Oklahoma pastor gets death threats for blackface impression

04/26/2023

2 3 minutes read

An Oklahoma pastor who says he doesn’t have “a racial bone” in his body says he had to preach with security guards at his church Sunday because he received multiple death threats after photographs of him wearing blackface mimicking legendary singer Ray Charles and Native American figure Pocahontas went viral online.

“So the reason why the security, I just wanted to let you know before the sermon, five death threats before we stopped taking the phone calls. That makes nine death threats on my life in the last five years,” Pastor Sherman Jaquess of Matoaka Baptist Church in Ochelata, Oklahoma, told congregants during the service.

Jaquess said his detractors are so angry that they have labeled him a pedophile for offending them.

“The big thing they’re doing now, you can choose to believe it or not, is they’re just posting everywhere that I’m a pedophile. Now, I don’t know what dressing up like Ray Charles or dressing up like Pocahontas has anything to do with being a pedophile,” he said.

The blackface photo, according to The Examiner-Enterprise, was photographed at a church Valentine’s Day event in 2017. Another photo from 2014 shows Jaquess dressed as Pocahontas.

“I just want to publicly say I don’t have a racial bone in my body. I’m not racist at all,” Jaquess said during a sermon on April 19. “It’s a sad day we live in. … I love Ray Charles’ music. How can you portray Ray Charles if you’re not a Black man?”

Sherman Jaquess, Pocahontas — | Facebook: Sherman Jaquess via Ayanna Faulkner

In an interview with The Examiner-Enterprise, Jaquess suggested, as he did on Sunday, that people were too easily offended. He sees his blackface performance as honoring Ray Charles.

“We have people [who] are offended by a lot of things, but it’s hard to play Ray Charles if you don’t play a black man; it wasn’t anything,” he said. “It was honoring to Ray Charles; we sang the song as best as we could.”

According to the History Channel, blackface is considered offensive due to its “historic use to denigrate people of African descent.”

“It’s an assertion of power and control,” David Leonard, a professor of comparative ethnic studies and American studies at Washington State University, told the network. “It allows a society to routinely and historically imagine African Americans as not fully human. It serves to rationalize violence and Jim Crow segregation.”

Jaquess said he didn’t think in those terms when he dressed up like Charles or Pocahontas.

“When I was a youth pastor, we used to have theme nights. We’d have superhero night. We had cowboys and Indian night. … I dressed up like a squaw,” Jaquess said, using a derogatory term for a Native American woman. “I had a full Indian-looking dress on; I had a wig braided.”

Marq Lewis, a Tulsa activist who first highlighted the pastor in blackface in a viral post on Facebook, suggested that Jaquess should have known better.

“You can honor anyone by not putting on blackface, and he is ignoring the historical references and all of the satirical types of caricatures that African Americans have gone through in this country,” Lewis told The Examiner-Enterprise. “For him to say that’s not racist says to me that he is completely out of touch with the reality of what this world and this country has dealt with — it’s actually a slap in the face of African Americans and all people of color.”

The pastor, an outspoken critic of drag queen performances in his community, said he won’t apologize for criticizing the shows or dressing up like Pocahontas.

“I think it’s an abomination for men to dress up like women in a sexual fashion with hardly any clothes on to cover their genitalia and dance in front of children for the children’s pleasure,” he said, recalling his interview with The Examiner-Enterprise reporter Andy Dossett.

“He said, well, we have a picture of you in drag. I said no, you don’t. You have a picture of me in a dress. It was a full-length dress. He said that’s the definition of drag. I said that’s not the definition of drag anywhere I’ve ever been. I said there wasn’t anything sexual about it. He said, ‘Did you put makeup on your face?’ I said, ‘I sure did.’ I said, ‘I have Cherokee blood in me. But I put some brown makeup on so that I looked more Cherokee.'”

The embattled pastor called the reaction to his positions on blackface and drag shows insane. He said his church has lost parishioners because of the controversy and received more than 180 telephone calls from angry critics.

“It’s crazy. It’s insane. It’s mental illness,” he told the church on Sunday. “There are several people that have left this church and will eventually leave this church because of it.”