Recently, the Houston Interfaith for Ceasefire (HIFC) coalition held a press conference at Trinity Episcopal Church (1015 Holman), uniting religious leaders from various Christian, Jewish and Muslim fellowships. Painfully absent from the gathering were Black religious leaders – the only Black fellowship participating being Houston’s Shrine of the Black Madonna.
Was the Black absence due to a lack of relationships and interactions with members of the overwhelmingly white HIFC members, or do Black religionists have nothing to say about genocide befalling the Palestinian people?
Houston Interfaith voices
Dr. Brooke Hotez, a Jewish community leader, educator and organizer, was one of the HIFC members calling for a Gaza ceasefire.
“I’m here today as a proud Jewish American… fighting for a shared future of co-existence, and I will not despair. We’re calling on local, national and international leaders to stop the flow of weapons and to take immediate action to broker peace and to provide humanitarian aid to those in dire need.”
Hotez sought to dispel “dangerous myths,” like the idea that the black and white checkered Palestinian scarf (the keffiyeh) is an enemy symbol.
“It is a Palestinian cultural symbol representing love for humanity and the human desire for freedom,” she said before sharing one of her favorite teachings from the Jewish tradition, the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Father).
“It says, ‘Judge every person favorably, and do not judge your fellow until you have stood in their place.’ When we see protests on university campuses or out in the streets, judge them favorably. Understand, they want the killing to stop. They’re passionate about the right of freedom and safety for all. As a Jew, another dangerous misconception I want to dispel is that Jewish safety means an unjust occupation is justifiable. The security of Jews does not come at the expense of Palestinians. They are not our enemy. Enough is enough.”
Press conference convener, Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen, senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, stated plainly, “I’m here this morning with clergy and laity from across the city calling for an immediate and total cease-fire in Gaza, the release of the hostages and uninterrupted humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza.”
Local Black voices
The gathering’s lone Black voice came from Aswad Walker, the Shrine’s associate pastor, whose introduction to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict came when he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1980s. There, Walker was a member of the Steve Biko Committee which demanded UT divest funds from apartheid South Africa and release Nelson Mandela and all other political prisoners.
“And as we’re out there marching and protesting and doing all the things we were doing, I met several folk from Palestine, Palestinian students. They were by our side the entire time… And from that introduction, I realized that there’s been this coalition that has existed between Blackfolk and Palestinians for a very long time.”
Walker, who says the Gaza conflict should be called “an ongoing genocide,” said some Blacks have asked, “What does this issue in Palestine have to do with Black people here?”
“From our perspective at the Shrine of the Black Madonna, the common thread we see is a disrespect of humanity [by] a people who are placing their commitment to the myth of white supremacy over humanity. So, we proudly join this powerful group in calling for a ceasefire.”
The Defender reached out to several local Black clergy but, at press time, only heard from Reverend Ray Mackey, chair of the Independence Heights Greater Houston Baptist Ministers Alliance.
“We despise evil and certainly the killing of innocent lives whether in Gaza, the state of Israel, as well as our very own homeland,” said Mackey. “Our conviction is to love all God’s people and to despise evil wherever, and to cling to what is good. We remain devoted in brotherly love and with the honor and zeal of our Lord to all those fighting the good fight of faith. As to the effects of the ongoing warfare in the region, we share the ultimate confidence of Luke 8:17: ‘There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that shall not be known and come to light.’ Until such time we fervently pray for a permanent ceasefire, a peace that surpasses all understandings and especially for all the families continued to be affected by this turbulent situation.”
National Black voices
Though the Defender was unable to secure position statements and/or thoughts from many local Black ministers on this topic, nationally Black clergy are raising their voices unapologetically.
Leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s Council of Bishops earlier this year issued a call for a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian armed groups and an end to US aid to Israel as its government wages a war of slaughter in the Gaza Strip.
Moreover, South Carolina’s historic Mother Emanuel church, the site of the horrific white domestic terrorist massacre of nine Black churchgoers in 2015, was the place where protesters in January demanded US support for a Gaza ceasefire, interrupting President Joe Biden’s campaign speech in the process.
In February, the Rev. Stephen A. Green, founder of Faith for Black Lives, organized a peace pilgrimage for Gaza from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., calling for the immediate release of the remaining hostages and a permanent ceasefire.
“We walked 150 miles to push the Biden administration to demand a ceasefire to protect the lives of all precious Palestinians and to pursue the beloved community,” Green said. “The Black prophetic tradition calls me to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God as we speak out against genocide, occupation and war.”
Noted Womanist theologian Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas wrote for Religion News Service in March, “Our humanity, that which signals what it means to be created in the image of a compassionate God, is fundamentally grounded in our ability to have empathetic regard for one another — to recognize the suffering and pain of another as if it were our own.”
“No one is winning in Gaza, where the tragedy is ever-growing: as of this writing, more than 34,000 Palestinian deaths, 1,200 Israeli deaths, 200 abductions and another 77,000 people injured,” said Willie Dwayne Francois III, president of the Black Church Center for Justice and Equality. “Children are bearing the brunt of genocidal inhumanity in a land that is holy for its residents and for many faith traditions of Abrahamic lineage. Mass violence begets mass violence, damning us to a closed circuit of tear-stained faces of the living and blood-soaked streets from the dead. Since Oct. 7, 2023, images of destruction, rubble, injury and death have dominated our timelines and televisions.”
Dozens of Black clergy members participated in an interfaith luncheon on Thursday in the basement of First Iconium Baptist Church in East Atlanta. In attendance were faith leaders from various Christian denominations, as well as Muslims.
Also making her position known was Reverend Leah Daughtry, the national presiding prelate of the House of the Lord Churches, a network of churches throughout the U.S., and CEO of the 2008 and ’16 Democratic National Convention committees. She shared her thoughts with NPR:
“From the beginning, immediately after October 7, I joined with colleagues to call for the return of the hostages, the ceasefire – bilateral ceasefire, humanitarian aid to flow freely to those who need it, and for an intensified peace process in the region, and to address what we viewed as an escalating war and escalating conflict among the countries there. So what we see now is, of course, there was the horrific attack of October 7. Families are still separated because the hostages are being held. But you have this growing death toll – people who are being killed by the IDF, but also people who are being killed through starvation because they don’t have food and water.
“We as faith leaders have to be concerned about the moral toll of this war and what our authority is and what our responsibility is in ensuring that all people are safe, are able to live their lives in freedom and security and that all children are able to grow and to live a thriving life… we do have a kinship with the land of Israel because it is the land of the book. It’s the land of our text. I just came from Israel in the spring, taking a delegation of people to view the sites that connect with our faith. But the land that is written about in the Old Testament is very different from the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. And so we observe that difference, and we believe that we have to be on the side of the oppressed, as God is.”
Videos from Houston Interfaith for Ceasefire Press Conference
