Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Climate Revival
Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. speaks during a Climate Revival launch event at New Bethel Church in Washington, September 13, 2024. The organization’s get-out-the-vote strategy mirrors decades of voter outreach conducted through the Black church.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA – The nonprofit Climate Revival is leading an effort to raise awareness among Black voters of faith about the specific impacts of climate change on their communities as the election nears. Climate Revival’s co-founders, Grammy-nominated singer Antonique Smith and president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus Rev. Lennox Yearwood, are heading a concert tour across several cities to encourage Black churchgoers to vote “climate champions” into office this November. The Charlotte leg of the tour took place at East Stonewall AME Zion Church.
Smith and Yearwood co-founded Climate Revival as a response to what they perceived as a worrying lack of progress within the larger climate justice movement in communities of color. Smith cited a Yale study that found that only 12 percent of Black Americans knew of the term “climate justice” (though upon reading a description of the term, 70 percent of Black Americans supported it). For them, this reflects a flaw in the wider environmental movement’s messaging.
For much of its history, the environmental movement has focused on the melting of the polar ice caps, biodiversity, and the endangerment of certain animal species, for example. But the specific effects of climate change and pollution on communities of color were often left out of the conversation. That messaging failure has subsequently led to a lack of knowledge in these communities about how climate change affects them.
“They do care,” Smith said. “They just don’t know. They don’t know the connection. They might know they’re dying of cancer, but they don’t know that’s also causing climate change.”
Community health impacts have been a major talking point on Climate Revival’s tour, with discussions on how various aspects of climate change—from natural disasters to contaminated air and water—disproportionately harm people of color. For example, each year dozens of people living in Louisiana’s infamous “Cancer Alley,” a stretch of land from Baton Rouge to New Orleans dotted with petrochemical plants, are diagnosed with some form of cancer due to the severe air pollution.
For Yearwood, it’s also important to recognize the traumas and mental health impacts that people in these communities experience. “I’ve known the pain of seeing people who have given up, who lost everything in the storm, who lost all their pictures,” Yearwood said. “I’ve seen families broken up. I’ve seen the sorrow in those churches, of folks crying because they will never see their loved ones again.”
Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Climate Revival
Climate Revival co-founder Antonique Smith performs during the September 13 launch event in Washington.
Another major issue they identified was that churches had done no organizing work around climate justice. Smith’s commitment to climate justice is deeply rooted in her Christian faith, a desire to “be a good steward for God’s creation.” But when she previously toured Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, she found that most churches in the area made no mention of climate change or climate justice whatsoever. And in some cases, that silence may have been intentional.
“For the most part, churches aren’t addressing climate change at all,” Smith said. “And there’s some churches in the area who are not addressing it because they’ve been helped financially by those plants. Some of the residents don’t really want to say anything. I think it’s out of fear, because they feel like, OK, I’ve been helped. I don’t want to be hurt by these folks.”
At their Charlotte stop, the concert split between hymns sung by Smith, talks given by other speakers, and a sermon delivered by Yearwood. On this leg of the tour, Yearwood titled this sermon “Choosing Destruction.” He spoke to the congregation about the story of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. He drew comparisons between Judas’s acceptance of “30 pieces of silver” and the money that churches have accepted from the fossil fuel industry.
“That story was selected as more of a friendly warning to our churches,” Yearwood said. “Not just fossil fuels. They take money from the industrial prison complex, taking money from all kinds of things that aren’t healthy for our community. If you’re taking something actually harming our community, it’ll come at a demise for you. You’re choosing destruction. You’re not choosing destiny.”
Climate Revival’s get-out-the-vote strategy mirrors decades of voter outreach conducted through the Black church, particularly during the civil rights movement. Initiatives like “Souls to the Polls” are to this day an integral part of motivating Black Americans to vote, especially as a means to combat voter suppression.
Climate Revival itself is a nonpartisan organization, so it cannot endorse any candidates for office. Instead, its main role is to encourage Black voters of faith to weigh climate justice as a part of how they vote. For Smith and Yearwood, Climate Revival is a continuation of this work of energizing Black voters. But they would like this momentum to continue beyond the election. In particular, they would like to see the church come to the forefront of the environmental justice movement.
The tour will continue until Sunday, November 3. The remaining legs of the tour will be in Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Philadelphia, and Newark, New Jersey.
