The day President Joe Biden announced he would step aside and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination, one of the first calls Harris made was to her longtime pastor, a native Mississippian and storied civil rights leader.
The Rev. Amos C. Brown, an 83-year-old Jackson native and pastor at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, is no stranger to such high-profile contacts. He has often been turned to by U.S. presidents. He was a close mentee of Medgar Evers. Martin Luther King Jr. tutored Brown at Morehouse College and even wrote Brown a letter of recommendation for seminary.
But Brown acknowledged in an interview with Mississippi Today that July 21 was extraordinarily memorable. He was just about to walk to the pulpit of the historic church to deliver his sermon when a deacon privately shared the news about Biden’s just-announced decision to drop out of the race.
“I paused to mention it to the congregation before I read the sermon text, which I selected well before I knew anything about what would happen that day,” Brown said. “That text was from Hebrews 12: ‘Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily beset us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.’ The timing of that text struck me as providential and poetic.”
After the Sunday service, Brown and his wife visited with members, went home, and, as pastors so often do on Sunday afternoons, he laid down to rest.
“I was actually about to go to sleep and my phone rang,” Brown said. “When I answered, it was the vice president’s voice. She said, ‘Hello, my pastor. I call because I need for you to pray for me, for Doug (Emhoff, her husband), for this nation because I’ve decided to run for president.’ I handed my phone to my wife, they talked for a minute, and then we had prayer together.”
Brown, invoking a cornerstone Christian verse from the Book of Micah, continued: “I prayed for her safety and security. I prayed she’d be led by spirituality as she sought the presidency, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with her God. Then I recited a passage from James Weldon Johnson’s great hymn ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’”
Harris is a longtime member of Third Baptist Church — Brown called her “an old-timer” — and she has talked extensively about her upbringing in both the Christian and Hindu faiths. Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir that her “earliest memories of the teachings of the Bible were of a loving God, a God who asked us to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’ and to ‘defend the rights of the poor and needy.’”
Her Baptist upbringing, in particular, centers on the teachings of Brown, a civil rights leader who has fought for those same virtues for nearly 70 years.
Brown’s civil rights work began in his hometown of Jackson, where he organized the first NAACP youth council at College Hill Baptist Church. At age 15, he rode with Medgar Evers from Jackson to San Francisco for the 1956 NAACP national convention, held at the same Third Baptist Church that he has now pastored for nearly 50 years. He was temporarily expelled from Jim Hill High School for talking with a national newspaper about the importance of integration, and he was later stripped of his earned class president and high school valedictorian status. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission kept an extensive file on the teenager.
Later, after leaving Jackson for college at Morehouse in Atlanta, he traveled around the South to help lead the Movement, like organizing a wade-in at Tybee Island, Georgia, and serving as a leader for NAACP chapters in numerous states. While preaching at Third Baptist and at churches in St. Paul, Minnesota, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, he has been elected or appointed to numerous civil rights posts. He served as a delegate to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in 2001, president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, and vice chair of California’s Reparations Task Force.
“I think Vice President Harris was attracted to the history of this church, to the role we’ve played in social justice and advancing the human race,” Brown said. “She’s a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we’ve known for a very long time now.”
The relationship between Brown and Harris transcends faith. Brown said Harris served as his campaign manager when he ran for reelection to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1999, and he publicly supported her successful campaigns for San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. Senate and vice president.
But the spiritual bond the two share, Brown said, is what he’s been dwelling on most these past few days as his friend and church member barrels toward the Democratic presidential nomination ahead of a pivotal November election.
“She’s above all else a good and decent human being,” Brown said. “If we had more people in this world of her integrity and her personhood, we’d get closer to being an expression of that beloved community that Dr. Martin Luther King envisioned. That’s the kind of outlook we need to hear in America today.
“All this division and put-down and hate speech and fear mongering is too much,” Brown continued. “There’s just too much of that. Someone once said people tend to hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. Well, they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate or connect with each other. We must connect with each other, and we must love each other. That’s the message Kamala Harris is going to share with the country because that’s who she is. That’s the person I’ve known for so long.”
As for his time in Mississippi, Brown said he’s been fortunate to carry his home state legacy with him around the world.
“Everybody has a connection to Mississippi. I think about Jackson often,” he said. “You know, the deacon who tapped me on the shoulder before I preached (on July 21) to tell me that President Biden had stepped down? That was Brother Cedric Carter, who’s actually from Vicksburg originally.”
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