Days after 9/11, San Francisco pastor Amos Brown blamed the United States for the terrorist attacks in a fiery sermon that drew condemnation from 9/11 victims’ families and liberal lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). Brown was back at the pulpit this week, this time to bless his longtime parishioner, Kamala Harris.
Harris chose Brown, the pastor of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, to give the closing prayer at the Democratic convention on Thursday. He blessed Harris and prayed for "a future ... where the humanity of all persons will be affirmed and celebrated."
It’s no surprise that Harris would invite the preacher to the most significant event of her political career. She has been a member of Brown’s church for more than 20 years. Harris worked for Brown’s campaign for San Francisco supervisor in 2000 and has called Brown "an inspiration to me always." According to Brown, Harris phoned him last month before she announced her decision to run for president.
But Brown has espoused radical anti-American views over the years.
"Ohhhh—America, what did you do?" Brown said at a memorial service on Sept. 17, 2001. "America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?" Brown questioned at the time.
Harris’s relationship with Brown has sparked comparisons to Jeremiah Wright, the pastor to former president Barack Obama. Obama faced scrutiny during his 2008 presidential campaign after a video emerged of Wright shouting, "God damn America!" during a sermon. Obama quit Wright’s church over the dustup. Harris remains a member of Brown’s.
Brown defended Wright in an interview just before his recent DNC appearance. "He was speaking in the style of an Afro-American preacher. It was how he was feeling about America. Can’t a man express his genuine feeling?" Brown told the Washington Post.
Brown’s controversial sermon came at a memorial service for Mark Bingham, who fought with al Qaeda hijackers on Flight 93 to bring the plane down in a Pennsylvania field, preventing it from hitting intended targets in Washington, D.C.
"America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism when you wouldn't show up?" Brown said at the memorial service. He had just returned from the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism, which the United States and Israel boycotted, citing concerns about anti-Semitism.
Brown’s diatribe sparked immediate rebuke from Pelosi, who said at the memorial service, "make no mistake … the act of terrorism on Sept. 11 put those people outside the order of civilized behavior, and we will not take responsibility for that."
Paul Holm, the longtime partner of Bingham, recalled that Brown’s remarks were "one of the most shocking things from a very dark period."
"For Amos Brown and his allies to make it worse was un-American," Holm told the Washington Free Beacon last month.
Brown, 83, rose to national prominence after his testimony against Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. And now, Brown serves on the California Reparations Task Force, where he has called for cash payments to the descendants of slaves from "billionaires in San Francisco," according to the New York Times. The pastor held a "Solidarity for Reparations" event at his church in 2022 and told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021 that "America is a racist country." In 2018, he led calls for a boycott of the San Francisco Giants after one of the baseball team’s owners donated to the campaign of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (Miss.).