Rev. Pinkney - and God - Versus Racism in Michigan

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The ACLU has agreed to become the lawyers for Rev. Edward Pinkney, the activist minister from Benton Harbor, Michigan, who was imprisoned for three to ten years for invoking God in accusing the presiding judge with corruption. "To our knowledge," said a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, "this case marks the first time in modern history that a preacher has been imprisoned for predicting what God might do."

The same judge had previously sentenced Pinkney to probation on charges of having stolen votes in a local election. He revoked probation after Rev. Pinkney made his prediction about God's plan for the judge.

Rev. Pinkney is the acknowledged leader of Black protest in Benton Harbor, a 92 percent African American enclave surrounded by a mostly white county. The real power in the city of a little over 10,000, says Pinkney, is the Whirlpool corporation, which is behind a development project that many Blacks say is against the community's interests. County Judge Paul Maloney changed the sentence from probation to hard prison time, after Rev. Pinkney wrote that Maloney was "racist" and "dumb," and would answer to God for the injustices he had inflicted. Those punishments, wrote Pinkney, would include "curses, fever and extreme burning," unless the judge "hearken[ed] unto the voice of the Lord thy God to observe [and] to do all that is right."

According the Judge Maloney's version of the Constitution, that was enough to send Rev. Pinkney to an Upper Michigan correctional facility. Pinkney says he's being punished for exercising his freedom of speech, and contends the original charge of vote stealing was a frameup by the white establishment that answers to the Whirlpool Corporation, which is accustomed to getting its way in Benton Harbor.

"We knew they were corrupt," said Pinkney, "but the point was, nobody had ever stood up to them before until I came along." He charges people were paid to testify that he was "in possession of an absentee ballot" - the basis for his conviction.

Whirlpool, which is so intent on pushing through its pet project in Benton Harbor, announced that it plans to lay off 5,000 workers, many in Michigan. But, despite the billion-dollar corporation's financial troubles, its will is the equivalent of law in Whirlpools headquarters town.

The bars of Rev. Pinkney's cell testify to that.

America will never be the land of democracy and equal justice as long as the power of money places corporations above the law, or, in Rev. Pinkney's case, allows the corporate class to cause the incarceration of a civil rights leader.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com