(RNS) — When the Rev. James A. Forbes Jr. has faced challenges throughout his life, he’s turned to two sources of inspiration that helped him persevere: his faith and his poetry.
The first Black senior minister of New York City’s Riverside Church recalls experiences with adversity, such as being rejected from attending Duke Divinity School, attempting to sit at a newly desegregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and having his approach to his Pentecostal faith questioned, in his new book.
In “Veracity and Verse: A Preacher’s Reflections and Poems on Faith and Truth” — published by Broadleaf Books last month — Forbes writes, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry, about his family’s devotion to justice. That commitment ranged from his mother commanding the dining room table, to his brother organizing sit-ins, to inheriting his father’s Pentecostalism and determining that, as he saw it, it did not require publicly speaking in tongues.
“Many of my poems were created in memory of the dedication my parents and church community had for moving forward and staying connected by the faith, hope and love of God,” he wrote in the preface. “The segregated South was the backdrop of our living; however, the love of God sustained us.”
Forbes, 89, writes about his mother’s rule at dinnertime as he grew up as the oldest boy among eight children in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“My mother was always interested in including the entire family, and so at the dinner table, she always said, ‘Now, all the children in?’” Forbes, who once again resides in Raleigh, recalled in a mid-June interview with Religion News Service. “That was her expression: Are all the children in? Meaning we don’t want to leave anybody out.”
RELATED: James Forbes’ ode to Juneteenth calls on Americans to embrace the promise of freedom
His poems touch on family, faith and freedom. They include a tribute to the mother of Jesus titled “I’ll Do Whatever You Want Me to Do” that notes “Mary said, ‘Yes’ to God’s blessed command/Now, she is honored all around the world.” And they feature a critique of President Donald Trump’s first-term references to Haiti, El Salvador and African countries titled “The Divine Reprimand (to those who refer to others in degrading and disrespectful terms)” that reads, “What you called odious waste,/Excrement, trash, slop for swine./In time, they will be seen for the treasures they are: A rare work of art by an Artist Divine.”
In 1957, Forbes was denied admission to Duke Divinity School. In his book, he wrote that the school told him: “We do not accept colored students, nor do we plan to do so in the foreseeable future.” Twenty years later, with a sermon titled “Let’s Forgive Our Fathers,” Forbes preached at the school’s Founder’s Day.
“It was wonderful to learn that, though you may be rejected or despised, if you are a genuine human being, God will make a way for you anyway,” he said in the interview.
Forbes also recalled sitting down at a Woolworth’s counter that his brother had helped become a place where Black people could dine in the early 1960s.
“A (white) woman immediately got up and ran out of the store — immediately — and so when she ran out of the store, I immediately went home and wrote a poem,” Forbes said. He began to recite the words of “Thoughts at a Desegregated Lunch Counter”:
“Why did she move when I sat down?/Surely, she could not tell so soon/That my Saturday bath had worn away/Or that savage passion/Had pushed me toward rape.
Perhaps it was the cash she carried in her purse;/She could not risk a theft so early in the month./And who knew that on tomorrow would fall her lot/To drink her coffee from a cup/My darkened hands had clutched?
So horrible was that moment/I too should have run away/For prejudice has the odor of a dying beast./Whether rapist or racist, both fall in the savage class/And the greatest theft of all is to rob one’s right to be.”
At that time in his life, he was pursuing an internship at his father’s church in Raleigh “to get some sense of what it would be like to serve as a minister in a southern Pentecostal congregation after being trained at the predominantly white, liberal Union seminary,” he wrote in the book. Forbes’ father was a bishop in the United Holy Church of America, the oldest recorded African American Pentecostal-Holiness denomination in the United States.
As the younger Forbes eventually led Pentecostal churches of his own, a key aspect of his faith was questioned by his church members.
“When I did not speak in tongues, they thought, maybe he’s not authentic,” he said in the interview. “Members of my congregation were not sure. But in the course of time, I became very clear that it did not matter whether I spoke in tongues or not. I was an authentic Pentecostal. I was a man of the Spirit whether or not I spoke in tongues.”
The Rev. James A. Forbes Jr. during an April 2025 interview. (Video screen grab)
After seminary but before leading Pentecostal churches, he became a student minister at an all-white Southern Baptist church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Decades later, after teaching at his alma mater, Union Theological Seminary, he was appointed to a prominent pulpit at New York’s interdenominational Riverside Church, where he said he “served a divided congregation” that he described as being 60% white and 40% Black.
“My leadership and preaching style was celebrated and rejected at the same time,” he wrote. “My work was to elevate spiritual awareness in the church and in the public square. Riverside thus became a career milestone and period of great challenge. I had to walk with God intimately to sustain my faith.”
After becoming Riverside’s minister emeritus in 2007, Forbes focused on racism — which he writes “threatens all of our health: Black, white, brown, and beyond” — by founding the Healing of the Nations Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit that has created events and dialogues seeking to address racial, economic and religious injustice in the country.
“Like many diseases, the plague of racism has lain dormant in some areas, at times, yet has continued to infect our nation,” he wrote. “But the good news is that this plague is not necessarily terminal if we diagnose it, treat it, and speak to prevent its spread.”
He also has kept writing poems, including “All Americans Together (A Juneteenth Meditation),” which he penned in 2021 about Juneteenth — now a national holiday marking when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free, two and a half years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
At almost 90 years old, Forbes said he is retired, but he hopes his book will be a way to continue his ministry.
“My sense is that these poems might pick up someone’s spirit, they might deposit a resolution regarding some values, they might quicken someone to changes that they want to make, and they might nudge people toward a greater faithfulness to their own sense of integrity,” he wrote in his book’s preface.
Here are two of Forbes’ poems featured in “Veracity & Verse”:
“The Courage to Be Who We Are”
We need courage to be who we are
Strength and courage to be who we are
When trouble assails us
And confidence fails us
We need courage to take a stand
There’s no need to search for an island
Where everybody loves your name
For as soon as you’ve found it
You’ll soon be surrounded
By someone playing the same old game
So, I’ve come to this blessed conclusion
That no matter where I am
I can be fully me, courageous and free
When I remember Whose I am.
“How Can You?”
How can you hate my other children
And still expect to enjoy my grace?
Do you fear I’ll love you any less
If I share love in another place?
I love Jews, Christians, and Muslims, too —
There’s enough of me to love you all.
If the wideness of my love is a problem
for you,
You must have had a terrible fall.
Never claim to hate in my name.
Zeal that kills wins no prize.
Show me your love by finding a way,
To see all people through my eyes.
Poetry excerpted from “Veracity and Verse: A Preacher’s Reflections and Poems on Faith and Truth,” written by the Rev. James A. Forbes Jr. Copyright © 2025 Broadleaf Books. Reproduced by permission.
RELATED: From Rockettes to Riverside: Senior minister Adriene Thorne leads NYC church
