(RNS) — The Progressive National Baptist Convention focused on get-out-the-vote efforts during its annual meeting and celebrated Vice President Kamala Harris becoming a presidential candidate.
“We need everyone to register,” PNBC President David Peoples said at a news conference on Wednesday (Aug. 7), adding that members of his denomination should encourage “our friends and our frenemies and our entire family to vote.”
About 2,500 people attended the four-day annual session of the historic Black denomination, considered the church home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., that concluded in New Orleans on Wednesday.
“We are not political, but we are prophetic,” Peoples said.
But he went on to hail Harris and question recent remarks by former President Donald Trump, who is running against Harris, and to draw comparisons between Harris and the biblical figure Queen Esther.
“We need everyone to help our sister, Kamala Harris, who has always known that she was Black, a daughter of a South Asian mother and a Jamaican father,” he said. “Yes, I know Trump acts like he can’t understand anything about a biracial family and background, even though he has a German and Scottish background. Which one does he wake up and want to be?”
RELATED: Pastors’ first ladies, other Black church leaders organize support for Harris
Peoples was not the only prominent speaker to draw attention to the election and its candidates.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and the pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, voiced criticism of Trump during a midday Wednesday session that annually honors the late preacher Gardner C. Taylor.
Sen. Raphael Warnock speaks at the Progressive National Baptist Convention annual meeting in New Orleans. (Video screen grab)
“Your whole history is built on racism, and then you dare to try to curry my favor by saying it’s those brown folk over there who are coming over the border to get your Black job?” he said, without naming Trump but referencing a term the former president used in a June debate with President Joe Biden and again in a recent interview with the National Association of Black Journalists.
“What kind of fool do you think I am? It’s my Black job to make sure you never make it to the Oval Office again. That’s my Black job. That’s everybody’s job,” he added.
As it has in previous election seasons, the PNBC is working with the AFL-CIO on voter mobilization, with the labor group providing training and funding.
“The PNBC will partner with the AFL-CIO in four targeted battleground states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina),” said the Rev. Darryl Gray, PNBC’s director general for social justice, in a statement.
“Just as our ancestors gave their all so that we could have the right to vote, we won’t let them down, nor will we allow ultra partisan conservatives or white Christian nationalism rhetoric threaten peace within our society.”
During the news conference and a social justice session at the meeting,