Pastor calls for action — not just words — on inequality
Urban Voice Magazine founder speaks about race, poverty, violence
Instead of speeches and marches, black people need policies to eliminate violence, poverty and inequalities in the educational system, the Rev. Timothy Careathers said Thursday night.
“This discussion tonight is an attempt to get something done,” said Careathers, pastor of Westside Baptist Church.
He and Jermaine Harper, founder of Urban Voice Magazine, hosted a town hall discussion on “keeping race, poverty and equity on the Political Agenda.”
Careathers said he wanted to answer the late Dr. Martin Luther King’s question, “Where do we go from here?”
The discussion is the first of a two-night event that Westside Baptist Church is hosting to determine policy and community-oriented solutions for poverty, gun violence and economic inequality.
Another service is scheduled at the church at 6:30 p.m. tonight. Damien Durr, youth pastor of the Temple Church in Nashville and consultant with the Children’s Defense Fund, will be the main speaker.
Thursday’s event began with a community march from the Southside Recreation Center to the church.
In Chattanooga, nearly 40 percent of the city’s African-American residents live below the poverty line. Black households make an average of $27,000 per year, while whites make $51,000. And Chattanooga ranks seventh in the nation for income inequality, said Careathers.
“How did we get here?” he asked a 10-member, all-black panel. The group included the Rev. Ternae Jordan Sr., Youth Pastor Anthony Pollard, Baker’s Barber College owner Tim Baker, NAACP President Dr. Elenora Woods, Tenesha Irvin of the Tenesha Irvin Show and Satedra Smith, mother of murder victim Frederick Jordan Clark.
Careathers called the meeting a family discussion for the improvement of the black community.
Panelist Johnny Holloway, former head of Rainbow/PUSH, said the state of the black community is a result of lies and a lack of knowledge concerning black history.
“Black people know white people’s history, because that’s what we were taught, but white people don’t know black people’s history, because they lied about it. And so if you don’t know the history of the people who you are living with, you really have a misconception about them. There are a lot of people with misconceptions about black people. That’s how we got here,” Holloway said.
Panelists Corliss Cooper, a retired police captain, said the majority of crimes are committed by teenagers who don’t feel loved. She said crime could be reduced if more adults spend more time with young people.
Panelist Demetrus Coonrod, president of the Eastdale Neighborhood Association, said black people have to take responsibility for their own actions and black leaders should be held more accountable for helping the community.
“(We have to) pick the ball up from the 1960s and move forward in a productive way and stop blaming others who don’t look like us, because we’re at fault,” he said. “We put ourselves in these situations by not holding us, I mean people who look like us, accountable. If we keep looking at people who don’t look like us to save us, we’re going to continue to be lost, because, like he said, we know their history, but they don’t know our history.”
When asked why there is so much crime in the black community, local Nation of Islam leader Kevin Muhammad responded by quoting Dr. Martin Luther King.
“Dr. King said that when sin is committed in darkness, don’t look at he who committed the sin, look at he who created the darkness,” Muhammad said. “Dr. King said that it is the white policy makers who created the darkness. They created the slum. They created the unemployment … You’ve got to look downtown at the policies that have been passed through our government that has created the environment that we live in in our city.”