Ferguson activist raised in the Black Church showed pastors how to aid young protesters

As twilight descended on Ferguson, Missouri, for a third consecutive night after the killing of Michael Brown Jr. by a police officer, Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett could no longer hold her peace.

Each day since the killing on Aug. 9, 2014, she had watched her daughter, Brittany, leave the safety of home to protest the grotesque manner in which the 18-year-old Brown had been treated, his body lying in the street for hours, as if in a warning to the community.

The previous night had been particularly brutal: Officers hurled tear gas which Brittany had inhaled. Police officers atop tanks pointed their rifles at protesters. Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett had seen enough.

“My mom was, like, ‘I just really would rather you stay home,’” Brittany recalled. “She was, ‘I know that you’re passionate about this, I know that you’re angry, but I need you to stay home tonight.’”

“And I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t even know how to stay home.’”

The decision to leave that night against her mother’s wishes, and subsequent decisions she made to become a national leader in the movement for police accountability for Brown’s death, reflects not just the story of one activist fulfilling her purpose and finding her voice.

In its own way, Packnett’s rise to be one of her generation’s best-known racial justice activists also reflects the promise and power of the ministry of her late father, the Rev. Ronald B. Packnett, who was senior pastor of St. Louis’ historic Central Baptist Church.

The Rev. Packnett’s organizing and activism extended into the street, said his friends and family interviewed for this story.

He organized the St. Louis community in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. He defied the religious establishment when he committed to attending the Louis Farrakhan-led Million Man March in 1994, when that kind of activity was frowned upon in the conservative circles that Packnett used to run in.

Packnett died in December 1996 after a long illness. He was just 45.

Matthew V. Johnson, senior pastor of the Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, knew Packnett -- part of a new generation of progressive preachers who began thinking theologically about the social situation of the 1980s.

In 1982, Packnett was named to the executive board of the 7-million-member National Baptist Convention – a key post from which to push for a more socially aware and dynamic version of the country’s largest Black denomination.

“The understanding was that the civil rights-era religious awareness finally arrived at the National Baptist Convention,” said Johnson. The leadership wanted young, progressive reformers and Packnett fell into that group, he said.

Throughout her childhood, until her father died, Brittany was often in tow.

“I tell people that I was really raised in this tradition,” Packnett told The Associated Press. “The formal politics, the informal politics, boardroom presence, speaking at the high-level institutions, the street work, the protests, the community building.”

“Our collective commitment as a church to issues of justice was always as much of a part of ministry as anything else,” she said. “There was an intentional orientation around the beauty and value of Blackness within my spiritual upbringing at all times.”

Ferguson marked a new phase in the freedom struggle. For perhaps the first time, a mass protest movement for justice for a single victim was born organically — not convened by members of the clergy or centered in the church.

Many of the participants were unchurched, and tension boiled over numerous times as nationally prominent clergy and the hip-hop community encountered contrasting receptions as they converged on Ferguson. It demonstrated how the 40-year-old musical genre had joined, and in some cases supplanted, the Black church as the conscience of young Black America.

Brittany -- who married and now identifies as Brittany Packnett-Cunningham – is a self-avowed police abolitionist.

She brought to the social-justice movement a uniquely prophetic voice deeply influenced by the cadences, rhymes and beats of hip-hop. It was a legacy from the early days of her father’s ministry, when the hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five depicted the deterioration of Black communities and the horrors of police brutality.

Brittany recalls asking herself, “What’s happening?”

“Some of the other pastors wanted the rallies to be in their churches and not in their streets,” she said. She concluded that this message was oblivious to the ongoing changes.

“It didn’t happen inside of a church house. It didn’t happen inside the church parking lot. It did not happen in vacation Bible school. It did not happen in the choir stand,” she said. “It happened in the street.”

Those asking “What’s happening” deserved an answer and an apology, said the Rev. Traci Blackmon, who in 2014 was senior pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ, a church near Ferguson. She issued that apology into a bullhorn, to a youthful crowd of protesters outraged by Brown’s killing.

“I felt I needed to apologize to those children because you could see that we didn’t know them and they didn’t know us, and that breakdown was on us as clergy,” she said.

Brown’s killing, and the culture of fear it ignited, was the latest iteration of an all-too familiar scene, said the Rev. Angela Sims, president of the Crozer Colgate Rochester Divinity School and author of “Lynched: The Tragic Legacy of Lynching in America.”

Long before Brown was killed, white Missourians lynched 60 people, the most lynchings from 1877-1950, Sims said.

Brown’s body lying on the ground, Sums said, sparked such outrage because it mirrored a tactic by white people to leave the body hanging in public as a warning. One difference, she said, was that technology allowed the event to be seen around the globe within minutes.

“I see that in relation to an aspect of a culture of lynching that not so subtly communicates that if it happen to them it can also happen to you, so govern yourselves accordingly,” Sims said.

Blackmon was among a handful of clergy who made it onto the Ferguson Commission, appointed by then-Gov. Jay Nixon to investigate the social and economic conditions contributing to inequalities and tensions in the St. Louis region.

Those conditions were deeply entrenched – firmly in place by the time Ronald B. Packnett took over as senior pastor at Central Baptist in St. Louis.

He was born in Chicago and matriculated at Illinois State University. After graduating, he went to Yale Divinity School, then took at the pastorate at St. James Baptist Church in New Britain, Connecticut.

While attending the National Baptist Congress of Christian Education in St. Louis, he decided to correct the way of one of the young women presiding pronounced “entrepreneur” in order to get her attention. Her name was Gwendolyn DeLoach. “He was much more likable over dinner,” she said. Soon, they fell in love, marrying in 1981.

In the winter of 1982, the Rev. T.J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was elected president of the National Baptist Convention. Packnett – who had worked on housing and workforce issues -- joined the collective leadership.

“Ron was a gentleman, and he was a radical thinker,” the Rev. Boise Kimber, the NBC’s new president, said in an interview.

Two years after his appointment, the Packnetts had their first child, a baby girl they named Brittany.

The new father soon got a call from Central in St. Louis. Would he be interested in applying to be pastor there?

For Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett, a young mother, the opportunity to return to her family home was too attractive to pass up.

Packnett sprang into action as Central’s new pastor, leading a congregation proud of a history that had triumphed over slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But his vibrant tenure was soon clouded by health problems. On the day he died, in December 1996, Brittany was only 12.

At Central, a series of ministers aided the family. Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett eventually remarried. Brittany enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, and after graduation joined Teach for America.

She felt she was doing good work, but not her best work. “I was coming of age and trying to figure out what I believe,” she said. When Brown was killed, she found herself feeling like a little girl again.

“I definitely brought his spirit out there with me,” she said.

Amid the tear gas and rubber bullets, her late father’s former clergy colleagues summoned her, asking a question.

They did not yet know that she and other young activists had the ability to organize an international movement from their phones. They lived in a world in which hip-hop had become their religion, giving them the spiritual sustenance to stand up against the police amid the protests. ____

This story is part of an AP ongoing series exploring the impact, legacy and ripples of what is widely called the “Ferguson uprising,” which has sparked nationwide outcries over police violence and calls for broader solutions to entrenched racial injustices.