How Gaza turned everything upside down for the Black church and Biden

The bright, low sun of an ice-cold February morning was streaming through the elaborate stained-glass window of South Philadelphia’s historic Mother Bethel AME Church when its pastor, the Rev. Mark Tyler, strolled to the altar. He saw the rainbow coalition of about 75 peace marchers scattered among the pews, but he was hearing the ghosts of civil rights past.

Tyler told the gathering that this date, Feb. 14, was also the 264th birthday of Mother Bethel’s legendary 19th-century founder, Bishop Richard Allen, who is buried on the church grounds at Sixth and Lombard Streets. These grounds are hallowed: African Americans debated slavery here while people fleeing their enslavers tunneled below in the Underground Railway. Frederick Douglass came to Mother Bethel in 1863 to plead for Black enlistees in the Union army.

For Mother Bethel’s current spiritual leader, that line continues through the civil rights struggles of the 1960s that had baptized a few of the older activists in the pews and the cause that brought them together in 2024: a demand for an immediate end to the fighting in Gaza, where Israel’s ongoing onslaught has killed more than 28,000 people, including an estimated 12,300 children.

“If Richard Allen were alive today, he would be welcoming you into this place to say, ‘Come in and prepare yourself for marching and remember our people who are innocent and whose lives are in danger, whether they be in Palestine, whether they be in Ukraine, whether they be in North or West Philadelphia,” Tyler preached. “We have to be on the side of right because God still sides with the oppressed.”

Those at Mother Bethel were the vanguard of an eight-day Pilgrimage for Peace, a 140-mile march by a multi-faith coalition of activists calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the release of all Israeli hostages held by Hamas, and a surge of humanitarian aid into a region devastated by more than four months of war. I was there, in part, to hear the passion of people willing to walk up to 10 miles a day (assisted by buses, when need be) — in subfreezing weather and a predicted snowstorm — to call attention to their peace plank. But I also had questions about the march’s final destination.

The White House.

The momentous election year of 2024 wasn’t supposed to look like this, at least not in the playbook as drawn up by President Joe Biden and his Democratic campaign team. Four years ago, the passion of African American churchgoers who fill the pews of Mother Bethel on Sundays, and sibling churches in places like Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee, was largely what propelled Biden — who got an estimated 87% of the Black vote in 2020 — to narrow wins in key swing states.

This time around, the carnage in Gaza may not be the number one issue for Black voters, but it’s become a lightning rod for a broader disappointment with the 46th president. That’s been dramatized by Biden’s embrace of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and the contrast between online images of dead or wounded Palestinian children and the U.S. arms shipments that are linked to these ungodly attacks.

As the conflict drags on, hundreds of Black ministers from all over America, and especially in key political states like Georgia (which Biden won in 2020, famously, by a mere 11,779 votes), have sent urgent letters to the White House, or lent their names to full-page newspaper ads pleading for the president to call for an immediate end to the bloodshed and to use his leverage, such as arms shipments, to make it happen. Most say their stance reflects the feelings of their rank-and-file congregants, who see parallels between the 400-year human rights struggles of Black Americans and what they now see as the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Of course, the fall election is still nine months away, and a lot will happen both at home and in the Middle East between now and November. But key leaders in the Black clergy say the notion of 2020 Biden voters staying home in protest, or even flipping to the GOP’s Donald Trump, is real.

The Rev. Kamaria Byrd-McAllister, the “first lady” at Morris Brown AME Church in Strawberry Mansion, who lent her support to the Gaza peace pilgrimage, told me her congregants in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods “are overwhelmed by their own trauma, by violence and poverty and a whole bunch of things.” Yet the flood of heartbreaking images from Gaza is starting to break through.

Byrd-McAllister noted that Biden voters, including African Americans, are different from Trump’s cult-like MAGA supporters. They’re not “following blindly,” she explained, but they demand action on issues that matter, which now includes Gaza. “It’s very devastating to witness this in real time,” she said. A “whole community of people is wiped out, and we’re continuing to pour money.”

Wednesday’s kickoff of the Washington, D.C., pilgrimage featured a kind of pep rally, bringing a parade of faith leaders and veteran activists to the Mother Bethel pulpit, most of whom focused on the urgency of ending the slaughter of women and children. They also sought to draw hope from the remarkable same-day confluence of the Allen and Douglass birthdays, the holiness of Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent, and Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love.

West Philadelphia Rabbi Alissa Wise, the lead national organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, recalled that her great-uncle, Rabbi Aaron Wise, had marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965 with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while a Hindu activist saw the parallels not only to U.S. civil rights but the peace walks of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmet Tekelioglu, Philadelphia executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, told the gathering, “When I look at this room, we are joined in pride, but I can feel your pain.”

Over the course of the rally, that pain grew increasingly political. Tellingly, there were just one or two passing references or illusions to Trump, even though the history of the 45th and wannabe 47th president — most notably his so-called Muslim ban on U.S. travel from majority-Islamic nations — suggests his election would be a nightmare for supporters of the Palestinian cause. The focus was on the current president, and it sounded more and more bitter as some compared his plight to Lyndon B. Johnson, whose 1960s presidency and ambitious domestic agenda were undone by the war in Vietnam.

The only elected official who spoke — new City Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke, also pastor of the United Church of Christ congregation in Oxford Circle — had especially harsh words for Biden, calling the pilgrimage “a righteous journey to what’s felt like, to many, a house of injustice ... or a house of incompetence.” The Working Families Party that O’Rourke belongs to was one of the left-wing groups that backed Biden in 2020.

He was followed by an impassioned plea from the New York-based Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who criticized the billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Israel. “My tears come because as an American, I am complicit in every child that you see — that little girl you see hanging on the building. I killed her. You killed her. We are in tax season right now.” Her words were met with applause.

» READ MORE: Is Gaza becoming Joe Biden’s Vietnam? | Will Bunch Newsletter

In an interview, Tyler — considered one of Philadelphia’s leading civil rights activists through his work with groups like POWER Interfaith — conceded that it’s been “complicated” taking a stand on the Middle East situation with his thicket of interfaith and political connections. But he said that, in the end, “there should never be a time when lives are disposable.” He said the political calculus for the Biden White House should not be all that different.

“If there’s no good political thing, then at least let’s do the right thing,” Tyler said of pushing for a Gaza cease-fire. “Because, again, I acknowledge this is a political football — it’s a loser. But so then let’s save some lives in the process.”

A short time later, the marchers filed out past Allen’s burial site and turned right on Sixth Street, into a brutally stiff winter headwind, with miles to go to change the mind of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’s current occupant before it’s too late.

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