Congo, the Bonza family, and other thoughts

I loved Elder Rendlund's talk. I also thought it was awesome two apostles told of Congolese converts. Elder Renlund's talk telling the stories of faith and courage of the Bonzo family and Brother Indigwe (I probably butchered the spelling), of telling the meaning of the Congo Falls picture in the temple, or using the Congo River as symbolism is a level of acknowledgement we would not get from President Nelson if he had been the one to dedicate the last three temple dedicated. This leads to one thing about Nelsonian reforms. They fall into 3 areas. There are the ones that were announced and publicized. A few like releases of temple reccomend questions and mission interview questions (was that actually Nelsonian or was it late Monsonian, I do not recall) are most clear in this publicizing of the matter. It is not clear to me there was much if any revision interview questions, they are just more public. Others of these from 2 hour church to unified quorum to ministering instead of home and visiting teaching to guidelines on who can be official witnesses for baptisms and dealings to ages of advancement and limited recommend qualification are clearly major. Youth program changes and the new hymn book also come here, even if they are such that we have not seen their end. A second group of reforms were not announced publicly or explained in detail. The biggest issue here is the changes in the endowment. A third set of changes are even harder to perceive. This includes the apparent decision to rotate temple dedication assignments through all 15 members of the 1st presidentcy and quorum of 12. While the changes here at not totally a break from the past, the fact that half of all operating temples were dedicated by one man shows that there is a perceivable change. Of course some things are hard to classify. President Nelson meeting the Pope was a first ever event. However President Eyring had met with the Pope a few years ago, and meetings between cardinals and the first presidency date back almost a decade. President Nelson speaking to an NAACP conference is maybe a bridge further than we have ed had with the Catholics. President Nelson has met with the Pope but he has not been introduced by the Pope with words of praise to then speak to a large gathering of Catholics. Of course the NAACP is a non-sectarian though heavily religious body. The origins of the cooperation with the NAACP are late Nelsonian, the origins of cooperation with the Catholics are McKayian although there are older precedents, and McKay and the Catholic bishop of Salt Lake met surriptiously at least early on. Also, although the origins of the cooperation with the NAACP date to the Monson era, then they were cooperation by the Jackson Mississippi Mission and leaders of the Jackson and other Mississippi stakes with the local NAACP branch which were being encouraged by Elder Holland. A few events helped propel this to a grander scale. Although President Hinckley spoke to a meeting of the Utah chapter of the NAACP in the late 1990s this did not ever have national impact. The Mississippi connected blossomed because the Mississippi chapter head was advanced to national leadership. That may have been Leon C. Russell, I am not sure. Another key factor is changes that follow the death of Vaugh C. Leetch, the head of public relations for the Church, weeks after President Monson died. Elder Jeetch was a lawyer who spent much of his career as an outside attorney for the Church representing its interests in cases such as the Main Strret Plaza cases and many others. He developed broad coalitions for the legal advancement of religious freedom and testified before Congress in 1999 in favor of RLUIPA giving an account of the struggle to build the Nashville Temlle as an example of how local zoning laws could exclude religious buildings and thus, especially when some of your worship must be in a specific designed sacred space, create a situation when the government bans worship or at least makes it more burdensome. Elder Keetch was replaced by Elder Gerard newly called in April 2018 as a general authority. His background is head of public relations for the American Petroleum Institute. If you have heard any API sponsored adds on the good the oil industry brings in good jobs, you have seen the impact of Gerardian spreading if positive messages. Gerard also worked to fight the view that oil industry jobs were just for whites and increase the recruiting of ethnic and racial minorities, especially African-Americans into the industry. I have a suspicion some of this was done with the NAACP. There are of course other factors at play in the new cooperation, some of it driven by President Nelson's true warmth and friendship for others, and maybe some of it driven by his long and close friendship with a pastor of a missionary Baptist Church pastor in Salt Lake City who had been in the voting right March on Selma, Alabama as well as other civil rights events. However there are lots of people both from the NAACP side and the side of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that have been willing to forge this relationship. Its top manifestation to date having been in Detroit is something that brought great joy to several members of my branch. Among those who I saw at the meeting was officer Richard Knox, the elders quorum President of one of the three branches that meet in Detroit (3 wards also include 9 square miles of the city or more each, and another ward has 1.5 square miles of the city, Detroit has 139 square miles but this is not counting the 4 in Highland Park which is Detroit only more so, that city is all in Brother Knox's branch). The last time I had seen Brother Knox had been at a joint branch activity the month before, but that was in Southfield since his branch meeting in that majority-African Americsn suburb. Southfield Public schools are more African American than Detroit Public schools. Since 100% of the students I had in 5 years teaching in DPS schools were African American (at least if that is how you describe a child with a white father and a mother whose African ancestry is less than her Native American or white ancestry, and how you describe a child whose white mother always marks him as white as well as black) and the lowest percentage of blacks in a school I taught at was maybe 98%, although it may not have been that low, the big question is how can Southfield Schools be more black. The answer is they are less Hispanic. In Southwest Detroit many schools are 50% or maybe more Hispanic. Also for reasons that are not fully understood, but have something to do with crime rates, something to do with lower class marginally working if not all welfare dependent whites having coexisted with blacks on the west side ghetto since the 1960s when the wast side ghetto was all black and the few Hispanis on the west side ghetto were eluded as white immigrants from Mexico, living amongst white immigrants from Malta (the largest such group in the US), white immigrants from Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine (some of whom were the same people over time with family origins in just one village, but as the v Politics in Europe changed how you identified yourself in the US as being from originally Hungary, or Czechoslovakia or Ukraine changed), white immigrants from Quebec (and of course mixed race Chippewas from northern Michigan who claimed they were migrants from Canada to avoid their children being sent to boarding schools). While the migration from south-west Detroit to the suburbs has been present, it never reached a tipping point where whites left rn masse, even Catholics abandoning their immovable parish. This was mainly because the poor whites of the westside ghetto lacked the money to leave unlike the whites on the east and northwest sides. It was also because Coleman A. "I want all white people especially white police officers to move across 8 mile" Young was not able to find a big business willing to level the mixed race neighborhoods of southwest Detroit to building a parking lot for a new shiny factory as he found in GMs willingness to level Poletown to build the parking lot for their new Hamtramack Assembly plant to turn out more Cadillacs, and close the westside Caddilac factory.

Poletown was about 50% African American before that place was destroyed. Religious differences among other factors made marital unions across the color line rare, and we who live in a Detroit where 75% of neighborhoods in the city are over 95% African-American cant help over idolizing the list world of Poletown. P