NEWS PROFILE: Pastor on Clinton’s race panel: Can there be one America?

c. 1998 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ Every Sunday the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook tends to the spiritual needs of her flock from the pulpit of a storefront church in the South Bronx, a baseball’s throw from Yankee Stadium. By Monday, she’s usually on a plane headed for some far-flung city to help heal […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Every Sunday the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook tends to the spiritual needs of her flock from the pulpit of a storefront church in the South Bronx, a baseball’s throw from Yankee Stadium. By Monday, she’s usually on a plane headed for some far-flung city to help heal America’s centuries of racial wounds.

Cook is the senior pastor of Bronx Christian Fellowship, whose 200 working-class members worship in a former bank. She’s also a member of the advisory board for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race and Reconciliation, an ambitious, yearlong effort to assess race relations in the nation and develop a blueprint for the future.


It’s this latter role that has catapulted this homegrown community minister to the forefront of one of the most important domestic debates.”We’re asking can there be one America in the 21st century,”said the 41-year-old native New Yorker.”We’re not going to have a majority culture as we know it. We have to learn how to live cooperatively.” Each of the eight members on the panel has logged tens of thousands of air miles since last September, visiting as many as 12 cities each month. On each step they are introduced to programs that are successfully improving race relations at the grassroots level and hosting town meetings to encourage dialogue among the races, like the national one led by Clinton in Akron last fall.

The panel will formally present the president with its findings and recommendations when its mandate ends Sept. 30. Clinton, who has made it clear he wants to achieve a breakthrough in race relations before his second term expires, is expected to address the nation on the subject of race before the end of the year.

Now, Cook, who gave up a promising career in television to enroll in divinity school in the early 1980s, is poised to take center stage as the board turns its attention to religion and race.”We’re looking to the community of faith for successful efforts in racial reconciliation,”said Judith Winston, executive director of the president’s race initiative.”The conference will give them a chance to share ideas _ to hear the things that have been done to bridge the racial divide _ and we want these leaders to take those ideas back to communities with them.” When Cook steps forward to lead the discussion, she will assume a familiar role, one she’s played locally during her 15 years bridging racial divides in New York City.

She knows what it means to bring disparate groups together. She was the first female chaplain in the New York Police Department and the first female pastor of one of Manhattan’s oldest houses of worship, Mariner’s Temple and Baptist Church, a predominantly black church in the heart of Chinatown.”We got people of different backgrounds talking,”Cook recalled of her 13 years at Mariner’s Temple.”And by the end, we had a thriving multicultural center.” Cook believes it’s time to face the issue of race relations head on.”For 30 years after Martin Luther King’s assassination it seemed like nobody talked about race. I think now Americans of different races can say, `Yes, we’re different,’ and find ways to come together,”she said.

Selected as a White House Fellow in 1993, Cook discovered what it was like to be part of the national political scene.”I was the minister in residence,”she said.”People would seek me out for spiritual guidance. The president even stopped me in the hall one day and said he wanted to hear me preach. Then he asked me to pray for him. That was a moving moment.” As the only religious leader on the advisory board, which also includes a lawyer, college president, labor leader and business executive, and is led by the eminent American historian John Hope Franklin, Cook has found she’s become its spiritual voice inside the White House and beyond.”They all know I’m the Baptist preacher,”she said.”I don’t feel I have to defend that. I find most people welcome it.” Winston praises Cook as the motivational presence on the panel.”We’re delighted to have someone reach out to the religious community, but who also has broad interests beyond faith,”she said.”Suzan also wants to find solutions to problems in education, health care and housing.” Cook, who lives with the grade-school memory of a white classmate asking to change seats because her family was opposed to their friendship, remains relentlessly optimistic about the progress made in race relations during the last decade. She’s also hopeful about the advisory board’s ability to tackle this deep-rooted problem.”I was afraid when we toured the country I would see the Klan in different colors, but it has not been the case,”she said.”I think the spiritual revival in the United States is helping break those racial barriers.” And she continues her mission back home, squeezing in an interview between a high-energy, two-hour service and auditions for the church’s talent show.

Cook takes pride in the community she’s helping rebuild along the Bronx’s once-fashionable Grand Concourse. She brought the idea of a”Lunch Hour of Power”uptown when she started her congregation in 1996 and now several hundred people from clerks to judges come once a week for lunch-time services.

From her cluttered office in the back of the makeshift church, she can see Borough Hall, home of the powerful Bronx borough president.”I have his ear,”she said.”He knows that 200 people in the congregation means 200 votes down the road.” She’s also found time to complete her second book, a series of motivational essays for women based on her experiences as a mother and minister. The only concession in her busy schedule is the elimination of evening meetings, in order to help her husband raise their two young sons.


It’s her sons’ world, if not her own, Cook hopes to make brighter.”Martin Luther King didn’t start out to change the world,”she said.”He started out small and watched the momentum build. I’d like to hope the legacy of the advisory board, and the president, is that we made a difference on the race issue.”

(Editors: For more information on the President’s Initiative on Race and Reconciliation, visit its Web site at http://www.whitehouse.gov/initiatives/OneAmerica.)

DEA END WORDEN

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