‘We don’t need a Walker, we need a runner’: Pastor rails against Herschel Walker in fiery pulpit speech

‘They thought we were so slow ... that we would elect the lowest caricature of a stereotypical broken black man,’ pastor says

Pastor Jamal Bryant railed against Herschel Walker in a fiery speech at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, east of Atlanta.

In his Sunday sermon, Mr Bryant took aim at the Republican Semate nominee ahead of the midterms on 8 November.

The pastor said that “when the Republican Party of Georgia moved Herschel Walker from Texas to Georgia, so that he could run for Senate” it was because change was moving too fast in the “post-antebellum South”.

“The state had been flipped blue,” he added, referring to the 2020 election in which President Joe Biden won the state and two Republican Senators lost to Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

“There are some principalities that were not prepared for a Black man and a Jewish man to go to Senate at the exact same time,” Mr Bryant said. “So they figured that they would delude us by picking somebody who they thought would in fact represent us better with a football than with a degree in philosophy.”

“They thought we were so slow, that we were so stupid that we would elect the lowest caricature of a stereotypical broken black man,” he added. “As opposed to somebody who was educated and erudite and focused.”

“Since Herschel Walker was 16 years old, white men [have] been telling him what to do, telling him what school to go to, where to live, where to eat, where to buy a house, where to walk, where to sit down, where to sleep, where to pay for abortions, where to buy a gun,” he said, adding that they believe that, “you think they’re not going to tell him how to vote”.

“In 2022, we don't need a Walker – we need a runner. We need somebody who’s going to run and tell the truth about January 6,” Mr Bryant told his congregation. “We need somebody who can run and push for the cancellation of student loan debt. We need somebody who’s going to run and make the former President respond to a subpoena.”

“We don't need a Walker. We need somebody who will be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding knowing that your labour is not in vain,” he said.

“We can think for ourselves, function for ourselves, and vote for ourselves. Why? Because we don't need a walker,” he concluded.