c. 2005 Religion News Service
CLEVELAND _ Shortly after she arrived here 15 years ago, Bernice Powell Jackson went to a baseball game. But she did not go inside the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium; instead, she stood beside the American Indians who were protesting what they consider the racist logo of Chief Wahoo.
On that first opening day and subsequent home openers, she listened as Cleveland Indians fans shouted all kinds of epithets at her and even mooned her.
“Get a life.”
“Give it up.”
“He’s our hero.”
She still hears people shouting at a group of American Indians, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?”
Wahoo, the fire-engine red, buck-toothed, grinning idiot image of the Cleveland Indians, hasn’t gone away. And with another opening day only days away, neither will Jackson, now the president for North America of the World Council of Churches.
In a lifetime of work for social justice, a journey that has taken her from the front lines of the anti-apartheid fight to contemporary struggles for same-sex marriage, peace in the Middle East and universal health care, she knows nothing comes easy: “It’s slow all the time, and it’s very frustrating sometimes.”
What there is not _ for committed Christians _ is another way, Jackson said.
“We don’t have choices. We’re commanded to do so. What does the Lord require? To do justice,” she said.
At age 56, Jackson is not giving up, just taking a couple of new paths on the journey.
Jackson, executive minister of justice and witness ministries of the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ, last year was elected to be the leading representative of the World Council in North America.
She announced last fall she would not seek another four-year term as head of the church’s justice ministries when the denomination meets in Atlanta in July. But in January she was ordained a clergywoman, a move she had resisted for years in order to be a role model of church leadership for people in the pews.
Her work provides a constant reminder that the poor, the uninsured, the persecuted are always with us. She said people all the time ask her the same question: How can you continue to do the work you do?
“Without understanding, first of all, God is, and that secondly, God is a God of justice, it would really be hard to do this work,” Jackson said. “You need to understand God is still in charge.”
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Jackson was born a Baptist. She first became involved in what is now the United Church of Christ at age 5, when her family joined Peoples Congregational Church in Washington, D.C.
It was a church in the vanguard of the civil rights and interfaith movements, filled with black men and women who were judges, teachers, doctors and lawyers.
Perfect for a young black woman.
“Just by virtue of seeing these people and knowing where they were, even though the world was telling me what I couldn’t do, my own world was showing me what I could do,” she said.
Jackson got her bachelor’s degree from Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., and a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism.
She also began a lifetime of work for social justice, serving on the communications staff of the National Urban League and becoming involved in anti-apartheid work, working from 1979 to 1982 in the Women’s Division of the office of New York Gov. Hugh Carey.
It was during her time in New York that she met the Rev. Robert Powell, an Episcopal priest who also was actively working for a democratic South Africa.
The couple married, enjoying a relationship forged in love and a shared belief in the power of good to overcome evil, no matter what indignities they would observe in frequent trips to South Africa.
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In 1981, just after they had returned from an overseas trip, the couple were attending a Sunday service at Riverside Church in New York when Robert Powell had a heart attack.
“He died that day, sitting right next to me. I was 32. He was 42,” Jackson recalled.
They had been married only two years.
“It began what I call my wilderness experience. It made me face the question not why would God take him from me, but why would God give him to me,” Jackson said.
In the intense period of reflection that followed, she decided that among the gifts she received from her husband was the ability to distinguish between the will of God and the evil caused by the free will of human beings.
Neither slavery, the Holocaust nor apartheid was God’s will, her husband used to remind her.
In those moments when she would cry out to ask how a system like apartheid could be allowed to exist _ at times, for example, when their only contact with South African friends would be on opposite sides of a glass wall at the Johannesburg airport _ her husband would remind her of God’s presence in the struggle for freedom.
“Wherever there is pain, that’s where God is,” she said. “God chooses to be where the pain is, where the oppression is.”
In 1985, Jackson became the director of the Bishop Desmond Tutu Southern Africa Refugee Scholarship Fund, raising more than a million dollars a year to bring South African and Namibian refugees to the United States to attend college.
At Tutu’s urging, she enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she received her master of divinity degree.
In 1990, Jackson came to Cleveland to be executive associate to then-United Church President Paul H. Sherry. She met and married Franklyn Jackson, a school administrator.
She became the first woman to be executive director of the church’s Commission for Racial Justice before her election as executive minister of justice ministries for the denomination.
As North American president of the World Council of Churches, she is a particularly strong advocate for the World Council’s Decade to Overcome Violence, urging churches, congregants and communities to do their part through actions ranging from establishing domestic violence shelters to working for peace.
The pain of a racially divided South Africa gave way to the joy of seeing Nelson Mandela freed from prison and being able to return to a country where people of all races were welcome in the same hotels and restaurants that once denied admission to black guests.
But there are still overwhelming needs, from the scarcity of safe water supplies in many parts of the world to a lack of health insurance for many in the United States.
In the face of continued suffering, Jackson said she still believes in the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s contention that the moral arc of the universe finally “bends at the elbow of justice.”
Where is God today?
“God is in the refugee camps at Darfur, God is with a mother whose child was killed senselessly,” Jackson said. “Wherever the points of pain are, that’s where God is.”
And that is where she plans to be.
“For me, I just keep working at it,” she said. “That’s what we are called to do as people of faith.”
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So on the afternoon of April 11, when the Indians open at home at Jacobs Field against the Chicago White Sox, Jackson plans to be out there again asking the team to banish Chief Wahoo to the scrap heap of symbols offensive to American Indians.
Maybe not this year, or next, or even the year after, will she and other opponents of Wahoo be successful. But eventually, she believes, the ball club will do the right thing.
“I’m sorry it’s taken 15 years,” she said. “But I’m not without hope. I know it’s going to happen. … It’s going to happen because it’s right.”
And when that day comes, she said with a smile, “we can all dance out there.”
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(David Briggs writes about religion for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland)
