Ferguson activist raised in the Black Church showed pastors how to aid young protesters
As dusk fell over Ferguson, Missouri, for the third night in a row following the killing of Michael Brown Jr. by a police officer, Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett could no longer keep her mouth shut.
Every day since the murder on April 9, 2014She had watched her daughter Brittany leave the safety of her home to protest the horrific treatment of 18-year-old Brown, his body lying in the street for hours as if it were a warning to the community.
The night before had been particularly brutal: officers had thrown tear gas that Brittany had inhaled. Police officers on tanks had pointed their guns at protesters. Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett had seen enough.
“My mom was like, ‘I just think it would be better if you stayed home,'” Brittany recalled. “She said, ‘I know you’re passionate about this, I know you’re angry, but I want you to stay home tonight.'”
“And I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t even know how to stay home.’”
The decision to leave that night against her mother’s wishes, and the subsequent decisions she made to become a national leader in the movement for police responsible for Brown’s deathreflects not only the story of an activist fulfilling her purpose and finding her voice.
In her own way, Packnett’s rise as one of the most prominent racial justice activists of her generation also reflects the promise and power of the ministry of her late father, the Reverend Ronald Barrington Packnett, who was senior pastor of St. Louis’ historic Central Baptist Church.
According to friends and family interviewed for this story, Reverend Packnett’s organizing and activism extended to the streets.
He organized the St. Louis community in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. He defied the religious establishment when he committed to the Louis Farrakhan-led Million Man March in 1994, when such activities were frowned upon in the conservative circles in which Packnett had previously been active.
Packnett died in December 1996 after a long illness. He was only 45.
Matthew V. Johnson, pastor of Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, knew Packnett, who was part of a new generation of progressive preachers who began to think theologically about the social situation in the 1980s.
In 1982, Packnett was appointed to the board of directors of the 7-million-member organization. National Baptist Convention – an important position from which to strive for a more socially conscious and dynamic version of the largest black religious community in the country.
“The idea was that the religious consciousness of the civil rights era was finally coming to the National Baptist Convention,” Johnson said. The leadership wanted young, progressive reformers, and Packnett fell into that group, he said.
Throughout her childhood, until her father died, Brittany was often with her.
“I tell people I really grew up in this tradition,” Packnett told The Associated Press. “The formal politics, the informal politics, being in the boardroom, speaking at the highest institutions, the street work, the protests, the community building.”
“Our collective commitment as a church to issues of justice has always been as much a part of ministry as anything else,” she said. “There was always an intentional orientation toward the beauty and value of blackness in my spiritual upbringing.”
Ferguson marked a new phase in the struggle for freedom. For perhaps the first time, a mass protest movement for justice for a single victim was born organically—not convened by members of the clergy or centered in the church.
Many attendees were not religious, and tensions ran high several times as nationally prominent clergy and the hip-hop community faced contrasting receptions when they gathered in Ferguson, showing how the 40-year-old music genre had joined, and in some cases replaced, the black church as the conscience of young black America.
Brittany, married to Brittany Packnett-Cunningham and now identifying as Brittany, is a self-proclaimed police abolitionist.
She brought a unique prophetic voice to the social justice movement, one that was deeply influenced by the cadence, rhymes and beats of hip-hop. It was a legacy of the early days of her father’s ministry, when the hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five depicted the degradation of black communities and the horrors of police brutality.
Brittany remembers asking herself, “What is going on?”
“Some other pastors wanted the meetings to be in their churches and not on the streets,” she said, concluding that this message did not take into account the ongoing changes.
“It didn’t happen in a church building. It didn’t happen in a church parking lot. It didn’t happen in vacation Bible school. It didn’t happen in the choir stall,” she said. “It happened on the street.”
Those who asked “What’s going on” deserved an answer and an apology, said the Rev. Traci Blackmon, who in 2014 was senior pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ, a church near Ferguson. She delivered that apology through a bullhorn to a youthful crowd of protesters enraged by Brown’s killing.
“I felt I had to apologize to those children because you could tell we didn’t know them and they didn’t know us, and that failure was our fault as clergy,” she said.
Brown’s killing, and the culture of fear it fueled, was the latest iteration of an all-too-familiar scene, said the Rev. Angela Sims, president of Crozer Colgate Rochester Divinity School and author of “Lynched: The Tragic Legacy of Lynching in America.”
Long before Brown was killed, 60 people were lynched by white Missourians. Most of the lynchings occurred between 1877 and 1950, Sims said.
Brown’s body on the ground, Sums said, sparked such outrage because it reflected a white tactic of leaving the body hanging in public as a warning. One difference, she said, was that technology made it possible to see the event all over the world in a matter of minutes.
“I see that as relating to an aspect of a lynch culture that not so subtly communicates that if it happened to them, it can happen to you, so govern yourself accordingly,” Sims said.
Blackmon was among a handful of clergymen who made it to the Ferguson Commissionappointed by then-Governor Jay Nixon to investigate the social and economic conditions contributing to inequalities and tensions in the St. Louis region.
These conditions were deep-seated—firmly entrenched when Ronald Barrington Packnett took over as senior pastor at Central Baptist in St. Louis.
He was born in Chicago and graduated from Illinois State University. After graduation, he attended Yale Divinity School and then served as pastor at St. James Baptist Church in New Britain, Connecticut.
While attending the National Baptist Congress of Christian Education in St. Louis, he decided to correct the way one of the young women in charge pronounced “entrepreneur” to get her attention. Her name was Gwendolyn DeLoach. “He was much nicer at dinner,” she said. They quickly fell in love and were married in 1981.
In the winter of 1982, the Rev. T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was elected president of the National Baptist Convention. Packnett—who had worked on housing and labor issues—joined the corporate leadership.
“Ron was a gentleman and a radical thinker,” the Reverend Boise Kimber, the new president of NBC, said in an interview.
Two years after his appointment, the Packnetts had their first child, a girl they named Brittany.
The new father soon received a call from Central in St. Louis. Would he be interested in becoming a pastor there?
For Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett, a young mother, the opportunity to return to her childhood home was too tempting to pass up.
Packnett sprang into action as Central’s new pastor, leading a congregation proud of a history that had overcome slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But his vibrant tenure was soon overshadowed by health problems. On the day he died, in December 1996, Brittany was only 12.
At Central, a series of pastors helped the family. Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett eventually remarried. Brittany enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, and after graduating, she joined Teach for America.
She felt she was doing good work, but not her best work. “I was growing up and trying to figure out what I believed,” she said. When Brown was killed, she felt like a little girl again.
“I definitely took his spirit with me,” she said.
While being attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, she was called by her late father’s former clergy colleagues and asked a question.
Little did they know that they and other young activists had the power to organize an international movement from their phones. They lived in a world where hip-hop had become their religion, giving them the spiritual sustenance to stand up to the police amid the protests. ____
This story is part of an ongoing AP series examining the impact, legacy and fallout from what has become known as the “Ferguson uprising,” which sparked nationwide outrage over police brutality and calls for broader solutions to deep-seated racial injustices.
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