Washington, DC – The National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), a faith-based coalition of 34,000 churches comprised of 15 denominations and 15.7 million African Americans is herby extending a formal apology to the people of Vietnam and Hiroshima. When President Obama was first elected, we thought in the Black community that he would bring some humanity to American politics and especially American Foreign Policy. His recent trip to both Vietnam and Japan underscores the moral failure of both the President and this country to not own up to their moral responsibilities. Put simply, President Obama refused to apologize to the people of both Vietnam and to the survivors of Hiroshima. There has been 71 years since we have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 71 years. Because of the immorality that governs our Foreign Policies it would not allow the first African American President to apologize for dropping the most powerful and evil weapon ever invented by man on God’s children to say, we are sorry. Please accept our apology on behalf of humanity.
Sixty million people died in World War II and 250,000 died when we dropped the atomic weapon on Japan. Even though the Japanese brutally tortured the Chinese, the Koreans and the Americans, they like President Obama, have never apologized to humanity for their inhumanity to us all. President Obama, a recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, missed a golden opportunity to finally end the hatred that lingers in the hearts of Americans and others by simply saying, we apologize for the actions taken by creating the only nuclear holocaust in human history thus far. President Obama is so afraid of his legacy and the politics of today to rise above the clouds of human suspicion and apologize for Americans evil acts during World War II and Vietnam.
Rev. Anthony Evans, President of the National Black Church Initiative, “I truly feel sorry for this President, who in his quiet moment of reflection would be angry at himself because he had a rare opportunity to change the tone and political history of this country. But he once again gave into his internal fears of the politics of today and his sense of cautiousness, which has led to a sense of paralysis. To live a life that is guarded or directed by being cautious and maintaining the status of immorality is to live out a long life of personal and moral regret.”
Likewise it has been 43 years since the war has ended in Vietnam. We still lack the moral fortitude to apologize to the Vietnamese who did nothing to Americans other than the fact that they were trying to unite their country. 58,200 Americans gave their lives to this war that did not have any moral reasons for a war. 1,031,000 Vietnamese men, women and children lost their lives.
In an historic and eloquent address at Riverside Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”
The Black Church will never agree that war in itself, has any intrinsic value to the human soul. And it shames the Black Church that since Martin’s death and the election of President Obama, that he has not learned a thing about humanity— that he has not learned a thing about the cruel manipulation of the poor in the face of war. By his failure not to apologize he has lent his name and his soul to a long history of this country of toting the fact that if America wages war, they are morally justified and the whole world is morally wrong? As Apostle Paul has said to the Church of Galatians 3:1 “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”
