By Kevin Aldridge
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Two of Greater Cincinnati's largest African-American religious denominations announced Tuesday that they would be joining forces to help bring resolution to the 20-month-old boycott against the city.

Leaders of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) and African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) said now is the time for black churches and their ministers to step up and assume more leadership within a nonviolent movement that appears to have reached an impasse. The church leaders emphasized they are not a new boycott group, nor are they trying to supplant existing boycott leadership.

The clergy said they wanted to add a fresh voice and a new "spiritual" perspective to the movement that might lead to the negotiation of boycott demands with city leaders. They said it would take the combined effort of religious and civil rights groups, social service agencies and businesses in the city to bring about change and justice.

"The boycott has gone on long enough," said Bishop E. Lynn Brown, presiding prelate of the CME Church's second Episcopal district. "We have to move forward. We want to negotiate and we want to heal."

Brown, who presides over about 200 churches in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, was introduced Tuesday by Rev. Steven Scott, of the First Coalition for a Just Cincinnati Inc., as one of the movement's new spokesmen and primary activists. Scott, one of the original organizers of the boycott, is a North Fairmount Baptist preacher and member of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Greater Cincinnati and Vicinity.

"We want Bishop Brown to come on board so that we have some more legitimate, honest leadership," Scott said during a meeting at Metropolitan CME Church in Walnut Hills.

Boycott negotiations have not taken place, the church groups said, because the mayor and other city leaders would not negotiate with some controversial personalities involved with the movement. They said they want to present the city and the community with a credible group of front men or "untouchables."

"That means we can't be bought, we won't sell out and we are not afraid of anybody," Brown said"Also when you are involved in a moral movement, you've got to have folks that are clean - spotless," he said. "You can't go downtown to City Hall and let folks pull out a dossier on you."

Brown and Bishop Robert V. Webster, who also presides over about 200 congregations in the AME Church, said they plan to approach the mayor and city officials to negotiate demands in an attempt to resolve the boycott amicably. Brown said if city leaders shun those attempts "then we can put on our traveling shoes and give them a boycott like none they've ever seen before."

Mayor Charlie Luken said he is willing to talk about the city's progress and the challenges that lie ahead.

"The negotiation of demands is a non-starter for me," Luken said. "But I have always been open to talking with people about our positive record of progress and where we have to go together as a city without the rhetoric that is often used against us."

Luken said he hopes the added voices within the boycott would bring some "realism to the discussion" as it relates to the demands. He said most of the items on the boycott group's consolidated list of demands are not doable and go beyond the scope of the city's power.

E-mail kaldridge@enquirer.com