Jamal Bryant Called Cleveland the Home of Black Democracy. Then He Put Our Churches on Trial.

Community / Commentary — REAL POWER.TV

Pastor Jamal Bryant came to Richmond Heights four days before the election and told Cleveland it is the home of Black democracy. Then he asked whether our churches would get enough votes to stay open.

Four days before the election, a preacher from Atlanta stood up in a room in Richmond Heights and told us he had no business being there.

Congresswoman Shontel Brown brought him to the mic. The men of Kappa Alpha Psi met him in red. Pastor Jamal Bryant said he had spent the last 90 days on the road, from Houston to Compton to Philadelphia, trying to move Black voters. “The last place I thought I’d ever be is Cleveland, Ohio,” he said.

Then he told us why.

“Because in Black America, the only place you shouldn’t have to tell people to get out to vote is Cleveland, Ohio.”

He let that hang there. He wasn’t finished.

Was that a compliment? Or was he reading us the charges?

The Receipts

He started with our own history.

It was 1967. A man raised by a single mother in Outhwaite Homes walked to the polls and came out mayor of a major American city. Before Washington. Before Atlanta. Before Baltimore. Carl Stokes showed this country what Black political power looks like, and his brother Louis carried it to Congress.

Then Garrett Morgan, the Clevelander whose traffic signal, Bryant reminded us, tells the whole country when to stop and when to go. “It is not Simon Says,” he said. “It’s Garrett Says.”

Then Langston Hughes, who came up through a Cleveland classroom.

“I have absolutely no reason to be in Cleveland tonight,” he said, “because you all already know better.”

It sounded like a pep rally. It wasn’t.

The Turn

“For me to come to Cleveland is an insult to your legacy,” he said. “It is an insult to your ancestry, and it is an insult to the standard that you raised for all of Black America.”

He put a number on it. By his count, more than 900,000 eligible Ohioans sat out the last election. “They had the capacity,” he said, “but lost the passion.”

Then he named the condition. “We are under the curse of doing nothing.”

He took us to the Book of Judges, to a little town called Meroz. When Israel went to war, an angel cursed Meroz. Not for worshipping idols. Not for breaking covenant. For sitting it out. “Your sin,” Bryant said, “is in doing nothing.”

And then he turned it on the church.

He quoted Archbishop Desmond Tutu: at the end of every year, the poorest people in the community should vote on which church stays open. “If Cleveland had to vote on whether your church is open in 2027,” Bryant asked, “would you have enough votes?”

Did You Do Anything?

He asked it again and again, and every time he hung something new on it.

Did you do anything for the Haitian and Jamaican families in this city who are afraid to come outside because ICE is on the prowl? Did you do anything for Black women who lost their jobs, when the church will put them on the praise team but not the finance team? For young people coming home buried in student loans? For grown children moving back in because a paycheck doesn’t stretch anymore?

He didn’t exempt himself. His church has sent 250 students to HBCUs over three years, he said, all of them free, most the first in their families to go to college. He was proud of that until God convicted him. In 50 years in the Black church, he had never seen it give a scholarship to a young man who wanted a CDL, or a young woman who wanted to be an esthetician.

“We have adopted W.E.B. Du Bois and thrown away Booker T.,” he said. Then he reminded us Jesus was a blue-collar worker.

The Empty Seats

Then he said the thing I’d been carrying all fall.

“If you’re not careful, you’ll look across this room and you’ll note that the demographic we need is not present tonight.”

In Atlanta, he said, voters under 25 were the lowest-turnout group of all. He told us why. “We have made civil rights, civic engagement, and the Black church an elective, and we forgot to make it a part of the core curriculum.”

That one landed on me. We fed people every other Saturday this fall. We filled rooms. The young people weren’t in them. Bryant didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. He just said it out loud.

The Pastor Who Answered

The strongest answer of the night didn’t come from the crowd. It came from the man who closed it.

Rev. C.J. Matthews, who opened his church on Woodland to our breakfasts, stepped up to give the benediction. That morning he had buried a murdered 16-year-old. And he answered Bryant’s question in front of the whole room.

“I’ve got to check and see if I would get enough votes to be open,” he said. After sitting with those families, “I don’t know if I’d be open.”

When I talked with him afterward, he hadn’t taken a word of it personally. “We didn’t need a prophet to come here and say nice things to us,” he told me. “We needed to hear the truth.”

Now he’s challenging every church in this city to take the same test. That’s what leadership sounds like when it’s honest.

Who We Are

Bryant closed where he started. Atlanta, he said, is the home of civil rights, because of King, Lowery, Lewis and Abernathy.

“And while Atlanta is the home of civil rights, Cleveland is the home of Black democracy. I just came today to remind you of who you are.”

Here’s my take. He’s right, and we shouldn’t need the reminder. Next time, we don’t import the fire. We build it here, with Cleveland preachers, Cleveland organizers and Cleveland young people on the front line, because that’s where Bryant said a revolution starts.

Dr. Heather E. Burton hosted him at a luncheon at Pinstripes, and I sat down with him for The RealPower.TV Podcast with Kenn Dowell. That conversation is coming.

His question won’t wait for the next election. In 2027, would your church get enough votes?

Act like you know.