Here & Now

In Focus with Rev. Greg Lewis: The Power of the Black Church

Murv Seymour: Reverend Greg Lewis, Souls to the Polls, thank you for being here.

Rev. Lewis: Hey, thanks for being here with me.

I’d love to start with just, how did you get into the ministry? Why was this the right career for you?

Well, you know, I haven’t always been a minister. But I’ve always gone to church. And, you know, when I was young, I really had a lot of faith that I really know about, because I just felt like I had some kind of eternal thing going on inside. But when life went on, you know, and you start to do things on your own and your mom’s not making you go to church, and you could do whatever you want on a Sunday morning, then I stopped. And I got into a lot of things that probably weren’t good for your mom to know about. [Rev. Lewis laughing]

Okay.

And that’s just the honest-to-God truth. And I finally, you know, I woke up one day, and I said, “You know what? I don’t want my mother to see me like I am.” So, I just really started getting back into church, and reading the Bible, and you know, doing ministry, you know, at the church, and I just spent my whole days in the church after, you know, a rough road to my enlightenment. And I said, “You know what? “I’m sick of all this other stuff, “so I’m just gonna really concentrate on my relationship with God.” And it got so interesting just going back to your roots and understanding, you know, the Bible. And I kind of read that Bible backwards, forwards, backwards, forward. And I just said, “You know what? “This is it; this is it for me, you know? “This is the life, and I gotta try to help everybody else “see what I’ve seen so that we can all be, you know, helping build kingdom together.” And that’s basically what happened. I said, “Man, that’s it, I’m done,” And the pastor said, “Hey man, you know, I see an anointing on your life.” He indoctrinated me into the ministry, and I have not turned back.

What do you see the role of the church today? What is the role of the church?

Well, you know, actually, the church’s role is to help people understand true strength, true power, and the minister of God. It’s actually a place where, for me, it became a place of survival. See, because here in this country, you know, as a Black man, you know, one thing that I understood is that I was treated like an outsider. And it always seemed like there was some point where I was going to be eliminated, but it never happened. And I asked myself why ’cause I don’t have a Army, a Navy, a Air Force, Marine, a CIA, FBI, sheriff department, police department, and I’m treated like an outsider, but I was always protected. And that was, to me, God protecting me, protecting folks like me, protecting Black folks, brown folks, red folks, yellow, protecting us from a system that really treats us like outsiders. And that’s what the church ought to be instilling in people: the true power of God, so no matter what your situation, you always know that you can succeed. Because if you let other people tell you when you can have success, how you can have success, all those things… If you let other people tell you that, they may not tell you something that’s gonna be productive for you in your life. So, you have to know for yourself what, who you are, and understand that, you know, you can do something. You can be something. You can go places. You can do all these things that you want to do, but it’s going to take a lot of perseverance, and it’s gotta take a power that you really can’t find in a neighborhood, in a community, in a city, state, or a nation. It’s gotta take a superpower, and that power is of God. And that’s what the church ought to be instilling in the people who have been downtrodden. You know, what has been inculcated in their systems is failure. You know, I remember having this thought about history when I was going to school. And every time I looked in the history book, you know, all I saw about myself is that I was a slave. And then I saw Benjamin Banneker, and I saw Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and I saw these people, but it never was a true reflection of who I am. I mean, even in Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, we really never got a true story about those people, how they were courageous and fought, and had this bravery that you really can’t, you can’t explain it as something that came from the world. It had to be something very special that they felt, that they knew about, that they felt inside, that really gave them the courage to stand up and be counted as a human being. And that’s what the church ought to be doing. They ought to be helping people stand up and understand that, look, you’re more than a conqueror, if you will. And that’s what our church, I think that’s our duty right now because we have so much what I would call–

Well, let me ask you this–

Failure in our communities that, you know, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But go ahead, I’m sorry.

No, no, I was gonna ask you in terms of historically, the Black church has been the pillar of the community. How do you see that these days?

Oh, yeah, I mean, when I started the group Pastors United, I was coming out of my friend’s store, and it has everything about Black history and Afrocentric, you know, clothing, and bags, and books, and all those kind of things. I was coming out of his store, and he asked me, he said, “Hey, man, where you going?” I said, “I’m going to vote.” He said, “Man, what you going to vote for?” I said, “Man, I always vote.” He said, “Man, why you going to vote? “You don’t have a block. You know, you just going to vote?” You know, so I looked back at him, I said, “You know, hmm, I’m gonna get me a block,” and then I thought about the church. The church is where all the organizing goes for our community. That’s where people will sit down, talk to each other, and you can strategize and organize, and then, put things into action. You know, not a whole lot of arguing and fussing and fighting, and, you know, sometimes you may not want to go along with the situation, but in the church, you go along because ‘this is what we’re going to do together’ kinda attitude. So, I started, you know, working with the church, and now we have about 416 pastors, not churches, pastors who work together when it’s time to get out to vote, and that could not happen without the church. That’s where we organize our communities. That’s where we organize our business strategies. That’s where we organize our politics, is in the church, and that’s what the church is certainly, certainly of value to me, to me, of more than anything else in our community, because that’s the place where we can organize, organize, organize.

And you bring up voting. You have the organization Souls to the Polls. Give me a quick snapshot of what that organization does.

Well, you know, back in 2013, Valerie Jarrett came to one of our meetings in one of our church basements. You know, Valerie Jarrett was the lead organizer for Barack Obama, and she said, “You know, you can vote on Sundays.” I said, “Wow!” I said, “Yeah, souls to the polls.” And then, we started talking to people about voting on Sundays, but not only that, we started giving them information about what candidates were running. We started giving them information about where to go vote. We started to give ’em information about early voting. We started to talk about registration. We started to talk about telling each other, and making plans to get your family and friends to go vote. We started doing these radio spots where we just really encouraged people to vote. All things voting is in Souls to the Polls, and now we’ve become the folks in our community that people come to when they wanna know anything about voting.

And are you making a difference there, and are you moving the needle?

Yeah, I mean, it was three specific elections that we really saw our work. First of all, early voting. You know, we really impress upon people to vote early. We had a voting site, and we called it the Midtown voting site. It became the most potent early voting site in the Midwest because we pushed people to go vote early, and then there was Souls to the Polls Sundays, where we asked folks to get out of church and go vote. On this particular Sunday, we all going to vote, so we would have buses and everything.

Let me ask you this, the importance of voting early, why is it important?

Because, you know, people already, you know, have a very, very skeptic view about voting. And people aren’t excited about voting. You know, they don’t get up and say, “Hey man, it’s voting day,” you know, like Christmas. You know, they’re like, “Man, I might go vote, and I might not.” So, if we encourage them to go vote early, there might be one of those days when they say, “Man, I feel like voting today, I’m going to vote.” But if you wait ’til the last day, that opportunity does not come after you missed that last day. I just think that people should have the comfort of not being pressured to go from 7:00 to 8:00 at night on this day. Man, make it comfortable for yourself. Man, you can go on Saturdays, you can go on Sundays, you can go during the week. Man, just stop in and vote, and I think that’s important for a population that is really skeptical about voting, especially a population that has been so suppressed when it comes to voting. And what I mean by that is, last year, I found 62 suppression obstacles. This year, it’s 72. It’s not just one obstacle for suppression.

What kind of things are we talking about?

You know, first of all, in Wisconsin, it was this voter ID, or we call it voter ID, but actually, it’s just a photo ID that you need to show when you go and vote. That really kind of put a serious issue in communities of color ’cause some folks don’t have an ID. Some folks can’t get an ID, and I’m just not talking about young folks. I’m talking about older folks because in order for you to get an ID, you gotta have a birth certificate. Some folks don’t have a birth certificate. Some older people did not have their birth in a hospital. Lots of ’em didn’t have birth in a hospital, so it was very difficult for them to get the IDs. That was an obstacle. Then we have these drop boxes that we talked about using for people who want to get those ballots mailed to their homes, and you fill them out. And then, you have to mail them back. Well, sometimes you don’t mail them back in time, but the drop boxes would give you an opportunity to drop those ballots into a box, and people would come and pick them up. That was cut out, and in communities, those two things in a community of color really make a difference. Because first of all, this system is so, let me say, it’s so counterproductive to what needs to happen for people of color. And what I mean by this, man, it should be easier to vote. We should make it easy. I ought to be able to go to McDonald’s, say, “Hey man, lemme get a Big Mac, “and by the way, man, gimme one of them ballots. “While I’m eating, I’m gonna fill it out. “I’m gonna put it in that drop box. Somebody can come and get it later.” That’s how easy it should be. In the Netherlands, do you know that if you don’t vote, they give you a ticket?

Murv: Hmm.

Here, man, if you do vote, [laughs] you might get a ticket. No, my point is that they make it very hard for folks to be encouraged to engage into the process here in America, especially for people of color.

Let me ask you about the current political climate where, you know, you got the left versus the right, and conservatives versus the liberals. Does this current environment encourage people to get involved with voting, or is it driving people away from getting involved in voting?

You mean the viciousness of politics?

Yes.

Oh yeah, definitely, it’s discouraging ’cause it makes no sense. I mean, we have gotten away from what we call common sense. You know, now it’s scorched-earth politics, where people will burn up everything, they’ll destroy anything just to hold power. And people vote against their own self-interest just to make sure that others don’t get the same opportunities as they do, and I’m putting that kind of nicely. But this is a bad time for politics and people engaging in a process that is certainly equalizing more than any other process in this country. And the reason I say that is because, man, I don’t care who you are. If you rich, if you got land, if you own television stations, if you live in a mansion, you only get one vote. Voting is the great equalizer, and we have not taken advantage of that as people in our community because we just don’t believe that our votes count. And I always tell folks, “Listen, man, “if your vote didn’t count, why do you think “there’s so many people making sure you don’t vote? “Why you think they spend billions of dollars “convincing you that you ought to be frustrated “and not even deal with a system that you live in every day, “that you should make decisions about it? “Why do you think that’s happening if your vote didn’t count?” See, we have a lot to overcome; we really do. We don’t believe we have power. But you asked me a question earlier about, you know, what effect do we have in these communities, in this state, in the country? The last presidential election was won by 20,000 votes, and President Biden won. Well, at the–

That’s here in Wisconsin?

Yeah, in Wisconsin, yeah, thank you. Well, at that Midtown early voting site, early voting site, there came 18,500 votes, early votes. The election was won by 20,000 votes. If we had not pushed and prodded people to go to the polls, that election could have been a lot different in Wisconsin, and the same thing for the governor’s election, even the last-

Let me ask you quick, Greg.

Rev. Lewis: Yes.

Do you have any idea how many people you’ve maybe driven to the polls or even gotten to get registered to vote? Any idea, over the years?

Well, you know what? This is what I do; all year round, I count votes. I call pastors, and I have these conversations. I say, “Look, you know, we’re getting out the vote, man. “We need everybody work together, and, you know, “do you have somebody who will represent your church and help us do this?” And finally, after I ask all the questions… You need help? Can you help? Can you canvass? All those kind of things. The last thing I ask, I say, “How many votes you got in your church?” And, you know, they kind of tell me these numbers that probably are too many, so I have to break it down. I say, “Look, man, I don’t want to know “what you think you got. I want to know what you know you can have in your church.” So, if you say you got 200 votes, you know, I’m gonna say, “Listen, I don’t want to know what you think you have.” I say, “What do you really have?” And then they’ll tell me, “Man, I know we can get 75 votes outta here.” You know, so we went from 200 to 75, and I count those, I count those votes. And, you know, I tallied that, you know, we’re probably, in the church here in Milwaukee, we’re probably responsible for probably about 50,000 to 60,000 votes for sure. Now, I don’t know, you know, that’s what I’m talking about with me counting, but I don’t know what else happens with word of mouth, with getting people to the polls, with getting family and friends and those kind of things ’cause I don’t count on those. I count on what I can count when I talk to the pastors at these churches year-round. So, I think between 50,000 and 60,000 is a solid number for us getting out the vote.

Yeah, let me ask you about the state of Black Milwaukee. What is the state of things here in the city? And what are some of your concerns about the Black community here in Milwaukee?

If you look at statistics about our city, you’ll find that we’re probably at the bottom of the list on every important category for success in the world, Milwaukee. Jobs, education, family structure, finance, economics, health. That’s where we are. It’s really sad. It’s sad. [speaking with great emotion] I hate that question. That’s who we are ’cause we’ve given up. We’ve given up. People don’t wanna fight. They’re tired, they giving up, but I won’t let ’em, you know? Man, I know you’re tired, but you can’t stop now. See, that’s where we are. We have been so downtrodden here, and it’s so sophisticated and subliminal, man. You know, people don’t even know. You know, it’s like Harriet Tubman said, “Man, I could have freed a lot more slaves, “but I couldn’t convince them that they were enslaved. I couldn’t convince them.” You know, that’s kind of like it is here. Man, you know, we don’t know that we’re not free because we don’t stand up and fight. What I mean by that: I could do it by the numbers when we talk about voting, especially in local elections. You know, the last local election, man, we had like, I think, 11% of eligible voters go to vote. That’s crazy, and that’s where it’s at. That’s where we could have full control. Milwaukee is 40% Black, 18% Hispanic. That’s a huge, huge advantage, if you use it right. And we won’t because we don’t understand the power of the most significant equalizer in the world: the vote.

I heard you say in one of your sermons here when I was visiting, that people in the community are walking zombies.

Yeah, man.

What do you mean by that?

You know, they’re not paying attention to what their true power could really be. They’re not paying attention at all to the strategy of a system that we can engage in and use it to our advantage. You know, I always say, you know, our folks, they’re walking down the street whistling “Dixie.” Why would you be whistling “Dixie,” man? You know what “Dixie” represents? I mean, we’re walking down the street, we don’t know. I bet I could go out here right now, and I could see people walking down the street, and I say, “Man, who’s president?” They may not know. How could that be? How could that be?

How do you fix that?

Well, it’s a lot of hard work, and you just gotta keep going at it. I mean, see, that’s the problem with what I do. It’s so frustrating; I quit every day. I’ll be like, “Hey, man, I’m quitting, I quit. “This is too frustrating. “People just don’t really get it. “You know, they don’t care. “I’m doing all this work. “Nobody really cares. “Nobody’s paying attention. “Nobody appreciates you. You’ll die, and then they’ll go on to something else,” that kind of thing. And then, I get up in the morning, take a shower, and say, “Yes, let’s get back to it,” because there is no easy way out. You gotta keep, you know, pressing the issues, and that’s really the deal. You gotta-

What do you see as the biggest challenge out there in terms of the work you do and the kinds of things you do?

It’s getting people to understand that they have power. That’s the biggest challenge for me. Man, you got power! See, because, in America, our white population is basically split. Right now, the polls are showing Biden and Trump split right now, and we make the difference. How much more power do you need if you know that? But if you don’t think in those terms, you really can’t participate in a reality that’s there. You know, you let all those opportunities just pass you by. That is so frustrating, man. Man, that’s incredibly frustrating for me. I’m like, “Man, you don’t know what’s going on here? “Man, you got serious power right now. “God has already set it up for you “to make decisions about you, and you won’t even take that opportunity to do it.” That is, that’s frustrating for me, you know? You don’t understand your power, and we think we don’t have any at all, and that’s just nuts, because I can tell you, if you look at a situation like Milwaukee, and you can’t see that you have power, where would you have another situation like this and people wouldn’t understand that you can make decisions about your life? I mean, it’s just-

That is totally frustrating. You know, we have a 120,000-unit shortage for housing, but the money is there to do housing. Why won’t we fight? Somebody tell me, why won’t we fight? Why won’t we get together, and why won’t we fight? It’s because we’re not thinking strategically. We don’t focus on what could get things accomplished. You know, we still worry about the nonsense, we’re still worried about other things, but if you take care of one thing, it’ll take care of other things. And then, for me, you know, it’s like, man, you gotta understand, I hate to put this so simply, but you gotta understand the power of God. When you get finished doing everything, understand who’s in control. It’s not you because it’s already been proven that you can’t get things done. It’s God, I mean, but you gotta have some type of get up and go. Even under strong resistance-

Let me ask you–

You gotta have some get up and go.

Let me ask you this, Greg, and this is a question I save for presidents, but I’m gonna ask you.

Rev. Lewis: Yes.

What keeps you up at night?

Well, I tell you, the fact that knowing all these things and knowing there’s a solution, that you would fail, that you won’t get it across, that people don’t hear you, that you won’t make a difference, that keeps me up at night. That, man… As hard as you might work, you still haven’t done enough. That keeps you up, for me. Nobody’s listening, nobody’s paying attention, man. That really keeps me up at night. I mean, we got the answers, man. I mean, the answers are there, but you know what? Populations of people have to force the issues. I remember when Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the chairman of the Conductors’ Union, A. Philip Randolph. He said, “Make me do something.” He gave us the answer. We won’t make anybody do anything. And we pledge our allegiance to a party, but we get no results for our pledge of allegiance. We get no accountability for our loyalty. We need to understand that. Listen, if you’re going to continue to back a situation, a person, or whatever, you ought to have some repercussions on there, and they shouldn’t be negative. And, so far, it’s not been as positive as it needs to be. That is, you know, incredibly unfair to ourselves. But we do it to ourselves because we’re still waiting for somebody to ride in on a white horse and save us. I can tell you, the cavalry ain’t coming. We gotta circle the wagons and save ourselves. That’s what’s got to happen. People have got to understand that if you don’t do anything, nothing’s going to happen. I mean, if you sit there and just feel sorry for yourself, that’s what you’re going to get, somebody sitting there feeling sorry for themselves. Get up, get it! You gotta get up. And see, here’s the other thing that we have a serious problem with, and that is… patience because now we kinda at the bottom of the totem pole. Everybody’s got in front of us now. The truth is tough. And I don’t mean just Black folks. I mean white folks, too, because–

But why can’t they handle it?

Because the truth kind of hurts, man, and people are trying to hide the truth so much, man. People put you in circumstances to justify how they treat you. They make up stories to justify how they treat you. “Cognitive dissonance” is what she called it. You know, you talk about folks. And you tell, you know, and you tell a population, you know, Black folks are lazy, Black folks don’t want to work, so that you can justify not giving them an opportunity, you know? And, you know, used to say things like, you know, Black folks smell. Black folks… But you have them cook your food. You have ’em take care of your children. I mean, that doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t correlate with a reasonable analysis of your situation when you need someone to cook, or you need somebody to watch your children. I mean, but you make up these stories so that you can justify treating people the way you do. She called it “cognitive dissonance.” It’s a lot more complex than what I’m explaining. But, you know, we have a opportunity to do something for ourselves right now, man. And the time is now, ’cause it’s a great time, because if you look at things, you know, our culture, our traditions, they’re all over the place, and people appreciate ’em, but we don’t. I always say, “Man, when we have a party, we don’t know what we’re gonna eat.” If Italians have a party, they know they gonna eat Italian food. If Polish people have a party, they gonna eat Polish food. If Chinese have a party, they gonna eat Chinese food. If we have a party, we don’t know what we gonna eat.

Man, you know, we eating them ribs. [Rev. Lewis laughing] Stop playing.

No, man, they gonna argue about that, too. [Murv laughing] They’ll be like, “I don’t eat pork.” I’m like, “Okay, man,” ’cause, you know, I’d have, you know, I’d have chitterlings and greens.

Murv: Don’t forget about that chicken. [Rev. Lewis laughing]

Pinto beans, yeah, that’s what we’re eating.

Murv: Some greens.

“No man, we ain’t eating that.” I’d say, “Okay, well.” But my point is, is that we just don’t understand how important we are, and we don’t understand our worth, and that is such a disheartening way of living is not knowing your worth. We don’t have a true history. They won’t even let us treat ourselves to a true explanation of our past in a school environment. You know, I can’t tell the true story about what we’ve done over the years and how we’ve contributed to a society. I can’t talk about the Moors. I can’t do that in our public school system because that would go against everything that our children have been taught over centuries, and they make sure that, you know, we don’t understand our value, and we won’t fight back.

I’ve got time for one more.

Rev. Lewis: Yes.

I’m gonna give you a superpower to do whatever you wanna do to change your community, to inspire your community. What is that superpower?

Well, the superpower would be for everybody to understand their true genius. And when I say that, I really mean it. Because our young people are really bright, intelligent, ingenious, if you will, when they’re young. But when they engage in the system, all of a sudden, they become… dumb. They become incapable. They become weak. Why is that? Why is that? If I had one wish, I would make sure that people really would understand how truly gifted we are. And that would be certainly a huge, huge opposition to what we face today, as far as people telling us who we are.

All right, Pastor Lewis, thank you again, sir.

No, thank you. [chuckles]