Words and pictures from Cory Booker’s Town Hall at First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill in Nashville, on Friday, May 9. It was a packed-out and inspirational event, glad to bear witness.
As you may know, back in the day, First Baptist was a center for the civil rights movement; James Lawson began holding workshops there on non-violent civil disobedience in 1958; John Lewis, Diane Nash, and others participated in those workshops; and Kelly Miller Smith, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was pastor at the time. Nowadays, the street in front is named for Nelson Merry, who was born a slave and founded the church in 1865. So, it is hallowed ground and was a fitting site for Senator Booker to come to the Music City, discuss our current times, take questions on education and healthcare, avoid making a single comment about the Grand Ole Opry (yay), and most of all, rally folks to continue the good fight. As he aptly pointed out, Congress didn’t magically give the vote to women in 1920 or wake up one day in the 1960s and decide they were all in for Civil Rights. The pressure came from the people, the power of the people.
Early on, there was a question from a gentleman who was exasperated (aren’t we all) by having to constantly call Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty here in Tennessee, to seemingly no avail. He asked if it really matters. The answer of course was yes, and Senator Booker passionately encouraged the man to keep at it, that he is doing something, before segueing into a story about how a volunteer putting in one extra hour each week made a significant impact on his life, as a child. These stories are everywhere, really, but they are true, one person can’t do it all, but we can all do something. So, as I sat there in the church, with all its history, I thought about those freedom fighters and the SCLC and so many, black and white, really, who put it on the line. They didn’t say, well, if we boycott these buses, it’s not really going to help anything or marching doesn’t really do anything. They just got after it. So, props to that gentleman and anyone pressing on through their doubts. Do we have a choice?
Senator Booker also spoke about radical love, that he was intentionally going out to red states to get people engaged, because if these populations aren’t listening or voting for blue, he feels it’s up to him to reach out and do better on the messaging, that his 25 hour speech and these town halls stem from the fact that people in his life had been urging him to do more. In one of the last questions, a high school student who runs a young Democrat club asked him for advice, discussing his difficulty in getting more kids engaged in progressive causes. Booker encouraged him to create his own path, with his generation’s creativity, not to dodge the question, but rather, to draw an analogy to the children’s marches in Birmingham in the 60s and their transformative effect. Afterwards, Booker reached out to the young man personally, as evidenced by a happy selfie included in these shots.
Now I get that some folks will say, oh, Booker’s just a politician out working to position himself for the next election or the open field in 2028. But, first off, it’s his job to talk to people, listen, get elected, and hopefully, be responsive. Secondly, I can say that just being there connected me to community, and made me feel more engaged and optimistic than before I walked in. Isn’t that the point? One of the things I’ve discovered, volunteering, or engaging in civil “discourse,” is that people can feel the common ground and simply wind up talking to each other, total strangers, thrown together through agency.
It was the magic hour as I left the church, that last hour before sunset, when I happened into a random conversation with a stranger, a woman who told me she was a federal employee and is scared to death, she took time off work to be there, it was on the down low, but she had to tell someone and there I was, and though there was fear in her eyes, she said they are doing everything they can behind the scenes. She looked around nervously and then lightened up a bit, commenting on how great the town hall had been. “He could be President,” she said, referring to the Senator from New Jersey. He sure could, because hope matters, and hope with action is even better. So, hang in there everyone, and keep pressing on.
(There were several excellent openers as well, including Pastor Shane Scott, Mayor Freddie O’Connell, and Tennessee State Senator, Jeff Yarbro. Of course, Mayor O’Connell spoke of the recent ICE raids in Nashville, and said in many cases, the city cannot even get the names of those whisked away from traffic stops by the feds, and in all cases, cannot get a record of any charges against those whose due process is being violated. He broke the news to the crowd that the Mayor of Newark was arrested that afternoon for protesting ICE activity and one of the women asking a question of Senator Booker was the daughter of one of those forcibly “removed” from Nashville.)
Doug Hoekstra 