African American Hope—Then and Now

African American Hope—Then and Now

As I pen these words, America has just elected its first African American President—Barack Obama. While Evangelical Christians may take issue with President-elect Obama’s pro-choice views on abortion, and perhaps with various other political positions, no Christian, of any race, can deny the historic nature of what has just occurred.

For African Americans in particular, Obama’s election is a ray of hope. And hope—awaiting a better future day—has always been core to African American Christianity.

Hope Then: The Story of Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne[1]

African American Daniel Alexander Payne was a Bishop in, an early leader of, and the official historian for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC). Reflecting back on the 1816 organizing convention of the AMEC, Payne believed that the separation of the AMEC from the white Methodist Episcopal Church was “beneficial to the man of color” in two ways.

“First: it has thrown us upon our own resources and made us tax our own mental powers both for government and support.” Secondly, it gave the black man “an independence of character which he could neither hope for nor attain unto, if he had remained as the ecclesiastical vassal of his white brethren.” It produced “independent thought,” “independent action,” and an “independent hierarchy,” and the latter “has made us feel and recognize our individuality and our heaven-created manhood.”[2]

Personally, Payne experienced numerous opportunities to live out his Christian manhood. Early in his life Payne was devastated when a new law forced him to stop teaching his fellow African Americans.

Wavering on the precipice of doubt, he girded up the loins of his mind with solemn words of hope, “‘With God one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. Trust in him, and he will bring slavery and all its outrages to an end.’ These words from the spirit world acted on my troubled soul like water on a burning fire, and my aching heart was soothed from its burden of woes.”[3]

Payne engaged in a spiritual conversation with himself in which he exhorted himself to see this life from God’s eternal perspective. He encouraged himself to trust that God is good even when life is bad.

From 1619 when a Dutch man-of-war came ashore in Jamestown, Virginia carrying twenty enslaved African men and women, until November 4, 2008, 389 years elapsed. That’s almost 150,000 days waiting for hope. Hope that slavery and all its outrages, that prejudices and racism and all their outrages, would come to an end.

Hope waits. It waits 389 years. It waits 150,000 days.

Hope Now: Stories of African Americans Today

Mitchell Landsberg of the Los Angeles Times reports on hope now.

“God bless America,” the woman said as she walked past the line of voters standing outside a mid-city Los Angeles elementary school. She was middle-aged, African American, with an “I Voted” sticker on her blouse. And she was bubbling over with emotion.”God bless America,” she repeated, and disappeared down the street.

It was that kind of day in heavily black neighborhoods of Southern California, where a swirl of emotions—joy, hope, pride, fear—crested after months of anticipation. For the first time in American history, an African American appeared poised to become president of the United States, and people were savoring the moment.”I’d be lying to say [race] didn't matter,” said Vincent Marshel, 43, an audio-video director at a hotel who got in line at 6:36 a.m. to vote near his home in Eagle Rock. “I’m glad I was alive and kicking to see this day come.”

Marshel was in line early, but not as early as Iris Hill. She showed up at her polling place in Valley Village at 5 a.m., and was the first voter in line at Faith Presbyterian Church. Hill, 27, usually mails in an absentee ballot, but wanted the experience of voting in a booth this time. “I’m excited about this one” she said, “It is a historic opportunity for change, and voting in person just felt right this time.”

Hill, who is African-American, sees the election as a sea change. “This election means a great deal. So much had to change to get to this point,” she said. Hill said she was thinking of her grandmother, who was born in 1929 and lives in North Carolina.”She was part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s in Birmingham, fighting for basic rights. And for her to go from being a disenfranchised non-voter in the South to being able to vote in this election for an African-American for president. . . .”[4]

Hope Waits

One need not have voted for Barack Obama, nor agree with his political positions to understand that November 4, 2008 is a profound day in American history. It is also a profound example of the power of hope, of the power of trusting in a good God who shapes beauty from ashes, who empowers us to move beyond the suffering.

It is a day that can profoundly impact each of us personally if we will apply the message of hope to our lives, particularly to times of suffering in our lives. How long do you wait when life beats you down? How do you cope when devastating doubts seek to defeat your faith?

Hope waits. Hope waits on God who is a time-God. Hope waits 150,000 days for God to bring good out of what people intend for evil.

Hope waits because hope trusts that God is good. Hope believes that our physical eyes perceiving our physical world can never be the final arbiter regarding the goodness of God. We need faith eyes to see that God is at work even when all seems lost.

And, yes, sometimes we do not see His work until that final day when all tears will be wiped away. But every once in a while, even in this life, we can see glimpses, a small taste now, of that future day of hope.

For many, November 4, 2008 is such a day.


[1]For more on Bishop Payne, see Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Baker, 2007.
[2]Payne, A History of the A.M.E. Church, I, pp. 9-12.
[3]Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, p. 28.
[4]Landsberg, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2008.