By Bob Allen
The pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church called Thursday’s placement of four Confederate flags on the campus of the home church of Martin Luther King an act of hate and terrorism.
“It is the kind of statement that we would characterize as a terroristic threat,” Senior Pastor Raphael Warnock said in a morning press conference posted online by WSB-TV in Atlanta. “Some have been afraid to attach that term, for some reason, when it comes to black churches, but the idea of terrorism cannot be a racialized idea if we are serious about equal treatment under the law.”
“This is the same as a swastika on the campus of a Jewish temple,” Warnock said. “This is an act of domestic terrorism, a terroristic threat.”
Warnock, who has been active in former President Jimmy Carter’s New Baptist Covenant movement aimed at uniting U.S. Baptists across racial and denominational lines, said it will be up to law enforcement to determine if the act constitutes a federal hate crime.
“I’ll let the lawyers deal with that, but it is a hateful act,” Warnock said. “As the pastor of this church, I view it as an effort to intimidate us in some way, and we will not be intimidated.”
Warnock said one of the four Confederate flags left on the campus of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Ebenezer Baptist Church was in the church’s bell tower under a “Black Lives Matter” poster.
“That’s intended to send a message,” Warnock said.
Warnock said the hateful message is particularly disturbing because it comes just weeks after the “massacre of nine innocent people in a Charleston church, an environment in which we have witnessed several church burnings, and at a time at which we are witnessing the killing of unarmed citizens by police and the response in the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“The young man that committed the terrible act in Charleston said that he intended to incite a race war,” Warnock said. “Well, this is the home church of Martin Luther King, who said that hate is too heavy a burden to bear.”
After preaching a trial sermon to the congregation at Ebenezer at age 19, Martin Luther King Jr. was ordained as a Baptist minister. In 1960 he became a co-pastor of Ebenezer with his father, “Daddy” King, and remained in that position until his assassination in 1968. His funeral was held at the church as a final farewell to his spiritual home.
“What this ought to do is encourage freedom-loving people to join together and to not just fight against the very obvious symbols of racism, but to make sure that we have a city and a state and a country that works for all of God’s people,” Warnock said.
Warnock said it is ironic the act occurred early in the morning of the first day of a two-day meeting at Ebenezer of African-American clergy from across the country to discuss the issue of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on black males.
“We have more black people in prison in the United States today than did South Africa at the height of apartheid” he said, “more in prison than we had in slavery in 1850.”
The act also comes the week before the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for Southern blacks to register and vote, which rolls around Aug. 10.
“I keep emphasizing this,” Warnock said, “because the young man who killed those wonderful people in the church in Charleston said that he had to do it because ‘you’re taking over the country.’ That is the crass and crude face of a kind of ugly political rhetoric that we’re seeing in the public discourse. This idea that somehow the emergence of new voices in the American electorate represents a threat, that’s what we have to push against. We have to push against it by condemning this act, and we have to push against it by making sure that people have voting rights.”
Police said surveillance video shows two white males placing the flags. Four flags were confiscated and will be investigated.
The superintendent of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site said they got a non-specific threat the day before the June 19 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., that killed nine people.
Warnock said Ebenezer Baptist Church has received threatening calls using racially charged language and ethnic slurs in the past.
“Let the message go out that we will not be shaken by this,” Warnock said. “We are undeterred in our resolve to continue to fight for justice, to fight for freedom.”
“This deepens our resolve,” he said. “We will continue to fight for freedom, and we’ll continue to struggle against hatred where it rears its ugly head: sometimes in the symbolism of a Confederate flag, sometimes in the kind of structural inequality that we see in mass incarceration and the effort to suppress voter rights.”
Warnock, who chairs a social justice commission for the Progressive National Baptist Convention Inc., gave a keynote message at the New Baptist Covenant Summit in Atlanta in January. He has been pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church since 2005.
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