Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church – then and now.
As the confederate flag was held aloft by white supremacist Trump supporters inside the smashed up heart of USA democracy, it’s clear that America is not turning the corner away from Trumpism. Rather, it seems even darker times are ahead as Biden takes office and the battle between progress and regression takes a terrible new turn for American society.
In all this chaos was the bittersweet win for both the democratic candidates in the Georgia State elections – bittersweet because their win was both the final straw for Trump and those intent on ‘insurrection’ and also a crystal clear rejection of racism as Jon Ossoff, Jewish, and Raphael Warnock, African American, became Georgia’s new senators-in-waiting.
And it was all the more poignant a win since Raphael Warnock is the pastor of Martin Luther King’s church – the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a church with a longstanding history of fighting racial and social justice struggles and the church where Dr. King’s funeral service was held.
Since 2005, the Reverend Warnock has served as the Senior Pastor of the Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, spiritual home of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The son of two Pentecostal pastors, Dr. Warnock responded to the call of ministry at a very early age, and at age 35, became the fifth and the youngest person ever called to the senior pastorate of Ebenezer Baptist Church, founded in 1886.
As we watch the USA implode with racism at the heart of this conflagration; as millions die from a preventable disease; as the world faces another economic crisis post the pandemic, global military spending reaches its highest ever annual sum – $1.9trillion. All this combined with the ever-increasing militarisation of police forces, MLK’s 1960s analysis is as relevant now as ever.
‘The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.’
Tipping Point North South 