Kamala Harris Embraced Reparations 5 Years Ago. Her SF Pastor Says Criticism Is Unjust

This evening, Harris will participate in the only scheduled presidential debate. Conservative media personalities have assailed her position on reparations as extremist and zeroed in on Harris’ relationship with her pastor, Rev. Amos C. Brown of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church. Brown, who led the closing prayer at the Democratic National Convention on the night Harris accepted the nomination, was a member of the California Reparations Task Force. Days after the brutal attack on a Black woman in the Financial District on Sept. 1, Brown, who does not shy away from bringing politics into the pulpit, invited law enforcement and city officials to Third Baptist to address the spate of anti-Black hate crimes in the city. In the gravelly, Southern drawl that reveals his Mississippi roots, Brown told the small crowd in the pews that the failure of legislators to support reparations was another form of violence. “We must do something. The time is now for us to stop talking, to stop analyzing. We don’t need to make it a paralysis of an analysis,” Brown, who was also on San Francisco’s reparations commission, told KQED on Thursday. “We have the facts. We got a report on the diagnosis. Now let’s...