Justice For Trayvon Martin: Where Are Our White Faith Leaders?

by Mark Pinsky

In the halcyon days of the 1960s civil rights movement, no march, protest or demonstration in the South was complete without white ministers, priests and rabbis prominently in the ranks, linking arms with their African American brothers and sisters. Each was acting — as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once described himself — as a “drum major for justice.” Of course, in that era, most of the white clergy were from up North.

But in the case of the movement in support of the cause of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed, 17-year-old African American fatally shot Feb. 26 in a gated community in this Central Florida town, local white faith leaders have been missing from action in the movement for justice for nearly a month.

From both this world and the Great Beyond, I can hear a chorus of that great trio of social action veterans, Father Theodore Hesburgh, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, reciting the verse from Deuteronomy (16:18-20): “Justice, justice, shall you pursue!”

The first white clergy didn’t appear publicly in support of the Martin family until March 21 — and that lone exception was there by invitation. Leaders of the growing movement, primarily local and national black pastors and elected officials, invited a Southern Baptist preacher, the Rev. Alan Brumback, of the diverse, 1,000-member Central Baptist Church of Sanford, to lead one of the opening prayers at an evening rally at the city’s lakeside municipal park, which drew a crowd of more than 8,000.
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