c. 1998 Religion News Service

BOSTON _ The Rev. Charles R. Stith is gearing up for a new foreign mission _ not to save souls but to preach the Clinton administration’s gospel of partnership between the United States and Africa.

President Clinton has nominated the United Methodist minister and civil rights leader as U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, an East African country that administration officials see as poised for a leadership role on the continent.

Backers of the nomination say Stith appears to have a smooth ride ahead to confirmation by the Senate, even as he finds himself mired in a squabble over the use of a racially explosive phrase on the cover of Boston magazine recently.

Stith and his wife are longtime friends of Bill and Hillary Clinton and once stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House. The president has turned to Stith at a time when the administration says it wants a new relationship with Africa that shifts the focus from aid to trade.

While touring Africa in April, Clinton drew hackles at home with his apologies for past U.S. policies on the region that he said veered toward neglect and paternalism. But during an interview interrupted by congratulatory telephone calls on his nomination, Stith said of the new Clinton doctrine,”It’s an agenda of hope as we move toward the end of the millennium. And that’s what my ministry has been all about _ hope.” Stith has been called black America’s”Minister of Finance”by Minority Enterprise magazine for his campaigns nationwide to broaden economic opportunities in urban communities. The clergyman said he wants to extend this mission to Africa in the midst of Tanzania’s conversion to democracy and free markets.

Yet while diplomatic hopefuls usually play it safe and try to dodge controversy, the outspoken Stith has chosen to lead a new and racially charged fight on his home turf, one that has divided some of the city’s black clergy.

As president of the Boston-based Organization for a New Equality, Stith is demanding an apology from Boston magazine for headlining an April cover story”Head Negro in Charge.”Editor Craig Unger, who wrote the headline for a profile of renowned African-American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr., refuses to offer one. And Stith has all but declared an advertisers’ boycott of the magazine.”The term is a racial epithet. It’s insulting and it’s divisive,”said Stith, who spent 15 years as pastor of Boston’s Union United Methodist Church before stepping down to devote himself full time to helping minorities and women gain access to credit and capital.

Stith and his supporters say”Head Negro in Charge,”or”HNIC”in the shorthand of this battle over words, is akin to calling a black man an”Uncle Tom.”They claim the appellation goes back to the days of slavery, when masters granted special privileges to certain slaves who sold out rebels on the plantation.

But Unger, who is white, said black intellectuals today often use the phrase in reference to those anointed by the white establishment as spokesmen for the entire race.

Unger, reached by telephone, said he would have no further comment beyond what he wrote in a May 3 Boston Globe column accusing Stith and others of playing the”race card.” In Unger’s account, the conflict has escalated largely because of rivalries within the African-American community, notably between Stith and the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Pentecostal pastor who heads the national Ten Point Coalition, which ministers to troubled youth. Rivers, who also frequently writes for magazines and who was featured in a recent Newsweek cover story, has said his fellow ministers should drop the pressure campaign and get back to the problems in their communities.”We’re not asking that anyone be fired. We’re just asking the magazine to do the decent and common-sense thing _ to apologize,”he said of the magazine headline.

Asked if he thought twice about getting into a race quarrel at a time when he is seeking a diplomatic post, Stith said with a quiet laugh,”The short answer is, yes.” What swayed him, he said, was the fact that his son Percy, a freshman economics major at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, was due home for a visit at the time of the uproar. Stith said he would have found it hard to explain to his son why he was sitting out the controversy.

Although no date has been set for hearings on Stith’s nomination, administration officials and Senate staffers say they see no obstacles to confirmation. Stith said his meeting with Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., chairman of the Africa subcommittee, went so well that the senator gave him a copy of his tape,”The Gospel (Music) According to John.””He’s actually got a great voice,”Stith said of Ashcroft.”I sent him a note saying that if his day job doesn’t work out, he’d have a future”in gospel music.

Greg Harris, Ashcroft’s spokesman, said aides have been sifting through the nominee’s file and see”nothing out of the ordinary at this point.” Since founding the Organization for a New Equality in 1985, Stith has prodded financial institutions to open the flow of mortgages, commercial loans, home insurance and other services to minority communities. The latest effort has focused on financial education: teaching”economic literacy”or personal finance to members of African-American churches in Boston, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cleveland, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Prince George’s County, Md.

Noting a parallel between the work at home and the mission abroad, Stith said,”What we’ve done is focus on under-capitalized communities. In Tanzania, you’re looking at an under-capitalized country and under-capitalized economy.” A 1977 graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Stith has been involved in Africa causes since his undergraduate days at Baker University in St. Louis when he spent a summer helping build churches in Kenya. He was active in the”free South Africa”movement during the 1980s, and served as a member of the official U.S. delegation that monitored free elections there in 1994.

In April, he and his wife Deborah Prothrow-Stith, an assistant dean at the Harvard University School of Public Health, spent two weeks in the ambassador-training program offered by the State Department. If confirmed, Stith would succeed Brady Anderson, a Clinton friend who translated Bibles for a missionary organization in Tanzania before becoming ambassador. “Ambassador Stith would be supporting Tanzania’s democratic evolution and its strengthening of civic institutions,”said a State Department official who asked not to be identified.”He’ll probably be confirmed easily.” DEA END BOLE