Recently, after an election in which Black Church PAC knocked on over 30,000 doors, made some 44,000 phone calls and sent 1.6 million text messages, the group published an open letter to President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris with a simple message: Black voters of faith matter and deserve a seat at the table.
"The Black Church community did not sit on the sidelines through this electoral process and do not intend to sit on the sidelines of accountability, agenda setting and governance," the letter read. It went on to ask the incoming administration to appoint Blacks to key posts and to pursue a bold progressive agenda.
The letter was signed by more than two dozen Black religious leaders, including Rev. Michael McBride, one of the founders of Black Church PAC.
In late October, I caught up with Rev. McBride in Georgia as he traveled on a get-out-the-vote bus tour of key states. The cell transmission was spotty, but his message was loud and clear: Black voters would be crucial to the 2020 election, and they no longer wanted their support to be taken for granted.
McBride was right about the election. Surging Black voter turnout in key states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan helped deliver a victory to Biden. Black turnout also helped Biden win Georgia and Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate in that state to wage a strong enough challenge to warrant runoff elections in January. Now, with both the Senate races in Georgia virtually tied, Black voters could again make a decisive difference.
This wasn’t the first victory for the PAC. In 2018, it endorsed 15 candidates; seven won: five new members of Congress, the new mayor of Little Rock, and a new Supreme Court justice in North Carolina. Getting nearly 50% of your candidates into office is a pretty good record for a PAC that was making its first endorsements. During the 2020 election cycle, it gave $2,800 to only one federal candidate, Joe Biden, on political and raised less than $1 million. Its two largest donors are philanthropist Susan Pritzker, the American Federation of Teachers PAC, and Priorities USA Action PAC, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
In 2020, a year when House Democrats lost at least five seats, the PAC’s endorsements helped Georgia Rep. Lucy McBath hang on to the seat she had won two years ago and to elect a new Democratic representative in Missouri, Cori Bush.
To be sure, larger Black groups, including Black PAC and the Color of Change PAC, also endorse candidates. And many African American groups have been working tirelessly in key states to spur Black turnout. But the Black Church PAC’s focus is different.
Founded in 2017, the PAC aims to mobilize and engage Black religious voters, says McBride, senior pastor, The Way Church, Berkeley, California.
The priorities and contributions of Black churches often remain invisible, McBride contends. While there has been a “hyper-focus on right-wing evangelical ... political engagement,” McBride says, Black voters “from a Black church tradition” have “for decades, for centuries” been against “the agenda of the anti-Black, anti-civil rights machinations of both political parties.” They have “been able to identify and discern terrible political leadership much earlier than other voters in this country have been able to diagnose it.”
Too often, he says, candidates and their campaigns and the Democratic party fail to invest in that effort, because “we are thought to be a guaranteed vote … They don’t craft messages … that are well funded and resourced to engage our communities.”
He adds that evangelical Black congregations are not as obsessed with the culture wars as white evangelical churches. Beyond same-sex marriage and abortion, “we have to ask ourselves, where does the agenda of Black people fit?” Justice and economic well-being are at the “top of the list” of Black church leaders, he insists.
For hundreds of years, the Black church has been the “engine for civil rights and human rights” and the “premier organization” fighting white supremacy, McBride adds. “We needed to weigh in on elections as an institution.” That did not mean, however, weighing in as churches per se.
Churches generally stay away from PACs because of the Johnson Amendment, the provision in tax law approved by Congress in 1954 at the behest of then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, that states that churches that endorse candidates would risk losing their tax-exempt status. (While the amendment has not been repealed, President Donald Trump issued an executive order in 2017 directing the Internal Revenue Service not to enforce it.)
McBride is no fan of the IRS restriction, which, he charged, had been an effort to stifle the influence of the Black church … and its “institutional power-building to dismantle the new Jim Crow”—racist policies and laws that persisted despite the passage of civil rights laws designed to end segregation.
Nevertheless, McBride says that the Black Church PAC is designed to follow federal tax law. “We studied and we figured out a way to do it within the confines of the legal system,” he says. He notes that the PAC does not consist of churches but of “individuals who have relationships, networks and platforms across the spectrum of the Black church”—what he terms the “invisible Black church. It’s a very unique and powerful way to make sure that the institutional influence of the Black church can help continue to defeat white supremacy.”
When “we want to work with Black churches,” he adds, that is done through the Black Church Action Fund. “We’re allowed to do that kind of work as long as it is education and nonpartisan. The fund was created “as the vehicle to organize Black church denominations.”
The Black Church PAC has a clear issue agenda: Its major priorities are ending gun violence, police violence, mass incarceration and voter suppression. The PAC sends questionnaires to candidates recommended by board members at a “regional convening” of the PAC. Candidates may also ask the PAC to consider them for an endorsement, McBride says. All candidate responses are reviewed before the PAC decides to give them “a thumbs up or thumbs down,” McBride says.
In addition to asking their positions on the PAC’s top priorities, the questionnaire also probes candidates’ receptivity to reparations by asking their views on HR 40, legislation that would create a commission to study the impact of slavery over the nearly 250 years it persisted in the U.S., assess the harm it continues to impose on the descendants of slaves in the 21st century, and to consider reparations and other remedies. As they assume elected office, McBride says, candidates should be aware of the importance of reparations as a vehicle for “equity and economic equality.”
The PAC also has been strategic about its endorsement choices, looking at swing states and at candidates that might have a shot at winning with the right amount of support, McBride adds.
The pandemic almost sidetracked voter mobilization efforts, not only because it required a “Herculean shift” to online organizing but also because of the pressing need to get personal protective equipment to Black essential workers, seniors and “loved ones in jails and prisons,” McBride says. He launched the Masks for the People campaign to ensure a supply chain of FDA-approved gear.
Despite these obstacles, the Black Church Action Fund launched virtual “souls to the polls events,” text-a-thons, voter registration drives and digital organizing workshops. Its efforts during the last days of the campaign included a bus tour during which fund leaders held “pop-up” events to engage voters and offered voter care packages that included PPE and hotline information if they experienced problems at the polls. “We will leave no stone unturned to ensure Black voters vote in historic numbers,” McBride pledged.
Indeed, the action fund has so energized churches that they’re aiming to go way beyond turning out the PAC’s initial goal of 1 million Black voters, McBride says. “Now, all the major denominations have voting programs that are committing to cumulatively reach well over 2 million folks to get to the polls," he notes.
As for ensuring free and fair elections, McBride says that’s the responsibility of the government. “The Black church has limited resources,” he says. Nevertheless, the Black Church Action Fund has used its websites to provide ample voter education and materials to make the voting process easier. It’s also partnering with many Black groups that are putting together voter protection teams, and even training Black young people to be poll workers.
While no one election will solve “our problems as a people in this country,” McBride added, “we think the conditions will be made easier with Joe and Kamala as president and vice president.”
The Black Church PAC will be active in the years to come, McBride says. The PAC won’t be trying to “court” candidates, he says. Instead, it wants to show the “power” of the Black vote, and then push elected officials “as hard as we can to deliver on policies that change the material conditions of black people in this country. That's all we can really hope for.”
