|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In August 2018, social media users came across a meme featuring a photograph of Robert Kennedy, a speculative question about the nature of God supposedly posed by one of his brothers (John F. Kennedy), and a series of images seemingly showing Christian religious figures with African features: This question -- But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we loop up and He is not white? What then is our response? -- was posed by a Kennedy, but it wasn't President John F. Kennedy. This thought originated with JFK's younger brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, as reflected in an article published in the August 1966 issue of LOOK magazine titled Suppose God Is Black: Senator (Robert F.) Kennedy visited South Africa during the height of apartheid in the summer of 1966 and delivered a series of speeches to students at universities across that country. His most famous speech, dubbed the Ripple of Hope address, was delivered at the University of Cape Town and marked the National Union of South African Students' (NUSAS) annual Day of Affirmation: When Kennedy returned to the United States, he wrote about his experience in South Africa for LOOK magazine. In that article, Kennedy related a story about an interaction he had with one of the audience members at the University of Natal in Durban. According to Kennedy, the audience member informed him that most of the churches in the area taught apartheid as a moral necessity and said that black Africans shouldn't be allowed to pray alongside whites since God created blacks to serve. In his article, Kennedy wrote that he responded by posing the question featured in this meme: Some contemporaneous newspaper reports also republished portions of Kennedy's article: The web site for the documentary RFK in the Land of Apartheid includes the full text of the LOOK article.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}