THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT FIRST MADE ITS PRESENCE FELT IN the presidential election of 1976, when it supported Jimmy Carter, the Democratic presidential candidate. Carter, a victim of high inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis, lost the next election to the ticket of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, in large part because the evangelical Christians switched sides. They preferred Reagan’s positions on social issues, taking the side against abortion, gay rights, and civil rights. Reagan aligned himself with televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. Falwell especially railed against the civil rights movement, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, and sufferers of AIDS. He went so far as to blame the spread of AIDS on the “wrath of God against homosexuals.” An aghast Republican senator John McCain labeled Falwell and his ilk “agents of intolerance.”
When George W. Bush ran for governor of Texas in 1993, he ran as God’s disciple. He read the Bible every morning. His campaign planks included a call for religion-based drug-treatment centers and prison ministries. After attending church, Bush would tell people, “I feel as though God was talking directly to me.”
When he ran for president in 2000, he wed economic and social issues. He took on the left head-on. He talked of “tough compassion” when it came to the poor and talked of his being “a uniter, not a divider.” What we got was a president who turned out to be as divisive as any president in American history. Though the Constitution calls for a separation between church and state, George W. Bush acted as though Christianity was the national religion. If it had been left to this born-again dry alcoholic, we’d have returned to the age of Puritanism.
Under George W. Bush, “faith”—as in Christian faith—became a crucial test for political appointees. But admitting to being religious apparently doesn’t reflect what Jesus might have done, as Bush’s appointees in the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned a blind eye to the dire suffering of the citizens of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. For five days the survivors sat and waited in vain for federal aid. Too many died during the wait.
Bush placed appointees with right-wing Christian backgrounds, but with little experience or skill, in key government posts, including FEMA and the Justice Department. The head of FEMA, Michael Brown, had been an official in a dog-racing organization, but he was a devoted Bush supporter, and he was hired for his loyalty. When New Orleans flooded, he was helpless to do anything—or perhaps he was told by the Bush adminstration not to do anything. The country watched in horror as the poor of New Orleans had to sit for days before something as basic as water was brought to alleviate their misery. Bush ran for president on a platform of minimal government. Here was minimal government in its most disgraceful form.
When President Bush said, “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie,” he was taunting all who believe the abandonment of New Orleans was a disgrace to this presidency that will forever be one of the legacies of the Bush administration.
As for Bush’s Justice Department, it was revealed that Monica Goodling, a top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University School of Law, with no practical experience, had the task of hiring and firing U.S. district attorneys. When nine of them either wouldn’t go after Democratic candidates for vote fraud or wouldn’t stop prosecuting Republicans accused of misdeeds, she fired them, replacing them with appointees dedicated not to justice but to the Republican Party. Goodling pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, to keep from going to jail for choosing loyalty to George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and the Republican Party over loyalty to her country.
One after another, Bush’s religious-right cronies became tarred by scandal. The homophobic Ted Haggard, the head of the National Association of Evangelicals, was forced to resign when it was revealed he had a gay lover. Other Moral Majority Republicans with Godis-my-pilot credentials bit the dust in the wake of the Jack Abramoff payoff scandals. Tom DeLay, the speaker of the House, was forced to quit, kicking and screaming, in disgrace. Ralph Reed, the number two man in the Christian Coalition, was accused of having his hands in the corporate cookie jar, as was the Reverend Louis Sheldon of the American Family Association, and James Dobson of Focus on the Family, all of whom were accused of taking money to promote gambling casinos. Apparently they didn’t heed the eleventh commandment: Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry did what any real minister who cares about his flock should have done: he protested Bush’s thirst for war. Daughtry stood in front of the United Nations along with Daniel Ellsberg of Watergate fame in an attempt to make people see the folly of Bush’s Iraqi invasion. He was arrested. He has even traveled to Darfur to protest the genocide there. The Reverend Daughtry, who has spent years trying to get the city’s police to stop killing defenseless black citizens, has been a legendary influence in the black community.
Charles Barron and Rev. Daughtry. AP Photo/Ed Bailey
City Councilman Charles Barron has been one of the Reverend Daughtry’s most loyal parishioners. After growing up poor on the Lower East Side and becoming a Black Panther, at age twenty Barron decided to pursue a college degree. It took him a dozen years, but he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1988 from Hunter College. While in college, he became associated with the Reverend Daughtry and his political organization, the Black United Front. Daughtry and Barron organized sit-ins and protests after every instance of what they perceived to be police brutality against African-Americans.
Once Barron began to see and understand the difference between having influence to make a difference and having the power to make changes, he decided to run for political office. After losing a race for the city council as an independent running against twenty-two-year incumbent Priscilla Wooten in 1999, Barron won the seat two years later against the Democratic-machine candidate Greg Jackson. Since then he has become chair of the committee overseeing the CUNY system and he has gotten millions of dollars to improve parks in East New York. Along the way he has also shaken up the establishment. He believes one day he can become mayor of New York City.
CHARLES BARRON “When I went to Hunter College in the CUNY system, there were a lot of student activists. It was in 1979, and I was part of a program called ‘In the Spirit of the ’60s.’ I invited Malcolm X’s daughter and the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, and Richie Perez, who was a member of the Young Lords. [The Young Lords started as a street gang in Chicago in the 1960s, split into ministries, and morphed into a Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panthers.] Richie was at Brooklyn College, and he and I became friends.
“Through the Reverend Daughtry, I joined the Black United Front, and we engaged in just about every issue you could think of, from police brutality and apartheid in South Africa, and that’s when I really started my political action on a leadership level.
“Our movement started with the shooting of Arthur Miller. He was a black businessman who went to check on his brother who police had roughed up and who was in custody. Miller had a permit to carry a gun when he went over to them. They saw his gun around his waist and shot and killed him. We started the Arthur Miller Patrol. Three hundred people with green jackets on patrolled the streets to protect us against the police.
“Then Victor Rhodes was beaten up by Hasidic Jews. Fifty of them stomped him into a coma in Crown Heights. We protested after that incident. Then came our boycott of stores in downtown Brooklyn that wouldn’t hire blacks, which led to more attention.
“Then came the Eleanor Bumpers case. She was a grandmother who was arthritic and diabetic. They said she was a couple months behind in her rent, and the police came to evict her and took the hinges off her door. They came with riot shields, riot helmets, restraining rods, and they claim she came at them with a kitchen knife. I would too if you broke down my door and came in with white police officers with all that gear on.
“They blew her hand off with a shotgun, the hand they claim the knife was in, and then they shot her in the chest and killed her.
“So we demonstrated and went to court. Our lawyer asked the judge, ‘They blew her hand off. Why the second shot?’ We didn’t even think the first shot was justified. The answer: the timing between the two shots. The cops walked.
“Then came the Michael Stewart case. He was a young black graffiti artist who the police said was painting on the trains, and they wound up choking him to death. To death.
“By now we knew enough that the medical examiner had to tell you the manner of death and the cause of death. They can’t just say, ‘Cardiac arrest.’ We know that. He’s dead. His heart has stopped.
“The manner of death is one of four things: natural causes, homicide, accidental death, or suicide. We knew it wasn’t suicide. They knew it wasn’t natural causes. If he had said accidental, it could have been reckless endangerment or manslaughter. But they didn’t write anything for manner of death. The police got off that time too.
“In 1980 we became the Black United Front and emerged as a national organization. We had our founding conference in Brooklyn, where over a thousand delegates came from thirty-five states and five foreign countries. I became a little more known and took more of a leadership role. I became Reverend Daughtry’s assistant and the New York State coordinator.
“Then in East New York the city wanted to build an incinerator, and I fought against them. The emissions would have been horrendous in such a congested area. I found a law that said that no private company could build an incinerator in New York City, and we went to court and stopped it, an environmental victory that was unheard of. That was in 1995.
“I was getting more known, and when they [the owners of the property] wanted to build a movie theater in East New York on Linden Boulevard, we protested, saying what we really needed was a supermarket, a youth center, and a technology building. We demonstrated. I brought in Al Sharpton. Three hundred people were yelling, ‘Not another brick over my dead body.’
“The next day they put up the whole wall. They still built it. I said to myself, ‘How did this happen?’ Come to find out that the city council member, Priscilla Wooten, who had been in office twenty years, voted for it. The city council, I discovered, passed the budget, and it passed laws over land use. We have fifty-one districts, 162,000 people in each district, and the council member has to sign off on it. That’s power.
“I was demonstrating, screaming and hollering for the person in power to make a decision in your best interest. That’s influence. But when you have that seat, that’s power. I said to myself, ‘What’s missing in our movement is power. I’m going to get that seat.’ That’s what launched me into electoral politics.
“To get in, I had to learn how to win. When you’re going up against the machine, you have to learn how to win elections. They may not know how to do anything else, but one thing they do know is how to win elections. They know how to get on the ballot, and they know how to kick you off the ballot. They know to make sure they have the high-powered lawyers, and then they are going to beat you by mailings and the election operation.
“My first run was against Priscilla Wooten in 1999. She was close to Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor, and to Peter Vallone, the speaker of the city council. Both of them campaigned for her. I had the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and [former mayor] David Dinkins on my side. And we went to war.
“On that first run I had five thousand signatures to get me on the ballot. I only needed nine hundred. They charged that I wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and they took me to court so I could spend some of my campaign money. I had to spend $10,000 just to give the judge my birth certificate. And they said I forged most of the signatures, when no two signatures looked alike and they didn’t even bring in a handwriting expert.
“First of all, they were shocked I could get five thousand signatures. They thought, Oh, radical Charles doesn’t know about this stuff. He’s not even going to stay on the ballot. We beat them in court twice.
“We went to war. They said I was a Black Panther who hates white people. They said I’d never be able to deliver anything to the district because the mayor and the speaker hate me. They said if I won, the people who were given jobs by the incumbent would lose them. They even got preachers to speak against me.
“They outspent me. If there were forty polling places, they had ten supporters in front of every site. I had two, because I couldn’t afford to pay for any more. People make their decisions at the last moment. They might be familiar with the mayor, and they might not be familiar with the council race, so they say, ‘Vote for Mayor Giuliani and Priscilla Wooten.’ They hand you a palm card.
“Then there was the postering. I put my posters up, and they paid kids to tear them down. So you had to be ready for war. The bottom line was she had the infrastructure, the congressmen, the assemblyperson, and eight senators—that’s a political machine, and even though I lost—four thousand votes to her six thousand—I was encouraged we could do so well. For a first-time run, we got 40 percent of the vote to her 60 percent, and everybody was shocked we got that close.
“I stayed organized, stayed visible, attended planning board meetings, school board meetings, and in 2001 they passed term limits in New York City, so the seat opened up. You could only spend two terms in office, eight years. This was Priscilla Wooten’s last term.
“The machine selected another popular candidate, Greg Jackson, to be the Democratic machine’s candidate. They didn’t come to me, because they knew they couldn’t control me. I’m an independent who just happens to be a registered Democrat. It’s not that they dislike me. They can’t control me.
“The second time around we worked hard. I went to train stations in the morning, went door-to-door, held block parties, went to churches on Sunday, and I got another 4,000 signatures on the ballot. I won by 300 votes: 4,900 for me, 4,600 for Greg Jackson. We beat the machine.
“After I won the city council seat, I did a great job in my community. I got $3.6 million to transform Linden Park from nothing to something. It’s going to be named Sonny Carson Park. Sonny was a gang member who became a political leader in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. He got people jobs, fought police brutality.
“I got another $1 million for Venable Park, and I got $2 million for the Brownsville Recreation Park.
“When the Community Service Society of New York made a study saying nearly 50 percent of black men were unemployed, I went to Mayor Bloomberg and the speaker to get money for a workforce-development program. I got $34 million over three years to get people jobs now.
“After I was elected, I became the chair of the Higher Education Committee, which has oversight over CUNY. When the mayor tried to cut this and that from the CUNY budget, I led the charge and got it restored. For the first time in history, we have a five-year CUNY capital plan for $602 million to fix up the CUNY schools. I got nearly $40 million for the Peter Vallone scholarship. I got about $20 million for a safety-net program where if they raise the tuition in the community colleges, students can apply for that difference.
“I get a lot of media attention. I’m very outspoken. I speak my mind. I don’t speak like a politician. When I went to City Hall, I asked why all the pictures on the walls were only of white men. Some were slaveholders. One, Thomas Jefferson, was a pedophile. And George Washington sold us for molasses. I said, ‘We need to have some black people up on the wall.’ Where’s Harriet Tubman? Malcolm X came this way. Martin Luther King came this way. Adam Clayton Powell was the first black city councilman. Where’s his picture?
“One of the issues I brought up was freeing Assata Shakur from her exile in Cuba. Before she changed it, her name was JoAnne Chesimard, and she was in the Black Panther Party. She and several other Panthers were in a car driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the police stopped them, pulled them over simply because they were Panthers. Once the police rolled up on the car with their guns out and they saw Zaid Shakur in the car, they opened fire. Zaid fired back, and he was killed. Assata was arrested. She didn’t even have a gun. Then she was liberated from prison. They broke her out, and she went to Cuba. She’s been there ever since, and I think she should be brought back and freed. [To prevent this, in 2006 the Department of Homeland Security had her designated a terrorist.]
“They rolled up on her, fired, exchanged fire. She didn’t pull a weapon. I don’t think she should have ever been charged with anything. I don’t think she did anything.
“After I said that, the New York Post called me ‘terminally odious.’ They called me the ‘execrable Charles Barron.’ Words I had to look up in the dictionary to find out how bad they were. They called me everything but a child of God.
“They said I was a race-baiter and a racial arsonist. And there is another issue that really gave them some fuel to work with. I called for reparations for African people for the years of slavery. The Jews got paid. The Japanese got paid. The Africans should get paid for 246 years of free labor and 100 years of Jim Crow racism. We need reparations. We built this country, which is another issue. Come on. It would be better than spending the billions in Iraq. Why don’t they spend the money to build up all the neighborhoods in New Orleans, where black people live?
AP Photo/John Marshall Mantel, File
“I spoke at a reparations rally in Washington, DC, in front of about sixty thousand people. Al Sharpton spoke. The Reverend Farrakhan spoke. It was my turn, and I noticed the crowd wasn’t listening, and I said, ‘You all be still. This is serious stuff.’ I was doing rally talk. I said, ‘They are lucky we want to talk. They are lucky we want to run for office. They murdered us. They lynched us, and they don’t want to pay back. We should go to the Treasury Department and take our reparations.’
“Everyone cheered. It was just rally talk. I said, ‘It makes me sick. When I get back to New York City, for my mental health I’m going to slap the first white man I see and tell him it’s a black thing.’
“Everybody clapped. The whites in the crowd laughed.
“But I forgot that I was on CNN, C-SPAN, NBC, CBS, ABC, oh my God, and I got e-mails from all over the country. One said, ‘I’m a white man from North Carolina. If you want to slap somebody, come slap me.’ It got crazy.
“The next day I went on the radio with one of the conservative talk-show hosts. He asked me if I said that. I said I did. He asked me why. I said, ‘It was a case of oratorical improvisation and black hyperbole.’
“He said, ‘What?’
“I repeated it: ‘Oratorical improvisation and black hyperbole.’
“They say I’m controversial. I find interesting that the word ‘controversial’ has been applied to me, as has the other word, ‘defiant.’ Those are biased terms. Isn’t it interesting that ‘controversial’ just means people disagree with you? Who isn’t controversial? Mayor Bloomberg is also controversial.
“Mayor Bloomberg seems to be a gentleman. I call him a kinder, gentler Giuliani, though his policies are the same. Giuliani was a horror show. He’s a racist man. He’s power hungry, and he has a disdain for black people. He came in there and left us with a $3.3 million deficit, and nobody talks about that.
“When he first came in he put a little mask on his face and walked around the World Trade Center site so the dust didn’t get in his throat, and he became America’s mayor.
“But five years later the World Trade Center site is still not built. Not under Giuliani, not under Bloomberg. And one year later the same Republicans are asking, ‘Why didn’t Ray Nagin rebuild New Orleans?’ When in fact the Republicans destroyed New Orleans. The people survived Katrina. What they didn’t survive was the FEMA/Bush hurricane.
“So I think Giuliani’s policies were bad. Police brutality was at an all-time high, because it was Giuliani’s time, and they did what they wanted to. Housing for blacks was a major problem under Giuliani. Housing is still a problem under Bloomberg. Apartments are not affordable.
“Unemployment was high under Giuliani, and unemployment in our neighborhoods is extremely high under Bloomberg. Isn’t it interesting, we have a $53 billion budget in New York City, larger than forty-eight states in the United States. Larger than every African country, larger than every Caribbean country, or any European country. And many Asian countries.
“Only the federal budget of $2.7 trillion, the California budget of $140 billion, and the New York State budget of $112 billion is larger. Having said all that, how do you now have the most impoverished congressional district in America in New York City?
“This is a tale of two cities: black and white. Rich and poor. The South Bronx has 42 percent poverty—$19,000 is the median income. Charlie Rangel’s district in Harlem has 30 percent poverty. In New York City! Carol Maloney’s Upper East Side district has 12 percent poverty and a median income of $72,000.
“So that’s why I’m not impressed that Mayor Bloomberg isn’t as racially inflammatory as Giuliani. He doesn’t have the same disdain Giuliani has for black people. Bloomberg will meet with black leaders like Al Sharpton. Giuliani wouldn’t meet with any black leaders, moderate or otherwise. He wouldn’t even meet with Carl McCall or C. Virginia Fields, a moderate borough president. Giuliani has disdain for black people. He really does.
“He never would have made it as president because of that, though there are a lot of whites in America who like that. They thought because he was popular, he’d keep us in check. Maybe that’s the kind of president they want.
“I’ve been asked how George W. Bush’s election affected me. For me personally it didn’t change much. There’s a marginal difference between Bush and Clinton, who was very harmful in his own way, because he was a conservative Democrat. A lot of legislation got passed that shouldn’t have, including the free trade agreement and the welfare reform bill. Clinton was weak on immigration and affirmative action.
“When Bush came in, one of the things that disheartened so many young people was the Republicans’ stealing the election in Florida, and stealing it again in Ohio [in 2004]. The young people said, ‘My vote doesn’t matter.’ That has made it difficult to convince people to be involved in electoral politics. That changed things tremendously. And of course, there’s the PATRIOT Act, which makes it more difficult to organize in protest. People are more fearful. There are so many ways the government now can come down on you.
“The whole country, Republicans and Democrats, is leaning to the right so much that some of us say we have a one-party system of Republicrats. That’s what we have to fight for, for there is great danger within the Democratic Party, for black people in particular, because the Democratic Party has moved so far to the right trying to win elections that our issues from the civil rights movement and the ’60s are being blown apart. The Democrats no longer are strong on civil rights, the Voting Rights Act, they aren’t that strong on immigration, welfare, not strong on a lot of our issues.
“And where the Democrats are losing, of course, is their lack of vision. Say what you want about Bush and the conservatives, their vision is very clear. You don’t have to agree with them, but they let you know: No stem-cell research. Killing an embryo is immoral and against God. No abortions. That’s death, against God. No gay marriages. That’s out.
“The Democrats say, ‘I may be against abortion, but I’m for choice. I’m for stem-cell research, for gay marriage. The Bible Belt thus has a belief that Bush and the Republicans are more spiritual and religiously convicted, though it’s incredible you can be concerned about the unborn but murder the born with the death penalty. Or bomb the born in Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine or anywhere in the world, but still have this concern about the unborn. That’s the hypocrisy. But the Democrats have not made the case.
“The Democrats can take the country back because of the Iraq War. It’s such a failure, and there is no clear exit, and even the Democrats, if they wouldn’t be such cowards, should stand up and say, ‘Bring the troops home immediately and let the United Nations go back in where they were from the beginning.’
“We should never have made the unilateral decision to do this in the first place. Osama Bin Laden was Ronald Reagan’s freedom fighter and Clinton’s terrorist. How do you figure that one out? The Taliban, you remember, was funded by America when Russia was in Afghanistan. Real international hypocrisy. But the Democrats are not calling it like that. They think the way to get elected is to go conservative, and that’s their big problem. The voters say, ‘Why should we go for an imitation when we can vote for the real thing?’
“I am hopeful things will change. Any leader who has no hope is not fit to lead us. And any leader who subscribes to any form of our oppression is not fit to lead us. So when you have leaders saying, ‘Racism isn’t going anywhere,’ they are not fit to lead.
“Change is inevitable. The question is the probability of it in your lifetime. And that’s what you have to work toward: the probability of the inevitable.”