Reverend Charles
Moseley helped win one of the first victories of America’s civil rights
movement. It was 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, and he joined a group of
black students protesting against their exclusion from a a local ‘lunch-counter.’
They overcame.
When I ask the
reverend about those landmark events he stops and looks at me with a
mischievous smile playing in his tired, hooded 70-year-old eyes.
‘You know I don’t
drink coffee anymore,’ he says, enigmatically. ‘When they finally served me a
cup of coffee at that lunch counter it was so hot I thought it came from the
pits of hell.’
Reverend Mosely
speaks slowly, methodically. At times, you think he is nodding off.
But when he rises
to the pulpit of the Nazareth First Missionary Baptist Church he is filled with
a staggering dynamism.
His is the oldest
black church in Asheville, North Carolina, founded by freed slaves back in the
1860s. Reverend Moseley has been the pastor here for 33 years.
I sat in the back
of this Sunday service and listened to him mark a moment in American political
history.
‘We are excited
on the one hand and apprehensive on the other,’ he says. ‘Do we still trust in
God?
The congregation
says, with one voice, ‘Amen’.
‘Let’s pray for
all the candidates but only vote for one.’
He never mentions
Barack Obama by name.
‘I have faith in
the one we are considering. He has already proved he will give his life to the
improvement of all mankind.’
His sermon
touches on the biblical account of the Good Shepherd. As he reaches a climax,
his voice becomes more insistent.
‘Are we going to
take the risk to vote?’. He asks the question and then answers: ‘say yes, say
yes’.
‘We are in the
centre of history. You can tell your children, your grandchildren, you were
part of the great revolution.’
The sermon is
complete and the choir begins to sing an old hymn called ‘Someone’s knocking …’
When the hymn
comes to an end, the pastor comes off the pulpit and has a word in the ear of
the chief usher, with the white gloved hands. The congregation is called to the
front of the church. The reverend motions for me to join his flock. I find
myself part of a wide semi-circle arranged loosely around the front pews. The
reverend instructs everyone to join hands. I am gripped by a kind-faced woman
to my right and a stern church elder to the left.
The reverend
begins to sing in a beautiful baritone, ‘We Shall Overcome’.
I look around the
semi-circle and realise that almost every single person in that church is old
enough to have lived in an America where blacks were put on the back of the bus
and excluded from lunch-counters.
They have lived
long enough to see a black man stand at the gates of the White House, with a
real chance of moving in.
And they know he
got there because of the bravery of people like Charles Moseley.