Annual Pastors Conference: All White Christians Invited

By Frederick Sparks

But oh no, it isn’t racist. The groups sponsoring the event, the Christian Identity Ministries, (whose website states: “Our true countenance is not one of hate, but one of love. Yes, we believe that the Europeans and their descendants are the chosen people of God. We believe this, not because we think that the white race is superior, but because there is overwhelming proof in support of this belief. “) and the Church of God’s Chosen, merely didn’t have sufficient facilities to accommodate non-whites.  The organizers also pointed out that they’ve never been invited to NAACP meetings and mosques and synagogues and stuff….so there!   What’s the problem?

The closing day of the event will include a “Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony”, to symbolize an “opposition to tyranny.”  While there will be KKK members in attendance, this lighting ceremony is absolutely not  a “cross burning” long associated with Klan activity.

Annual Pastors Conference: All White Christians Invited
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What, to the Slave, is Your Fourth of July?

Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

One of the most blistering indictments of American hypocrisy, religiousity, jurisprudence, universal rights of man and the construction of the Black Other:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics, enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing…Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, hear only his accusers!

What, to the Slave, is Your Fourth of July?