Black Mormons Weigh Romney-Obama Match-up
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By Chika Oduah
Bull. One simple word. I'd put the other word behind it, but we don't talk that way."
That's how Don Harwell responded when asked if he felt compelled to support President Obama -- a fellow African-American -- in 2012.
The 'we' he referred to are the Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as "Mormons."
Harwell abandoned the Roman Catholic tradition he was raised in and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church) in 1983.
He says he is proud of his African-American heritage and of the great strides the race has been able to achieve. He just doesn't quite see eye-to-eye with Obama when it comes to politics, labeling the 44th president a socialist.
"Obama," Harwell said. "doesn't know what he's doing."
His support goes to former Godfather's Pizza CEO turned Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain and former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney. According to Harwell, the former, has the business acumen necessary to run the nation and the latter -- no pun intended -- is a "good man," who he knows personally.
theGrio OPINION: Mitt Romney's thin record on race
But the consensus among black Mormons is that there is no consensus. Political views among African-American Latter-Day Saints run the spectrum and many of them say that the religious affiliation of Romney and of former Utah Republican governor Jon Huntsman does not play a role in their perceptions of the two as politicians. Color doesn't seem to be an issue either, according to Harwell.
African-Americans Mormons, like Harwell, live with a poignant awareness that two traits of their self-identity have faced historical discrimination: one is being black, and the other, being a Mormon.
That's why black Mormons appreciate the support found in organizations like, the Genesis Group. Harwell serves as president of the group, which was formed in 1971 as an auxiliary unit of the LDS Church as a network for black Mormons and their friends and families.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints keeps no record of church members on the basis of race.
The LDS Church and black Mormons are familiar with bigotry. The founding prophet, Joseph Smith, said he began to see God and Jesus Christ in visions as a 14-year-old boy living in upstate New York. Through those visions, he began to publish the Book of Mormon and organized the Church in 1830. He and his followers traveled from Ohio to Missouri and Illinois, often forced to leave once word of their presence became known. Smith was martyred in 1844.
"The LDS Church has suffered greater religious persecution in its history than any other religious group in American history," Harvard law professor Noah Feldman told the Desert News, a daily newspaper published in Salt Lake City, the city founded in 1847 by Mormon leader, Brigham Young.
"And make no mistake about it, that prejudice is real."
Today, the LDS church is still viewed with suspicion and condemnation.
The most recent claim against the church came from Dallas pastor, Robert Jeffress, who called it a "cult" at a recent convention of Christian conservatives.
"We're supposed to be peaceful and non-argumentative but it really irritates me when people make claims that they don't know," Harwell said.
A June poll conducted by the Pew Research Center that looks at candidate traits and experience shows a growing public acceptance of homosexual presidential candidate, while opinions toward a possible Mormon president are largely unchanged since February 2007, when 64 percent said being a Mormon would not matter; 30 percent said they were less likely to support a Mormon for president; 2 percent said they were more likely.
The survey indicates a majority of Americans, 68 percent, say it would not matter to them if a presidential candidate were Mormon. However, a quarter said they would be less likely to support a Mormon. A breakdown by party affiliation showed that more Democrats than Republicans would be less likely support a Mormon candidate. Among those less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate, 63 percent say there is no chance they would vote for Mitt Romney and only 31 percent say there is at least some chance they would.
But the question of whether a Mormon can ever be president leaves some to remember that less than a few years ago, most Americans didn't expect to see an African-American president.
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Memorial to King Honors an Entire Movement
By Blair L.M. Kelley
Martin Luther King was a preacher, a visionary, and an activist; one of the people who immediately had a clear sense about what protests against Jim Crow segregation could mean.
When King gave his first speech in what would become the civil rights movement, he spoke to a packed church sanctuary of bus boycott participants in Montgomery, Alabama.
However, his vision in that moment made him address the nation, framing black Montgomery's dissent as Christian and non-violent. When King stood to speak, he articulated a vision of what was possible. He didn't focus on the buses, but on the bigger picture. He told the world that "the only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest."
In the course of his career as an activist and head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King coupled non-violence with his vision of ending racial segregation, and pushed for full voting rights for black southerners whose lives had been limited by racial violence and second-class citizenship. But after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King began to look beyond the southern movement for racial justice.
He protested unequal housing in Chicago, dissented against the Vietnam War, and was planning to lead an interracial coalition against the blight of poverty in the Poor People's Campaign at the time of his assassination.
So it is wonderful to see King memorialized in Washington, D.C. between presidents who were architects of a vision of American citizenship. At the helm of the civil rights movement, King called into question what citizenship meant if it was not extended on an equal basis to all Americans, reminding all of us all of the "inescapable network of mutuality" and teaching us that all Americans are "tied in a single garment of destiny."
However, it is precisely that mutuality and collectivity that we must remember as we memorialize King.
King was a leader in a movement that required many different kinds of leaders to surmount the challenge of racial inequality. Let's take again the example of Montgomery. Protests began in black Montgomery after the arrest of Rosa Parks, a leader in the local and state chapter of the NAACP, who had been advocating for voting rights, the protection of black women against sexual assault from white men, and fair conditions on city buses for years.
Parks' arrest served as a call to action so immediately E.D. Nixon, head of local chapter of the NAACP, and Joanne Robinson, head of Montgomery's Women's Political Council, went to work, spreading the idea of a boycott of the buses that Monday morning. There had been other protests against segregated conditions on buses most recently in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1953. There had even been protests against the segregation of streetcars in Montgomery fifty years prior to the bus boycott. But in this moment of dissent, King made a difference, but only in concert with the leadership of others and the will of thousands of people in Montgomery who participated in the long term protest. Maids and seamstresses, laborers of all kinds walked to work each day. In the cold, in rain, and in the heat, it was the people of black Montgomery that provided the platform upon which King could emerge as a leader.
The movement would be shaped behind the scene by experienced activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson who provided tactical and logistic support that helped King found and organization of activist preachers that would become the SCLC.
The campaign for voting rights would be buoyed by the work of educators like Septima Clark and Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School who founded the Citizenship Schools that strengthened black literacy and created determination. And the larger struggle for civil rights was energized by students like Bob Moses, Diane Nash, Julian Bond, and John Lewis who after leading the sit-ins founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.
So when I look at the stone from which the determined King emerges, I see the faces of others. Ella Baker's constant and determined gaze is there, leading NAACP fieldwork in the 1940s, giving student protestors the intellectual space enough to found their own organization called SNCC in 1960. When I look at the rough places in the stone, I see the determined face of Diane Nash, insisting that in the face of extreme violence the Freedom Rides had to continue.
When I look at the stone, I see Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who organized Birmingham, Alabama as a labor leader and minister, facing extreme violence at every turn. When I look at the texture of the stone, I see the calm bravery of Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer and the hundreds of others who stood in the line of fire in Mississippi, simply to enable African Americans to cast a vote. It is this texture, the varied personalities, the disagreements about tactics and approaches that made the movement move.
It is this larger community that we have to remember when we look at the rendering of King's face. I'm sure that he would have it no other way.
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Obama Says "Occupy Wall St." Not Much Different From Tea Party
By Casey Gane-McCalla
President Obama, who has become a target of the Occupy Wall Street protests sweeping the country, today embraced the economic frustration being given voice on the streets and said that his vision for America's economic system is best suited to resolve protesters' concerns.
"I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests," Obama told ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper in an exclusive interview from Jamestown, N.C.
"In some ways, they're not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren't looking out for them," he said.
Obama said the most important thing he can do as president is express solidarity with the protesters and redouble his commitment to achieving what he described as a more egalitarian society.
"The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you're supposed to do, is rewarded," Obama said. "And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don't feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers that those folks aren't rewarded."
Obama alluded to his American Jobs Act, which is funded in part by raising taxes on wealthier Americans and some corporations in order to make them pay "their fair share."
"We're at a critical moment in this country where if we can regain some of the values that helped build this country that people, I think, long for, when they feel that everybody gets a fair shake but we're also asking a fair share from everybody, if we can go back to that then I think a lot of that anger, that frustration dissipates," he said.
Obama acknowledged that widespread popular frustration is directed at him over the administration's failure to jumpstart job creation and economic growth. But he shrugged off the suggestion that he could have done more from the start, including focusing less on health care reform.
"Every day I think about other things we could be doing," Obama said. "The truth of the matter is what we passed is a very big Recovery Act that we knew was going to take some time to take effect. It made a difference," he said.
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