Cool Runnings
| 21:36 UK time, Thursday, 30 March 2006
The Atlanta programme of the WHYS tour featured one of the coolest contributions of the week from Pastor Raphael Warnock at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Wednesday. He's a tall, very smartly dressed man and he carries a lot of charisma. He certainly wasn't phased by talking to our audience when he preaches to thousands every week in his own church.
Anu was opening the second hour of the show when Pastor Warnock started making his way down towards her. I told her in her headphones that he was on his way down but she'd already seen him. He was hard to miss....as Anu introduced him he calmly took the roving microphone and spoke- and everyone listened. This is a man who effectively follows in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Junior at Ebenezer. Not a problem, he said and told of how when he was a kid he used to wear his father's shoes and 'I looked pretty cute but it wasn't going to get me anywhere' before paying a moving tribute to the late Dr King.
Another man we loved at Ebenezer is Loy. He's 70, but looks ten years younger and he used to play for the St Louis Cardinals because when he was at the top, baseball in Atlanta was still segregated. He told me that the church has been going for 123 years and two of their members are 99 years old. Looking around the modern new church (built in 1999, it seats two thousand and another 125 for the choir) and said 'change is good'.
We talked about immigration and we talked about the role of religion in American public life. Like in New Orleans some of the most moving sights happened during the news when members of the audience got up and introduced themselves to someone they'd heard speaking earlier and swopped stories, or business cards or-in the case of Ebenezer- memories.
Everywhere is the memory of Dr King and we played an archive clip of him talking just prior to serving a jail term in the 1960's. In the clip he talked of poverty, injustice and the folly (as he saw it) of fighting a war thousands of miles away. A few in the audience nodded as if he could have been talking about today.
