A Black pastor from Detroit on Tuesday delivered a rousing benediction near the conclusion of President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington, invoking the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and saying America “is called upon to be a great nation.”
Members of the audience in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda nodded their heads as the Rev. Lorenzo Sewell of the 180 Church in Detroit spoke and broke out in applause as he concluded his remarks. Trump, standing close by, hugged Sewell as he left the podium.
In his benediction, Sewell spoke of a “millimeter miracle,” referring to a would-be assassin’s bullet that grazed Trump’s ear at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last summer and prayed to God, “We are grateful you are the one who has called him for such a time as this, that America would begin to dream again.”
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“We pray that you use our president that we will live in a nation where we’ll not be judged by the color or our skin but by the content of our character,” boomed Sewell, invoking the words from King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. “We are grateful today that you would use our 47th president so we would sing with new meaning, ‘our country ’tis of thee.'”
The inauguration took place on MLK Day in the nation’s capital.
The inclusion of Sewell was confirmed by Trump’s transition team last week and the pastor has been linked with the president for some months, having hosted a roundtable in Detroit for Trump last June and speaking at the Republican National Convention last summer in Milwaukee.
Two other religious leaders, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, the president of Yeshiva University in New York, and the Rev. Father Frank Mann, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, also delivered benedictions at the inauguration. However, Imam Husham Al-Husainy, who heads the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Dearborn, did not take part as originally expected, though it was not immediately known why.
Contact Todd Spangler: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler.
