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• "Reflections, Dr. Gardner C. Taylor"
• Rev. Taylor "On Faith"
• Rev. Taylor's bio

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Pastor explains why he believes the election of Barack Obama is an instance of divine intervention. (2:57)
 

Full interview. (23:18)
 

Tavis Smiley: I am pleased and honored to welcome Reverend Dr. Gardner Taylor to this program. The legendary pastor of Brooklyn's Concord Baptist Church is for me the greatest living Christian preacher in this country; maybe the world. He became a critical force during the civil rights movement alongside his dear friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2000, President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He joins us tonight from Raleigh, North Carolina. Dr. Taylor, an honor to have you on this program, sir.

Rev. Dr. Gardner Taylor: Well, Tavis, it's a delight to be on your program.

Tavis: I only hate that you are there and I'm here and I can't get a hug from you.

Taylor: Well, I don't particularly like that either, but (laughter) wherever you are, I'm happy to be.

Tavis: I'm glad to talk to you. I wanted to talk to you because at the ripe young age of 90, that age you achieved earlier this year, 90 years of age, I wanted to talk to somebody tonight who could give me some perspective, could help me look in the rear view mirror of history, where this Obama moment is concerned. So let me just start by asking what you make of what happened this week.

Taylor: Well, of course the first thing, I find it hard to believe that I have actually lived to see this occur. As someone said yesterday, "If I'm dreaming, don't wake me up." I'm enjoying it.

Tavis: Did you ever think - I've heard so many people say that they never thought they would see this in their lifetime, and that becomes the back story for so many African-Americans who have lived, been fortunate to live as long as you have, who thought they would never see a day like that. Are you one of those persons?

Taylor: I most assuredly did not think I would live to see it. It is more than a giant leap from where - what I knew when I began. I began - I remember the first time I voted in 1945, and my late wife and I went to the voting place, it was a fire station on 15th Street in Baton Rouge. We did not know if we were going to be able to vote, we did not know whether we were going to be able to be received there -- we didn't know what was going to happen. But we voted in the Democratic primary, 1945.

Tavis: Tell me -- you referenced a moment ago, Dr. Taylor, that from where you started you never thought this would happen in your lifetime. It's important for people to understand, those who don't know your back story, how it started. I wonder if you might indulge me again -- I've heard this story so many times, but I never tire of hearing it -- the story of the car accident that changed your life because it contextualizes Black and White then and Black and White today, I think. Will you tell that story for me?

Taylor: Yes, it was 1937, about April of 1937, and I was chauffeur for Dr. J.A. Becoats, who was president of Leland College. And there was an accident on the way back from an errand on which I had been, and a Model T Ford -- they were driving them then -- cut across the road in front of me and I went for the ditch, but it was a terrible crash and that Ford seemed to bounce maybe six, eight inches, a foot, off the ground.

One man died on the spot with the blood coming out of his ear; the other man was taken away. And there I was, a young Black boy, surrounded by not a single Black person, on a country road in Louisiana, 1937. It's hard for people today to realize what that meant or what that could have meant, but it did happen.

Tavis: What do you make of the fact that you were a young Black boy, that a White man ends up being killed in an accident that you are a part of, you are in, to your point, Louisiana, and your life was not only spared but White witnesses came to your defense, yes?

Taylor: Yes. It was a miracle. Two Whites -- one I did not know; a farmer farming, plowing in his field by the side of the road. Another man named Jesse Shockey, (sp) who was a local Southern Baptist preacher on his way home from the oil field, were the two witnesses who saw the accident.

And it was, in that day, almost unheard of for a White person to find a person of color not at fault in any situation. And we went to the inquest the next morning, and those two men gave their testimony, which exonerated me. I shiver still to think, Tavis, of what it might have been had they not told it as it had happened.

Tavis: How did that change your life? How did that lead you to the calling that we have come to appreciate you having found?

Taylor: Well, I was intending to go to law school. As a matter of fact -- and I don't know how that happened -- I'd been admitted to the University of Michigan law school. I can still see the X on the side of the application form where it was indicated that I was coming from an unaccredited school.

But anyhow, I had been admitted, and that actually made me think -- I started to say second, gave me second thoughts, but gave me multiple thoughts about what I ought to be doing with my life, and it was that which I think nailed my turning to the ministry.

Though my father was a preacher and I suppose in the back of my mind somewhere it had been ringing around in my awareness that -- something about the ministry, I don't know. But I do know that one incident tipped the scale.

Tavis: You mentioned your father. We are all who we are because somebody loved us. Tell me about your mother and about your father as part of this history lesson that we're getting tonight.

Taylor: My father was born in 1870. A preacher, and at a time when he would say in his own way that it was when you could almost hear the echo of hounds baying on the trail of runaway slaves. It was a picturesque way, that was the way he talked.

In 1870 -- my mother was born much later, in the late 1880s, I guess, in Baton Rouge, and of that union I was born, 13 years after they were married.

Tavis: Your father died when you were just a boy. Tell me how that impacted your life, and I wonder if you might share with me again the morning that you were getting up to go to church with your mother after your father passed away. You knocked on your mother's door. Tell me the story.

Taylor: My father died the middle of the week, 1931, in May -- I'll never forget that. The funeral was on a Saturday -- I'll never forget that. The Sunday morning, I knocked on my mother's door and I said to her, "What do we do now, Mother?" And she said to me something that I didn't quite understand then but through the years I've come to understand it far more clearly. She said, "The lord will provide."

Tavis: And you believe that, of course, after all these years?

Taylor: I believe it more after these years than I knew about what I was saying when she was saying it to me then.

Tavis: Tell me what you make of -- before I ask that, let me go here. Tell me about your friendship with Dr. King, and as I suspect, persons will hear in just a moment, once you start to describe your friendship and how you came to know each other, they will hear the name by which you refer to him. And you are the only living person who refers to him by this name, given the closeness of your friendship.

So I preface that so folk will know who you're talking about. But tell me about your friendship with Dr. King.

Taylor: Well, I inherited it. My father was an officer of the National Baptist Convention, and Dr. King's grandfather, A.D. King, was -- A.D. Williams I guess was his name, yes -- was an officer of that convention. So they knew each other, and Sandy Ray in Brooklyn, who was a pastor, had been in school with Dr. King's father.

So I inherited the friendship, and I guess I am perhaps the only living person who would have addressed Dr. King as Mike, the family name, and his father as Mike. And when Dr. King was wounded, was stabbed, really, in New York, I met the father at the airport and carried him to the hospital where Dr. King lay.

Tavis: What do you make of -- couple of things I want to ask you. What do you make of the comparisons, all of the media outlets -- and we certainly understand it -- but all the media outlets and Black people with their t-shirts and their buttons, so many comparisons, these pictures side-by-side of King and Obama. What do you make of that?

Taylor: Well, Dr. King spoke really as a prophet of a day that was going to come that would be far different from the day in which he lived and a day about which he spoke. And it was strangely prophetic that the night before the night he was -- the night before he was killed, he was assassinated, he had spoken about going to the mountain and seeing, and having doubts that he would live to see but expressing the faith that Black people would reach the mountaintop.

It was a tremendous, prophetic word, and within 24 hours, I guess, he was gone.

Tavis: Where were you when you heard the news?

Taylor: I was driving out Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, and the news came that Dr. King had been assassinated, had been shot. We did not know then what condition he was in, and of course I went back to the house and the radio said that he was gone.

Tavis: How would you describe your friendship with him? You're being modest, so I'm going to dig a little deeper. How would you describe your friendship over those years?

Taylor: Well, Dr. King and I vacationed together in this country and in Puerto Rico and in Jamaica, and once in Brazil, in Rio. Baptist (unintelligible) Alliance was meeting there, and we went to a restaurant for dinner and interestingly enough met the grandson of Booker Washington, who seemed to be living in Brazil then, so that we were good friends and we vacationed together and talked often on the telephone and face-to-face whenever he was in New York.

Tavis: Dr. Taylor is so modest -- he was Dr. King's favorite preacher, and he would never say that but I'll tell you that. Let me ask, Doc, how you have navigated all of these years of living since Dr. King? I've said many times, and the audience knows this, that I regard Dr. King -- I've told you this before -- I regard him as the greatest American we've ever produced, and I never got a chance to know him, but you were his friend.

There are a lot of folk who are putting a lot of hope, a lot of aspiration, a lot of dream for their future and that of their children -- some children yet unborn -- on Barack Obama. But how have you lived from King to Obama, where one could argue that the level of love in our leadership has never matched up to what Dr. King offered us?

Taylor: Well, I supposed it would be hard for any generation or generations to match Dr. King's confidence about the future, because he spoke prophetically. But you know, Tavis, Mike could be very lighthearted in conversation, but there was always that kind of brooding presence in him, as if he was seeing something far off. And I never quite understood that. I'm not sure I understand it today. But that was in him.

Tavis: What do you make of all the conversation that we are having in the country now about whether or not Obama's ascendance to the White House as the president-elect now means that we are somehow living in a post-racial America?

Taylor: I'm not sure of that. I am quite certain that we are -- I'm profoundly convinced that we are living in a sharply different America. The fact of Mr. Obama's election to the presidency lies almost beyond my imagination. I never thought that I would live to see it. I'm sure people far younger than I am did not think they would live to see this, and I don't think you can draw any comparison between what Dr. King and what President-elect Obama is doing or will do. They were different eras altogether.

Tavis: What do you think this election says about our country?

Taylor: Well, I think it says that the country feels a great relief about getting rid of some of its past. I have the feeling that across the nation, people, Black and White, feel a sense of relief, of anticipation, of hope about the future and about the future of the nation.

I'm rather inclined to feel that if this had not happened -- and I don't know, nobody knows what will happen -- but if this had not happened, the nation was on -- is on so precipitous a downward plunge economically, ideologically, religiously -- any way you want to put it -- that how the nation would fare in the years ahead is hard to determine and it's hard for one to feel great confidence about what it would be like.

And we don't know what President Obama's going to do and what he's going to be, but he has infused into the nation a new sense of hope and promise and fulfillment.

Tavis: You used three words a moment ago -- two of the words you used, I get. Knowing you as I do, I get your take on that; I think most of us understand politically and ideologically how the country has been for the last eight years, on a downward plunge, as you put it. I get that.

You're going to have to unpack for me, though, what you mean to suggest when you say that we are on a downward plunge religiously or spiritually.

Taylor: Yes. Well, I have a theory -- it's maybe not a sound one -- that every 35, 40, 45 years, the nation passes through a kind of traumatic change. That happened after the Civil War, up through Plessey vs. Ferguson in 1896, I guess it was. Hope, and then a kind of letdown and a feeling of futility -- I won't say hopelessness, but of great doubt about the nation's direction and its future.

And I think -- and each era seems to spend itself and to start off in a kind of enthusiasm and euphoria and confidence and then is worn down by events and by experience until it becomes cynical and doubtful. I think we are just coming -- we're in that period now, and Mr. Obama represents a hope that the nation will somehow fulfill its destiny.

One of our presidents -- President Reagan, as a matter of fact -- used to talk about the country being a city set on a hill, and great attention was paid to that, but nobody seemed to have looked up how he came by that phrase. It came, really, from John Winthrop's sermon as the Arabella came toward American shores with the people who were coming to settle here.

And he said a thing in the quaint language of that day. He said, "If we can abridge ourselves of our superfluities and see about the necessities of others, we shall be --" some things between that -- "as a city set on a hill." Well, we keep losing that sense of such a city, and we come, and I think we are just at the end of one of those periods when cynicism and doubt and futility and uncertainty about the nation settles in.

And Mr. Obama represents, I think, a hope that the nation will become a city set on a hill, as Mr. Reagan used to refer to it.

Tavis: As we say in the Black church, Dr. Taylor, that's a fresh word right there -- that was a fresh word that you offered just there. You have used the word "hope" any number of times over the last few minutes while you were speaking, and obviously there was no shortage of conversation in this campaign about hope.

But as a minister of the gospel, when you hear that word used, when you use the word "hope," give me some hermeneutical context to what you mean when you say "hope."

Taylor: Ah, I caught that word "hermeneutical." Now, Tavis, I believe that what we have to do is to -- in this event, to see that there is something more than a horizontal series of events. It is amazing that we would have come to this. There was a -- when Mr. Obama was standing for Senate seat, there was a marital -- how should I put it? -- a marital indiscretion by his opposition which ended that candidacy, and Mr. Obama came into the Senate.

I'm not sure he would have been elected to the Senate, because the other person was a Harvard graduate, had a different color from Mr. Obama's, and was a person of wealth. But then that propelled him there. And now we come to a situation where a particular confluence of developments has taken place. We've had these eight years of sad direction and of disillusionment; a war.

We've had the financial collapse now of our economy. There was a candidacy of a person 70-odd years old with a person joined to him of dubious capability to handle the affairs of a nation. All of these things came together.

And here comes this bright young man, articulate, gifted, well spoken, and now we have a new president.

Tavis: Is that a confluence of events, or are you trying to tell me it's divine intervention?

Taylor: I believe it's divine intervention. I don't think any script writer could have produced this kind of scenario. It is almost beyond belief that all of these things would have come together at this particular juncture in history. Now, you mentioned hermeneutics -- there is a word, "chyros," in the New Testament. It means the fullness of time, that things come together to produce certain events.

And I think we are at that kind of moment.

Tavis: Dr. Taylor, I am honored to have you on the program. I wish I could do this for, like, hours at a time, as we do when we get a chance to get together down in Raleigh and just sit and talk. But what a delight to have you on.

Taylor: Any time, you know that.

Tavis: I thank you and I love you. I appreciate you.

Taylor: Same here.

Tavis: Thank you, sir.

Taylor: I more than you.

Tavis: Oh, well, I would debate you on that, but since you're my elder I'm not going to argue with you on that point.

Taylor: Thank you. That's one of the few advantages of being old. (Laughter.)

Tavis: My dear friend, the Reverend Doctor Gardner Taylor, the longtime pastor of Concord Baptist Church and a delight to talk to him tonight.