming and Black-friendly. Charlotte is also an artistic city with cultural diversity. And if you love leisure and entertainment, this city has the best, from amusement parks to exciting sports.

And if you love the nightlife, Charlotte city has perfect spots to visit. Charlotte is also ranked as one of the best cities for Black singles. Furthermore, the city's weather is mild, which is favorable to all age groups.

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Dallas, Texas Dallas is known for its big business hub, culinary scene, and sports enthusiasm. Around 24% of blacks reside in Dallas, meaning you will live among other Black families if you relocate to this city.

Due to its industrial and cultural diversification, Dallas has become a hotspot for job seekers. Job opportunities are high due to the diverse economy from finance, technology, and healthcare industries. Dallas is home to several Fortune 500, meaning it has a stable economy.

The cost of living is lower than in other major cities. However, the cost is 3% higher than the national average. Housing, food, and transportation are all lower than the national average, while goods and services, healthcare, and utilities are higher than the national average by 10% or more.

This city's luxurious apartments and homes make it more attractive for black people to live a better life at little cost. For example, Dallas can be a go-to option if you are looking for the best cities for Black singles over 40, and New York feels a little expensive.

The education system is generally good, with one of the best public magnet high school systems. Furthermore, Dallas has a humid subtropical climate, meaning you can enjoy more time outdoors and other recreational activities.

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Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta is a well-known place for the Black population to thrive and has been known as the Black Mecca for decades. Black population in Atlanta was 47% in 2020. With its vibrant culture, Atlanta offers a strong sense of community, giving you peace and a feeling of belonging.

It also has robust economic opportunities and is a perfect city, especially for those with middle-class incomes.

If you're looking for a place to raise your kids, Atlanta offers a kid-friendly environment where they can even enjoy outdoor activities. On top of this, Atlanta ranks top in education attainment, with six HBCUS within its locality.

Crime in Atlanta has continually dropped, making most people consider it as probably the safest place to live as a Black.

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YOUR AD SHOULD BE HERE CONTACT EARL A. BIRKETT 212-419-5831 eab@bavual.com

Saint Bavual’s Revelation On the final episode of BAVUAL MEETS (Summer 2023 Issue) , our intrepid time traveling agent Bavual Adisa had been killed while on a mission as a Tuskegee Airman over 1944 Germany when his plane was shot down, after preventing a Nazi takeover of the world during World War II.

The Angel Bavual Adisa Observes 2044 Earth From Heaven

Bavual was rewarded with eternal bliss in Heaven, where he was permitted to see Earth as it would become 100 years later, in the Year 2044.

WHAT WILL HE SEE IN THE FUTURE?

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Angel Bavual was shocked to see that all his efforts to create a better world lay in ruin. WHAT HAPPENED? Racism and racial and class inequality, the fever for conquest between nations for raw power and depleted resources, the unchecked media dissemination of misinformation and propaganda and the deterioration of the climate due to greed and neglect all combined to reach uncontrollable levels.

One day the match was lit...

“My God, it’s all Gone!

Damn You World!”

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“I MUST come back!”

EARTH IN AN ENDLESS STATE OF WAR AND DESTRUCTION Angel Bavual observes all the senseless annihilation and is determined to return to prior Earth in human form to set it right.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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Compiled by Earl A. Birkett from multiple articles ILLUSTRATION: BENAYAH BEN ISRAEL

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The Meaning and the Reality of

Black Jesus HE

is known as the Son of God, Christ the Savior, King of Kings.

God (“Yahweh”) sent his Son to Earth in human form to a simple shepherd and his wife. Born in a manger, the humble carpenter roamed the Earth for 32 years until his was called to minister unto the people that he was the one true way to eternal life if you repented of your sins and believed in him. He admonished them to seek peace on Earth and to treat each other as they themselves would like to treated. The Jewish rabbi was rejected and persecuted by his own religious leaders yet embraced by the less regarded gentiles. He resisted temptation and was persecuted and crucified by them. He then descended

into Hell and conquered Satan, after which he rose from the dead and descended into Heaven to be beside beside His Father and the Holy Spirit (called the Holy Trinity) , promising to return someday to create a New Earth and gather up his followers for eternal life in Paradise.

That’s about all we know from the four Gospels about this man called Jesus of Nazarene, whose presence was on earth is so profound that he split history from BC to AD and has been worshipped for 2000 years by what is now 2.38 billion* Christians - 30 per cent of the world’s population. Above all else, one persistent question remains about this man: what did he look like? *2021 estimate

The Middle East In Biblical Times In order to understand Jesus’ ethnicity, it is necessary to know what the Middle East looked like at the time of his birth in 7 B.C. (The actual year varies, as does his birthdate, which has been accepted in Christendom as December 25.) According to Scripture in the four Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus was born a Jew, Yeshua ben Yoseph, in a manger in Bethlehem, in the land of Canaan (modern-day Israel in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank), to Joseph and Mary, a couple who fled to Egypt upon being warned by an angel in a dream that King Herod, foretold of the Messiah’s birth, ordered that every male infant in Bethlehem and the sorrounding area be killed. Mary, a virgin, was miraculously conceived

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DID HE HAVE AFRICAN ROOTS?

A SCIENTIFIC DEPICTION OF JESUS THROUGH THE USE OF MACHINES.; ACCEPTED AS THE 'REAL' LOOK OF JESUS CHRIST.

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by the Holy Spirit entering her womb.

Later, the couple returned to Nazareth, where they settled, but traveled to Bethlehem to register the impending birth. There was no room at the local inn, so Mary and Joseph were offered room in the manger, The newborn Jesus was visited by wise men or Magi from the East who bring gifts to him as the King of the Jews.

Was Jesus’ skin color that of a black man - or at least a man of color - and how did the world come to envision him as white?

As a Jew of His time, Jesus would have shared the ethnic characteristics common among the people of the Levant (the historical geographic term for the Middle East), a region called Judea that was a part of the Roman Empire. This region (see map on page 37) was (and continues to be) characterized by a diverse population with a range of skin tones, typically from light olive to medium-dark brown, reflecting the broader Semitic descent. Scholars suggest that Jesus likely had a darker complexion, common among the Semitic people of the Middle East.

Revelation 1:14-15 describes a vision of Christ with hair like wool and feet like burnished bronze, which some interpret as implying darker skin and woolly hair, though interpretations of Revelation vary widely and are symbolic.

The majority of Judea’s population, including Jesus’s family, were agrarian, working the land as farmers or shepherds. This outdoor lifestyle, under the Mediterranean sun, would contribute to darker skin tones, typical of Middle Eastern people, as a natural adaptation to the environment.

People in Judea wore tunics made from wool or linen, which, along with their dietary habits and lifestyle, were indicative of their Semitic heritage.

These practical attire choices reflected the climate and terrain of the region,

further emphasizing the connection "While most religious artists have put between the people and their Middle long hair on Christ, most biblical Eastern environment. scholars believe that it was probably short with tight curls.

This In 2015, British scientists, assisted by assumption, however, contradicted Israeli archeologists, have re-created what many believe to be the most what they believe is the most accurate authentic depiction: the face seen in image of the face of Jesus in human the image on the famous — some say history. And they have managed to do infamous — Shroud of Turin. The this as a result of forensic shroud is believed by many to be the anthropology, which uses methods cloth in which Jesus's body was similar to those police have developed wrapped after his death," said the to solve crimes. Using three well report which pointed to 1 Corinthians preserved specimens from the Time of for clues.

Jesus and special computer programs, they were able to recreate a 3D version "Although there is a difference of of Jesus. opinion as to whether the shroud is genuine, it clearly depicts a figure with As was Jewish custom at the time, long hair. Those who criticize the Jesus was likely bearded. As for his shroud's legitimacy point to 1 having long, straight hair, there is Corinthians, one of the many New evidence in the New Testament to the Testament books the apostle Paul is contrary. credited with writing. In one chapter

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he mentions having seen Jesus — then later describes long hair on a man as disgraceful," the report noted. "Would Paul have written 'If a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him' if Jesus Christ had had long hair? For Neave and his team this settled the issue.

Jesus, as drawings from the first century depict, would have had short hair, appropriate to men of the time."

THE “HEAD OF CHRIST”, ALSO CALLED THE SALLMAN HEAD, IS A 1940 PORTRAIT PAINTING OF JESUS OF NAZARETH BY AMERICAN ARTIST WARNER SALLMAN (1892–1968). THE PAINTING IS SAID TO HAVE "BECOME THE BASIS FOR [THE] VISUALIZATION OF JESUS" FOR "HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS" OF PEOPLE.

As for appearance, Jesus apparently was neither tall nor good-looking; he did not appear to be beautiful or majestic in any way, the opposite of the tall, handsome white rock star-type of popular imagery. f Jesus’ appearance was remarkable in any way, the writers of the gospels would have commented on it. For instance, the Gospel of Luke describes a tax collector named Zacchaeus as short.

“Jesus was heading his way, and Zacchaeus wanted to see what he was like. But Zacchaeus was a short man and could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree.” (Luke 19:3-4, CEV) If Jesus was taller than the average people in the crowd, Zacchaeus would have been able to see him above everyone else.

This new image of Jesus gave scientific proof positive that he was at least not a Caucasian of European ancestry.

The greatest evidence of Jesus’ ordinariness is from the Bible: “For he Based solely on the disputed Shroud of grew up before him like a young plant, Turin, which seemed to indicate a Christ with the features that we know and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should today, early artists of northern European ancestry seemed to use their look at him, and no beauty that we own cultural bias in coming up with should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows his likeness. Over time and greatly aided by the Roman Catholic Church and acquainted with grief; and as one for 1500 years the only Christian sect from whom men hide their faces he the image stuck. was despised, and we esteemed him not… But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our Although a handful of blacks claim so, there is no existing evidence that Jesus iniquities; upon him was the had African roots. However, there is chastisement that brought us peace, a great deal of biblical and and with his wounds we are healed.” geneological evidence that points to (Isaiah 53: 2-3, 5)

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Jesus being a man of color and definitely not a white European.

So how did he become white?

One of the oldest pictures of Jesus dates from 235 years after the resurrection. This picture of Jesus healing the paralytic was found in Syria on a wall in the Dura-Europos church, one of the oldest Christian churches in the world. Another ancient picture of Jesus, as a beardless young man as a shepherd, was found in the Roman Catacombs. By 400 C.E., artists were depicting Jesus with a beard.

Art was used in the early church to

teach believers the Bible. Paintings and sculpture provided a way to help illiterate believers of all ages remember stories about Jesus. Art was a part of the Roman culture and was incorporated in early Christianity. The prevalence of art and sculpture in the Roman, Greek, and Syrian culture influenced the role of artistic representation in the church.

Ancient artwork, paintings, and even modern images represent an artist’s imagination and the prevalent culture.

A quick search of Rembrandt’s paintings of Christ from the 17th century CE reveals very different perspective on Christ's appearance than earlier medieval illuminated manuscripts from the 10th century. It is easy to see how the artist’s perspective and culture influenced the clothing, hair color, and even the hairstyle that Jesus wore.

At no time in world history has the physical appearance of Jesus Christ been more pivotal than it is in the United States of America. Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey explore that history in their book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012). The book traces how different races and ethnic groups claimed Christ as their own — and how depictions of Jesus have both inspired civil rights crusades, and been used to justify the violence of white supremacists.

Up until the late 1800s, Blum says Americans were comfortable with Jesus' Semitic roots and depicted him with brown eyes. But as waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants came to the United States, some Americans "became concerned that it was changing the face of America too much, changing it racially, changing it religiously." In the early 20th century, there was an attempt to distinguish Jesus from his Semitic background.

Religious writers and artists who were

advocating for immigration restrictions began to depict Jesus with blond hair and blue eyes.

The Ku Klux Klan (not to mention today’s Christian nationalists) could not rely on Christian doctrine to justify their persecution and violence, so they had to turn to religious icons. "The belief, the value, that Jesus is white provides them an image in place of text," Blum states. "It gets them away from actually having to quote chapter and verse, which they can't really do to present their cause."

Non-whites, including enslaved blacks, could not identify with a Jesus that whites made into a symbol of hate and intolerance that anoints only them as his disciples; they preferred to identify with the Christ of scripture, one who preached love, sacrifice and tolerance, as well as the promise of eternal paradise after death for his believers.

Why does Jesus’ color matter, anyway?

After all, the debate over his race is one of the oldest running arguments in religion. The answer seems to be more cultural and political than religious.

Who can forget when the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared in 2013 that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “was a white man, too,” and “that’s a verifiable fact [it’s the opposite],” a remark she later said was meant in jest.

In fact, it’s a serious matter, for two reasons: First, while the classic Nordic Jesus remains a popular image today in some churches, a movement to replace the white Jesus has long taken root in America. In many Christian circles — progressive mainline churches, churches of color shaped by “liberation theology,” and among Biblical scholars — conspicuous displays of the white Jesus are considered outdated, and to some, offensive. In a rapidly diversifying multicultural America, more Christians want to see a Jesus that looks like them. But in some parts of the country, the white Jesus never left.

SHROUD OF TURIN, JESUS’ ALLEGED BURIAL CLOTH, HAS BEEN CITED FOR CENTURIES AS THE TRUE LOOK OF JESUS AS HAVING CAUCASIAN FEATURES AND LONG HAIR

The spread of white Christian nationalism has flooded social media feeds with images of the traditional white Jesus, sometimes adorned with a red MAGA hat. Former President Trump is selling a “God Bless the USA Bible” with passages from the Constitution and Bill of Rights — a linking of patriotism with Christianity that reinforces a white image of Jesus that is central to Christian nationalism.

Not everyone wants a part of this debate. Some Christians roll their eyes whenever they encounter a question about Jesus’ appearance. They say the Easter story has nothing to do with color and Jesus’ message. They cite scripture like Galatians 3: 28, 29: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

There are also those who are religiously neutral and wonder why people have to bring race into everything. As one exasperated commentator said:

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“I am so sick and tired of people making a issue out of what color Jesus was or what color were the twelve tribes of Israel or if God is black or white. For me, I personally I DON’T CARE what color any of them were or are. There is no verses in the bible that I know of that make an ‘issue’ out of skin color of people in the bible.”

Some, however, argue that the color of Jesus does matter — for a variety of reasons.

Members of various Christian ethnic groups have long since abandoned worshipping a white Jesus. Jesus has been portrayed as Korean, a black man with dreadlocks, as an indigenous Māori with a full-faced tattoo, and even as a black woman. It is no longer uncommon to encounter a black or brown Jesus on stained-glass windows in churches.

down along with Confederate monuments.

Some black theologians who say Jesus was black aren’t being literal: they’re making a larger statement against how Jesus has been traditionally portrayed — as a white man at the top of the social hierarchy. The Rev. Dante Stewart reflected this thinking in an essay entitled, “How I Learned that Jesus is Black.”

“I saw why they insisted on saying Jesus is Black,” Stewart, author of “Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle,” referring to black theologians like James Cone and author Toni Morrison.

“They were not talking about his skin color during his earthly ministry, though it definitely wasn’t white,” Stewart says. “They were talking about his experience, about how Jesus Some black activists have led a knows what it means to live in an movement to discard the White Jesus. occupied territory, knows what it Black theologians like the Rev. Albert means to be from an oppressed Cleage have depicted Jesus as a man of people.” color and a revolutionary. And during the George Floyd racial reckoning in Some also say that Jesus’ color matters 2020, some activists called for statues because of history. depicting a White Jesus to be torn

Blum says the image of a white Jesus has been used to justify slavery, lynching, laws against interracial marriage and hostility toward immigrants deemed not white enough.

When Congress passed a law in the early 20th century to restrict immigration from Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, white politicians evoked the white Jesus, he says.

“One of the arguments was, ‘Well, Jesus was white,’ ‘’ Blum says. “So the theme was, we want America to be profoundly Christian or at least Jesus based, so we should only allow white people in this country.”

Another reason that Jesus’ skin color matters is because a person can’t really understand him or his message without taking into account his skin color and socioeconomic status, says Christena Cleveland, the author and scholar.

Cleveland echoes the sentiments of some scholars who say that Jesus was a poor, oppressed minority — a man who one Black theologian described as a “non-white leader of a non-white people struggling for national liberation” from Rome.

A MURAL OF A BLACK JESUS AT ST. CECELIA'S CATHOLIC CHURCH IN DETROIT, MICHIGAN.

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The Bible 42 | BAVUAL WINTER 2024

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The Oldest Bible On Earth Is From Africa The Garima Gospels , the world’s earliest illustrated Christian book has been saved by a British charity which located it at a remote Ethiopian monastery in 2016.

The Gospels - named after Abba Garima, a monk who arrived in the African country from Constantinople in 494AD and is said to have copied them out in just one day - are beautifully illustrated, the colors are still vivid and thanks to the Ethiopian Heritage Fund have been conserved. This incredible relic has been kept ever since in the Garima Monastery near Adwa in the north of the country, which is in the Tigray region at 7,000 feet.

THE GOSPELS ARE WRITTEN IN TWO VOLUMES, THE FIRST OF WHICH WAS LIKELY WRITTEN BY GARIMA

Experts believe it is also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages. The Gospels, written on goat skin in the early Ethiopian language of Ge’ez, have amazingly survived invasion of Ethiopia

by Muslims and Italians and a fire in the 1930s that destroyed the monastery’s church.

Though the texts had been mentioned by the occasional traveler since the 1950s, it had been thought they dated from the 11th century at the earliest.

Carbon dating, however, gives a date between 330 and 650. The Fund was also allowed incredibly rare access to the texts so experts could conserve them on site.

Yet another nagging question regarding the Christian faith is the authenticity of their most sacred text: the Holy Bible. From its very first sentence, the Bible (which means “the books”) states the story it will explain in its 66 books: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

(Genesis 1:1)

largely been adopted by the Jewish faith and Protestant Christians, and the New Testament, which documents Jesus’ life, ministry, status as part of the Holy Trinity and destiny for mankind, and forms the fundamental doctrine of the Protestant Christian faith. Roman Catholic and a few Orthodox translations contain additional books, recognizing a portion of the Apocrypha.

it through biblical criticism has indirectly impacted culture and history as well. The Bible, which was originally written in Hebrew, Aramacv and Koine Greek, is currently translated or is being translated into about half of the world's languages.

Origin of the Bible As previously stated, the Bible is a To all Christians the Bible is God’s collection of books whose complex Word, as told through a collection of development is not completely Divinely-inspired scriptures that Although its believers consider the understood. The oldest books began as mainly consist of instructions, stories, scriptures to be sacred, their individual songs and stories orally transmitted poetry and prophecies; they reveal the interpretation varies widely, which has from generation to generation.

Supreme Being’s relationship with Man lead to the formation of many sects, Scholars of the twenty-first century are and His purpose for creating him as especially among Christians. only in the beginning stages of well as his spiritual destiny. Many exploring "the interface between other Abrahamic religions, including With estimated total sales of over five writing, performance, memorization, Judaism and Islam, view parts or all of billion copies, the Bible is the bestand the aural dimension" of the texts. its scriptures as sacred. selling publication of all time. It has Current indications are that writing had a profound influence both on and orality were not separate so much The Bible divided in two parts: the Old Western culture and history and on as ancient writing was learned in a Testament, whose 39 books have cultures around the globe. The study of context of communal oral

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THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS - THE OLDEST BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT OF THE HEBREW BIBLE - WERE DISCOVERED IN 1947 IN THE CAVES OF QUMRAN, IN ISRAEL’S WEST BANK performance. The Bible was written and compiled by many people, whom many scholars say are mostly unknown, from a variety of disparate cultures and backgrounds. The four books of the Gospel, which pertain specifically to Jesus’ life, are credited to four of his 12 Apostles, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, each of whom has a book named for them.

The books of the Bible were initially written and copied by hand on papyrus scrolls. No originals have survived.

The age of the original composition of the texts is therefore difficult to determine and heavily debated. Using a combined linguistic and historiographical approach, Hendel and Joosten date the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible (the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and the Samson story of Judges 16 and 1 Samuel) to having been composed in the premonarchial early Iron Age (c. 1200 BCE). The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the caves of Qumran in Israel’s West Bank in 1947, are copies that can be dated to between 250 BCE and 100 CE. They are the oldest existing copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible of any length that are not fragments.

During the rise of Christianity in the first century CE, new scriptures were written in Koine Greek. Christians eventually called these new scriptures the "New Testament", and began referring to the Septuagint of the Hebrew Bible as the "Old Testament".The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work.

Most early Christian copyists were not trained scribes. Many copies of the gospels and Paul's letters were made by individual Christians over a relatively short period of time very soon after the originals were written. There is evidence in the Synoptic Gospels, in the writings of the early church fathers, from Marcion, and in the Didache that Christian documents were in circulation before the end of

the first century. Paul's letters were circulated during his lifetime, and his death is thought to have occurred before 68 during Nero's reign. Early Christians transported these writings around the Roman Empire, translating them into Old Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Latin, and other languages.

The list of books included in the Catholic Bible was established as canon by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397. Between 385 and 405 CE, the early Christian church translated its canon into Vulgar Latin (the common Latin spoken by ordinary people), a translation known as the Vulgate. Since then, Catholic Christians have held ecumenical councils to standardize their biblical canon. The Council of Trent (1545– 63), held by the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant Reformation, authorized the Vulgate as its official Latin translation of the Bible. A number of biblical canons have since evolved. Christian biblical canons range from the 73 books of the Catholic Church canon, and the 66book canon of most Protestant denominations, to the 81 books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canon, among others. Judaism has long accepted a single authoritative text, whereas Christianity has never had an official version, instead having many different manuscript traditions.

All biblical texts were treated with reverence and care by those that copied them, yet there are transmission errors, called variants, in all biblical manuscripts. These variants have combined with changing languages, new meanings of words and new manuscript discoveries have led to many different versions of the Bible, the top five of which are the King James Version (the original Protestant Christian Bible), the New International Version, the New Living Transition, the Christian Standard Bible and the New American Standard Bible.

King James Bible and the Modern Era The modern era of the Protestant Christian Bible grew out of the Protestant Reformation, a movement mainly begun in 16th century Europe by a Catholic Church reformer named Martin Luther that challenged the Christian supremacy of the pope and the Vatican church and led directly to the formation of Protestant theology.

Protestantism’s legitimacy and popularity was the result of the printing press, invented in the mid-15th century

by Johannes Gutenberg, a German craftsman whose Bible was the first major book printed in Europe (and the start of the print era in the West, which was to spread throughout the world).

For the first time large numbers of Catholic parishioners could read the Bible and interpret it for themselves rather than take the pope’s edicts as the final word.

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The English Reformation led to a complete break with the Catholic Church in 1534, when the pope refused to grant an annulment to King Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII ordered the formation of the Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church, which eventually adopted Protestantism, in retaliation for the pope’s refusal. The church eventually adopted its own Modern English version of the Christian Bible, known as the King James Version.

Commissioned in 1604 and printed in 1611 under the sponsorship of King James VI and I, the KJV, consisting of 39 books of the Old Testament, 14 books of Apocrypha (officially removed in 1885), and the 27 books of the New Testament, has become the standard for Protestant Christendom in the Western world.

The King James Bible followed England’s colonization of other parts of the world. Robert Aitken, a Philadelphia publisher, was the first to publish an English language KJV Bible in 1782. (Non-English translations had believers, have accepted this version. been printed as early as 1663.)

Since 1900, the popularity of the Bible in Africa has dramatically increased alongside the religion itself due to its spread by Christian missionaries.

Christian theology itself (and by extension The Bible) was in large part molded by the African theologians Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine - as well as Athanasius from Alexandria, Egypt. If it wasn’t for Augustine, the religion would not have had great theologians like John Calvin, because Calvin got a lot of his ideas from Augustine.

The Bible Today The legacy of the King James Bible is undeniable. The Anglican Church in England and the Episcopal Church in the U.S. have recommended the KJV as one of six authorised bibles, and other Protestant denominations (except perhaps the Mormon Church), other religions and religious non-

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Outside of religion, scholars have called the KJV Bible "the most important book in English religion and culture", and "the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world".

Linguist David Crystal has estimated that it is responsible for 257 idioms in English; examples include feet of clay and reap the whirlwind. Even atheist figures such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively.

That said, interest in the King James Version has declined since the mid1980s, except for the Scofield Reference version used by Evangelicals, as it has been overtaken by modern versions that are designed to appeal to the way English is spoken in current times. The English Standard

TERTULLIAN (155-220) FROM CARTHAGE., LEFT, ORIGEN (185-253) OF ALEXANDRIA , RIGHT, AND AUGUSTINE (354-430) FROM WHAT IS NOW ALGERIA,, BOTTOM, CONSIDERED AMONG THE GREAT CATHOLIC CHURCH FATHERS, WERE ALL AFRICAN. ST. AUGUSTINE WAS A KEY INFLUENCE ON PROTESTANT REFORMER JOHN CALVIN, WHO HELPED CREAT A NEW BRANCH OF CHRISTENDOM. Version (2001) is seen by many as the successor to the KJV. Finally, the Old Testament has attracted the ire of feminists, who contend that it is biased toward patriarchy, i.e., the control and domination of the father in exercising an authoritative, if not oppressive or even abusive, rule over his wife and family. They seek to correct this bias by making Christian doctrine more inclusive to women. Opponents contend that male leadership in the Bible is sacrificial, loving, and caring rather than oppressive, and that women, also created in the image of God, under the leadership of their husband, are to partner with their husband in being stewards of God’s creation in fulfilling the cultural mandate. They are to come alongside them as they together aim to be “fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) Nevertheless, the debate is likely to be ongoing.

DISCIPLES AND MISSIONARIES

WHITE FATHER, A ROMAN CATHOLIC INTERNATIONAL MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF PRIESTS AND BROTHERS WHOSE SOLE FIELD OF ACTIVITY IS AFRICA. IT WAS FOUNDED IN NORTH AFRICA IN 1868 BY THE ARCHBISHOP OF ALGIERS, CHARLES-MARTIAL-ALLEMAND LAVIGERIE. BAVUAL WINTER 2024 | 47

There are those who doubt, or at least question, that Jesus himself intended that his beliefs were to be continued as an organized religion that has come to be called Christianity. Jesus was in fact a Jewish rabbi, and as such came to minister to the Jews by claiming to be their Messiah (but curiously and only in the Gospel of John, not God), which they rejected because they believed that a man calling himself the Son of God was blasphemous. It just came to pass that the Gentiles did accept him as the Christ, but that was not his original intent. This is confirmed by the inscription above his cross: INRI or “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” (John 19:19-23) Jesus didn’t remove the Jewish religion, rather he ushered in a new time by his coming. The Jewish people lived by the Word of God, but in Jesus, as John explains, “the Word

became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) The early followers of Christ did not see themselves as starting a new religion but as following the Jewish Messiah. In John 14:16, Jesus tells His disciples, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” In Acts 9:2, those who follow Jesus are called “belonging to the Way.” In Antioch (Acts 11:26), followers of Jesus were first referred to as Christians or “little Christs,” which is likely a better descriptor because disciples of Jesus weren’t seeking to form a new religion but to be like Jesus.

Modern-day Christians often point out that they aren’t “religious” but are,

instead, in a relationship with Jesus Christ. Modern Jewish followers of Jesus often refer to themselves as “Messianic” or “completed” Jews to make the point to others that they don’t have to abandon their Jewish heritage to accept that Jesus is the Messiah.

So if Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection was meant for the Jews, how did non-Jews come to form a religion around him?

The answer appears to be a misinterpretation of Jesus’ beliefs, or an interpretation that suited their own beliefs.

Among the many interpretations of Jesus’ word as presented in the Gospels, the one that gained the most widespread acceptance was where Jesus instructed his twelve Apostles

THE THREE AFRICAN BISHOPS OF ROME OF THE EARLY CATHOLIC CHURCH: POPE VICTOR (189—199) OF WHAT BECAME LIBYA, POPE ST. MILTIADES (311—314 ) OF NORTH AFRICA, AND POPE ST. GELASIUS I (492—496 )

ST. MILTIADES

ST. GELASIUS I

VICTOR I

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A

to continue his work. Matthew 10 records Jesus' commissioning of his twelve disciples, empowering them to extend his mission. He gives them detailed instructions for their mission, warns them of impending persecutions, and encourages them with the assurance of God's providence and protection.

The coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, in an event known as Pentecost, signaled the beginning of the public ministry of the Catholic Church. Catholics hold that Saint Peter was Rome's first bishop (“And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” Matthew 16:18) and the consecrator of Linus as its next bishop, thus starting the unbroken line which includes the current pontiff, Pope Francis. That is, the Catholic Church maintains the apostolic succession of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope – the successor to Saint Peter.

Most holders of the office have been Roman or Italian, with a sprinkling of other Europeans, including one Pole, and one Latin American pope.

However, in the early papacy era (St. Peter in the mid-1st century to 590), there have been three popes of African ancestry: Victor (189-199) of what became Libya; St. Miltiades (311-314 ) of North Africa, and Pope St. Gelasius I (492—496 ), who was born in Africa when it was still under Roman rule.

Gelasius was the first pontiff to be referred to as the “vicar of Christ.”

The first disciples of the Church were called to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all regions of the known world.

Christianity in Africa first arrived in Egypt in approximately 50 AD. By the end of the 2nd century it had reached the region around Carthage. In the 4th century, the Aksumite empire in

modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea became one of the first regions in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion. The Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia followed two centuries later. From the late fifth and early sixth century, the region included several Christian Berber kingdoms. Important Africans who influenced the early development of Christianity and shaped the doctrines of Christianity include Tertullian, Perpetua, Felicity, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian, Athanasius and Augustine of Hippo.

The Islamic conquests into North Africa brought pressure on Christians to convert to Islam due to special taxation imposed on non-Muslims and other socio-economic pressures under Muslim rule. The Ethiopian Empire was the only region of Africa to survive as a Christian state after the expansion of Islam.The Ethiopian church held its own distinct religious customs and a unique canon of the Bible. Therefore, the Ethiopian church community is globally unique in that it wasn't Christianised through European missionaries, but was highly independent and itself spread missionaries throughout the rest of Africa prior to the contact of European Christians with the continent. The P'ent'ay churches are however works of a Protestant reformation within Ethiopian Christianity.

The position of the head of the Catholic Church of Africa (Archdiocese of Carthage), the only one permitted to preach in the continent, belonged to the bishop of Morocco in 1246.

In the late 15th century, Portuguese traders and missionaries from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) began arriving in West Africa, first in Guinea, Mauritania, the Gambia, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, then Nigeria and later in the Kingdom of Kongo, where they would find success in converting prominent local leaders to Catholicism.

The Jesuits went largely unchallenged by rival European denominational missions in Africa. Other religious congregations did exist who sought to evangelize regions of the continent under Portuguese dominion, but their influence was far less significant than that of the Christians. The favor of the Jesuits took a negative turn in the mid eighteenth century when Portugal no longer held the same dominion in Africa as it had in the fifteenth century. The Jesuits found themselves expelled from Mozambique and Angola; the existence of Catholic missions diminished significantly in these regions.

During and after the Scramble for Africa, late in the 19th century, these Christian communities and others began to flourish up and down the

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coast, as well as in Central and Southern Africa as new missionary activities from Europe started, (Christian evangelists were intimately involved in the colonial process in southern Africa). In the 21st century, they constitute the bulk of the booming Christian community on the continent.

According to theologian Thomas C. Oden, "Christians of northern Africa —of Coptic, Berber, Ethiopian, Arabic, and Moorish descent—are treasured as part of the whole multicultural matrix of African Christianity". Within different geographical areas, Africans searched for aspects of Christianity that could more closely resemble their religious and personal practices. Adaptations of Protestantism, such as the Kimbanguist church emerged. It’s founder Simon Kimbangu questioned why God would send a white man to preach. The Kimbanguist church believed Jesus was black and regarded symbols with different weight than the Catholic and Protestant Europeans.

The common practice of placing crosses and crucifixes in churches was viewed as a graven image in their eyes or a form of idolatry. Also, according to Mazrui, Kimbanguists respected the roles of women in church more than orthodox churches; they gave women the roles of priests and preachers.

Members within these churches looked for practices in the Bible that were not overtly condemned, such as polygamy.

They also incorporated in their own practices relationships with objects and actions like dancing and chanting.

When Africans were able to read in the vernacular, they were able to interpret the Bible in their own light. Polygamy was a topic of debate- many literate Africans interpreted it as acceptable because of information contained in the Old Testament- while it was condemned by European Christianity.

Dona Beatriz was a woman from Central Africa known for her controversial views on the acceptance of polygamy – she argued that Jesus

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with the pandemic. Evolving into the Christ Apostolic Church, it gave rise to many offshoots, which continued to emerge into the 1950s spreading with migrants around the world. For example, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in 1952, has congregations in a dozen African states, Western Europe and North America.

There has been tremendous growth in the number of Christians in Africa SIMON KIMBANGU coupled by a relative decline in adherence to traditional African religions. In 1900, there were only nine million Christians in Africa, but by the never condemned it – and she was year 2000, there were an estimated 380 burnt at the stake. European million Christians. In 2020, there were missionaries were faced with what they nearly 658 million Christians in Africa, considered an issue in maintaining with 760 million expected by 2025.In Victorian values, while still promoting 2020, Christians formed 49% of the the vernacular and literacy. continent's population, with Muslims Missionaries largely condemned the forming 42%. As of 2023, there are an controversial African views and estimated 718 million Christians from worked against leaders branching out. all denominations in Africa, and the Simon Kimbangu became a martyr, majority of Africans are Christian. put in a cage because of Western missionaries concern, and died there.

Christianity is embraced by the The irony is that modern Protestant majority of the population in most churches adopted many of his beliefs, Southern African, Southeast African, especially those emphasizing social and Central African states and in large justice, ecumenicalism and parts of the Horn of Africa and West Mormonism. Even black churches Africa, while the Coptic Christians adopted dancing and chanting in their make up a significant minority in services.

Egypt. According to a 2018 study by the Gordon–Conwell Theological The influenza pandemic of 1918 Seminary, more Christians live in accelerated the Africanization of Africa than any other continent, with Christianity and hence its growth in Latin America second and Europe twentieth century Africa. As many as third. five million Africans are estimated to have died. European governments, Some experts predict the shift of churches and medicine were powerless Christianity's center from the against the plague, boosting antiEuropean industrialized nations to imperial sentiment. This contributed Africa and Asia in modern times. Yale to growth of independent and University historian Lamin Sanneh prophetic Christian mass movements stated that "African Christianity was with prophecy, healings, and not just an exotic, curious nationalist church restructuring. For phenomenon in an obscure part of the example, the inception of the Aladura world, but that African Christianity movement (churches that believe in the might be the shape of things to come." efficacy of prayers and practical LIKE US? guidance by the Living God through Subscribe @ Bavual.com his Holy Spirit) in Nigeria coincided

The Black Church

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With religious affiliation on the decline, continuing racism and increasing income inequality, some scholars and activists are soulsearching about the Black church’s role in today’s United States.

For instance, on April 20, 2010, an African American Studies professor at Princeton, Eddie S. Glaude, sparked an online debate by provocatively declaring that, despite the existence of many African American churches, “the Black Church, as we’ve known it or imagined it, is dead.” As he argued, the image of the Black church as a center for Black life and as a beacon of social and moral transformation had disappeared.

Scholars of African American religion responded to Glaude by stating that the image of the Black church as the moral conscience of the United States has always been a complicated matter.

As historian Anthea Butler argued, “The Black Church may be dead in its incarnation as agent of change, but as the imagined home of all things black and Christian, it is alive and well.”

As a scholar of Christian theology and African American religion, I’m aware of this long history of the Black church and its contribution to American politics. Its story began in the 15th and 16th centuries, when European empires authorized the capture, auction and enslavement of various peoples from across the coast of Western and Central Africa.

Origins of African American Christianity As millions were transported through the “Middle Passage” to the Americas, Europeans forcefully baptized the enslaved into the Christian faith despite many of them adhering to traditional African religious systems and Islam. European slave traders dismissed Africans as “heathenish” to justify their enslavement of Africans and the coercive proselytization to Christianity.

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In the 1600s, British missionaries traveled throughout the American Colonies to convert enslaved Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the continent. Originally, however, white slaveholders were hesitant to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity because they feared that Christian baptism would lead to the enslaved Africans’ freedom, causing both economic ruin and social upheaval.

They widely supposed that British laws mandated the freedom of all baptized Christians, and thus white slaveholders initially refused to grant missionaries permission to instruct enslaved Africans into the Christian faith.

By 1706, six Colonies had passed laws that declared that Africans’ Christian status did not alter their social condition as slaves. Consequently, missionaries created “slave catechisms,” modified religious instruction manuals that instructed enslaved Africans about Christianity while reinforcing their enslavement.

Over time, evangelical Protestant groups followed suit in their proselytization of the enslaved community, most notably during the First and Second Great Awakenings, the Protestant religious revivals that swept across the American nation in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries.

Denominations that form the Black church Both during and after the end of slavery, African Americans began to establish their own congregations, parishes, fellowships, associations and later denominations. Black Baptists founded the first National Baptist Convention USA, in 1895, the largest Black Protestant denomination in the United States. The National Baptist Convention of America International and the Progressive National Baptist Convention were founded years later.

The first independent Black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was formalized in 1816, grew out of the

SPRINGFIELD BAPTIST CHURCH IN AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, THE OLDEST BLACK CHURCH IN THE U.S., WAS FOUNDED IN 1787, THOUGH ITS CONGREGATION IS BELIEVED TO DATE TO 1773, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Free African Society founded by Richard Allen, a former enslaved man and Methodist minister, in the city of Philadelphia in 1787. Allen and his colleague Absalom Jones walked out of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church after white members demanded that Allen and Jones, who had been kneeling in prayer, leave the ground floor and go to the upper balcony, which was designated for Black worshippers.

Other Black Methodists founded two other denominations – the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1821 and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 1870. The Church of God in Christ, the largest Black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, was founded by Charles Harrison Mason, a former Baptist minister, in 1897 and incorporated in 1907.

Other Black Christians belong to mainline Protestant denominations.

Additionally, there are 3 million Black Roman Catholics in the United States, and a smaller number of African Americans who attend Eastern Orthodox churches. Moreover, a number of African Americans belong to independent nondenominational congregations, while others belong to white conservative evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

THE CHOIR HAS ALWAYS BEEN AN IMPORTANT MAINSTAY OF THE BLACK CHRISTIAN PROTESTANT CHURCH Contributions to American politics The Black church has played a vital role in the shaping of American political history. African American churches provided spaces for not only spiritual formation but also political activism.

Black churches were spaces where slave abolitionism was envisioned, and insurrections were planned. Black preachers such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner were actively involved in attempted and successful slave insurrections in the South.

During the Reconstruction era, the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry McNeal Turner served as one of the first African American legislators for the state of Georgia.

Turner was famous for his scathing critiques of American Christianity and the nation at large. Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist and educator who wrote extensive accounts of the lynchings of Black people in the South, fought against Jim Crow policies, and advocated for Black women’s right to vote. An active churchgoer, Wells also organized and led Bible study classes for young Black men at Grace Presbyterian Church, a predominantly Black church founded in 1888 in the city of Chicago.

Many Black Christians participated in the Civil Rights movement, including Bayard Rustin, an openly gay Quaker, who was instrumental in organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963.

Despite his contributions to advancing Black people’s freedom, Rustin was pushed to the background by his peers because of his homosexuality.

Pauli Murray, the first Black woman to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, was a lawyer, legal scholar, civil rights and gender equality advocate and poet. Murray compiled an extensive collection of laws and ordinances that mandated racial

An influential institution The Black church is far from monolithic. Its members hold different theological positions and hail from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, education levels and political affiliations.

Some African American Christians did not participate in efforts to end racial segregation, fearing violent backlash from white people. Today, Black Christians are divided over other social justice issues, such as whether to support LGBTQ equality.

Nevertheless, African American Christians have drawn insights from their experience of enduring racism and their Christian faith to contest racial subjugation and advocate for their freedom and human dignity.

Despite the rise of the religiously unaffiliated or “Nones” within the African American community, the Black church, I believe, continues to be an influential institution.

Stephen Khan Executive Editor The Conversation International Published on the conversation.com February 3, 2023

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HISTORIC AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES A PARTIAL LISTING IN EACH STATE

The African American Church has long been considered one of the foundational and most influential institutions in black America. This page is dedicated to highlighting the oldest of these institutions in states across the nation.

Listed below are African American churches by state which are at least one century old (founded in 1919 or earlier) and which are continuously operating until today.* In other words, one can attend service next Sunday in any church on this list. The oldest continuously operating church in each state is listed in Bold Yellow.

ARKANSAS

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Little Rock First Missionary Baptist Church, 1845-

Metropolitan AME Church, 1821Mount Zion United Methodist Church, 1816-

CALIFORNIA Los Angeles First A.M.E. Church, 1872Oakland First A.M.E. Church, 1858-

ALABAMA

Sacramento St. Andrews A.M.E. Church, 1850-

Huntsville St. Bartley Primitive Baptist Church, 1808-

San Jose Antioch Baptist Church, 1893COLORADO

CONNECTICUT

Atlanta Big Bethel AME Church, 1847Ebenezer Baptist Church, 1855First Congregational Church, 1867Wheat Street Baptist Church, 1869-

Hartford Faith Congregational Church, 1819-

Savannah First African Baptist Church, 1773-

Denver Zion Baptist Church, 1865Shorter AME Church, 1868-

Montgomery Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 1883ARIZONA Phoenix Tanner Chapel AME Church, 1887Tucson Mt. Calvary Missionary Baptist Church, 1900*This list is incomplete. The list compiler, BlackPast.org, asks that a church that is not on the list but wants to be to please consider writing a 500 to 550 word entry for its inclusion. If you are interested, please contact BP@blackpast.org. Do not send in information on your church without contacting BlackPast first. Your entry must conform to the website’s guidelines before it can be added to the list. Nonetheless we invite church members across the United States to add a profile of your house of worship to BlackPast.

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GEORGIA

New Haven St. Luke Episcopal Church, 1844DELAWARE Wilmington Ezion-Mount Carmel United Methodist Church, 1789-

FLORIDA

MARYLAND

MISSISSIPPI

Jacksonville Bethel Baptist Institutional Church, ca. 1865-

Baltimore Bethel A.M.E., 1785-

Natchez Rose Hill Missionary Baptist Church, 1854-

ILLINOIS

Vicksburg Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1864-

Alton Salem Baptist Church, 1819-

MISSOURI Brooklyn Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, c. 1830-

St. Louis First Baptist Church, 1817-

Chicago Olivet Baptist Church, 1850-

MONTANA Great Falls Union Bethel A.M.E. Church, 1890-

INDIANA Richmond Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1836-

St. Xavier Catholic Church, 1836-

Helena St. James A.M.E. Church, 1888-

IOWA

MASSACHUSETTS

NEBRASKA

Des Moines Burns United Methodist Church, 1866-

Boston African Baptist Church, 1805-

Omaha St. John AME Church, 1865NEW HAMPSHIRE

KANSAS Portsmouth People’s Baptist Church, 1873-

Topeka St. John A.M.E., 1868-

NEW JERSEY KENTUCKY Elsinboro Mt. Pisgah A.M.E., 1754*Oldest Continuously Operating African American Church in the United States*

Lexington Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church, 1790-

Columbus Avenue AME Church, 1838MICHIGAN Detroit Second Baptist Church of Detroit, 1844LOUISIANA MINNESOTA New Orleans St. Augustine Catholic Church, 1841-

St. Paul Pilgrim Baptist Church, 1863BAVUAL WINTER 2024 | 55

Newark Moorish Science Temple of America, 1913Princeton Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, 1836-

PENNSYLVANIA Philadelphia Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, 1794African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, 1792-

Houston Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, 1868San Antonio St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, 1888-

NEW MEXICO

UTAH

Albuquerque Grant Chapel AME Church, 1883Mt. Olive Baptist Church, 1899-

Salt Lake City Trinity A.M.E. Church, 1890VIRGINIA

Las Cruces Phillips Chapel CME Church, 1911NEW YORK

Falls Church Galloway United Methodist Church, 1867Silver Bluff Silver Bluff Baptist Church, 1773-

New York City Mother African Methodist, 1796-

Petersburg First African Baptist Church, 1756-

TENNESSEE Abyssinian Baptist Church, 1808St. Phillips Protestant Episcopal Church, 1809The Church of St. Mark, 1838NORTH CAROLINA Winston-Salem St. Phillips Moravian Church, 1822OHIO

Memphis Church of God in Christ, 1907–

Richmond First Baptist Church, 1780-

Nashville First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill, 1835Spruce Street Baptist Church, 1835Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist Church, 1835Clark Memorial United Methodist, 1865-

WASHINGTON Seattle First A.M.E. Church, 1886Mt. Zion Baptist Church, 1890Spokane Cavalry Baptist Church, 1890WEST VIRGINIA

Cincinnati Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1824OREGON Portland Bethel A.M.E. Church, 1889-

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TEXAS Corpus Christi Holy Cross Catholic Church, 1914El Paso Second Baptist Church, El Paso1884

Malden African Zion Baptist Church, 1852WISCONSIN Milwaukee St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 1869-

The Preacher

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In virtually every black community, the church pastor is perhaps its most revered member. He or she is looked to for spiritual guidance and moral, ethical, economic and political support. Most black pastors are representatives of their community to the larger white community and its authorities. They provide educational and sports programs for the youth from daycare through college, food and clothing banks, shelter to the homeless, affordable housing to the working-class, transportation and activity for seniors, a way for singles to meet, a resource for congregants to be informed about social and political issues that affect them and in general a beacon of strength and respect, even admiration, in the neighborhood. The most influential among them have become politicians and businesspeople in their own right.

Pastors led the way in every major historical era, from slavery to the abolitionist movement to Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement and finally to wokeism, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Most church heads have promoted progressive and social justice causes but a few have, sadly, promoted something called the Prosperity Gospel, a belief that Jesus wants you (and definitely the pastor, because he represents you) to be rich and a winner, even if it hurts others, who should be considered the losers; it is social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, something that Jesus never taught and would be offended by.

Some have also appeased or even sided with racists and white supremacists, to the harm of their communities for what they hope will be personal gain, to the great harm of their community.

BAVUAL cites those black pastors and theologians, both past and present, men and women who stand out in the history of the Christian church and are remembered as true disciples of Jesus.

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PIONEERS OF THE CHURCH gather a congregation and purchase a attention. Liele was soon able to

George Liele Liele, born into slavery in Virginia in 1752 but was taken to Georgia, was converted to the Christian faith through Rev. Matthew Moore of Burke County, Georgia, and continued to worship in this white church for four years until Savannah was evacuated by forces loyal to Britain. His master Henry Sharp was a deacon in Rev. Moore's church and seeing his gift for speaking, encouraged him in his preaching to other slaves. Liele was freed by Sharp, also a Baptist and loyalist, before the American Revolution began. After being freed by Sharp, he converted and baptized many slaves outside the Savannah area. One of the converts was David George, who was one of the eight original members of Silver Bluff Baptist Church in Aiken, South Carolina, another early church.

Liele was licensed to preach by Baptists in Georgia in 1773, the first African American to be so. (Two hundred and twenty two years later his great great granddaughter The Reverend Dr. A. Louise Bonaparte become a licensed Baptist Minister and become the seventh generation in their family to do so.) That year he became founding pastor of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, one of America’s oldest continuing black congregations. Leile's preaching helped to convert many believers there, including Andrew Bryan, who became a leader of the congregation and sometimes preached as well.

When the British lost the Revolutionary War in 1781, Liele chose to leave with the British to ensure his freedom rather than risk reenslavement in the American South.

He migrated to Jamaica, then a British colony and slave society, with his wife Hannah and their four children. The novelty of a black itinerant ex-slave preacher attracted considerable

piece of land about a mile from Kingston, where he gradually built a chapel. Despite initial resistance from both white slave-owners and enslaved blacks, whose allegiance was to the Anglican Church in England, the Baptist church eventually caught on; Liele was instrumental in planting hundreds of churches throughout the Caribbean.

Today, George Liele is a well-known figure in the Caribbean, and he is greatly revered. He was America’s first missionary, black or white.

GEORGE LIELE

Rev. Henry Highland Garnet On Sunday, February 12, 1865, Rev. Garnet had achieved something never done before by an African American.

He delivered a sermon in the U.S. House of Representatives - he first African American to speak in that chamber - while it was not in session, on the occasion of Congress's passage on January 31 of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery. Today, 159 years later, 133 black Americans have the honor of serving in Congress.

Garnet’s long journey to that historic moment began in 1815, when he was born into slavery in Chesterville (then New Market), Kent County, Maryland. His grandfather was an African chief and warrior, and in a tribal fight he was captured and sold to slave-traders who brought him to America, where he was sold.

In 1824, Garnet’s 11-member family escaped from Wilmington, Delaware, where they were given permission to attend a funeral, to New York City via the Underground Railroad.

Garnet education at the New York’s African Free School, which he began in 1826, was interrupted in 1828 when Garnet had to find employment, twice making the sea route to Cuba as a cabin boy and once as a cook and steward on a schooner running between New York City and Alexandria, Virginia. It was when he returned from the latter voyage in 1829 that his story turned grim. His family had been located by slave hunters. His sister, Eliza (born Mary), was arrested, but was able to free herself by proving residence in the free state of New York. His father jumped off of the roof of a two-story building to escape the slave catchers. Garnet, likely with his mother in mind, who had escaped by running to a corner store, took a knife and walked onto Broadway, waiting to be found and confronted by the slave catchers. His friends found him instead and took him out of the city to Jericho, Long Island, where he stayed under the protection of Quaker Thomas Willis. He then became an indentured servant to Captain Epenetus Smith of Smithtown, Long Island, but suffered an injury to his right leg and managed to be released from his indentures later in 1829, whereupon he returned to the African Free School for a year.

Garnet, by now an abolitionist, continued his studies at the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth. New York, though a northern city, harbored strong racist feelings toward blacks. Garnet’s attempt to start the abolitionist Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association (named for abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison) initially attracted white support but eventually was closed due to racism.

In 1839, Garnet moved with his family to Troy, New York, where he taught

school and studied theology. In 1842, he became pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian church, a position he held for six years; the church sheltered fugitive slaves. With William G. Allen, Garnet published the National Watchman, an abolitionist newspaper.

Garnet, who would later return to New York and later Troy, New York, became a major figure in the antislavery and equal rights movements.

He promoted an armed rebellion as the most effective way to end slavery, an idea that other abolitionists dismissed as too radical. Before long he began to support emigration of blacks to Mexico, Liberia, or Haiti, where he thought they would have more opportunities. Garnet advocated a kind of Black nationalism in the United States, which included establishing Black colonies in the sparsely-inhabited Western territories.

When the Civil War started, Garnet's hopes ended for emigration as a solution for American blacks. He moved with his family to Washington, DC, so that he could support the black soldiers and the war effort.

After the war, Garnet was appointed president of Avery College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and later returned to New York City as a pastor at the Shiloh Presbyterian Church (formerly the First Colored Presbyterian Church, and now St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem). His final role before his death in 1882 was to serve as U.S. Minister (now ambassador0 to Liberia. Garnet is a template for the pastor/activist/politician.

REV. HENRY H. GARNET

Rev. Alexander Crummell Almost every black person has heard of W.E.B. DuBois, one of the two great black thinkers (the other being Booker T. Washington) of the direction that the African American community should take towards equality with whites, but few people know who his mentor was: Rev. Alexander Crummell.

Crummell, an Episcopalian priest, missionary, scholar and teacher, was born in New York City in 1819 to free black parents. He spent much of his life addressing the conditions of African Americans, urging an educated black elite to aspire to the highest intellectual attainments as a refutation of the theory of black inferiority.

Crummell began his education at an integrated school in New Hampshire.

He later transferred to an abolitionist institute in Whitesboro, New York, where he learned both the classics and manual labor skills. However, after being denied admittance to the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church because of his race, Crummell was forced to study privately. Nonetheless, at the age of twenty-five, he became an Episcopalian minister.

From 1848 to 1853, Crummell lectured and studied in England. He graduated from Queens’ College, Cambridge University in 1853. Crummell left England to become an educator in Liberia, accepting a faculty position at Liberia College in Monrovia. From his new post, Crummell urged African Americans to emigrate to Liberia.

Internal politics, however, forced Crummell to leave Liberia in 1872, shattering his dream of the West African nation as a Christian republic populated by both indigenous people and African American immigrants.

Crummell returned to the United States and settled in Washington, D.C. where he founded St. Luke’s Episcopal

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Church. When some Episcopal bishops proposed a segregated missionary district for black parishes, Crummell organized a group now known as the Union of Black Episcopalians to fight the proposal.

Crummell also lectured widely across the United States, stressing the social responsibilities of educated middle class African Americans as race leaders.

From 1895 to 1897, Crummell taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1897, the last year of his life, Crummell helped found the American Negro Academy and became its first president, with W.E.B. DuBois and William Saunders Scarborough as vice-presidents.

Alexander Crummell, who would become a major influence on myriad black leaders including DuBois, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Marcus Garvey, died in Point Pleasant, New Jersey in 1898.

REV. ALEXANDER CRUMMEL

Richard Allen Born into slavery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1760, Richard Allen went on to become an educator, writer, minister and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Benjamin Chew, a Quaker lawyer, owned the Allen family, which included Richard’s parents and three

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other children. Chew eventually sold the Allen family to Stokeley Sturgis, a Delaware planter.

At age 17 Allen was converted to Methodism by an itinerant preacher.

Allen’s master, Stokeley Sturgis, was said to have been influenced by Allen to become a Methodist as well. After his conversion, Sturgis offered his slaves the opportunity to buy their way out of slavery. In 1783, by working at odd jobs for five years, Allen managed to purchase his freedom for $2,000. In the meantime, Allen began to preach in Methodist churches and meetings in the Baltimore area. Through his Methodist connections Allen was invited to return to Philadelphia in 1786. Upon arriving in the city he joined St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, where he became active in teaching and preaching.

As the number of African Americans attending St. George’s increased, racial tensions mounted. Allen preached at 5:00 a.m. in special services on Sunday mornings to approximately 50 African American Methodists. When they attended the regular morning service, segregated seating was instituted. With this segregation Allen became convinced that a separate church was necessary for the black congregants. In 1787 Allen and a number of other African American Methodists walked out and formed a separate church that would become Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first Methodist church in the United States specifically for African Americans.

Seven years later, on July 29, 1794, Bethel was dedicated by Bishop Francis Asbury. Richard Allen served Bethel Church as its pastor, and he was ordained a deacon by Asbury in 1799.

Other African American Methodist churches were formed in New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.

On April 9, 1816, after two decades of conflict with white Methodism, Allen

RICHARD ALLEN

and other African American Methodist preachers hosted a meeting in Philadelphia to bring these churches together and to form a new denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Allen was elected bishop, and with his consecration became the first African American bishop in the United States.

By the time Allen died at his home on March 26, 1831, the AME church was well-established in the United States and supported missions in several countries overseas.

Allen cared passionately about education and opened a day school for African American children. He abhorred slavery, worked actively for abolition, and maintained his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

He was committed to selfdetermination for African Americans in the United States, and eventually opposed all colonization plans for African Americans in other countries.

Charles Price (C.P.) Jones Charles Price Jones, who would come to be known as C.P. Jones, was the founder of the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. Born in Floyd County, Georgia, in 1865, Jones became a missionary

Baptist preacher in Jackson, Mississippi, where he met Charles Harrison Mason in 1895. In 1896, Jones, Mason, and two other preachers held a faith healing revival in Jackson. The theory of entire sanctification as taught by the Wesleyan-Holiness movement was not accepted by Baptists congregation, as Baptist hold to a progressive sanctification. In 1897, Jones and Mason left their congregations and adopted the views of the Wesleyans and started their own church.

In 1907, there was a separation with Charles Mason and other ministers who returned from the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles over the biblical interpretation of speaking in tongues as an evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Mason carried the church name and approximately half of its congregation into Pentecostalism.

(In 1915, Elder Charles Mason, who became Bishop Charles Mason, incorporated the Church of God in Christ which he founded. Conflicts caused the holiness movement to separate into many denominations. It was first called 'the movement', and later Church of God, Church of Christ, Church of God in Christ, and Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A.) Jones made his first trip to Los Angeles in 1915 to conduct a revival

CHARLES PRICE “C.P.” JONES

for Bishop William A. Washington and helped him organize and incorporate the Bethel Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. He moved to L.A. in 1917 and organized Christ Temple Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. Headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi, there were 14,000 members in 154 churches as of 2010.

In 1922 the church created a council of Bishops in the national convocation and Jones was chosen to be the first Senior Bishop. He actively maintained the spiritual leadership and operated as Senior Bishop of the church until he fell ill in 1943. Because of his declining health, he attended his last convention in 1944 in Chicago, Illinois, where he was elected Senior Bishop and President Emeritus of the National Convention for life. Jones died in Los Angeles in 1949.

Jones is the author of over 1000 hymns. Some of his known hymns which are still sung around the world are Deeper, Deeper; I Will Make the Darkness Light; Come Unto Me; Where Shall I Be; I'm Happy With Jesus Alone; and Jesus Only. He pastored churches in Arkansas, Mississippi, and California.

Charles Octavius Boothe Boothe was one of the founders and the first pastor of Dexter AvenueKing Memorial Baptist Church (1877) - the first pastorate of a young Martin Luther King Jr. - Selma University (1878), and the Colored Baptist Missionary Convention for the State of Alabama(early 1870s) - the first statewide African American Baptist denominational organization. He also served as the first minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and a two year term as president of Selma University (1901-1902).

Born into slavery in Mobile County, Alabama, in 1845, Boothe proudly proclaimed that his maternal greatgrandmother and his paternal grandfather were born in Africa.

Possibly taught to read by his grandfather in addition to his own personal efforts to learn, he read the Bible as a child and grew up in the African American Baptist faith. Boothe was baptized in 1866 and ordained a minister in 1868 at the age of 23.

A prolific and indefatigable writer, Boothe served as editor of a religious newspaper, the Baptist Pioneer, and wrote and published newspaper articles and reports on missionary activities. He wrote two significant works: The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama, which documented the efforts of African American Baptists in Alabama, and Plain Theology for Plain People, which offered easy-to-read, simplified explanations of religious concepts for Baptist ministers and church members. As with most of his sermons, lectures, and written materials, he sought to comfort the black Baptist faithful, and condemn white supremacy.

Boothe labored unwaveringly to achieve basic literacy and religious education for African descended freedmen and women in order to dispel the ignorance and misconceptions imposed upon them by the institution of slavery and create a path to social advancement. All-thewhile, he steadfastly resisted white endeavors to control African American educational institutions and religious ministries.

The years of striving to improve the condition of blacks and to combat racial oppression took their toll; he died in Detroit, Michigan, in 1924.

CHARLES OCTAVIUS BOOTHE

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WORKING PASTERS TO KNOW IN 2024 Many pastors work hard to share God’s love and bring more people to Jesus. Listed here are 17 black pastors from around the world who have made a big impact. These pastors have grown large churches and helped many people find hope in God. Some have also fought against injustice in their countries.

has advised multiple U.S. presidents on policies related to urban violence and poverty. Rev. Rivers believes the church should be a peacemaking force from within distressed communities. His violence prevention work focuses on personal transformation through faith to break cycles of retaliation.

one of the wealthiest pastors in Africa and has built educational institutions like Covenant University and Landmark University. He is known for his prosperity gospel teachings and bold style of preaching. Oyedepo has started over 5,000 churches in Nigeria and several African nations and aims to have a church within 5 minutes of every person.

Influential Black Pastors from the US

Influential Black Pastors from the UK

The Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, U.S. Senator (D-GA) preaches from the historic pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once pastored during the civil rights movement. known for passionately addressing pressing social and political issues from the pulpit, Rev. Warnock has also served as a twice-elected Democratic U.S. senator from Georgia since 2021.

Rev. Tim Stephens is pastor of Windsor Park Baptist Church in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Born in Jamaica, Rev. Stephens studied theology in the United States before moving to the UK. He leads a racially diverse church with members from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa and more. He works to promote reconciliation and forgiveness in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of The Troubles.

Aloysius Bugingo, commonly known as Aloyo, is a prominent Ugandan pastor who founded the House of Prayer Ministries in Kampala, Uganda in 1995. The church has over 20,000 members and emphasizes prayer, deliverance and prosperity.

Bugingo was known for his bold preaching style and revelation gifts. He conducts many crusades across Uganda and hosted a popular weekly television program called Ekitabo Kya Laba aired across East Africa. Bugingo has attracted some controversy regarding his personal life and relationships.

The Rev. Arthur Price Jr. leads the historic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a church forever linked with the civil rights movement. This congregation faced immense tragedy and hardship when it was targeted in a horrific Ku Klux Klan bombing attack in 1963 that killed four young African American girls. However, Rev. Price and the resilient members of 16th Street Baptist church refused to give into hatred.

Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie made history by courageously becoming the first woman to ever be elected as a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, shattering gender barriers. She is a renowned biblical scholar and prolific author who has broken new ground throughout her pioneering career, capably presiding over the AME Church’s Council of Bishops for multiple terms. Currently the President and General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, Bishop McKenzie is an influential voice who champions both women’s rights and empowerment.

Bishop Joseph W. Walker III leads the rapidly growing Mount Zion Full Gospel Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, which has expanded to 5 campuses. His vibrant ministry extends online, and he actively utilizes social media and technology to reach out and connect with college students across campuses in Tennessee and Kentucky. Bishop Walker is also a Grammy-nominated gospel music artist and songwriter known for his musical sermon series “You’ve Been So Good.” He passionately communicates messages about hope, encouragement and living life to the fullest.

Bishop T.D. Jakes leads the globally influential Potter’s House megachurch in Dallas, Texas, with over 30,000 members locally. His rousing sermons broadcast on television networks and distributed online reach many millions more worldwide. T.D Jakes is known for his charismatic and dramatic preaching style and writing numerous top-selling inspirational books. He champions personal growth and fulfillment through ongoing spiritual development across all of life’s ups and downs. His messages tackle real life struggles and focus on healing.

Rev. Eugene Rivers is founder and director of the Azusa Christian Community in Boston, Massachusetts. He has been active in anti-violence efforts in Boston’s inner city since the 1990s. Reverend Rivers helped negotiate truces between rival gangs and worked with police to reduce homicide rates. He

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Rev. Rose Hudson-Wilkin serves as Suffragan Bishop of Dover in the diocese of Canterbury - deputising for the Archbishop - since 2019; she is the first black woman to become a Church of England bishop. She was previously Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons from 2010 to 2019. Formerly the Chaplain to the Speaker of the British House of Commons, she was also the first black woman to serve as Chaplain to the Queen of England. A native Jamaican, Reverend Hudson-Wilkin has called for the Church of England to take responsibility for its links to slavery and colonialism and to address ongoing racial injustice. She is also known for her pioneering work supporting urban youth, immigrants, and encouraging young minorities to find their voices as leaders. She speaks openly about experiencing discrimination even as an Anglican priest.

Dr. John Azumah is a professor of World Christianity and Islam at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, USA. Originally from Ghana, Dr. Azumah, an ordained Ghanaian minister in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, has written extensively about relationships between Christians and Muslims in Africa as global religions meet local cultures. His books and leadership training equip churches for interfaith community engagement and effective ministry in religiously diverse contexts.

Pastor Kingsley Appiagyei was the Senior Pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Manchester, England. He was also the President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain in 2009.

Pastor Appiagyei was born in Ghana and studied theology in Russia before becoming a pastor in the UK. As President he provided leadership and care for over 2000 Baptist churches across Britain, promoting unity and common witness to Christ. He served on national committees focused on racial justice, poverty alleviation, and effective engagement with young adults both within and outside of the church. Under his leadership, the Baptist Union also took a strong public stance in advocating for international religious freedom. He retired from Trinity Baptist Church in 2015 after over two decades of ministry.

Influential Black Pastors from Africa

David Oyedepo is a Nigerian pastor who founded the Faith Tabernacle megachurch in Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria in 1981. With over 50,000 members, Faith Tabernacle is one of the largest churches in the world. Oyedepo is considered

Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye is the influential leader of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). Adeboye initially worked as a lecturer in mathematics at universities in Nigeria and the University of Lagos before taking over as the General Overseer of RCCG in 1981 from the church’s founder.

Under Adeboye’s leadership over the past four decades, the RCCG has expanded explosively across the world from having less than 40 parishes to having a presence across over 196 countries and territories. Estimates suggest RCCG may have 5 million or more members globally making it one of the largest contemporary Christian denominations.

Alph Lukau is an internationally acclaimed South African pastor and author known as the “Apostle of Faith.” He is the founder and leader of Alleluia Ministries International based in Johannesburg which he founded in 2002. Under his leadership, the church has over hundreds of thousands of members across several countries.

Pastor Mensa Otabil is an influential Ghanaian pastor who founded the International Central Gospel Church in Accra, Ghana in 1984. His contemporary style of preaching and leadership training programs have made him popular especially among youth and professionals. Under Otabil’s leadership, ICGC has grown to have hundreds of branches across Africa, Europe, and North America.

Comparative Faiths

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Judaism The original Abrahamic faith, Judaism has been practiced for over 3500 years. Archaeological evidence confirms the existence of two adjacent Jewish kingdoms between 900 and 700 B.C., and the religious texts assume a confederacy of 12 tribes united in faith before that. Each tribe, and subsequent kingdom, claim descent from Abraham.

The faith is monotheistic, in contrast to the ancient Levant’s polytheistic history. The devotion to their god, “Yahweh,” comes from his commitment to them as a chosen people, while constantly being urged by him to return to pious behaviors. Unlike Christianity and Islam, there is no detailed assumption of the afterlife other than a deep sleep called “Sheol.” Roughly 14 million Jews continue to practice the faith today, despite extreme persecution during World War II.

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A JEWISH PERSON PRAYING AT A SYNAGOGUE

Islam Most active towards the end of the 6th century, the Prophet Muhammed is celebrated by Muslims today for founding the religion of Islam. Roughly 1.8 billion followers populate the world, the majority of which are spread between northern Africa, west Asia, and Indonesia. The prophet desired to repair the Abrahamic religions, which he believed to be corrupted.

Islam is marked by its adherence to discipline, in which abstinence from worldly behaviors as well as observance of daily rites is rigorously demanded. Notable historic discoveries have come from Islamic institutions, in fields such as algebra, surgery, architecture, and even coffee. The two main branches of Islam that cohabitate the Muslim world are Sunni and Shia, which are said to have been divided 14 hundred years ago over an issue of succession.

THE BLUE MOSQUE OF ISTANBUL OR SULTAN AHMET MOSQUE, TURKEY

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Hinduism The origin of Hinduism, a religion with 1.1 billion followers, is difficult to pin down because it began as an amalgamation of different beliefs. Officially formed between 2300 B.C. and 1500 B.C., the Indus Valley near modern-day Pakistan is the location in which it first blossomed. Typically thought of as the 'religion with 33 million gods,’ the majority of Hindus worship one god alone, albeit they accept the existence of other gods.

Core values are ones such as Karma and Samsara. Karma dictates that the moral sum of the deeds we produce will be returned to us eventually, through consequence or reward. Samsara is a model for the cyclical nature of life, a symptom of which is reincarnation. Historical contributions to the world include mathematics as well as astronomy and yoga.

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RUN-DMC

HINDU PEOPLE WORSHIPPING GODDESS DURGA UNDER HOLY SMOKE, WHICH IS A DURGA PUJA FESTIVAL RITUAL

Buddhism A prince who renounced his wealth to pursue wisdom, the Buddha is an eclectic figure from the 5th century B.C. who brought together many different beliefs in order to develop a revolutionary philosophy on human identity and purpose. The goal is to achieve an enlightenment called Nirvana, through meditation, kindness, and hard work. Values revolve around the absence of an ‘essential self,’ impermanence, and the reality that life is suffering. Therefore, a primary aim for mankind is the elimination of suffering in all its forms.

The orange tunic, that the monks famously adorn, represents a fire that burns away impurities. Two different sects exist, the Theravada Buddhists and the East Asian Buddhists, which differ in their selection of texts. At 500 million followers, Buddhism has been lauded for its effective use of an egalitarian philosophy that has worked to dismantle caste systems worldwide.

A YOUNG BUDDHIST MONK

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Sikhism

BOB MARLEY

In 1469, the first Guru of Sikhism was born. Guru Nanak, a northeast Pakistan native, migrated to India and began to record and teach his revelations during journeys around the Islamic and Hindu world throughout the early 1500s. These revelations are few but substantial: Share with others, earn an honest living, meditate on God’s name and resist negative behaviors.

Currently, the 25 million followers organize to promote universal egalitarian principles and believe that all faiths ultimately worship a singular divine being. A well-known example of this mindset is the tendency for Sikh temples to have a community kitchen dedicated to serving meals to anyone, for free.

Sadly, Sikh history is marked by political difficulty and deadly rebellion against intolerant regimes.

Several of the original Gurus, leaders that carry on Nanak’s spiritual empowerment, were executed by the state authority of their time.

A SIKH PERSON PRAYING WHILE IN THE LOTUS POSITION

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Shinto Shinto, the ever-nebulous religion of Japan, has no settled doctrine or origin story. At its simplest, Shinto beliefs gravitate towards a fluid idea of kami. Kami are the personified concepts of wind, rivers, trees, and other natural elements. Due to the influence of Christianity, the concept of an afterlife was introduced, and some followers believe humans become kami after death.

The religion became more concrete in the events surrounding WWII, wherein the Japanese government instituted it as a state religion that aimed to venerate the emperor as a living, human, kami. Otherwise, Shinto beliefs have developed since the 6th century as a nature-focused series of scattered beliefs, that merged and then split with Buddhism as well as Confucianism. With 104 million followers and a focus on ancestry and nature, the belief can be understood through indulging in Japanese storytelling; wherein, the horror of 20th-century industry threatens the magic of the world around us.

THE KUMANO HONGU TAISHA, ONE OF THE THREE GRAND SHRINES OF KUMANO, IN TRADITIONAL SHINTO ARCHITECTURE IN TANABE, WAKAYAMA, JAPAN

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Taoism A ‘one-size-fits-all’ belief, Taoism is a series of principles and axioms that attempts to guide followers towards balance. Two ‘persons’ sit at the heart of Taoism; the Tao itself, and Laozi, a 6th-century contemporary of Confucius. Laozi and his school decreed that the Tao is undefinable, and only engaged through lived experience. It is a powerful force that runs throughout the universe and encourages “De,” which is adherence to the Tao. The Tao is the natural order of the universe and is not worshipped as a god, and it is believed that humans merge with the Tao upon death. By adhering to the lifestyle of De, the 12 million followers of Taoism trust

Confucianism

A STATUE OF CONFUCIUS CONFUCIAN RITE (INCENSE BURNING CEREMONY) HELD AT THE JEONJU CONFUCIAN TEMPLE IN JEONJU-SI, SOUTH KOREA

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Despite dancing around spirituality, leading many to consider Confucianism as a philosophy only, the religion establishes a theological understanding of the Universe, albeit an impersonal one. In it, the priority of humankind is to strive to synchronize with the order of the universe in order to achieve oneness with heaven for the tranquility of community and self. This order is defined by “Tiān,” a non-speaking ‘God of Heaven’ which can be best translated as “the way things are.”

Moreover, Confucianism argues that the way humankind should act is a way that conforms to the most evident morals: charity, obedience to mentors, humility, and compassion. All people are inherently good and must work to realign themselves with that nature. Since its establishment by Confucius and his writings in 500 B.C., the faith currently hosts over 6 million followers.

Paganism Neopaganism is the revival of ancient preChristian spiritual practices and traditions that identify their roots from western and northern Europe. The word neo means "new," signifying a resurgence of archaic Pagan practices in the modern world. The word pagan is derived from the early 15th-century word paganisme or paganismus in Church Latin. It has 750,000 to three million adherents.

Many Pagans worship elements in nature such as the seasonal changes or cycles of the Moon, as well as polytheistic deities, which means numerous gods (unlike Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which are monotheistic religions). Many Pagans also believe in pantheism, which is the worship and respect of all gods within the pantheon of human civilization.

Paganism is a large term that includes witchcraft (Wicca), Druidism (Celtic traditions), and Norse (Viking) rituals in Scandinavia. Neopaganism maintains spiritual practices outside of the major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

While there are numerous and amorphous definitions of Paganism, there are many misrepresentations of Paganism in history. True practicing Pagans are not evil, do not engage in black magic, and do not worship the devil.

Neopaganism does not follow a religious doctrine such as the Bible or Torah; their most sacred code is, ''If it harm none, do what you will.'' The concept of utilizing magic in order to improve the world is permitted so long as that magic does not cause harm to another or maliciously seek to manipulate the natural order of things. Magick is defined as the use of supernatural energies and forces to beneficially influence events and differs from the term "magic," which can refer to stage magic (magicians).

The Future Church

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NEW YORK CITY’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE HOLY COMMUNION, BUILT IN 1844-45 WAS DECONSECRATED IN THE 1970S AND SOLD TO A DRUG REHAB PROGRAM WHO THEN SOLD IT TO PETER GATIEN IN THE 1980S. GATION TURNED THE FORMER CHURCH INTO THE LIMELIGHT, NEW YORK’S MOST NOTORIOUS NIGHT CLUB AND A KNOWN “DRUG SUPERMARKET” IN THE 1990S. CLOSED BY THE POLICE, IT REOPENED IN THE 2000S AS AN INDOOR MARKETPLACE AND EVENTUALLY A PARTIAL RESTAURANT.

Declining Membership and Repurposing The pandemic has thrown religious worship into turmoil. Some congregations spent months meeting over Zoom, uncertain if in-person worship could be safe. Others struggled to keep the doors open as contributions declined. A few have closed their doors.

But even before the coronavirus hit, many of the same issues were afflicting religious institutions; the most faithful worshipers have aged and church attendance has fallen in recent decades. Often, congregations have sold their buildings to eager developers, who might tear them down or partition the cavernous spaces into pricey condos.

JESSYE NORMAN

But not every flock-less church faces an afterlife as living spaces stuffed full of “exceptional quirks around every corner” for hipsters. Many have become different kinds of creative spaces and communal gathering spots, 72 | BAVUAL WINTER 2024

often providing what might be considered “secular ministry.”

It is unclear how many religious buildings are repurposed. Roughly one percent of the nation’s 350,000 congregations — or 3,500 — close each year, based on an analysis from Mark Chaves, a sociology professor at Duke University and director of the National Congregations Study. But not all find new uses and some buildings are filled by different congregations.

The reverent buildings continue to serve and delight their communities, like a café in West Virginia, a music studio in New Orleans, an internet archive in San Francisco, a nightclub in Denver, a college fraternity house in upstate New York, a restaurant bar in Arkansas, a digital audiobook and podcast service in Newark, New Jersey, and a vineyard in Ohio. Their transformations may serve as prophecies for more change to come.

CHURCH WORSHIP INTERIOR CONVERTED TO A RESIDENCE

Church Consolidation and The Megachurch Megachurches are not just a Western religious phenomenon. These massive edifices are also found in many countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. They are mostly of Pentecostal denominations. The largest church auditorium, Glory Dome, was inaugurated in 2018 with 100,000 seats, in Abuja, Nigeria.

The origins of the megachurch movement, with many local congregants who return on a weekly basis, can be traced to the 19th century. The first evangelical megachurch was founded in 1861 in London by Charles Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, which had a 6,000-seat auditorium.

The first megachurch in the United States was the Angelus Temple, founded in 1923 by Aimee Semple McPherson, a Pentecostal evangelist, in a 5,300-seat auditorium in Los Angeles.

A megachurch has been defined by Hartford Institute for Religion Research (2006) and others as any Protestant Christian church which at least 2,000 attend in a weekend. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggests that megachurches often include educational and social activities and are usually Protestant and Evangelical. Most of the congregations are very conservative politically (mostly as Republicans) and socially and of mixed race, though whites predominate. These large congregations are a significant development in Protestant Christianity as well as in politics.

Most of these churches, who tend to make millions of dollars a year taxfree, build their building in the suburbs of large cities, near major roads and highways, to be visible to as many people as possible and easily accessible by car. Some install a large cross to edify believers and evangelize potential new members.

A 2020 study by the Hartford Institute found that 70 percent of American megachurches had a multi-site network and an average of 7.6 services per weekend. The study also found that most U.S. megachurches are in Florida, Texas, California, and Georgia.

Churches in which more than 10,000 people gather every Sunday have been dubbed gigachurches. In 2015, there were about 100 gigachurches in the United States.

DUNAMIS INTERNATIONAL GOSPEL CENTRE AKA THE GLORY DOME, IS A CHURCH HEADQUARTERED IN ABUJA, NIGERIA, WITH DR. PAUL AND DR. BECKY ENENCHE, AS THE SENIOR PASTORS. WITH A SEATING CAPACITY OF 100,000, THE GLORY DOME IS THE LARGEST AUDITORIUM ON EARTH.

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The Online Church The COVID-19 pandemic has proven itself to be not so much a temporary inconvenience as it is a permanent disruption. During its three-four year run since 2020, the virus has completely upended the way people live and work.

For instance, prior to the pandemic, going to the office, the shopping mall, church on Sunday, restaurants and nightclubs or even going for a drive or a walk was taken for granted, just a part of ordinary life. When everything closed down for a few weeks or months by government edict, everyone saw their life suddenly upended by having to cocoon at home. When the quarantine was lifted and people could once again move about, many of us found that in many ways staying home was infinitely preferable to going back outside. Hence the change in lifestyle, which is probably with us to stay for a very long while.

This is no less true of the Christian church, where weekly worship services and other social gatherings moved from the church pews to Zoom.

Adjusting to a new reality As upsetting and frustrating as that may be the job of church leadership isn’t to fight reality, it’s to cooperate with it and leverage it. Fools deny reality, kicking against it to make it do what they hope it will do. The wise co-operate with it, leveraging it for new opportunities.

The new world will be a different place in some deeply recognizable ways but in some profound ways as well. As a result, the church will be a different place with the same mission but with some very new methods. As much as you may want everything to go back to normal, you

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can’t go back to normal when normal has changed forever. The future isn’t kind to the unprepared.

Pastors who have the energy, passion, and agility to change now will end up advancing their ministry in the future. And, of course, leaders who don’t, won’t. They may not even survive. So, with all that said, what does the future look like?

Digital church is here to stay Because so many churches have gone online for the first time and everyone has made digital their default, the long debate about whether online church is ‘real’ or not is settled. And even if it’s not settled theologically (a few still have questions and objections and always will), it is settled practically.

Physical gatherings have returned with joy as restrictions have lifted (don’t ignore the possibility that the restrictions will someday return), but to think that the world will suddenly go back to 100 percent physical when people have experienced digital is highly unlikely for a number of reasons: Churches are experimenting and making digital church better, having poured a ton of time and energy into making it better, experimenting with different formats and opportunities and really connecting with people, especially the social media generation. Many are doing a great job, and it’s only likely to get better in the coming years as smaller churches come online and all churches keep innovating.

Digital connections have proven meaningful for many. Sometimes the digital connections have been as or more meaningful than the inperson connections. There will be many who push back against this, but it’s foolish to ignore the fact that people connect more easily online and often admit the truth more readily online than they do in person. (That might not be right, but it is true.)

Most of the churches who are online now are experiencing growth. The critics will question how to count the online numbers as real growth and raise 100 other objections, but it’s unmistakable that people who were unaware or disengaged with church prior to the pandemic are leaning in now. Anecdotal evidence points to people who have attended a service today who never came to a building before.

There are churches that have seen a 500 percent Sunday ‘attendance’ spike since the pandemic . And, yes, people are texting in their decision to follow Jesus and many congregations are opening up digital discipleship pathways and groups for more people than ever before.

Unprecedented challenges provide unprecedented opportunities.

What we’re seeing in these early days of digital church is a huge spike in engagement and interest. To put digital church back on the shelf in the new normal is to ignore the greatest opportunity the church has today to reach people. And it also ignores the fact that many will want digital to be at least an optional if not a preferred method of engagement where geography and other barriers prevent access.

Will we go back to in-person and physical gatherings and services?

Absolutely. But it will never quite be the same as before; digital isn’t going away, the technology, like the church itself has always done, will continue to grow and advance by adapting to new times.

Adapted from Carey Nieuwhof in churchleadership.com, April 29, 2020

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The Rise Of Christian Theocracy If you’re alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism, the single worst thing you can do is define it too broadly. If you define it too broadly, then you’re telling millions of ordinary churchgoing citizens that the importation of their religious values into the public square somehow places them in the same camp or on the same side as actual Christian supremacists, the illiberal authoritarians who want to remake America in their own fundamentalist image.

To understand what Christian nationalism is, it’s important to understand what it is not. It is not Christian nationalism if a person’s political values are shaped by the individual’s Christian faith. In fact, many of America’s most important social movements have been infused with Christian theology and Christian activism. Many of our nation’s abolitionists thundered their condemnations of slavery from Northern pulpits. The civil rights movement wasn’t exclusively Christian by any means, but it was pervasively Christian — Martin Luther King Jr. was, of course, a Baptist minister.

Anyone may disagree with Christian arguments around civil rights, immigration, abortion, religious liberty or any other point of political conflict.

Christians disagree with one another on these topics all the time, but it is no more illegitimate or dangerous for a believer to bring his or her worldview into a public debate than it is for a secular person to bring his own secular moral reasoning into politics. In fact, people have learned from faiths other than their own, and our public square would be impoverished without access to the thoughts and ideas of Americans of faith.

The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.

In 2022, a coalition of right-wing writers and leaders published a document called “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” Its section on God and public religion states: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” That’s an extraordinary — and ominous — ideological statement, one that would immediately relegate non-Christians to second-class status. It’s utterly contrary to the First Amendment and would impose a form of compelled deference to Christianity on both religious minorities and the nonreligious.

But Christian nationalism isn’t just rooted in ideology; it’s also deeply rooted in identity, the belief that Christians should rule. This is the heart of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dominionist movement emerging from American Pentecostalism, which holds that Christians are called to rule seven key societal institutions: the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.

One doesn’t have to go all the way into Seven Mountain theology, though, to find examples of

Christian identity politics. The use of Christianity as an unofficial but necessary qualification for office is a routine part of politics in the most churchgoing parts of America.

Moreover, one of the common red-America arguments for Trump is that he might not be devout himself but he’ll place lots of Christians in government.

We can’t forget the intense emotion of Christian nationalism. Most believers don’t follow ideological and theological arguments particularly closely. In the words of the historian Thomas Kidd, “Actual Christian nationalism is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” It is tied, in other words, to a visceral sense that the fate of the church is closely tied to the outcome of any given political race.

That fervor can make believers gullible and potentially even dangerous. Its good-versus-evil dynamic can make Christians believe that their political opponents are capable of anything, including stealing an election. It artificially raises the stakes of elections to the point where a loss becomes an unthinkable catastrophe, with the fates of both church and state hanging in the balance. As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, this belief invites violent action.

Committed Christian nationalists represent only 10 percent of the population, according to a 2023 PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey. But even members of a minority that small can gain outsize power when they fold themselves into the larger Christian electorate, casting themselves as “just like you.” That’s why we cannot conflate Christian activism with Christian nationalism. One can welcome Christian participation in the public square while resisting domination, from any faith or creed.

Adapted from David French in nytimes.com, February 25, 2024

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Educate Yourself The Two Black Scholars Who

made history Milton Wright: The Black Scholar Who Interviewed Hitler On The Rise In the autumn/fall of 1932 when African-American scholar Milton Samuel J. Wright became the first and only person of African descent known to have had a face-to-face conversation with the infamous Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Wright was at the time a Ph.D. student of economics at Heidelberg University.

Some sources say the African-American academic, born in Georgia, had just completed two years of study in Germany and had been given his degree certificate when he and his German friends decided to attend a regional political rally where Hitler spoke.

ADOLF HITLER, 1932 MILTON S.J. WRIGHT At the rally, Wright would allegedly joke with his friends that he wouldn’t mind assassinating the future dictator. SS guards apparently overheard the conservation and followed Wright as he went to a top hotel — Europäischer hof Hotel — in Heidelberg with his friends to have dinner. Hitler was at that same hotel. Wright, on entering the hotel, was reportedly detained by Nazi Stormtroopers and taken to Hitler’s room to be questioned.

Wright, conversant with Nazi ideology, was scared and thought that would have been his end. But their interrogation turned into a 3-4 hour dinner for the two, where they discussed several topics. The conservation unsurprisingly became one-way. Hitler, who was calm throughout, would ask and then answer his own questions but with a loud voice.

Wright, fluent in German, would later give an account of his encounter with Hitler. “The time with Hitler was spent almost entirely by his asking me questions about the Negroes in the United States.

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Of course I had little opportunity to answer any of his questions because he would no sooner ask a question than he would immediately proceed to give his own answer,” Wright wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black weekly newspaper.

“When I would attempt to correct some of his versions of life in America, he would almost invariably break in with another question or comment. With that exception he was most courteous to me. He spoke loudly, long, and with an air or authority.”

Hitler’s views on race during the conversation were what one would probably expect from him. Wright wrote: “He [Hitler] expressed the opinion that Negroes could not have much backbone, because of the fact that they consistently allowed the whites to lynch them, beat them, segregate them, without rising up against their oppressors. ‘They must be definitely third-class people,’ he said. ‘Minority groups always get the worst of it in conflicts like race-riots.’ ‘Don’t you think your people are destined perpetually to be slaves of one kind or another?’ he asked. Hitler’s answer was an enthusiastic ‘yes’! Your people are a hopeless lot. I don’t hate them. I pity the poor devils.”

The future German dictator however paid Wright a compliment at the end of their four-hour conversation, saying he loved the fact that the first Black person he had ever met in person could speak better German than any White American or Englishman he had ever heard.

In six months after their meeting, Hitler would rise to power as the Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then as Führer in 1934. During the Nazi party leader’s dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, Jews and Blacks and a few other European nationalities were all victims of the Nazi’s racial cleansing, though anytime Nazi Germany is mentioned, the Jewish Holocaust is at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

In the Nazi era, from 1933 to 1945, African Germans were in the thousands. Servants, students, sailors and entertainers from present-day Rwanda, Burundi, Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, and Tanzania came to Germany, said a BBC report. In time, many African Germans were excluded from education and employment and were not allowed to have relationships with White people. Some were also sterilized while others were sent to concentration camps. In effect, while Black Germans were not subject to mass extermination as in the cases of

Jews, Romani and Slavs, they were targeted too, though not in the “same systematic way,” researchers say.

Wright had, before the start of the Nazi era, returned to the U.S. after having completed his dissertation, titled “The Economic Development and the Natives Policy in the Former African Protected Areas of Germany from 1884 to 1918.”

The academic, born in Savannah, Georgia, on June 28, 1903, had, before pursuing his doctorate in economics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, received his B.A. from Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1926 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1928. While at Heidelberg in Germany, he was a student leader who received a lot of invitations to international student conferences at the University of Cologne in Germany and Oxford University in England, a report said.

The year before he met Hitler, he had wanted to launch student exchange programs between historically Black institutions in the U.S. and German universities. The African-American intellectual would later write a seven-page first-hand account of his meeting with Hitler in an article in Ebony magazine over 20 years after the reported encounter.

While back in the U.S., Wright became a professor and head of the Department of Economics and Political Science at his alma mater Wilberforce in 1933. In 1959, he was dean of the College.

Before his death on March 11, 1972, in Ohio, survived by his daughter, the conversation he had with Hitler was dramatically reenacted on the anti-racist radio show “New World A-Coming” in 1944.

Mildred Europa Taylor From face2faceafrica.com January 18, 2021

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THE MONSTER WHO WOULD CONQUER THE WORLD If the world ever is tormented by the biblical antiChrist, Adolf Hitler surely would be his dress rehearsal.

To many the human embodiment of pure evil, Hitler in his 12 years as dictator of Germany created more death and destruction than any other single individual in world history. Mankind is still coping, 79 years later, with the hate and division that he wrought.

Born in 1889 Austria to a domineering civil servant and his meek wife, Hitler moved to Vienna as a teen to

and thinker. His tiny group tried and failed to overthrow the Berlin government in 1923. While serving time in prison he wrote Mein Kampf (1925), explaining his goal of conquering the world and eliminating all races inferior to his Aryan master race, especially the Jews. Out of prison in 1924, Hitler continued his rise to power, aided by a worldwide depression, and his political strength led to his being chosen chancellor of Germany in 1933. He quickly eliminated all opposition, becoming supreme ruler of the Third Reich.

THE FUTURE FÜHRER AS NEARLY SUCCESSFUL PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, 1932, ONLY MONTHS AWAY FROM BEING NAMED CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY, JANUARY 30, 1933

study art and architecture, with a goal of becoming a great architect. His designs were dismissed as pedestrian at best. Failing at this quest, he became homeless and embittered, blaming his misfortune on others, including the Jewish elite. World War I saved him from obscurity; he distinguished himself as a German corporal, was gassed in battle and nearly killed in 1918 by a British soldier who changed his mind good luck for him but bad luck for the world.

Hitler emerged from the war in 1919 as a hero. The Berlin government hired him to spy on a small political group called the Nazi Party. He liked their frankly psychotic policies so much that he quit his job as a spy and joined the Nazis, eventually becoming their leader

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During his 12-year reign as Führer, Hitler began a plan of systematic extermination of Jews, political enemies, homosexuals, the weak and infirm and anyone else not in conformity with his Aryan ideal. He formed an axis with Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, and Japanese warlords to launch World War II in 1939. At first winning the war, the Axis powers eventually fell one-by-one to the U.S.-led Allied nations. When it ended in 1945, some 70-85 million were killed, including six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Germany was destroyed and Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.

After the war, the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were conceived so that such a monster would never be allowed to rise again.

Cheikhanta Diop: His Controversial Scholarship Moved The Discussion On Race

CHEIKH ANTA DIOP

“Pharaonic Egypt is an African civilisation, developed in Africa by Africans”: what seems obvious today – except, perhaps, for Nicolas Sarkozy and his “monkeys” – has long been passed over in silence, or even openly denied by the Egyptology developed in European laboratories. We owe it to the scientist, historian, anthropologist and politician Cheikh Anta Diop for having given what belongs to Africa back to Africa.

Born almost a century ago on 29 December 1923, in Thieytou, Senegal, the researcher went to Paris to study and provoked a scandal in academic circles by publishing, in 1954, Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture), the doctoral thesis for which he had been unable to assemble a jury at the Sorbonne three years earlier, due to a lack of interest from the teachers.

His chapter, ‘Origine des anciens Égyptiens’, which opened Volume II of the General History of Africa (published in 1984 by UNESCO and Jeune Afrique two years before his death, in Dakar, on 7 February 1986), summarised his final conclusions.

Negroid features’ Relying on ancient and contemporary European sources on pharaonic iconography, linguistics, invoking craniometry, the study of blood groups and skin pigmentation, Anta Diop asserted that “the Egyptian population was Negro during the predynastic period” and that it was the same during the dynastic period (that of the pharaohs), where “wherever the indigenous racial type is rendered with any degree of clarity, it appears to be Negroid”.

“The typically Negroid features of the pharaohs Narmer, 1st dynasty, the founder of the line of pharaohs, Djoser, 3rd dynasty (with him all the technological elements of Egyptian civilisation were already in place), Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid (of Cameroonian type) […], show that all the classes of Egyptian society belonged to the same Black race,” he wrote.

Egypt, the matrix of African cultures For the scientist, trained in physics and chemistry, the Nile Valley was not only the crucible from which a Black people drew the civilisation that shone on the world for three millennia but also the matrix of the social, dynastic and ritual structures of later African cultures.

According to Diop, this was proven by numerous similarities in customs and language.

“When it was discovered that Egypt had a prehistory, Egyptologists went looking for its sources in the great Mesopotamian civilisations, still convinced that the light could only come from the East. This theory prevailed until the 1960s,” says Béatrix Midant-Reynes, a specialist in Egyptian prehistory and director of research at the CNRS in Paris.

Rediscovered scientifically and militarily by Europe with the expedition of General Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798, isn’t Egypt also the cradle of Orientalism?

Orientalism was an artistic movement in vogue in a Europe possessed by fantasies of a “sensual and mysterious Orient” but also as a discourse of European and then Western political and cultural domination, denounced in 1978 by the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said in Orientalism.

The creation of the Orient was answered by the creation of Africa, a land outside of history to which Europe had the duty to bring its civilisation. Egypt, the “mother of science, art and history” celebrated by Athens and Rome before Paris and London, studied by scholars from the academic orientalist establishment, could not be linked to it, despite its obvious geographical membership.

Detached from its continent, set up as an autonomous world, daughter of the Nile alone, fertilised by the East, Egypt was placed in the wrong place on the map of white cultures, supposed to have brought civilisation and power to Europe from Asia, via Athens and Rome.

Ignorance and contempt In 1908, as colonial expansion accelerated, Hachette’s 6th grade French manual taught: “There is much discussion about the origin of the Egyptians. The most competent Egyptologists, M. Maspero in particular, consider them to be a people of mixed blood, but where Semitic blood dominates, that is to say, the blood of the descendants of Shem, son of Noah. The Egyptians, therefore, came from Asia, whereas the Greeks believed they came from Africa, from the southern countries and from Ethiopia”.

In 1954, Diop brought back to the forefront of Egyptology those testimonies of the time, of “Westerners”, who, from Herodotus to Strabo, mention the Black skin and the African ancestry of the ancient Egyptians.

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“Cheikh Anta Diop’s contribution is to have thrown a spanner in the works and forced scientific circles to consider this question more carefully if only to try to contradict it,” continues the palaeontologist. “Today, no one denies the strong African influence on the constitution of the Egyptian civilisation, nor its ancient settlement from the sub-Saharan belt, at the time of the rise of the monsoons towards the North, around 10,000 BC. “But we must put this into perspective and also take into account the important role played by the cultures of the Negev and the Nile Delta that were oriented towards the Levant.”

In 1960, Sorbonne finally granted Anta Diop a doctorate for the thesis he had been unable to submit a decade earlier. Nevertheless, the academic world, both Western and Egyptian, for a long time ignored him and sometimes treated him with contempt.

“The typically Negroid features of the pharaohs Narmer … show that all the classes of Egyptian society belonged to the same Black race.”

Martin Bernal, a professor of history at Cornell University, revived the debate in the 1990s with the first of three volumes of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, published in 1987, a year after Diop’s death. For its author, Greek civilisation, considered to be the origin of Western civilisation, was the result of a period of Egyptian and Phoenician colonisation, i.e. AfroAsian. In line with Diop and Said, Bernal denounced “the appropriation by the West of the culture of the ancient Near East in the service of its own project” Political ideology or historical approach?

“Every era has its own filter of thought, and the human sciences, of which history is a part, are no exception,” says Midant-Reynes. “Institutions such as the CNRS are now very sensitive to the major questions of climate, the invention of the Anthropocene, etc., and in a few years’ time, the current research will appear to be marked by this debate.

In the same way, Diop’s research is situated at the turning point of African independence, at a time when these young nations were claiming an identity and a historical depth that they had been denied. The problem is when political ideology is imposed on the historical approach”.

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.The criticism levelled at Anta Diop by the Cartesian academicism of European research is that he uses certain facts to demonstrate an often radical conviction, rather than studying all the facts without any preconceived ideas in order to draw conclusions.

In 1996, in L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop: histoire et idéologie (Cheikh Anta Diop’s Africa: History and Ideology) François-Xavier Fauvelle, the current holder of the first chair of African studies at the Collège de France, dissected for the first time the Senegalese intellectual’s method and thought process. For Diop, he writes, “the establishment of truth does not require the mobilisation of facts. The truth stems from simple logical reasoning […]. The facts are secondary. The facts are ancillary. They allow, at most, for verification”.

“His work is indeed a thesis,” says Beninese pan-Africanist historian Amzat Boukari-Yabara, “but the author relies on largely Western sources, both ancient and modern, as well as on linguistics and ethnology. Yet French academics persist in their obsession with stripping Cheikh Anta Diop of his scientificity and focusing specifically on Egypt, even though he has dealt with many other subjects.”

It’s like a dialogue of the deaf, in which each party considers the other to be irrelevant, Boukari-Yabara sums up, echoing the regret expressed by Spanish Egyptologist Josep Cervelló Autuori at the end of a Barcelona colloquium which, in March 1996, brought together – for the first time – recognised Egyptologists from the “Dakar School” and Western academia: “The Western Academy continues, consciously or unconsciously, to construct “its” truth, which it believes to be universal and obvious, by virtue of its scientific and philosophical method, and the elements, resulting from unorthodox approaches, that foreign groups barely integrated into its discursive universe can bring to it, hardly interest it.

“Black African intellectuals, on the other hand, active [in their circles] but passive outside, seem to seek, with their own academicism and for the use of their politicaluniversity segment, a series of cultural categories capable of explaining the past, the present and the characteristics that define their societies. If dialogue mattered more to them, perhaps they would no longer need to resort to accusations of racism […] against Westerners ‘who don’t listen’.”

Melanin and blood types Will the exponential progress of technology, especially in the field of genetics, make it possible to definitively settle the debate on the origins and physical appearance of the ancient Egyptians? In his chapter of the General History of Africa, Diop called for a thorough analysis of mummies’ melanin grains and blood types, which he believed would confirm a sub-Saharan Negroid ancestry and appearance.

In 1985, a year after the publication of this book, a researcher succeeded in studying the DNA of a mummified Egyptian child. However, it took years of progress before palaeogenetics could be developed in the 2010s. The first

discoveries of this new discipline have sometimes contradicted – and sometimes confirmed – Anta Diop’s conclusions.

In 2017, scientists from the Max-Planck Institute in Germany published the conclusions of their genetic research on 151 mummies from the New Empire to the Roman period in the journal Nature: “Our analyses reveal that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than contemporary Egyptians, who received a sub-Saharan contribution in more recent [post-Roman] periods. In view of this early research, the sub-Saharan element appears to be far less important in Egypt than Diop assumed.”

In contrast, in 2018, British geneticists discovered that the “Cheddar Man”, like other Mesolithic congeners unearthed in Europe, had dark skin, frizzy hair and blue eyes. Further sequencing now suggests that between 40,000 BC and 6,000 BC, the inhabitants of Europe had dark skin and hair, far from European school images – which seems to confirm Diop’s thesis of a recent settlement of Eurasia by Africa.

“Paleogenetics is going to change many things, but it is not yet advanced enough to be able to offer physiognomic details,” says prehistorian Midant-Reynes. “So no one can say when and under what influences the ‘negroid features’ dear to Diop appeared”.

The exploration of the origins of humanity has only just begun and its surprises have not ended, both at the Dakar School and at the Collège de France. “Egypt belongs only to itself, but it was formed on African soil, by African people.

And the whole of its southern part, at the gateway to Sudan, has been, for thousands of years, its most dynamic region, the cradle of its ideological construction and its monarchy. For us, this is an obvious fact, but perhaps it needs to be made clearer to the general public,” concludes the French prehistorian. He recommended starting with schools, where the youngest students still hold a real fascination for the pharaohs.

Reductive school lessons In 2017, participants in a conference at the University of Toulouse II on the theme “France in the mirror of Egypt.

Cultural imperialism, heritage and scholarly knowledge (1880-2015)” noted that even as the lessons on Ancient Egypt were greatly reduced in primary and secondary schools, the theme’s presentation remained faithful to the obsolete prism of the Third Republic, that of an Egypt that was the daughter of the East and the mother of European civilisations.

“From 2008 onwards, Egypt has been diluted in the history of the East and the lesson on the beginnings of writing. […]

Its evocation also serves as a gateway to Antiquity and Gaul, and thus to the national novel”.

The evidence that ancient Egypt was African is far from settled. Worse, a January 2023 survey revealed that one in five French people aged between 18 and 24 believed that the Egyptian pyramids had been built by aliens. Shouldn’t this “conversion of France’s view of Africa and Africa’s view

of France”, which French President Emmanuel Macron regularly invokes, begin with teaching the African nature of ancient Egypt?

“Cheikh Anta Diop was a pioneer in the decolonisation of history and the revaluation of the African historical narrative. However, he remains banned from school curricula, and universities refuse to discuss his work,” laments Boukari-Yabara. Yet this task might not be so daunting for Pap Ndiaye, the current French Minister of Education, a historian of Black minorities and whose father, Tidiane, was a compatriot and contemporary of Anta Diop.

Wasn’t it Ndiaye who – a year ago in these pages – asked for the society to “definitively turn the page of Françafrique and to engage France in a new path in its relations with the continent”? For, beyond the improvement of relations between France and the African people, the shared recognition of the Africanness of ancient Egypt touches on the universal, as the poet Aimé Césaire, who coined the term “négritude”, recalled: “Historians have always considered Egypt as a kind of fact apart in Africa, we even forgot that Egypt was an African nation. By giving Africa back its past, Cheikh Anta Diop may have given humanity back its past”.

Laurent De Saint Perier From theafricareport.com February 18, 2023

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The Hustle

The Black influencers of

YouTube Culture Black creators have played an important role in shaping the culture on YouTube.

From fashion and comedy to politics, learning, and wellness, They have raised the bar for how creators engage with their audience, build community, and propel the platform forward. They’ve demonstrated that innovation, creativity, passion, and ambition can take you anywhere.

BAVUAL recognizes two incredible black creators who have made their mark on YouTube:

KSI KSI has truly hit the big time over the past decade, building a fanbase on YouTube and making it as a gamer, boxer, and musician.

From huge hits like 'Holiday' and his collabs 'Don't Play' with Anne-Marie and 'Not Over Yet' with Tom Grennan - it's safe to say the YouTuber turned musician is taking the world by storm!

KSI, whose real name is Olajide Olayinka Williams Olatunji (or "JJ" as he is also known), ventured into music in recent years, as well as some pretty high profile boxing matches (we're looking at you, Tommy Fury ). Take a look through everything we know about KSI, including his career journey from YouTube to the charts!

👀

Who is KSI? KSI is a British YouTuber and rapper who has risen to worldwide fame since he launched his YouTube channel way back when he was a teenager in 2009. After years of hard graft, he's now the 115th most popular channel on YouTube, in terms of subscribers, with 24.1 million (at the time of writing).

He started off his career with videos of himself playing Fifa but gradually

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branched out into gaming videos and then 'vlog-style' videos. As KSI's engagement flew through the roof and he gained an even bigger following, he then decided to launch a music career - something he dreamed about for a long time.

When did KSI start releasing music?

KSI has always been into music, as he has released diss tracks as part of the Sidemen but it was only in 2019, when he signed with RBC Records and BMG, when he really began to make noise in the music business.

How old is KSI? He was born on 19th June 1993, making him 30-years-old.

He has regularly topped the charts with collaborations with Yungblud, Anne-Marie and Craig David. Despite his musical success, KSI still uploads to YouTube, uploading his music as well as playful videos alongside the Sidemen.

Where is KSI from?

KSI was born and raised in Hertfordshire, but now lives in London. His father Jide is from Ibadan, Nigeria and his mother, Yinka, is from Islington, London.

His younger brother is YouTuber Deji, and the pair were named the 'UK's Most Influential YouTube Creators' in 2015.

When did KSI start a YouTube channel?

Way back in 2008, with an account called JideJunior when he was just a teenager, KSI had his first YouTube presence. His current channel, JJ Olatunji, was made in 2009.

Over the years, he's seen the popular video site evolve as well as his career - with many of his videos going viral very early on.

KSI also has his music YouTube channel under the name KSI, which is where you can find all of his music videos.

Is KSI a member of the Sidemen?

Yep! KSI is a member of a group of British entertainers who formed the entertainment collective Ultimate Sidemen (that is now just called Sidemen).

The group is best-known for producing videos of various challenges, sketches and of course, video game commentaries.

During their time as a group, the Sidemen have hosted a number of football events in a bid to raise money for various charities.

How much is KSI worth?

In November 2021, KSI made it onto heat's Rich List, with the rapper reportedly worth an estimated £19.6 million. In 2019, he was ranked second by The Sunday Times in its list of the top 100 UK influencers. Not bad, eh?

As of 2023, it is reported that KSI's net worth is around the $27 million mark.

KSI on TikTok You can follow KSI on TikTok, where his username is ksi, and he currently has over 11.8 million followers on the platform. KSI was also among the top 10 most viewed artists in the UK on TikTok in 2023.

KSI's Amazon Prime documentary KSI: In Real Life was executive produced by renowned investigative journalist Louis Theroux, and released on Amazon Prime in January 2023. Capturing his life over the course of one year, viewers followed KSI from his performance at Reading and Leeds Festival, his boxing career, recording his third album and also putting his relationships with his family under the microscope.

MARQUES BROWNLEE

KSI

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One particularly poignant moment saw KSI have a frank discussion with his dad Jide, in a clip he also shared on Instagram which saw the pair open up about their relationship and embrace.

He also opened up about making the doc in an interview on This Morning: "I think people started to realise and go, you know what, we see him on YouTube doing all these crazy things but when he’s just himself behind the camera, when everything is turned off, he’s just a normal human being."

Explaining that social media had impacted his life in negative ways as well as positive, he added: "I definitely lost my way and I feel like therapy helped me tremendously and made me understand what’s really important to me, what values are and what my purpose in life is."

Marques Brownlee You don’t pick up 16.4 million YouTube subscribers and more than 3 billion views by sitting around hoping. And you sure as heck don’t get there overnight. Just ask Marques Brownlee, who, like Michael Jordan missing the varsity basketball cut in high school, was rejected from YouTube’s partner program … twice. More than a decade later, he’s evolved into MKBHD, one of the most prominent and popular tech personalities in the world.

Brownlee has now lived so much of his life on YouTube that it scrolls like an accelerated autobiography — New Jersey teen casually uploading webcam clips of his golf swing grows up to be a worldwide influencer producing the internet’s slickest tech videos with the help of a $50,000 camera mounted to a $250,000 remotecontrolled robot arm.

Watch the documentary on Amazon Prime.

Hannah Mellin From planetradio.co.uk November 6, 2023

Wearing many hats — creator, interviewer, podcast host, instructor, Ultimate Frisbee player — the 28-year-old has shifted perceptions of what a tech authority can be

At The Top Of Their Game The 15 black YouTubers with the most subscribers are listed below*: 1. KSI: 24 Million subsribers 2. Marques Brownlee: 15.9 Million subscribers 3. Matt Smith: 13.7 Million subscribers 4. Deji: 10.6 Million subscribers 5. Lerri Merrit: 8.62 Million subscribers 6. Prince EA: 6.04 Million subscribers 7. Chris Smoove: 5.09 Million subscribers 8. Mystic Got Jokes: 4.37 Million subscribers 9. Tre Melvin: 3.21 Million subscribers 10. DeStorm Power: 3.02 Million subscribers 11. Jarvis Johnson: 1.84 Million subscribers 12. Kevin Curry: 618 Thousand subscribers 13. Roberto Blake: 556 Thousand subscribers 14. Michael Jr.: 213 Thousand subscribers 15. Locario Fan: 60.7 Thousand subscribers *as of 11/23

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and what the success of a digital innovator can look like. His laser-focused but often humorous observations, combined with deep knowledge and passion, have helped him appeal equally to diehard tech fans and mainstream viewers. And as a truly independent editorial voice with a level of cred that now rivals vaunted tech publications, he has inspired a generation of young upstarts.

But that’s not all. Brownlee also cohosts Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast. His New Jersey–based studio runs multiple YouTube channels, including the justlaunched Auto Focus, spotlighting electric vehicles. He recently launched a MasterClass Session. Oh, and he’s interviewed Kobe Bryant, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Elon Musk, among other icons.

What has it been like for you to progress from making your first videos in your teens to where you are now?

Looking back, it’s felt like a slow and steady growth for this entire time, which I think is a good thing. I’ve described it as a gradient, but also there’s some pillars I can point to along the way. Probably the first milestone was just starting to make tech videos.

Was there a “made it” moment for you, or is it just sort of a continuum?

I think one of the best things that’s never happened to me is having one video blow up and go viral, and then the whole channel explodes. And then you’re like, “Oh, this is the moment where I realized it’s a career.” Like, that’s never happened. I do remember when the channel hit one million subscribers — that was in college — that was a pretty crazy moment. But even when that happened, I’d been making videos and seeing the subscriber numbers grow, and I saw the trajectory and I knew it was going to hit a million subscribers at some point. It’s continued past 10 million subscribers, which is another ridiculous number that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s still really cool and I think we’ll continue to evolve.

Stinson Carter From gearpatrol.com January 26, 2024

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Jocks

For The Love of

Pelé October 23, 1940 - December 29, 2022

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Now, he belongs to the ages.” The sentence, uttered first in reference to Abraham Lincoln’s death, now describes Pelé. .

Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé to the world, was the greatest footballer of all time. He was the distilled spirit of Brazil and the sum of its football greatness.

In a country where football was primarily played and followed by elite whites and the middle- and upper-classes, Pelé’s success changed the perception of black people.

“By the 1970 World Cup, he invented a new type of play that was more touch and pass. He would make passes without looking. He just knew instinctively a teammate would be there. That is football genius.” said Silas Eduardo Severino, a Brazilian coach.

“After my death, I would like people to remember that I was a good person who always wanted to unite people and draw communities together. And for them to remember me as a good player.” Pelé said this in a 2014 interview The Week published The thinker Arthur Schopenhauer described talent as hitting a target no one else can hit, and genius as hitting a target no one else can see. He may just as well have been describing Pelé. The striker introduced a new level of skill and technical ability to Brazilian football, using both his feet and his head in manners others had not. Every early description of his career notes this emergence of an innovator.

They also note the joy of a child playing with a ball.

Named after the inventor Thomas Edison, Pelé married science with art. He transformed play into a mix of magic and technique, which epitomized and popularized the description of football as jogo bonito―“the beautiful game”.

“A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides―gratitude and purity,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who reflected deeply on what makes any individual exceptionally great.

Pelé spoke often and from the heart about his gratitude to God, to football, to the Brazilian people and to Brazil itself. Clean and unspoiled, Pelé’s character made his greatness visible early on. As early as the 1960s, in a country where football was primarily played and followed by elite whites and the middle- and upper-classes, Pelé’s success changed the perception of black people. Those days, black players were systematically discriminated against, excluded from professional leagues and the national team, and otherwise faced significant barriers. Pelé’s success made the sport

more accessible to and popular among people of all races.

In his 1964 book Viagem em Torno de Pelé, Brazilian journalist Mario Filho wrote: “Pele is more than a great player. He is a symbol of Brazil and of the joy of football. He has brought happiness and pride to millions of people around the world, and he will always be remembered as one of the greatest of all time.”

Pelé was born to Dondinho and Celeste Arantes on October 23, 1940, in Tres Corações, a picturesque and socially active town in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Rich in culture and dotted with colonial buildings, the rural town had a population of about 20,000 in the 1940s, and was described as quiet and peaceful, surrounded by lush forests and rolling hills.

The family lived in a thatched-roof house with a small yard in a neighbourhood of other small houses and narrow, dirt streets. This is where the young Edson put foot to ball for the first time. The family lived in poverty and often struggled to make ends meet.

Pelé spent much of his time playing football in the streets and in the small yard of his home, and he developed his skills and technique through hours of shoeless practice. By all accounts, the family supported his love of football.

The home was also where he learned the values of hard work and determination, which would serve him well throughout his career.

In his autobiography, Pelé wrote about how he and his friends would play with a ball made of rags and how football gave them a sense of purpose and hope.

As a child, Edson had excellent ball control and was able to dribble past defenders with ease. He was also a powerful and accurate shooter, able to score goals from far and near.

“When I was three or four, my father would take me along to Vasco (club) training sessions,” he told The Guardian in 2006. “Whenever I could I used to nip into the goal and play around, and whenever I managed to stop a shot I’d shout, ‘Good one, Bilé!’ or ‘Great save, Bilé!’ (a goalie team-mate of his father).

Because I was young, I somehow distorted the nickname and said that when I grew up, I wanted to be a goalie like ‘Pile’. When we moved to Bauru, this ‘Pile’ became ‘Pelé’.... And then one boy, I don’t remember who, started to tease me by calling me Pelé. So, thanks to that goalie Bilé, and a classmate’s little joke, I became Pelé. Now it is known across the world, and I do not mind it so much.”

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Pelé was six when the family moved to Bauru, a city in São Paulo, where his father was a centre-forward with a minor league club. At nine, he dropped out of school and began to dream of playing football professionally, with the help of and coaching from his father. At 13, Pelé caught the eye of Waldemar de Brito, one of the pioneers of Brazilian football and manager of the Bauru Atletico Clube. There, Pele began his career.

In 1956, while still 15, Pelé made the three-hour journey across the Serra do Mar Mountains to the Atlantic seaside city of Santos on the São Paulo coast. There, he joined the Santos FC Academy, rising quickly from the junior team to the first team reserves and the starting lineup before the end of the year. He was still 15 when he signed with Santos, the only first-division Brazilian team he would play for.

Club led to country, and Pelé made his international debut in 1957. For one beautiful decade that followed, Pelé was Brazilian football. From 1957 to 1965, he was the league’s top scorer, turning Santos into the world’s team, the team that everybody wanted to see lift the cup again and again.

Pele was just 17 when he played his first World Cup. He recalls in his autobiography how, in preparation for the tournament in Sweden, he fell and hurt his knee; some people thought his career was over. He writes about the determination and perseverance he needed to overcome the injury and regain his form. He scored six goals in the World Cup, making him one of the top scorers of the tournament. He would go on to score six more in three other World Cups, making him one of the most successful strikers at the tournament.

In his autobiography, Pelé wrote about the excitement and sense of accomplishment he felt after scoring a brilliant goal (one of three) against France in the semifinal. He scored two in the final against Sweden.

“What Pele did in that World Cup was enough,” says Brazilian coach Silas Eduardo Severino, early trainer of Endrick Felipe, the teen sensation Real Madrid recently signed for around €70 million. “Even today, there is no way to compare Messi or Maradona with him, at 17! He made us all believe. He did not know what the Europeans had; did not know what he had within himself. And what he had within himself was much greater than all the others.”

By the time his second World Cup came, the opponents were more aware, says Severino. “The whole world already knew that he was dangerous,

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and they marked him heavily. Their objective in every game was to stop Pelé. By the 1970 World Cup, he invented a new type of play that was more touch and pass, looking for the right time to break out. He scored one of the goals of the tournament.

He would make passes without looking. He just knew instinctively a teammate would be there. That is football genius.”

After the 1970 final against Italy, Pelé would collapse in tears on the field and was later quoted as saying, “I cried because of the emotion, because of the joy, because of the pain.”

Carlos Alberto Torres, the captain of the Brazilian team that won the 1970 World Cup, wrote on a cover blurb for Pelé’s autobiography: “Pelé was a true global icon and a symbol of Brazil. He inspired so many people and brought joy to so many lives.

He was an incredible ambassador for football and used his fame and influence to promote social justice and make a positive impact on the world.”

If what he did on the field was genius, what he stood for outside was equally inspiring. His success made others, especially black Brazilians, believe in themselves. Says Severino: “Pelé was very young, but if he could, I believed I could. If Pelé became a global superstar without playing in Europe, I could, too. He made us believe!”

On November 19, 1969, when Pele scored his 1,000th goal (including in unofficial matches), he dedicated the milestone to the children of the world, famously saying, “The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes; everything else is just background noise.”

Though he stopped playing for Santos in 1974, he signed with the New York Cosmos the following year. The New York Times reported at the time: “Pelé, known throughout the world as the king of soccer, agreed yesterday to sign with the New York Cosmos, who will reportedly pay him $7 million in a three-year contract.”

He played in the North American Soccer League from 1975 to 1977. This stint would awaken interest for football in the US, a country where it had failed to gain acceptance as it was competing with the more established American football, baseball and basketball major leagues.

On October 1, 1977, in a farewell friendly between Cosmos and Santos, which the former won 2-1, Pelé

retired for the final time. He had played one half for each team, and had scored against Santos in the first half.

“Pelé was a great player, a real symbol of our country. He gave so much to the game and to Brazil,” wrote Ronaldo, one of Brazil’s greatest strikers, after Pele’s death.

For nearly five decades after his professional career, Pelé maintained global relevance and used his fame and influence to advocate for various causes.

A national hero, Pelé has been the subject of numerous books, films and other works of art, and has received numerous awards for his contributions to football and to Brazilian culture. In a unique tribute, he became one of the first living persons to be featured in a video game, Atari’s Pelé’s Soccer, in 1980.

Pelé was also involved in efforts to promote peace and understanding between different cultures and countries. In 1978, he was invited to play in a charity match in Haifa, Israel, as part of the nation’s 30th anniversary celebrations. He agreed to play, but on the condition that a Palestinian player be included on the opposing team. The Palestinian player, Mahmoud Abbas, later became the president of the Palestinian National Authority.

He worked with FIFA as an ambassador against racism and with UNICEF to promote children’s rights. In 1978, Pelé was awarded the International Peace Award for his work with UNICEF. He had a soft spot for children. He had seven of his own, from three marriages.

In 1994, Pelé was appointed as a UNESCO Champion of Sport in recognition of his ability to use his influence to promote international collaboration and contribute to world peace and security.

He returned to the pitch in 1995, playing in a charity match to raise money for the victims of an earthquake in Kobe, Japan. He scored a goal and then immediately collapsed on the pitch. It was later revealed that he had suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital.

The following year, he was invited to speak at the United Nations for its 50th anniversary celebrations.

“Sport,” he said, “is the only international activity in which every person can participate, regardless of race, religion, or political beliefs. It is the one activity that can bring the world together.”

In 1997, he received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II and, two years later, the International Olympic Committee named him “Athlete of the Century.” The same year, Time magazine named him in its 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century list.

Between 1995 and 1998, Pelé was also Brazil’s Extraordinary Minister for Sports. And as an administrator, he thought deeply and passionately about the game. When Brazil hosted the World Cup in 2014, Pelé told French journalist Mustapha Kessous in an interview The Week published ahead of the tournament: “I do not want to give the impression that I am the World Cup. The most important thing is the image of my country and its influence throughout the world. I remember no one really knew about Brazil in 1958 when I went to Europe. When I arrived at the training camp in Switzerland, the Brazilian flag had a circle instead of the diamond. From then on, I have had just one wish for the World Cup―it should be used to help my people and my country.”

He was also mindful of the practicalities surrounding such an event. “Spending too much on stadiums is out of the question because the money is coming from the people,” he said in that interview. “We cannot afford to find ourselves with these white elephants that will not have any use after the World Cup. We need to build schools and universities.”

Having worked for charity ever since he retired, Pelé, in 2018, launched the Pelé Foundation, which has had a long and significant impact on the lives of people around the world. He continued his charitable work even while battling cancer. “He was a true role model and an inspiration to so many people around the world,” wrote Brazilian superstar Ronaldinho. “Pelé was an extraordinary player, but he was also an extraordinary person. He was kind, humble and generous, and he used his fame and influence to help others.”

Pelé’s death marks the end of an era in football, says Severino. “Pelé will always be an exact reference, the perfect example of what an athlete should be―a comrade, educated, elegant, calm. His legacy will continue to serve as a guide for all. His time with us―what he showed us, and what he taught us―now belongs to the world.”

On the heels of a World Cup that canonized Lionel Messi as football’s new god, we revisit the words of the Argentine hero: “For me, Pelé was the best

BAVUAL WINTER 2024 | 89

player in history. He was the only player who could do things no one else could do.”

In that 2014 interview, Pelé acknowledged the greatness of Messi, but also added: “When Messi scores 1,283 goals and wins three World Cups, we will talk about it again. We do not need to compare people. Football changes, records are made to be broken, but it will be difficult to beat mine.”

Even Diego Maradona, who was often pitted against Pelé in the debate of who the best was, once said that “Pelé was the greatest”.

To fill the interlude between life and death, we humans often seek the comfort of words that give context to and sum up the value of life. We find them on the site of Pelé’s foundation: “Pelé is a big word. As big as love.

Belief. Dreams. He is football’s greatest ambassador, and the gold standard by which everybody else lives.

Pelé is Brazil’s green and yellow. He is the magic in the air for every game that’s played.”

Perhaps having given thought to what he leaves behind, Pelé had told Kessous: “After my death, I would like people to remember that I was a good person who always wanted to unite people and draw communities together. And for them to remember me as a good player... People ask me all the time, ‘When will the next Pelé be born?’ Never! My mother and father have closed the factory.”

Milan Sime Martinic/Brasllia From The Week.com,, January 8, 2023

PELÉ HOLDS BRAZILIAN AND AMERICAN FLAGS AFTER HIS FINAL MATCH IN 1977. IT WAS AN EXHIBITION AT GIANTS STADIUM BETWEEN THE COSMOS AND HIS LONGTIME BRAZILIAN CLUB, SANTOS. HE PLAYED THE FIRST HALF FOR THE COSMOS AND THE SECOND HALF FOR SANTOS.

PELÉ AND ARGENTINE SOCCER GREAT DIEGO MARADONA POSE FOR A PHOTO TOGETHER IN 2016. THE TWO SHARED FIFA'S PLAYER OF THE CENTURY AWARD IN 2000. AFTER MARADONA'S DEATH IN 2020, PELÉ PAID TRIBUTE TO HIS "DEAR FRIEND" ON INSTAGRAM: "ONE DAY, I HOPE, WE WILL PLAY SOCCER TOGETHER IN THE SKY."

PELÉ PERFORMS AN OVERHEAD KICK DURING A MATCH IN 1965. DUTCH SOCCER STAR JOHAN CRUYFF ONCE SAID PELÉ "WAS THE ONLY FOOTBALLER WHO SURPASSED THE BOUNDARIES OF LOGIC."

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Roll of Honor

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Dedicated to the Memory of Earl Birkett, 1922-2014 Queenie Birkett, 1923-2023

Bloomers In Spring Arthur Ashe

ARTHUR ROBERT ASHE JR. (1943-1993) Tennis Star and Role Model / USA

ACHIEVEMENTS Won three Grand Slam titles in singles and two in doubles.

1st black player selected to the United States Davis Cup team, and the only black man ever to win the singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open.

Ranked world No. 1 by Rex Bellamy, Bud Collins, Judith Elian, Lance Tingay, World Tennis and Tennis Magazine (U.S.) in 1975.

Became an advocate for HIV/AIDS treatment, cure and understanding after contracting the disease through a blood transfusion BACKGROUND Born in Richmond, Virginia Ancestors were enslaved by North Carolina Governor Samuel Ashe first African American to win the National Junior Indoor tennis title.

Graduated UCLA, 1967 1st Lieutenant, U.S. Army, discharged 1969 as Vietnam era veteran Married photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy , 1977 Daughter Camera adopted in 1986

Eartha Kitt

EARTHA MAE KITT (1927-2008) Singer, Actress and Sex Symbol / USA

ACHIEVEMENTS Best known for known for her highly distinctive singing style and her 1953 recordings of "C'est si bon" and the Christmas novelty song "Santa Baby".

Began her 66-year career in 1942; in the early 1950s, she had six US Top 30 entries, Orson Welles once called her the "most exciting woman in the world".

Starred as Catwoman in the television series Batman in 1967.

Critic of the Vietnam War BACKGROUND Born in the town of North, South Carolina Mother Anna Mae Keith was unmarried Subjected to abuse as a child Raised in Harlem, New York, by (perhaps) her biological mother, Mamie Kitt Attended what became the High School of Performing Arts

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Martin Delaney

MARTIN ROBISON DELANY (1812-1885) Abolitionist, Patriot and Theoretician / USA

ACHIEVEMENTS Arguably the first proponent of black nationalism.

Credited with the Pan-African slogan of "Africa for Africans.

Beginning in 1847, he worked alongside Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York to publish the North Star.

Dreamed of establishing a settlement in West Africa.

Delany became the 1st African-American field grade officer (major) in the U.S. Army, February 1865 Ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina as an Independent Republican; later switched to Democrat.

BACKGROUND Born a free man in present-day Charles Town, West Virginia.

Both grandparents were native Africans of high status who were captured and enslaved Learned to read and write with The New York Primer; later apprenticed to a white physician.

Accepted at Harvard Medical School; forced to leave after white students protested.

Wed Catherine A. Richards, the daughter of a successful food provisioner, said to be one of the wealthiest families in Pittsburgh.

The couple had eleven children, seven of whom survived into adulthood. The parents stressed education, and some of their children graduated from college.

Medgar Evers

MEDGAR RILEY EVERS (1925-1963) Civil Rights Activist / USA

ACHIEVEMENTS Became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.; NAACP’s 1st field secretary in Mississippi..

Challenged the segregation of the state-supported public University of Mississippi.

Worked for voting rights, economic opportunity, access to public facilities, and other changes in the segregated society.

Awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1963 Murdered in June 12, 1963 at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson; he was finally convicted on his 3rd trial in 1994 based on new evidence.

His murder and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests; his life and death have inspired numerous works of art, music, and film.

BACKGROUND Born in Decatur, Mississippi; family owned a small farm and father worked at a sawmill.

Attended segreated schools.

Sergeant, U.S. Army during World War II; participated in the Normandy landings, June 1944 Earned his Bachelor of Arts in business administration from what is now Alcorn State University, an HBCU, in 1952.

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Michelle Obama

MICHELLE LAVAUGHN ROBINSON OBAMA (BORN 1964) Lawyer and First Lady / USA ACHIEVEMENTS First Lady of the United States during the presidency of her husband Barack H. Obama, 2019-2017.

The Obamas were the first black family to occupy the White House.

Known for her articulateness and promotion of a healthy lifestyle.

Role model to many young people, especially young black women.

Ex-vice president for community and external affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals Long involved in Chicago civic affairs and as a non-profit fundraiser.

BACKGROUND Born in Chicago to a city employee and a homemaker.

Descended from pre-Civil War African Americans with multiracial and slavery roots Educated at Princeton University ; graduated cum laude in sociology and African American studies, 1985 Earned J.D. degree from Harvard University, 1988 Practicing attorney; mentored her future husband Barack Obama (they were married in 1992) at her Chicago law firm.

Mother through in vitro fertilization of two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha aka “Sasha.”

A. Philip Randolph

ASA PHILIP RANDOLPH (1889-1979) Labor Unionist and Civil Rights Activist / USA

ACHIEVEMENTS Organized (in 1925) and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American-led labor union.

Prominent early voice in the civil rights movement and the labor movement.

His continuous agitation with the support of fellow labor rights activists against racist labor practices helped lead President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue an Executive Order in 1941, banning discrimination in the defense industries during World War II; continuing pressure led his successor Harry S Truman to issue Executive Orders in 1948 that promoted fair employment and anti-discrimination policies in federal government hiring, and an end to racial segregation in the armed services.

Headed the March on Washington in August 1963.

Inspired the "Freedom Budget", sometimes called the "Randolph Freedom budget", which aimed to deal with the economic problems facing the black community.

BACKGROUND Born in n Crescent City, Florida Father was a tailor and minister, mother was a seamstress Raised in a thriving black community in Jacksonville, Florida.

Parents taught him about character, the importance of education and selfdefense.

Graduated from Cookman Institute, Florida’s only black academic high school, in 1907.

Adopted socialism while living in New York City.

Co-published The Messenger magazine, which promoted progressive causes.

Married to Lucille Campbell Green; the couple had no children.

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Katherine Johnson

KATHERINE JOHNSON (1918-2020) Mathematician and Legendary NASA Employee / USA

ACHIEVEMENTS While at NASA and its predecessor,(1953-1986) she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist", which included work on the Mercury, Apollo and space shuttle programs and planning for a flight to Mars.

Lifelong promoter of education in science and technology.

Following her death, Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, described her as "an American hero" and stated that "her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten."

BACKGROUND Born as Creola Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

Her mother was a teacher and her father was a lumberman, farmer, and handyman.

Graduated from high school at 14 and summa cum laude in mathematics and French from West Virginia State College, an HBCU at 18 (1937).

A widow with three daughters, she remarried to James A. "Jim" Johnson, a U.S. Army officer and Korean War veteran.

Lewis Latimer

LEWIS HOWARD LATIMER (1848-1928) Inventor / USA

ACHIEVEMENTS Jjoined the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884, where he worked as a draftsman.

Inventions included an evaporative air conditioner, an improved process for manufacturing carbon filaments for light bulbs (credited as invaluable and crucial in advancing the technology), and an improved toilet system for railroad cars.

His innovations in the design of carbon filaments, which were used in incandescent light bulbs, significantly improved the bulb's efficiency and made it more practical for everyday use. It also helped make electric lighting more accessible and affordable The Lewis H. Latimer House, his landmarked former residence, is located near the Latimer Projects at 34-41 137th Street in Flushing, Queens, New York City.

BACKGROUND Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to two escapees from Virginia slavery.

His father George was identified and arrested and stood trial that was well-publicised; he was represented by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and subsequently was able to buy his freedom.

Joined the U.S. Navy at 16 during the Civil War. Employed as an office boy with a patent law firm, where he learned how to use a set square, ruler, and other drafting tools; later, after his boss recognized his talent for sketching patent drawings, he was promoted to head draftsman .

Wed Mary Wilson Lewis in 1873; the couple had two daughters.

Settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in “Little Liberia,” a community founded by free blacks.

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Benediction

The Sermon on the Mount

By Jesus of Nazareth Published in Matthew 5, King James Version, The Bible The Sermon on the Mount is a story that occupies the entire chapter 5 of the Book of Matthew in the New Testament. It is about Jesus teaching his followers how to live a life pleasing to God and the characteristics of Christian discipleship. It took place after Jesus chose the 12 apostles and came down the mountain to a place where a large crowd was gathered; it is his longest recorded sermon in the New Testament.

Jesus healed many people who were suffering from diseases and demons. He also taught them about topics such as the beatitudes, the law, prayer, fasting, and the kingdom of God. Jesus’ Sermon, delivered early in his ministry, has been the foundation of the Christian religion for 20 centuries.

MATTHEW CHAPTER 5 1 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: 2 And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, 3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. 9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. 10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

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14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

21 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: 22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

23 Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; 24 Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

26 Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.

27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: 28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

31 It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: 32 But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.

33 Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths: 34 But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: 35 Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.

36 Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.

37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.

41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; 45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

About the Author Jesus of Nazareth aka the Christ is acknowledged by over 2.6 billion Christians - nearly 1/3 of the planet - to be the Savior and the Son of God

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SUMMER 2024 HARVEST ISSUE

BLACK FARMERS BACKBONE OF THE WORLD 98 | BAVUAL WINTER 2024