DALLAS — It was Thursday evening, and Bishop T.D. Jakes was at home, laying out his clothes for the next day, when he saw the first live TV scenes of a sniper targeting officers working at a downtown rally against police violence.
By the time the rampage ended, five officers were dead and seven others wounded. And Jakes, pastor of the city’s 30,000-member The Potter’s House megachurch, was devastated.
“It took me back to the assassination of President Kennedy,” he said, horrific bloodshed that occurred only blocks from where the president’s motorcade had passed more than a half-century before. “It was deeply disturbing.”
On Sunday, Jakes turned his regular service into a town hall, inviting into the pulpit Dallas Police Chief David Brown, Mayor Mike Rawlings and Saundra Sterling, the aunt who raised the 37-year-old black man who was fatally shot Tuesday by white officers in Baton Rouge, La.
Alton Sterling’s death was captured on video. So too was the death of 32-year-old Philando Castile the next day in Falcon Heights, Minn.
Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, who live-streamed the fatal shooting on social media, called in to the Sunday service, telling Jakes and the congregation that “the police are supposed to protect us. ... This shouldn’t have happened.”
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Jakes prayed for both Reynolds’s and Castile’s family. “Lord, let justice prevail. Wrap your arms around them,” he intoned.
Yet he also urged prayers for the Dallas police force.
“This was a peaceful demonstration that turned horribly tragic. These officers gave their lives protecting not just black people but white people, Latinos, people of all races. Let’s praise God for these officers,” Jakes said as people in the 10,000-seat, capacity-filled sanctuary jumped to their feet and applauded.
“Hallelujah,” many in the congregation of blacks, whites and Latinos responded. “Amen,” others called out. Ushers handed out tissues to many in the aisles. One woman comforted another next to her. “It’s going to get better, baby,” she said. “It’s got to get better. The Lord will see to it.”
The 59-year-old preacher said many individuals, not just African Americans but all races, are distressed and finding various ways to express that. Most are turning to peaceful protest, but some are turning to violence, he said.
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“We’re seeing it in real-time speed on social media, passing from community to community and 24-hour news cycles of constantly being inundated with images of bloody shirts and screaming children,” he said. “It is extremely traumatic. And until leadership of all colors sits down at the table and comes out of denial and says we have a problem, justice will wrongfully fall into the hands of those who are not mature enough nor stable enough to act in the stead of people who are able to but won’t act.”
Micah Xavier Johnson, a 25-year-old Army veteran, has been identified as the lone gunman in Dallas. According to sources, he was motivated by rage over the deaths of blacks by police and increasingly had been exploring black nationalism.
But Jakes blames Johnson’s “naivete” for his deadly response. “We are all tired, but we can’t kill people because we’re tired. We were tired in the ’60s. I think we are even more tired now,” the pastor said.
He ticked off just a few of the fatal police shootings of unarmed blacks in the last two years, before Baton Rouge, before Falcon Heights, going back to Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old killed in Cleveland in 2014. “We’ve gone through the judicial system. In every case after case, the police officer is exonerated,” he said.
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“We have not seen the weeping of black women like this since the days of Emmett Till,” Jakes continued, recalling the Mississippi 14-year-old who was murdered in 1955 by two whites upset that the youth had reportedly flirted with one man’s wife. Till’s death — and the graphic images of his corpse published by newspapers — galvanized the civil rights movement.
He said this racial tension is something the nation should have solved generations ago: “This problem is too old. We’re sitting here talking about race in an era where we ought to be talking about terrorism. We ought to be talking about biochemical warfare. ... We’re dealing with our grandfathers’ problems.
“Why are we still dealing with a 200-year-old problem in a contemporary society?” Jakes asked. “That’s what we ought to be outraged about.”
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Jakes, who has served as an adviser to Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton, thinks elected officials must be just as focused today on fixing issues of civil justice. Neither they nor the black community can just wait for another Martin Luther King Jr. to come along, he said.
“Dr. King was masterful in that moment, critical at that time. But if there is not another Dr. King, that does not mean we cannot move our agenda forward,” the preacher noted. “You cannot think of one person who became a Dr. King for the LGBT community. And look at how much they changed the world. We are the people we’ve been waiting for. All of us have to do our part to get it done.”
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