News

Allen Temple Baptist Church Welcomes 1st Woman Pastor in History in Its Centennial Year

Published

7 years ago

April 29, 2019

A message from The Reverend Dr. J. Alfred Smith, Sr., Pastor Emeritus, Allen Temple Baptist Church, Oakland

At last, Baptists in the Bay Area have broken the glass ceiling that has prevented women from serving as Senior Pastors.

Baptists have joined the ranks of Shiloh Christian Fellowship, Patten Christian Cathedral, Center of Hope Community Church and Oakland East Bay Church of Religious Science, all of whom blessed the East Bay with women pastors in the late Dr. Violet Kitely, Dr. Bebbe Patten, retired Bishop Ernestine Cleveland Reems, and most active, the Reverend Elouise Oliver.

Each of these pastors distinguished themselves as compassionate servants, eloquent speakers, talented teachers, spiritual trailblazers, peacemakers, and examples of unselfishness and bold justice advocacy, whose churches continue to impact the city and the nation with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

With the confirmation of the Reverend Dr. Jacqueline A. Thompson as Senior Pastor, both my son and I have retired and welcome her leadership from Allen Temple’s pulpit.

A growing grass-roots opinion in the membership led by strong women and non-patriarchal men who were concerned that Jesus affirmed the equality of the sexes realized that the search community should give first consideration to their first woman assistant pastor. Dr. Thompson was already in great demand nationally as a preacher in multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-cultural settings and had won the hearts of her audiences with her charismatic preaching style that reached the Ph.D.’s and the “no D’s.”

On Sunday, April 7, 2019, more than 2,000 members stood in line around the block and more than 90 percent cast their votes for Dr. Thompson to be the Senior Pastor.

I thanked God, most merciful and most benevolent, for allowing me to live long enough to have helped in a small way to prepare a biological son and a spiritual daughter to serve as Senior Pastors of 100-year-old Allen Temple Baptist Church of Oakland, California.

What a way to celebrate this 100th year of our church anniversary.

The Allen Temple members had heard justice issues raised for generations from a prophetic pulpit. They read Luke 4:18 and Isaiah 58. They are not rigid fundamentalists.

The justice-minded members realized that an Affirmative Action program for women should exist in their own church, starting with their own home-grown candidate reared by a single mother who supported her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, which had few Black graduates.

Pastor Thompson earned her Master of Divinity at Howard University in Wash., D.C., where she was a teaching assistant to the renowned New Testament scholar Cain Hope Felder. She earned the Doctor of Ministry degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. Her post-doctoral work was conducted in Israel with Jewish and Arab scholars.

In 1976, Rev. Dr. Ella Pearson Mitchell, Rev. Dr. Malvina Stephens, and Josephine Kulhman were the first women ordained in Allen Temple.

May Rev. Dr. Thompson be blessed with good health and many years to serve as the Senior Pastor of a strong Allen Temple Baptist Church, pregnant with positive possibilities, and may she be warmly welcomed with open arms by the clergy groups in the City of Oakland.

May we work with Pastor Thompson in the ministry of love, respect, and forgiveness; and may

God grant us the courage, unity, and energy to struggle and resist the local and global issues of white supremacy, the criminal injustice system and exclusive health care for the rich, societal blindness to homelessness and poverty, and bold indifference to the inequitable distribution of wealth.

May we become students of economic justice that resists the building of walls at borders, that preaches rugged individualism for the poor and socialism for the rich who pay little or no taxes.

May we who know little about the “sweet bye and bye,” but much about the “nasty and now,” preach about life after birth on an Earth that is abundant and full for all human beings, especially for those of us who have been denied our humanity and dignity.

May the aging clergy in our Baptist ranks embrace a collaborative relationship with Rev. Dr. Jackie Thompson, who is gifted in intergenerational relationships with the large number of young adults who have no ties to the church; who have cut the umbilical cord that tied them to the survival institutions that saved their elders.

Any technocratic culture without spiritual grounding is like a plant uprooted from the soil and its life-giving nutrients.

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Poll Shows Support for Policies That Help Families Afford Child Care

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

Published

1 day ago

March 2, 2026

Oakland Post

By First Five Years Fund

New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

The national survey was conducted by UpOne Insight on behalf of the First Five Years Fund from January 13–18, 2026.

Key findings include:

• Parents need help: 80% of voters say the ability of working parents to find and afford child care is either in a state of crisis or a major problem.

• This is an affordability issue: 82% believe federal child care funding will help lower costs for working families — including 69% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats.

• And there continues to be strong support (62%) for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of families to afford safe, quality care for their children while parents work or go to school, including a majority of Republicans, 63% of Independents and 72% of Democrats.

• Support for funding child care programs remains strong: 75% believe child care funding should be increased or kept at current levels — including 75% of Republicans, 85% of Independents, and 97% of Democrats.

• 74% say funding for child care is an important and good use of tax dollars, including a majority of Republicans, three-quarters of Independents, and nine in ten Democrats.

FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling said, “Voters across the country are sending a clear message: federal child care and early learning programs work. These investments help parents stay in the workforce, strengthen families, and support healthy child development. They have also long had strong bipartisan support in Congress. At a time when affordability is top of mind for families, continued federal funding is essential to ensure child care remains accessible and within reach.”

First Five Years Fund works to protect, prioritize, and build bipartisan support for quality child care and early learning programs at the federal level. Reliable, affordable, and high-quality early learning and child care can be transformative, not only enhancing a child’s prospects for a brighter future but also bolstering working parents and fostering economic stability nationwide.

We work with Congress and the Administration to identify federal solutions that work for families with young children, as well as states and communities. We work with policymakers to identify ways to increase access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning programs for children. And we collaborate with advocacy groups to help align best practices with the best possible policies. http://www.ffyf.org

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Oakland Post: Week of February 25 – March 3, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of – February 25 – March 3, 2026

Published

2 days ago

March 1, 2026

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Trump’s MAGA Allies are Creating Executive Order Plan to Steal the 2026 Midterms

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

Published

4 days ago

February 27, 2026

Oakland Post

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

A group of MAGA pro-Trump activists, who say they are working in coordination with the White House, are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would claim without evidence that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential to President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes. Since Trump lost to Biden in 2020, he has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” without evidence. The report of a group of “Trump allies” preparing an executive order to give Trump power over elections was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lies around the right-wing campaign that pushed falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen was trafficked through right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Fox News was then sued for defamation for the claims by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox lost the case and had to settle for the largest defamation amount on record of $787.5 million in April 2023.

The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

The story in The Washington Post arrives as Trump increasingly signals that he may take actions that would alter the result of the 2026 midterms. The Republicans are widely expected to lose as their approval ratings plummet as a result of a failing economy under Trump. Over 50 members of Congress have announced they will retire this year and not return in 2027.

The Trump Department of Justice, which now has a large image of Trump on the side of it, “sued five new states Thursday [Feb. 26, 2026] demanding access to their unredacted voter rolls — escalating a campaign that has been rejected by multiple federal courts and faces resistance from Republican-led states as well,” according to Democracy Docket, a group that works to protect voting rights.

Trump claimed back in late 2020, the last year of his first term, that he had the authority to issue an executive order related to mail-in voting for the 2020 elections — which he would then lose. But the Constitution states that control of elections lies with the states. As the GOP works to place hurdles in front of voting, Democrats worked to make voting easier.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of the Biden Administration’s effort “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

Trump’s focus is clearly on altering the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s polling numbers and the elections and special elections that have taken place around the U.S. over the last year clearly indicate that Republicans are about to be hit by a blue wave of Democratic victories.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the founder of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears on #RolandMartinUnfiltered and hosts the show LAUREN LIVE on YouTube @LaurenVictoriaBurke. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke