By Sydney Byerly
The Indiana Citizen
May 5, 2025
Even as several religious organizations, including the Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis, gathered for a news conference Friday demanding that Indiana’s lieutenant governor apologize for his remarks about the Three-Fifths Compromise, Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith asserted that he spoke the truth.
Pastors and leaders of other churches and religious coalitions, along with state Democratic lawmakers, joined the Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis in speaking out against Beckwith and what they said was his false interpretation of U.S. history. They also shared a petition that demanded Beckwith apologize for his remarks and that Gov. Mike Braun fully denounce the lieutenant governor’s statement.
On Friday, the petition had more than 700 signatures. Leaders said they planned to deliver the document to Braun this week.
“We’re here today with the unified purpose to lift our voices in response to recent remarks made by Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, who described the Three-Fifths Compromise as ‘a great move,’” Rev. David Greene, pastor at Purpose of Life Ministries and president of Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis, said. “There’s nothing great about a policy that reduced our ancestors to less than a whole human being.”
The controversy started when Beckwith posted a video on social media following the April 24 debate and vote in the Indiana Statehouse on Senate Bill 289, dubbed the anti-DEI bill. Several Democratic senators spoke in opposition to the bill and Sen. La Keisha Jackson, D-Indianapolis, compared the measure to the Three-Fifths Compromise during her impassioned remarks.
The Compromise, written into the U.S. Constitution in 1787, counted slaves as three-fifths of a person when counting a state’s population to determine political representation and taxation. In his video post, Beckwith called the provision a “great move” and said it helped to end slavery. However, historians counter that adding that wording increased the southern states’ power in Congress, prolonging slavery and leading to the Civil War.
While the press conference was happening, Beckwith discussed his comments on WOWO’s Fort Wayne’s Morning News. Beckwith’s comments were highlighted in an article by Nathan Gotsch that also included a transcript of the radio interview with host Kayla Blakeslee.
According to Gotsch’s article, during that radio interview, Blakeslee asked Beckwith about whether he and Braun had had a conversation since Beckwith’s post about the Three-Fifths Compromise first broke and the governor commented on it.
At a press conference April 30 to tout his first 100 days in office, Braun distanced himself but did not outright condemn Beckwith’s comments about the Compromise. The governor said, “I definitely wouldn’t have used that characterization, and I don’t like it.”
Beckwith answered Blakeslee by saying that while he and Braun had not spoken about that in particular, he was confident that Braun agreed with him.
“I think he sometimes just kind of chuckles and sort of smiles whenever I’m out there and I think we make a good team because, you know, he agrees with me in principle,” Beckwith said of Braun during the radio interview. “It’s not like he’s gonna go back and argue, you know, like, “Well, that’s not, that’s not what happened.” No. He knows that that’s the truth.”
In that same radio show interview on May 2, Beckwith also said his remarks on the controversial Three-Fifths Compromise video were a necessary pushback against “woke lies” wreaking havoc in education and government.
Jackson gave an emotional speech while calling on the Indiana Senate to defeat SB 289, which is when she made her remarks about the Three-Fifths Compromise.
“Because I’m Black and I’m a Black woman, that makes me (a) double minority,” Jackson said, reminding the other senators that she was their colleague. “For you to think that this bill is OK, you’re wrong.”
During the WOWO interview, Beckwith also made controversial comments about Jackson’s debate speech, saying “senators like her wouldn’t even be where they’re at today had it not been for great moves like the Three-Fifths Compromise.”
The Indiana Citizen reached out to Jackson, but she declined to comment, referring to her arguments on the Senate floor.
In an April 25 statement, Jackson said: “DEI is not a political buzzword — it’s a foundational value that makes our communities stronger, more creative and more inclusive. By eliminating DEI, we are limiting perspectives and ignoring the richness of our diverse state. Life is not black and white — there is nuance, and we must embrace the complexity that makes Indiana what it is.”
Despite the calls for him to apologize, Beckwith said during the radio interview that he stands by every word he said in the video.
“I said what I said, I believe what I said,” he told WOWO. “It’s the truth, and I’m not, I’m not backing down.”
Beckwith went on to compare his commentary to a doctor giving a cancer diagnosis.
“It’s kind of like a doctor telling a cancer patient he has cancer,” the lieutenant governor said. “It’s not like anybody gets joy out of that, but it needs to be said. And we’ve got a cancer in our culture right now — it’s called woke-ism.”
The “woke-ism,” Beckwith claims, is “destroying the integrity of our Constitution that did give liberty and equality to everybody. It took hundreds of years to get there, but we got there because of great moves, like the Three-Fifths Compromise that our founders put in place.”
Sen. Andrea Hunley, D-Indianapolis, spoke on behalf of the legislators at the news conference May 2, giving a shout-out to Sen. Jackson and urging Braun to acknowledge the danger of his lieutenant governor’s “revisionist remarks.”
“And so today I join all of you, I join the faith leaders in making sure that we are unambiguous in our demands to Governor Braun,” Hunley said. “So, Governor Braun, listen up. We’ve got to make sure that you know that you’ve got to say it loud. You’ve got to be clear that the lieutenant governor’s remarks are dangerous and they’re revisionist. We want to hear you say it back.”
Hunley added that she thought the lieutenant governor’s claims about the Three-Fifths Compromise were “a shameless distortion of history.”
“It’s an insult to every Black Hoosier. Words matter, and especially when they come from those who’ve been entrusted with leadership,” she said.
Aside from Hunley, the press conference also featured a handful of speakers from different backgrounds, all there to speak to the impact of Beckwith’s claims. A crowd dressed mostly in black, aside from the bright colors of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus stoles, showed up in support of the caucus and clergy and in anger at Beckwith’s remarks.
Minutes before the May 2 press conference officially started, a woman walked up to the stage, propping up signs reading “Call It What It Was” and “Dehumanizing Rhetoric” on chairs on both sides of the podium. The signs acted as a premonition regarding the overall message of the speakers’ statements towards Beckwith and Braun.
Lasana Kazembe, associate professor in the Africana studies program at Indiana University Indianapolis, called Beckwith’s comments a dog whistle that are using racism to distract. He told the crowd the remarks were not really about the Three-Fifths Compromise or about providing any accurate interpretation of the nation’s history.
“What it is about, is how those comments feed an ideology,” Kazembe said. “(They) feed an ideology of white nationalism and far right negative extremism that has really taken hold in this country in a way that … I haven’t, certainly seen in my lifetime.”
Kazembe concluded by saying “tomorrow, it’ll be something else.”
Clyde Posley, coordinator of the racial and social justice division of the Union District Missionary Baptist Association, said Beckwith should be tied to his racist comments. Without ensuring the lieutenant governor “owns what he birthed,” Posley said, Black people will allow themselves to continue to be viewed as things and not human beings.
Posley’s voice rose in volume as he grew more passionate. “I am not a thing,” he said. “I’m not a thing, although I possess things by the grace of God. I am a man. I am not a thing, although I have access to things because of the grace of God. I am not a thing. I am a man. I think like a man, I understand like a man, I reason like a man, I deduce like a man, I argue and contend and fight in this Black body like a man. So, it would become my fault to decide to allow someone to reduce me to an inanimate object of trade.”
The crowd exploded into a standing ovation after Posley finished his remarks, and as Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, executive director and president of the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance, took to the stage, he quipped, “It’s a tough act to follow a Black preacher.”
Spiegel said, echoing previous speakers, that Beckwith’s comments are unacceptable and, in his faith, all people are seen in the image of God and “there are no fractions of a person.”
“While Mr. Beckwith is entitled to his opinions as an elected official of the state of Indiana, he is not entitled to spout revisionist history as a matter of fact, nor is he permitted to repeat racist vitriol as lieutenant governor,” Spiegel said.
Spiegel also called on Gov. Braun, urging him to fully denounce the statements, saying Braun’s previous attempt was “not enough.”
“Mr. Beckwith is making headlines the wrong way, and yet, I suspect headlines are his goal, regardless of the impact,” he said. “This story has been in the news for a week straight now, echoing nationally, while Mr. Beckwith’s intention may be to keep the story alive, to promote his position. I cannot believe this is any way good for the people of Indiana.”
Rev. Lisa Schubert Nowling, of First United Methodist Church in Bloomington, said she felt honored to be asked to speak and gladly made the hourlong drive to Indianapolis for this cause.
“I am so grateful to be gathered here today with many black and brown siblings who are censoring our lieutenant governor —but the onus is not upon you — the burden is upon the white people … to remove the hoods of their privilege,” Nowling said. She paused as people in the crowd gasped and murmured in support after she referred to “white privilege” and Klu Klux Klan hoods, and added that it was everyone’s responsibility “to censure the political leaders who uphold racism, and then to improve our abysmal voter turnout.”
Schubert Nowling told The Indiana Citizen after the press conference that after texting with a friend, who is a woman of color in another state, about the lieutenant governor’s statements, she felt like she could sit with “the pain that siblings of color felt for centuries.”
“That’s why I felt like I really needed to address my white siblings today, because my siblings of color are already fired up and ready to go and to advocate for change, and we have too many white people who are just sitting there doing nothing,” Schubert Nowling said.
Steven J. Clay, president of the Indiana chapter of the National Action Network and a former Indianapolis city-county councilman, said he was “delighted” to join “some people who have made up their mind to get into some good trouble,” which garnered cheers as he referenced U.S. representative and civil rights activist John Lewis’ famous saying.
Clay echoed Sen. Hunley’s praise for Sen. Jackson, saying he would not allow any other lawmakers to get away with disrespecting or dishonoring those who represent people of color at the Statehouse.
“We are the stewards of this society, and we have sent some of our best who are here today to represent us in the Statehouse, and we are here to stand with you, to say to you and to say to others, we will not provide safe harbor for any other lawmakers to disrespect you and dishonor you,” he said.
The hourlong press conference concluded with everyone gathering for a group picture. As they stood for the photo, someone shouted, “we are not distracted” and another said they were “standing there like whole people,” before a chorus of “no justice, no peace” rang out as people exited the building.
Sydney Byerly is a political reporter who grew up in New Albany, Indiana. Before joining The Citizen, Sydney reported news for TheStatehouseFile.com and most recently managed and edited The Corydon Democrat & Clarion News in southern Indiana. She earned her bachelor’s in journalism at Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism (‘Sco Griz!).
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
