(RNS) — In his book, “The Coming Race Wars?,” theologian William Pannell foresees the poor and disenfranchised engaging in violent urban uprisings and revolts across the world similar to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. It will only be a matter of time, he writes, “before some cop blows it again in his or her treatment of a Black person, probably a Black man.”
Police brutality, racist and discriminatory lending practices, lack of well-paying jobs could push Black people and other marginalized communities to revolt, Pannell predicts. And the evangelical church — with all its influence, resources and its supply of missionaries across the world — is ill-equipped to address social issues at home, he argues.
Pannell, professor emeritus of preaching at Fuller Seminary, pushes back against the notion that Jesus is all people need to make it.
“I really do believe that people — all people — need Jesus,” Pannell writes. “But to make it in society, white Christians realize they need a lot more than salvation. They may expect Black people to be content with salvation in Christ. But that is not enough for the white Christians themselves.”
While the debate has been “between those committed to evangelism and those committed to justice,” Pannell writes that “what we should be striving for is a spirituality that will inform both evangelism and social transformation.”
Pannell wrote “The Coming Race Wars?” nearly 30 years ago.
“The interesting thing about this book is that it sounds so contemporary, even though it’s about 30 years old,” Pannell, 92, told Religion News Service. “Why is that? What is there about this book that makes it so painfully contemporary after so long a time?”
The book was first published in 1993, in the wake of the 1992 uprising that erupted in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King. Now, in the wake of 2020’s racial justice uprisings after the killing of George Floyd, Pannell has released an updated version.
“The Coming Race Wars: A Cry for Justice, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter” was published in June, and features a new introduction by Jemar Tisby, author of the book “The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism,” and an afterword that Pannell began writing before COVID-19 struck the nation and prior to the police killing of Floyd that sparked protests across the country against police brutality and in support for Black Lives Matter.
In the afterword, Pannell explains that he essentially began writing it nearly 30 years ago, when Rodney King called for an end to the riots, publicly asking on television: “Can we all get along?”
“The question of the Black man from Los Angeles loomed large thirty years ago and it still throbs with meaning,” Pannell writes.
Pannell, in the new epilogue, seeks to answer the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s question, “Where do we go from here?” But the meaning of “here” is something Pannell grapples with.
He underscores the death of King and recalls the crowd leaving the March on Washington “wondering about the future.” He highlights Billy Graham’s 1970 “The Unfinished Dream” speech in front of a predominantly white crowd and how his “power and prestige legitimated the marriage of God and country.” Pannell documents Graham laying the foundation for evangelical support for conservative agendas. After his death and the “evangelical movement shattered along ideological lines,” he asks, “What’s next?”
Pannell brings readers back into the present, to the Black Lives Matter protests and to former President Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore where he “drove the dagger of division deeper into America’s heartland,” and asks again, “Where do we go from here?”
“The here, unfortunately, is pretty much what it was 30 years ago,” Pannell told RNS.
To Edward Gilbreath, vice president of strategic partnerships at Christianity Today, the expanded and new version of Pannell’s book serves as a historical reflection but “also as a statement on how far we haven’t come.”
“Dr. Pannell was not afraid to speak the truth to power in evangelical circles at that time. He was very much engaged and a part of the predominantly white evangelical community,” said Gilbreath, who in 2019 helped spearhead Pannell’s updated book when he was an executive editor at InterVarsity Press.
“This gave him a very intimate perspective in terms of being trusted and someone who is not just criticizing for criticism’s sake, but he really cared about the church and wanted to see real change because he loved the church,” Gilbreath added.
With this version of the book, Gilbreath said he hopes to introduce Pannell to a new generation, those who may know about evangelist Tom Skinner “but have not heard the name William Pannell.”
Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said it’s crucial to contextualize how the original book was published at a time when L.A. was reckoning with the aftermath of what’s been described as one of the worst race riots in American history.
“It was important to talk about the ways in which evangelicals hadn’t paid attention to race,” said Butler, author of “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.” “He was already working on that book when the L.A. riots happened.” Butler dedicated her book to Pannell.
Butler juxtaposes “The Coming Race Wars?” with Pannell’s 1968 book, “My Friend, the Enemy,” where he seeks to explain how white people, including those Pannell knew and loved, could “at once be both friend and foe.” In it, he centers his experience as an evangelical Black man among Christians who seldom challenged white supremacy.
“That book was trying to address back in 1968 the same kind of issues that he was addressing in 1993, and here we are in 2021 with the updated version, and evangelicals still haven’t gotten it yet,” Butler said.
Pannell recognizes that a majority of evangelicals supported Trump and his administration. “It has become clear that this segment of the church is deeply divided and segregated not only by theology but by political ideology,” he writes.
The race wars may still be coming, Pannell writes, but he also highlights how the “command of the risen Christ to his followers was that they go into all the world and make disciples of the nations. Not build churches; not make converts. Make disciples.”
“It seems fairly clear today that we have far more churches and Christians than we have disciples,” Pannell writes.
In his afterword, Pannell poses the question: “What, after all, does it mean to be the people of God today?
“Moving forward from here will require a greater investment in discipleship, a deeper commitment to beloved community, and a reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit,” Pannell writes. “In other words, we’ll need to be the church.”
ROAD TO REDEMPTION: Rodney King, 47, was found dead in his swimming pool on Sunday, June 17. In April, he was a featured author at the LA Times Festival of Books, where he discussed his autobiography, 'The Riot Within.' (Photo: Susan J. Rose/Newscom)
Rodney King’s untimely death over the weekend has led to a lot of conversations about his significance as a key civil rights figure. King, of course, gained fame for the 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles cops that he endured and the subsequent race riot that followed in 1992 after the officers were acquitted of any wrongdoing. He then became an unlikely voice of reason when, in the midst of the deadly and destructive rioting, he famously asked, “Can we all just get along?” Sadly, that question still echoes today after each new racially charged issue or controversy that erupts in the media.
But what will be King’s lasting legacy? By his own admission, he was not a perfect man. In fact, drunk driving and alleged substance abuse were the reasons he was pulled over by the L.A. cops initially in 1991, and he continued to struggle with drugs and alcohol apparently until the night of his death. In a Los Angeles Times post, reporter Ken Streeter recalls his series of interviews with King this year and confirms that King was still drinking and still smoking pot (he said for medical reasons).
So, King doesn’t exactly fit the classic image of the heroic civil rights icon. Yet, he stands as an important symbol in our nation’s uneasy saga of racial unrest and our stutter steps toward reconciliation.
“The King beating and trial set in motion overdue reforms in the LAPD and that had a ripple effect on law enforcement throughout the country,” Cannon explains. Indeed, under L.A. police Chief William Bratton in the 2000s, the department began focusing on community policing, hired more minority officers, and worked to heal tensions between the police and minority communities who continued to protest racial profiling and excessive use of force.
In the post-Rodney King world, adds Cannon, “It became more perilous to pull someone over for driving while black.”
To his credit, King was well aware of his shortcomings and shared his story in an autobiography released earlier this year to mark the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots. In The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption, King came clean about his failures and his continued struggles with alcohol addiction, but also about how God had helped him begin to turn his life around.
In a poignant interview with the Canadian public radio program Q with Jian Ghomeshi, King talked about his book and expressed optimism about both his own future and the state of race relations in the United States.
What do you view as Rodney King’s legacy? What does his complicated journey say about race relations in America? Will he rightly be remembered a civil rights icon?
STREETS OF FIRE: An LAPD officer watches as fires spread across Los Angeles on April 29, 1992. The L.A. Riots were sparked when a jury acquitted four police officers accused in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. (Photo: Jon Freeman, Paul Harris/Newscom)
Gathering for Unity
People of faith gathered with other city leaders and community members at Glory Church of Christ in Los Angeles Sunday “to bring a message of remembrance, faith and hope” on the twentieth anniversary of the L.A. Riots, Annenberg Digital News reported. The 1992 riots were set off in the Los Angeles area by the acquittal of four police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man. Sixty-three people died in six days of rioting and more than $1 billion of damage was done.
“I’m sure many of us have different colors and maybe even different looking eyes. It shows that we are living in a community of diversity,” said the mother of 18-year-old Edward Song Lee, who was mistaken for a looter by a Korean store owner and shot to death. “Twenty years ago if we had this type of gathering, this kind of diversity in relations and in connections, I think my son would be still living today.”
An Influential Minister Remembers
The Rev. Dr. Cecil “Chip” Murray was in attendance, ADN reported. USC’s Center for Religon and Civic Culture says Murray, a fellow at the center, played a vital role in quelling strife before, during, and after the riots. It published a round-up of links to his commentary on the anniversary. Murray told Reuters, for example, that “he has seen enough improvement in the police mentality to give him hope for the future.”
Trying to Understand the ‘Other’
At Patheos, Jerry Park took a sociological look at why African Americans and Latinos targeted Korean-owned businesses for looting. He writes: “As a Korean American Christian this incident in history helped raise my own awareness that social problems felt by one racial minority are problems that affect me and the minority group that I belong to as well. And it reminds me that social inequality in America is far from color-blind.” Park promises to follow this post with one that highlights the perspective of the business owners.
From Church to Looting and Back Again
The Daily Beast looked back at the riots through the lens of two former gang members who discuss the truce it inspired among rival gangs. One of them, Skipp Townsend, was in church when violence broke out, but got caught up in the looting nonetheless. Now he is executive director of a youth gang intervention group. Townsend was “less upset by Rodney King than he was by the shooting of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was killed with a single bullet by a Korean convenience-store owner who suspected her of shoplifting” one day after the police officers who beat King pleaded not guilty. “The liquor-store owner said she had stolen a bottle of orange juice,” Townsend told The Daily Beast. “That penetrated my heart.”
Economic Realities No Better for L.A. Blacks
Erin Aubry Kaplan, an L.A. Times columnist, was also on her way to church when violence broke out, but she never made it because her route was blocked by rioters. She writes that she was struck that day by the number of black men in the street and links it to the high rate of black unemployment. “Everybody agreed back then that the root of the unrest was economic, yet 20 years later, blacks are still the ethnic group in Los Angeles County most likely to be unemployed or underemployed.”
The Role of Rap in Rioting
At The Grio, Ice Cube reflects on the role of rap music in the riots. He and others brought “the context of economic turmoil and youth indignation into the limelight with their expressive beats and rhymes,” the article said.
Where Are They Now?
The Root has a “Then and Now” slideshow of the major players in the story, if you’d like to know where they are now, but the 63 people who died in the riots can no long speak for themselves, so the Los Angeles Times has published a searchable database of their names with links to their individual stories and Fox News highlighted 22 victims for whom justice has yet to be served.
Among them was Anthony Lamarr Netherly, a 21-year-old African-American who was shot and left to die in the street. “The driver who found him loaded Netherly into his car and took him to Martin Luther King Hospital, where he died in the emergency room.” There was also Thanh Lam, 25, who “continued to make deliveries to customers of his family’s small grocery store in Compton” until he was shot by an African-American man who yelled a racial slur as he drove by and killed him.
“Our detectives combed through every piece of footage to try and identify suspects or vehicles and witnesses, but we never got any leads from that work and we still haven’t 20 years later,” LAPD Detective Olivia Spendola told Fox. “But you never give up hope.”
Too Much News to Highlight
For more coverage L.A. Magazine has a nice story collection, as do The Huffington Post and NPR, and people who were children in 1992 share their memories at Colorlines.
What do you think?
Could we see urban rioting again if socio-economic conditions don’t improve?
We sat down with Fuller Theological Seminary’s senior professor, Dr. William Pannell, for a discussion on the origins of the black evangelical movement. He also shared his wisdom on current theological and political affairs.
