Churches: Is God Black?

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Honkified Deity. Dr Nathan Wright Jr., an Episcopal priest from Newark, told the meeting that blacks must get rid of the "honkified God" who, he charged, has been imposed on Negroes by white Christians. The Rev. Herbert Bell Shaw, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and president of the committee, called on the group to evolve "a message and a dynamic leadership for the peculiar and urgent needs of the black people." The present religious task, added the Rev. Melvin Talbert, a Methodist district superintendent in California, "is to help black people find themselves, to restore to the black man a sense of dignity and pride." Once this is achieved, suggests Talbert, the time will have come "to move across racial barriers—if we want to."