Do battle against prejudice and discrimination wherever you find it.

I do think that it is impossible to do Christian theology with integrity in America without asking the question, What has the gospel to do with the black struggle for liberation?

Christian theology is for the liberation of all humanity, and it could never be neutral in the fight against oppression. That much I knew. And that was how A Black Theology of Liberation was born: with the spirit of Martin and Malcolm, Jimmy, and the black poets of the 1960s.

It never ceased to amaze me how white scholars could quibble, making simple things more complicated than they really were. What is more central in the Christian Bible than the exodus and Jesus stories and the prophetic call for justice for the poor?

in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts.

The oppressed…have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force."

If the Church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms. It must become prophetic, demanding a radical change in the interlocking structures of this society.

When Niebuhr thought a little more deeply about Darrow's empathy with black suffering, however, he said, "I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have eyes to see and heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice."

How to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression.

I was black before I was a Christian. Martin and Malcolm, therefore, had to go together, which meant being unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.

Freedom means taking sides in a crisis situation, when a society is divided into oppressed and oppressors. In this situation we are not permitted the luxury of being on neither side by making a decision that only involves the self.

Appeals to reason and religion do not change the balance of power, because both are used to defend the interests of oppressors.