Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics

15. We Are the Only Alternative

15 We Are the Only Alternative San Antonio, 1986 "Most people have come into our communities to destroy them ... the Klan ... the dope dealers ... the developers.... The people have looked to their ministers to defend and protect them."} The speaker is the Reverend Nehemiah Davis, the distinguished black pastor of the Mount Pisgah Baptist Church in Fort Worth. The setting is the modern new Catholic chancery of the archdiocese of San Antonio. The audience is a group of about 60 Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, and Texas community leaders from eight Texas Industrial Areas Foundation organizations who are meeting to get to know each other better and determine how they can exert statewide influence as a network. Some of them have driven 13 hours from EI Paso to be at the meeting, and several of the EI Paso representatives speak no English. So the low rumble of simultaneous translation from English to Spanish accompanies the dialogue, which is about power and how to solidify it locally and leverage it statewide. The ministers and priests are also struggling with what Ernie Cortes describes as a strength of his network: its pluralism and diversity. What started out as a poor Catholic and Hispanic neighborhood political organization in San Antonio had expanded panded into a Texas network of organizations that 172 / We Are the Only Alternative now included blacks and Protestants, whites and the middle class. At the Catholic chancery are representatives from three San Antonio IAF organizations: the Hispanic and Catholic COPS, the predominantly black East Side Alliance, and the Metropolitan Congregational Alliance, made up of middle-class Anglo North Siders who are about evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants. Houston is represented by The Metropolitan Organization, which had a growing base of black Protestant ministers, middle-class whites, and Hispanic Catholic parishes. Fort Worth in 1981 had developed a largely Protestant organization evenly divided between blacks and whites. The Fort Worth group called itself the Allied Communities of Tarrant County (ACT). Also present is Valley Interfaith, organized in 1983 and, with its 40 Catholic parishes, more like the Hispanic and Catholic COPS, which is also the case with the EI Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization (EPISO). But the new Austin Interfaith is largely a Protestant organization, with strong representation from the capital city's black churches. When all the leaders of these organizations come together for statewide meetings-which they do frequently-there is a mix of language, dialect, color, style, income, and education. The people are old and young, male and female, clergy and laity. The religious beliefs include Baptist fundamentalism, Lutheran certainty, Catholic mystery, Episcopalian order, Methodist activism, and Unitarian rationalism. Excitement is in the air at these meetings-even tension-and sometimes genuine confusion about how to work together. Ernie Cortes feels the diversity most of all because he oversees almost 20 full-time paid organizers who run these organizations , training new political leaders and building surprisingly stable community institutions in the process.2 Several of the IAF organizations had become regular players in their local decision-making structures. Almost all of them had achieved recognition for their ability to mobilize voters and influence key local elections. This recognition and the feeling that they had only scratched the surface of their potential led to a heightened sense of anticipation about the influence they might eventually wield in Texas politics. By the year 2000, Hispanics and blacks will constitute a majority of the Texas population less We Are the Only Alternative I 173 than 30 years old, with Hispanics alone representing almost 40 percent. Because of their strength among Texas Hispanics in San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley, EI Paso, and other places, and because of their potential strength in black urban communities , leaders of the Texas Interfaith Network, as they had begun to call themselves, feel that the future could be theirs. But today at the Catholic chancery, the IAF leaders know that it will not be easy to build their statewide power. A thoughtful strategy will have to be devised. To Nehemiah Davis, that meant focusing more time and attention on organizing Texas' black communities. He felt that if the IAF organizations wanted to expand their power, they had to bring more blacks into the network. Texas blacks represented 12 percent of the population, and black voters had the potential to expand their already significant voting blocks in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and key areas of East...