Alvin Bragg, the Black Church and the pursuit of justice from Martin Luther King’s time to today: How the Manhattan DA’s faith shapes his actions

By now, the racist and antisemitic threats and vitriol that have poured into the office and website of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, since last Thursday’s indictment have been well-documented. Likewise, the incendiary and physically threatening social media posted by the former president — posts Bragg’s predecessor Cy Vance pointed out could add additional counts to the charges.

Less attention has been paid to the context in which such threats and attempts at intimidation have been received. As Black and white Harlem clergy and members of the Manhattan DA faith-leaders’ transition team, we would like to highlight Bragg’s roots in the Black Church tradition and consequently, the location of that backlash in the history of the ongoing struggle for racial equity in the United States’ formal justice system.

Bragg grew up on Strivers Row in Harlem and joined Abyssinian Baptist Church as a teenager. He was mentored by the late Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts III who was the chairman of his district attorney campaign. He graduated from Trinity School on the Upper West Side and was admitted to Harvard University. At Harvard, he was president of the Black Student Association and, according to his predecessor in that position, Zaheer Ali, “He was very conciliatory and did his best to stay in the middle, stay in the mainstream.”

Alvin was the editor of the Harvard Law School’s Civil Rights Journal. Once he returned to New York he and his wife, Jamila, have been teaching Sunday school for several years. The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, was the guest preacher at Abyssinian Baptist Church on March 26 and told the congregation that 30 years ago when he was the youth pastor at Abyssinian, Bragg was a student in his young adult class.

After clerking for a federal district judge in New York and working for a Manhattan law firm, Alvin joined the office of the New York State attorney general in 2003. In 2009 he became an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. Later, he became a professor of law at the New York Law School and a board member of the Legal Aid Society. In his first year as Manhattan district attorney, Alvin pulled back from a case against former President Donald Trump that had been put in place by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.

Manhattan District Attorney Bragg legal credentials are impeccable. His sense of fairness and impartiality is unassailable. However, looking at Alvin’s efforts in the context of the Black Church in America and the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s, we see that education and integrity did not inoculate civil and human rights activists in this country from the threat of death and harm.

Few places were more central to the fight for justice than Black Churches. The movement was preached there, Civil Rights organizers met there, marches began and ended there, and lives of the innocent fell victim to terror and hate there. And yet Black Churches and the traditions that they upheld were pivotal to the expansion of desegregation and legal reform.

Today, April 4, is the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” speech delivered at the Riverside Church in 1967 in which King spoke out against the war in Vietnam, and was widely condemned as too radical, including by the editorial boards of the Washington Post and New York Times. Also, many leaders within the Civil Rights Movement condemned his speech.

In reality, the speech offered a deeply humane vision and one that warned when “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” King’s understanding of the perils of hatred and vengeance are as relevant today as they were decades ago, “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow down before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.”

When our justice system and the people who uphold it are attacked by death threats and intimidation, the resources we as a country have to buttress its foundations include wisdom from Black Churches — an American tradition that our Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will be able to draw on.

Mason is a deacon at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Breyer is executive director of The Interfaith Center of New York. Hoggard is the interim pastor at Abyssinian.