The relationship between the African American community and the church comes under the microscope in Heart and Soul: Faith After Ferguson (BBC World Service). Six months after the shooting of teenager Michael Brown and the death of Eric Garner, presenter Matt Wells finds the church attempting (and failing) to deal with the anger and recrimination of the protesters. He also finds a mighty philosophical distance between the church’s old ways of seeing and doing and the Ferguson Millennials, who are fighting their own social media savvy war.
The church – which is still the largest communal gathering place for sections of the African American community – is seen by the younger protesters as the habitue of the older generation. “The old fight is different to the new fight,” Pastor Michael Jones, who oversaw Michael Brown’s funeral, explains. “The older generation will protest and go away. The younger generation will not go away.” Things were not helped by the fact members of the clergy were seen as abandoning the community when they sided with the police. Part of the issue is the patriarchal hangover of the original movement. Speaking to Alexis Templeton and Brittany Ferrell of Millennial Activists United, who also happen to be a newly married gay couple, Wells finds the issues are also ideological. “Ferguson sparked a movement, it represents all black lives not just the respectable ones not limited to the straight black ones,” they say. Pastor Traci Blackmon provides a rare insight from the other side of the generational fence. “It’s an accumulation of rage. (People are) just sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
The programme does an admirable job of attempting to summarise the internal conflicts in 28 minutes. Still with Wells’s admission that most of the media-shy millennial protesters didn’t actually want to be interviewed, the programme, you feel, has only scratched the surface of what’s really going on.
Much lighter fare comes in the form of Deliverance (BBC Radio 3), a – gulp – radio poem charting five women’s last few days of pregnancy. Turns out that a radio poem is a slightly distracting mix of talking heads and a collection of background sounds that unfortunately resemble several mobile phone ringtones going off at once. About as stressful as dealing with a newborn. Perfect if that was the programme makers’ intention (we don’t think it was).
