Fighting the evil of racial injustice requires the energy and improvisational skill of a jazz musician, a minister and leader of faith-based groups in North Carolina told guests at an Episcopal symposium to face and heal racial divides.
The Rev. Dr. Hanna Broome, president of the North Carolina Council of Churches, delivered the keynote address at the Jazz and Race Symposium in Greenville on Saturday from the pulpit of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church off of Fire Tower Road. The event was organized by the Episcopal Diocese of East Carolina’s Racial Healing Commission.
Molly Holdeman, the commission’s chairperson and chair of the Pitt County Democratic Party, said that the commission’s mission is to identify and share “harsh truths” related to racial history, to promote repentance for past injustices and to help heal the wounds left by that history.
Broome filled in for Bishop William J. Barber II, former president of the North Carolina NAACP and co-chair of the National Poor People’s Campaign, the event’s original keynote speaker who was unable to attend.
In the short 24 hours she had to prepare, Broome said that she began to think about that interplay between jazz musicians’ unwillingness to be shackled by notes on a sheet or “oppressive tempos” and a modern crossroads of racial injustice which she called “a sacred moment of moral urgency.”
