Black Baptists/NAACP Join in ‘Get Out the Vote’ Message
What was dubbed a press conference felt more like a Sunday morning mega-church service at the Georgia World Congress Center Wednesday.
The topic: getting African-Americans to the polls.
“It makes it more necessary and crucial that we help register, educate and urge people to turn out on Nov. 6th and vote,” said Dr. Julius Scruggs, president of National Baptist Convention USA, Inc.
The group’s 132nd annual conference is in Atlanta this week.
Joining with leaders of other Black Baptist conventions and the NAACP, Scruggs called the upcoming election one of the most “critical” in our lifetimes.
But as subsequent speakers addressed the several hundred in the crowd, the rhetoric became a bit more heated.
“There is a distorted message out there,” said Dr. Ralph Canty of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
He took to task a phrase Republicans repeated throughout their convention: “We Built It.”
“My response to that was—’Built what?’ You didn’t build America. Conservatives didn’t build America. Republicans didn’t build America. Blacks built America on their backs.”
And it’s Blacks who are the targets of new voter suppression efforts disguised as voter ID laws, said Dr. Gregory Moss, president of the Lott Carey Foreign Mission Convention.
Proponents of new voter ID laws sweeping the nation, including in Georgia, say they ensure fair elections.
Moss took issue with that contention.
“After spending millions of taxpayers’ money, they found 25 cases of fraud across these United States. Somebody lied,” he said.
While a string of speakers reiterated many of the same points, they danced around naming names.
Dr. Bernard Yates, president of the National Primitive Baptist Convention, didn’t.
“I’m joining in … to say that Barack Hussein Obama deserves another term of office.”
Churches and their national conventions operate as non-profit, 501-c3 organizations. As such, the IRS prohibits them from endorsing political candidates.
At the end of the event, Dr. Julius Scruggs, head of the National Black Baptist Convention USA, cautioned reporters that no one was endorsing one candidate.
After the program, Scruggs was asked why the specific Barack Obama mention, but not Mitt Romney.
“There was no need to mention his name,” he said. “Because we are non-partisan.”
Dr. Amos Brown, who sits on the NAACP’s board of directors, elaborated.
“[Scruggs] made very clear that we are non-partisan. But we are a principled people. And the principle is that anybody in their good mind will embrace persons who support, protect and defend their self-interests,” he said, adding that African-Americans know who is in favor of that self-interest and who is opposed.
Six million African-Americans who are eligible to vote aren’t registered to do so.
In what’s expected to be a tight Presidential race, everyone here knows those are voters they can’t allow to stay home on Election Day.
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