[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 135 (Saturday, November 20, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2089-E2090]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   REV. DR. JAMES FORBES JR.: FROM THE PULPIT, A STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, November 19, 2004

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commend the service of Rev. 
Dr. James Forbes Jr., Senior Minister of the Riverside Church in New 
York. A constant and powerful voice for social equality, and freedom, 
his leadership has set an example to the community in New York's 15th 
Congressional District, in our Nation and around the world. A clergyman 
of the highest order, Dr. Forbes is also an activist who equates 
spirituality with justice.
  On June 1, 1989, the Rev. Dr. James Alexander Forbes, Jr. was 
installed as the fifth Senior Minister of The Riverside Church. He is 
the first African-American to serve in that position at one of the 
largest multicultural congregations in the Nation. Dr. Forbes is an 
ordained minister in the American Baptist Churches and in the Original 
United Holy Church of America. He has served congregations around our 
Nation, inspired by his painful personal experience of bigotry in the 
segregated South.
  Dr. Forbes was born in 1935 in Burgaw, North Carolina, where his 
father was a Pentecostal bishop. He was the second oldest of eight 
children. He has led numerous workshops, retreats, and conferences for 
the National Council of Churches of Christ USA, the National 
Association of Campus Ministry, the American Baptist Churches, the 
United Church of Christ, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the 
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Roman 
Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian 
Church (USA). He is a consultant to the Congress of National Black 
Churches and past President of The Martin Luther King Fellows. Dr. 
Forbes has earned three degrees and has been awarded 13 honorary 
degrees among other awards.
  I am deeply impressed by Dr. Forbes commitment to using tools of mass 
communication to educate our country in the principles of social 
justice, through a national movement called ``progressive principles of 
justice''. I commend to the attention of my colleagues a profile of Dr. 
Forbes, which appeared in the New York Times on October 12, 2004. This 
article reminded me of Dr. Forbes' leadership in moving us closer to 
the day when we all sit down together as children of God.

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 12, 2004]

                From the Pulpit, a Struggle for Justice

                           (By Chris Hedges)

       In the battle over Jesus, what he stood for, what he 
     represents and how faith is experienced and sustained, the 
     Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., the senior minister of 
     Riverside Church, is determined to provide an alternative 
     vision to the one offered by religious conservatives.

[[Page E2090]]

       He and other clergy members plan to employ the tools of 
     mass communication, including television, to build a national 
     movement for what he calls ``progressive principles of 
     justice.'' In the last few weeks, with his public support for 
     Senator John Kerry and his dire warnings about another four 
     years of President Bush, he has jumped feet first into 
     America's most divisive and, maybe, most important culture 
     war.
       ``The issue facing religious people is justice,'' he said 
     one recent Saturday morning in his office in the soaring 
     Gothic church, which overlooks the Hudson River. ``How can we 
     justify a corporate officer making a salary that is a 
     thousand times more than the lowest-paid member of the 
     corporation? Poverty is the real weapon of mass destruction. 
     But in this capitalist society when we raise questions about 
     the freedom of some to enjoy an inordinate proportion of the 
     resources while others lack basic necessities, it becomes a 
     hard and difficult discussion.''
       Controversy is nothing new in the pulpit of Riverside 
     Church. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., who was the 
     senior minister before Dr. Forbes assumed the post in 1989, 
     opened the church doors to political refugees from Central 
     America and called for an end to the production of nuclear 
     weapons. Dr. Forbes has welcomed gays and Buddhists into the 
     congregation and has fostered the spontaneity of his own 
     Pentecostal tradition, encouraging emotional personal 
     testimony, applause and standing ovations. But times have 
     changed. The social activism that was more widely accepted 
     within the mainsteam church decades ago has given way to a 
     narrower belief that stresses personal piety and devotion. 
     Dr. Forbes, who travels the country trying to galvanize 
     liberal clergy members into a national network, is often a 
     voice crying in the wilderness.
       He seeks, he said, to remind Americans that they also have 
     carried out violence and oppression in the name of God.
       ``Christians have joined in this negativity,'' he said. 
     ``Don't forget the Klan. They were bent on destroying 
     innocent people. Bad people are not confined to any one 
     religious tradition.''
       Dr. Forbes, 69, dressed in a blue blazer and pressed gray 
     slacks, speaks with the hypnotic rhythm of a preacher, his 
     words cascading in slow, elegant waterfalls. He comes 
     naturally to the pulpit, growing up the second oldest of 
     eight children in Burgaw, N.C., where his father was a 
     Pentecostal bishop.
       Dr. Forbes shared a story he has told before. When his 
     family sat down to dinner, his mother, who worked as a maid 
     for a white family, always asked, ``Are all the children 
     in?''
       ``And if there was a child not present, we had to prepare a 
     plate for that child and put it in the oven before we could 
     say grace and our Bible verses and eat,'' he said. ``That is 
     the image I have of God. God, for me, is Momma Eternal. 
     Before I eat, God asks, `Are all the children in?' ''
       He went to school to be a doctor, graduating with a degree 
     in science from Howard University. But after ``being called'' 
     to be a preacher, he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary. 
     ``God called me to be a healer,'' he said, ``but a healer of 
     souls and culture.''
       He served in small churches in the South, earning a 
     reputation as a preacher of power, and joined the civil 
     rights movement. He participated in sit-ins at segregated 
     lunch counters in Woolworth's stores.
       In 1976 he returned to New York to be a professor of 
     preaching and worship at Union, and from there went to the 
     pulpit at Riverside. Dr. Forbes is married to Bettye Franks 
     Forbes, a musician, and they have one son.
       His Pentecostal background unsettles some in the 
     congregation who see him as emotional and showy. The 
     squabbles, however, do not dim what he defines as an era of 
     ``renewal'' in which social justice values--values that drew 
     him to the ministry--will again surge to the forefront.
       Injustice, he said, is not an abstraction in his life. He 
     knows the pain of being excluded. On the first day he was 
     allowed to sit as a black man at a lunch counter at 
     Woolworth's he sat next to a white woman who had already 
     ordered her meal. When he sat down she stood and left, and he 
     went home and wrote a poem:

     Why did she move when I sat down?
     Surely she could not tell so soon that my Saturday bath had 
           worn away.
     Or that savage passion had pushed me for a rape.
     Perhaps it was the cash she carried in her purse.
     She could not risk a theft so early in the month.
     And who knows that on tomorrow t'would fall her lot
     To drink her coffee from a cup my darkened hands had 
           clutched?
     So horrible was that moment, I too should have run away.
     For prejudice has the odor of a dying beast.
     Whether racist or rapist, both fall into the savage class.
     And the greatest theft of all is to rob one's right to be.

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