A reminder, the Obama Rally in Coatesville is today (RAIN DATE)Sunday, April 06, 2008 in Gateway Park from 1 to 3 pm.

BELOW, GREAT STUFF from the DAILY LOCAL NEWS:

Jim
________________________________________
DAILY LOCAL NEWS
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Black clergy discuss Obama’s visit
CITY CHURCH OFFICIALS SHARE OPINIONS ON POLITICS, RELIGION AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCES AFTER CANDIDATE’S VISIT TO WCU
By R. JONATHAN TULEYA, Staff Writer
COATESVILLE — Sandwiched between the day Sen. Barack Obama’s bus tour rolled through Chester County and the day marking the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, five members of the local black clergy met to discuss politics, race and religion.
The timing of the meeting in relation to the other events was coincidental, but in retrospect appropriate.
The ministers gathered at a city restaurant Thursday around lunchtime at the request of a Daily Local News’ reporter. Each either lives in the county or is affiliated with a church here, and some fit into both categories.
All of them support Obama’s campaign for the Democratic nomination.
They were: the Rev. E. Lauraine Acey, a pastor at New First Baptist Church of Birdsboro and a Modena resident; the Rev. Earl Blackwell of the
Seventh Day Adventist Church in Coatesville; the Rev. James C. Kennedy Jr., the senior pastor at New First Baptist Church of Birdsboro, who lives in East Fallowfield; the Rev. Patricia McAllister from Mt. Zion AME Church in Columbia, and a Downingtown resident; and the Rev. Ethel Moore from St. Paul AME Church in Malvern, who also is from Downingtown.
Joining the group, too, was Kennedy’s 90-year-old father, South Coatesville Mayor James C. Kennedy.
The discussion unfolded in a series of mini-sermons, unavoidably beginning with their reactions to the inflammatory preachings about race and the United States by Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, from Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.
The following is a selection of what was said on that topic, as well as race, the Illinois Democrat’s position on social issues, President Bush and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
BLACKWELL: Just speaking personally, the controversy with Wright was created by the media. You can take excerpts from my sermons, and I would be considered a Rev. Wright. But when you listen to the whole content of his sermons, he was speaking directly to the prejudiced, racist, biased community of our nation. And what he was saying, in fact, was generally the truth. The thing is we need to start facing is the reality of situations rather than running from them … What is also significant is that the media would pick that as some way to degrade or make a negative about Obama, and he wasn’t even there, sitting in the congregation. He’s never endorsed his pastor to be his spokesman. For the media to pick and nick, that only encourages me even more to push and prod forward with the support of Sen. Obama.
ACEY: I am a part of that generation (the Civil Rights Movement era). I come out of the South. My parents literally had to spirit me out of the South before I was 10 years old because my life had been threatened because I stood up to a white man who called me a … As I have told people so many times, it bothers me when I see some of the statements that have been made and taken out of their context and issues are built around it. I don’t care who you are, what your ethnicity is. If you’re truthful, you have to admit that America has been biased against people of color since its inception and continues to be to this very day. Individuals talk about America and they constantly (hearken) back to the Constitution. The Constitution was not built around black America. We were not included in anything that is set forth in the Constitution of the United States of America. People of color, particularly Africans in America, were looked upon as property.
MAYOR KENNEDY: There is a lot of truth in what Wright said. I was born in the North in Pennsylvania … This thing is nothing new, what Wright said is true. It is true.
Obama addressed Wright’s comments — which suggested in one sermon that the United States brought the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks upon itself and in another said blacks should damn America for continuing to mistreat them — for the first time during a speech in Philadelphia last month.
“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said, according to the Associated Press. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
On Wednesday, during his appearance at West Chester University for the broadcast of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Obama said questions about his relationship with Wright were “fair game in the sense that what my former pastor said was offensive.”
“I think that in politics, whether I was white, black, Hispanic or Asian, somebody would be trying to use it against me. I do think that it is important to keep things in perspective.”
Acey said Wright’s language is common in Black Liberation Theology
ACEY: Liberation Theology did not originate in the black church. It came out of South and Central America because of the oppression of folks down there and we grabbed a hold of it.
MAYOR KENNEDY: It’s just like anything else. When you are oppressed you are going to do something. And we were oppressed … so we tried to make a difference.
BLACKWELL: That’s the birth of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.
MAYOR KENNEDY: And the birth of the NAACP.
KENNEDY JR.: Rev. Wright was an angry man speaking on social condition he has endured. In my time being in the Air Force I can say the United States is the best nation in the world. But here again the question we have to ask ourselves is, can it be made better? This is what Obama is doing. Obama is talking about a matter of inclusion.
The white middle class is basically seeing a day when they will no longer be included. You cannot have the oil companies making profits of $123 billion, and yet they’re telling you by Memorial Day gas is going to be $4 a gallon. Some folks are saying it’s a matter of black against white. No, it’s not that. It’s a matter of inclusion. When you look at Obama you see change in him, because the change in him is going to be that the rich corporations are not controlling him … This young man is just saying I want everybody to have a piece of the pie.
… I don’t know (Sen.) Hillary Clinton. I don’t know her at all. But I think when you look at it, Obama’s package of inclusion better suits, not just black folks, but anybody who is outside the realm and seeing themselves (hitting) the glass ceiling and saying to themselves, I used to be a part of this.
MCALLISTER: “He’s capturing the attention of thousands upon thousands, because

READ THE REST OF THE ARTIICLE HERE:

http://www.dailylocal.com/WebApp/appmanager/JRC/Daily;jsessionid=0yyyH41Q0dsPz9bvypG2ckvW7hhmRSyTlk6tXvsFvQXrhQTGPgsh!1656221429?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pg_article&r21.pgpath=%2FDLN%2FHome&r21.content=%2FDLN%2FHome%2FTopStoryList_Story_1851252