The Rev. D. Anthony Everett, lead Christian social activist, Nia Community of Faith: The most difficult message to get across to people during the holiday season is that Christmas is not about gift giving and receiving. It is not about the rich getting richer and the poor getting crumbs. Christmas is about the gift of God to humanity through the incarnation of the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One named Jesus — the Son of God. Through this divine and human sacrificial gift of life, death, and resurrection, humankind has been given the freewill to accept the grace of God and allow the Holy Spirit to lead us closer to the image of God from which we were created.

The difficult part of this message is that hope is not found in material things but the firm reality that to get closer to the image of God, we must reflect God. When children die from adults' lack of gun control legislation, we are not moving closer to God. When the poor and people of color are disenfranchised through a justice system that is not only broken, but specifically works to marginalize and enslave rather than restore and reconcile, we are not moving closer to God. When we ignore our own personal health and well being for short-term gratification and ignore the health and well being of the earth in the same manner, we are not getting closer to God.

I hope and pray that some day the message of Christmas is not about a Europeanized Santa Claus changed from a Turkish Christian named Saint Nicholas or that Jesus Christ is no longer a white male instead of an historical Northeast African from Palestine. On that day perhaps Christmas will no longer be about store sales and it becomes all about God's gift to humanity through Jesus Christ and how we emulate God's unconditional love in our own lives daily.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/religion/article44460174.html - storylink=cpy

 

It takes all to battle crime

The June 29 article by Justin Madden, "Tracing the roots of Lexington shootings; Experts, advocates weigh in on what role poverty, racism play in violent crime," was excellent.

It displayed a diversity of views without one seeming overbearing. Thank you for allowing the alternative voices of community activist Corey Dunn, 1st District Councilman Chris Ford and Associate Dean Vic Kappeler of Eastern Kentucky University's College of Justice and Safety into the conversation.

Also, thank you for including the report from the Lexington-Fayette County Human Rights Commission which I chair.

Too often, we only hear and read the skewed views of the local judicatory or law enforcement officials whose answer is always an ineffective retributive justice response of tough on crime with more arrests and more police presence to increase safety.

The problem of violence, especially gun violence, goes well beyond the act of violence, which is the mere symptom of larger societal problems.

All voices in our community, including the faith community as Ford began to allude, must be heard and involved in order to address this issue.

Rev. D. Anthony Everett

Pastor, Wesley United Methodist Church

Chair, Lexington-Fayette Human Rights Commission
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article44496423.html - storylink=cpy

 

The Rev. Anthony Everett, lead Christian social activist, Nia Community of Faith, Lexington: The role of the faith community, in all of this, is to be activists for peace. In the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church, my denomination, it states, "We believe war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ. We therefore reject war as an instrument of national foreign policy." This means to stand against the Syrian government whose use of chemical weapons against its own citizens is abhorrent. As well, we must demand the removal of chemical weapons from all nations, including our own.

Those of us who love peace and are part of either the faith or secular communities must lead the charge in opposition to United States military force against Syria. Military actions encourage the failed policies of our government's past to take sides in a civil war, escalate further violence and destruction, and increase all likelihood of a relentless civil war in Syria.

We are at a crossroads in our country's foreign policy to do the things we have done in the past that maintain military might and superiority, as the world's police, or to do the things that will carve out a humane tomorrow for the world. My prayer is that we choose wisely.
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/religion/article44444895.html - storylink=cpy

 

Anthony Everett, lead Christian social activist, Nia Community of Faith: Since the early days of this country, the gun violence culture has been a tragic part of our American way of life. Gun violence began as the first settlers came to the 13 colonies as a form of conquering and controlling the original inhabitants of the land. It continued with the creation of the U.S. Constitution and a Second Amendment that empowered state militias to quell the insurrection of enslaved Africans in Southern states.

The amendment had nothing to do with hunting and recreational shooting, if such a thing really exists. A bullet from a gun is meant only to kill a living creature. It has no other purpose.

The role religion and morality play in the gun violence culture debate is to educate people that human bodies are sacred — the temple of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ, in fact, was a pacifist.

The fact that an average of 33 bodies are laid to rest each day due to gun violence in this country cannot be in the best interest of the common good. There should be no debate when it comes to human life. Those who would support the right to life movement and conversely support "gun owners' rights" are hypocrites.

The faith community must call on every level of government to take steps to stop gun violence.

It is all about common sense and reforms that save lives, pure and simple, with efforts that have proven to be effective. Those efforts include universal background checks on every gun sale, banning high capacity gun magazines, and banning military-style assault weapons. It could include gun buyback programs in which the guns and ammunition are destroyed.

We must also shift our thinking that views the importance of the loss of life in Aurora, Co., and Newton, Conn., where the victims are majority European American, as greater than the loss of life of children like Hadiya Pendelton and others on the Southside of Chicago, Illinois or our African American youth in the north, east, and west neighborhoods of Lexington. The lives of African American youth are as equally as important. Youth from communities of color in America die disproportionately from gun violence..

Gun violence control is the real issue, and for anyone who reveres God and respects God's creation of human life, there is no debate.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/religion/article44405178.html - storylink=cpy

 

 

Anthony Everett, Nia Community of Faith and Lexington-Fayette Urban County human rights commissioner: "The issues that our faith community faces as marginalized citizens (African-Americans and impoverished ethnic people) in Lexington are numerous.

"We face massive impoverishment of children, youth, and elderly ethnic people. ... We face children and youth who come home to empty food pantries everyday. ...

"We face adults, children and youth who have not a ... place to call home and businesses who will not serve our war veterans because they are homeless.

"We face for-profit educational institutions that seek out marginalized African-Americans, promising hope for a better standard of living only to become indebted beyond their means.

"We face a growing number of illnesses and deaths from preventable diseases. ...

"We face addictions to legal and illegal drugs at a lower rate than other populations, but the resulting incarceration is at greater rates.

"We face a non-African-American population that enjoys our prowess in the world of entertainment (sports and music) but does not seek to understand our humanity and judges us according to a patronizing hubris.

"All of us, however, face judgment from a God who has had enough of the injustices that humanity plagues on one another. ...

Nia Community of Faith envisions a new year in which 'purpose' (the meaning of nia) replaces despair in the lives of our community.

"We envision a growing movement of local social activist of all faiths working together to eradicate the sins that cause pain amongst the least, the last, and the lost of the Lexington community."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/religion/article44147961.html - storylink=cpy

 

 

Anthony Everett, associate director for African-American ministries, Kentucky Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church: In times like these, when it is easy to hate our enemies and celebrate death as victorious, I remember the 1970s television series Kung Fu and one line stated by the main character, Caine, after he kills an attacker during one program. Humbly he states, "The taking of a life does no one honor."

President Obama realizes that this is not a time to celebrate or even claim victory, and all other people of faith should follow suit.

Bin Laden's death does not bring back the lives lost on Sept. 11. His death does not eliminate the tension between Arab ethnic people and Americans of all ethnicities or the terrorist acts against the United States.

Instead, we have the opportunity to reflect on the senselessness of all war and make a change, for no war is just. We must see the death of Osama bin Laden as senseless as we should the deaths of the Sept. 11 victims and American soldiers returning in body bags because "the taking of a life does no one honor."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/religion/article44099637.html - storylink=cpy

 

Nation built on black labor cares little for black lives

The March 4 Joel Pett cartoon is an accurate depiction of the circumstances in which we find young men of African descent today with the first African-American president powerless to do anything that would change their circumstances, but half the story has not been told.

Systemic racism from the days of forced enslavement of Africans through today's mass incarceration of African-Americans (men and women, boys and girls) has been the real culprit that has allowed this society to deem it OK that black men are murdered, whether by George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn or each other. African-American lives have little value in a consumerist economy, although this country was built on the backs of the ancestors of these same people. I guess we should be thankful just to be alive.

The gun lobby makes it easy for children to purchase guns and use them on each other. The drug business — whether crack cocaine, methamphetamines or the current-day heroin found rampant throughout Lexington — has not only beset African-Americans with a barrage of related physical health problems but it serves as the main entry for the mass incarceration of African-American males into a criminal injustice system filled with corruption.

Finally, the Zimmermans, Dunns and other vigilantes continually represent the whole of a nation that devalues the life of African-American males. Until the value of black lives become as important as white lives in this country, cartoonists like Pett will only see half the story as the truth.

Danny Anthony Everett

Lead Christian social activist

Nia Community of Faith

Lexington

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article44475612.html#storylink=cpy

 

Sometimes I Weep

Key Newsjournal Contributor, Rev. Anthony D. Everett from April 2012

As a little boy, I was often told the myth “Big boys don’t cry!”  Those who told me this were trying to prepare me to survive a racist world that could be quite brutal and cold to an African American male.  I proved them all wrong!  I wept at the age of thirteen when my friend, Robert Perez Pollard, died from a swimming accident.  I wept at the age of thirty-eight when I saved the company that employed me over $1 billion while I could barely pay my rent.  I wept when I saw my beautiful wife in her wedding gown for the very first time.  And, I wept when I learned of two African American teenagers, Trayvon Martin’s (17) and Chaz Black’s (16), seemingly unrelated deaths.

On February 26, 2012, Martin died at the hands of 28-year-old George Zimmermann, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida. Zimmermann, a European American male of Hispanic ethnicity, spotted Martin, who was wearing a hoodie, as Martin walked through the neighborhood where Zimmermann lives. Zimmermann called 911, identified Martin as a suspicious looking Black man, pursued, confronted, and attacked the boy, and shot Martin as he begged for his life.

Three days later, after lying dead in the morgue and testing negative for drugs and alcohol use, someone finally decided to call Martin’s parents whose numbers were listed in his cell phone.  Based upon “Stand Your Ground” legislation enacted in Florida that makes it easy for anyone to kill an attacker and claim self-defense, Zimmerman was never arrested by Sanford police.  Due to massive protests through a Change.org petition drive and the Sanford Police Department’s mishandling of the case, the Sanford Police Chief stepped aside and a federal investigation is underway.

Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, is unable to rest, eat, or sleep until her son’s murderer is brought to justice.

On March 18, 2012, Chaz Black, a sophomore prospect for the Henry Clay High School football team, was fatally shot and two other teens were wounded by an alleged assailant, 21-year-old Deionta Hayes, who pleaded not guilty.  The killing is believed to have taken place over a crap game gone bad in the Man-O-War Crossings Apartments near Man-O-War and Palumbo Roads in Lexington, Kentucky.  During the funeral for Black at Consolidated Baptist Church with a crowd overflowing out the door, I wept again as a tearful Joyce Black, Chaz’s paternal grandmother pleaded for the young people, “for Chaz’s sake,” to stop the violence.

This reminds me of the biblical story of Lazarus’ death.  Jesus heard that a friend of his from the same African Hebrew tribe, Lazarus was ill and needed healing.  Jesus delayed getting to Lazarus during the crisis and Lazarus died.  When Mary, Lazarus’ sister and Jesus’ companion, caught up with Jesus, she tearfully gave him a piece of her mind blaming Lazarus’ death on Jesus’ lack of presence.  As he saw Mary and the community that surrounded her weeping, Jesus was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.  He asked them where they laid Lazarus and, as he was led there, Jesus wept.  As the story unfolds, Jesus does a miracle of resurrection bringing life to Lazarus from the dead.  Later because Jesus gives life, his opponents seek to take his life away.

Like Lazarus, another male of African descent, African American males are in crisis in the United States.  With the largest incarceration rate of any country in the world, the United States judicial system incarcerates African American males disproportionately and more African American males are in the system than the numbers of enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic slave trade.  In 2010, homicide was the leading cause of death for African American male teenagers with a vast majority of those deaths at the hands of other African American male teenagers.

In the 2007/2008 school year, African American males graduated from high school at a rate of 47%.  In 2009, African Americans accounted for 44% of all the new HIV infections and African American males accounted for 70% of that number.  African American males have high unemployment rates at 19.1% as of September of 2011.   These startling statistics are dated but not much has changed.  Add drug abuse and violence toward African American women and you can see a distressed community in crisis.

What is needed from African American men is a deep, abiding presence in the lives of African American males – children, youth, and adults.  We need men to mentor, men to tutor, men to show respect to men and women, and men who will strive for education over incarceration.  We need the educated men to share with the uneducated men.  We need the skilled men to teach the unskilled men.  We need men who will no longer talk about the problems but will do something about the problems that plague our distressed communities.  We need men who will be present and accountable in the lives of others – Men of Action!

What African American males need from every other human being is compassion in the form of unconditional love.  This is not the love of romantic interest or even love that grows out of kindred relations.  This love is a basic love of humanity that says regardless of our conditions and stations in life, we are all equal.  It is the kind of love, not given out of sympathy but out of a deeper empathy for the condition of humanity.  It is love that does not look down but looks around.  This love is not surface level and is willing to sacrifice, even life itself, for the good of another.

We cannot bring Trayvon Martin or Chaz Black back to life but we can resurrect the lives of other African American males.  I, along with countless other African American men in Lexington and around the nation, am ready to be present and accountable.  We are ready to share love unconditionally in our walk.  We are big boys that cry.  How about you?

http://keyconversationsradio.com/sometimes-i-weep/

http://umc-gbcs.org/faith-in-action/sometimes-i-weep

 

The Village is On Fire by Anthony "Pastor E" Everett on Tuesday, May 03, 2016

When I attended Howard University, outdoor summer parties on the yard were the norm.  As winter set in, weekend house parties along with other extra curricular activities that took precedence over class work became a major factor why I graduated from Paul Quinn College years later.

  While dancing to the latest  “jam” that would surely get everybody on the dance floor, my friends and I would chant as loud as we could, “the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!”  We were in a mindless time far away from the realities of lectures and exams.  To us, the roof was on fire and we were hopeful that our chanting and gyrations on the dance floor would make it burn out of control!

  Somewhere before Black History month and after the celebration of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, I have been reflective upon the Igbo proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child” as the new chant of hope in a mindless time.  Although proverbs invoke wisdom, this proverb has been relegated to the level of the Zen koan “is the glass half full or half empty.”  Both are now clichés partially because of their overuse.  The concept of  “the village” is not a place where children are supported by the community, as in an ancient communal African village, but often preyed upon today.   What make it worse is that the village is on fire and this is why.

  Our educational system in the United States has become a door way for many African American males to enter the judicial system and eventually prohibits their basic human rights of economic justice, suffrage, and advanced or higher education.  The Commonwealth of Kentucky has the second highest rate of status offenders of all fifty states.  Status offenders are children and youth who have truancy issues, runaway from home, or are considered beyond the teacher’s or their parents’ control.  Charges are brought up against them and, if they do not comply with court orders, they are sentenced to juvenile jail with a record that may follow them for the rest of their lives.  Children as young as five years old have been placed in the judicial system.  Although the African American population is roughly 8 percent of Kentucky, African American males make up over one-third of prisoners, many stemming from status offenses.  The village is on fire but no one is chanting!

  There is hope.  Introduced by state representative Kelly Flood (D-Lexington) is a bill to reduce the number of children being detained by changing the method of dealing with status offenders.  At the January meeting of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission, representative Flood indicated that Kentucky has plenty of services to address the problems of our children and youth and I agree.  Many of these services and the courts do not talk to one another.  If the service organizations would collaborate with the school system, there may be no need for court intervention, saving over $1 million based on 2010 costs.  Given the chance, perhaps more African American males will be able to attend college, as I did, and graduate because of a village no longer on fire.

 Reverend D. Anthony Everett, also known as “Pastor ‘E’,” is the Lead Christian Social Activist for Nia Community of Faith in Lexington and also serves as a Human Rights Commissioner. 

http://keyconversationsradio.com/the-village-is-on-fire/