Former congressional candidate Catherine Davis of Georgia has a passion for educating the black community about pro-life issues and the family. Through her organization, the Restoration Project, she conducts seminars and outreach efforts to help African Americans take a stand for restoring virtue to the culture.

In New York City, research shows that more black babies are being aborted than those born alive. In some areas of the city, 60 percent of black women have had abortions.

Davis recently lent her expertise in policy to the new documentary film “Runaway Slave,” currently playing in select theaters throughout the country. Written and directed by Pritchett Cotton, the film captures the journey of Rev. C.L. Bryant as he journeys across the United States in search of ways to help liberate Americans the government’s “new form of slavery.” Davis sat down with CitizenLink recently to talk about her work.

CitizenLink: Let’s talk about the Restoration Project. What is it?

Catherine Davis: My passions are life and family in the black community. If you look at any area of life in America, African Americans are suffering at a greater rate than any other ethnic group, and no one has taken the time to really begin connecting the dots to show what horrific problems are facing the black community today. I founded the Restoration Project to begin to do that, starting with the pro-life issue. I work on and speak to every area of life where you see the black community being adversely affected. You could name a problem, and probably the highest percentage of people in America that (are struggling with it) are African Americans. I personally became very frustrated with so many different groups prostituting, if you will, the civil-rights movement to support causes that actually work against the black community. I thought that we needed a voice out here today that would speak truth, and lay it out in a way so that African Americans are making informed decisions based on facts, rather than on rhetoric and dogma that have worked to destroy the black community from within.

CL: In your research, you have found that 78 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located where there are large numbers of African Americans.

CD: This has been confirmed in several studies. The first was in 1974, when three college professors came together to see if there was any truth to the claims that were being made that the birth control facilities were being located in urban areas where blacks reside to control the black birth rate. Those professors concluded that race was a factor in the location of the clinics. In 2011, Mark Crutcher with Life Dynamics did a ZIP-code-by-ZIP-code analysis of the abortion facilities around the United States to see if, again, there was any truth to the claim that they were located in primarily urban areas where many blacks reside. Once again, race was a factor in the location of the abortion clinics. The most chilling study that I’ve seen — and I actually just weep every time I see this study — is in New York City, which is today aborting more black babies than are born alive. The Chiaroscuro Foundation, a non-profit grant-making foundation in New York City, has an interactive map of the city showing the percentage of abortions in the city by ZIP. As you run your cursor over any of the ZIP codes, you see the lion’s share of the abortions in New York City — more than 60 percent — are done on black women. And New York is into depopulation today as a result of that.

CL: What can churches and Christians in general do to help the black community?

CD: We just need to do the Bible. Somehow, over the years, the church has abdicated its role to help the poor, to heal the sick, to cast out devils. We have relegated that to the government. We allow the government to come in and do this in an attempt to supplant the role of the Body of Christ. It is time to go back to our biblical roots, our biblical worldview, and implement strategies and ideas and programs according to what God said. Nothing was more frightening to me than the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, when you saw these people take God out of their platform and begin to celebrate homosexuality and abortion above God. When there were attempts to put God back into the platform, people actually booed. Whether they were booing because the felt like they didn’t have the votes to put God back in or because they were mad because they put God back in, I don’t know. But the Body of Christ must come into this place to fulfill our role and our mandate to take care of the poor, and praying for the sick so they can recover.

CL: What was it like for you participating in the documentary, “Runaway Slave”?

CD: It was a great experience. I didn’t know what to expect. I had met C.L. Bryant at a Tea Party event earlier in the year. And he gave me a call one day and said he would be in the Atlanta area and that he wanted to interview me. The National Black Pro-Life Coalition was having a summit here in Atlanta, so he actually got to interview a number of the leaders in these efforts. It was pretty cool. It is daunting to see yourself on the big screen, but the experience overall was pretty cool.

CL: Why is it important for Americans to see the film?

CD: The film provides food for thought to begin to get us to see how government policies are destroying the very foundational principles on which this country was built. Although it focuses quite a bit on what’s happening in the black community, what’s happening in the black community is also happening in the broader community. The film demonstrates that government policies and programs have contributed to the destruction of families, to the destruction of life in the womb, and to the destruction of education. In the 1960s and 1970s, the black community was 97 percent literate. Today, reports show we are 40 percent literate. We are going backwards. We see that we have a massive pipeline into the prison system. Young black men are being labeled, in many cases from the womb, as being special-needs, and they’re not being taught (in schools). So they end up going to jail, and the policies of the country are such that once they enter into that pipeline, it will take a Herculean effort to break them out of it because now they are labeled as felons and criminals. Who’s going to give them a job? So we enter this circular maze that they’re unable to break out of.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Learn more about “Runaway Slave.”

See a listing of movie dates and locations.

See the Chiaroscuro Foundation’s interactive map showing New York City abortion ratios by ZIP code.

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