During what was one of the largest and most successful acts of nonviolent resistance in D.C. this Thanksgiving, Tamika Mallory and the Rev. Jamal Bryant chanted, sang, marched and waved signs alongside several dozen protesters standing outside of Target in Columbia Heights.
However, as organizer Dante O’Hara explained, the Nov. 29 protest inside and around the D.C. USA Shopping Center, where Target is located, represented the fulfillment of a vision articulated by the Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler earlier this year at the start of the District-based boycott.
“Rev. Hagler… always said that having a consistent presence in front of the store and talking to people directly was going to have the most impact,” said O’Hara, a member of the Claudia Jones School for Political Education.
In April, even as his health worsened and his signature voice became weaker, Hagler supported O’Hara and a handful of others who stood outside of DC USA to kick off the D.C.-based Target boycott on the anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. They urged shoppers against patronizing Target, one of several corporations that have rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, in the wake of President Donald J. Trump’s 2025 return to the White House and anti-DEI policies.
Until he was no longer able to, Hagler showed up every weekend along that stretch of 14th Street. In his absence, the D.C.-based Target boycott group has expanded Hagler’s work, with organizers conducting a similar act of resistance in the city where former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020.
“The whole idea is to raise the political consciousness of the community that they have the option and ability to spend their money elsewhere,” O’Hara told The Informer.
For O’Hara, Hagler’s power as a master organizer lies in his ability to tie Target’s cooperation with Trump to the atrocities committed against marginalized people in the U.S. and abroad.
“The action on the 29th was a culmination of those decades of struggle and experience of bringing people together to fight on bread and butter issues while connecting them to broader struggles like Palestine and otherwise,” O’Hara said. “He is a true revolutionary and visionary whose presence has been felt throughout this entire process.”
Celebrations and Accolades for a Living Legend
Over the last few weeks, tributes have been pouring in for the man that D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), in a D.C. Council resolution, called a living example to be mirrored by all.
Well before she and her council colleagues approved that resolution on Dec. 2, Lewis George, a self-described Democratic Socialist and advocate for working-class Washingtonians, spoke highly about the man who she said has never faltered in his criticism of those who prioritized monied interest over the people.
“You won’t find someone as consistent as Rev. Hagler has been about being unafraid and unapologetic to fight for those who don’t have the voices to fight for themselves to make sure people have living wages,” Lewis George told The Informer. “He’s unafraid to call out any leader. He’s okay with the consequences because his ultimate goal has always been protecting and fighting for our most vulnerable residents, whomever they may be.”
On the evening of Nov. 21, Lewis George counted among several people who honored Hagler during a celebration at Busboys and Poets on 14th Street and V Street in Northwest.
The three-hour event included remarks and selections from the Ward 4 council member, along with: Rev. Wanda Thompson; Rev. Patricia Fears; Bruce Marks of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America; Busboys and Poets owner Andy Shallal; union organizer Jos Williams; Israeli-born activist Miko Peled; Ayanna Gregory; singer-activist Luci Murphy; Jacquie Luqman; fashion designer and Hagler’s cousin Januwa Moja; Ron Moten of Don’t Mute D.C.; and the Rev. Kenneth King.
Thompson, pastor of The Ambassador Baptist Church in Southeast and fellow Empower DC board member, told The Informer that Hagler represents the highest ideals of how a man of the cloth should act.
“He manifests what I think the attributes of Jesus are, which is to be a revolutionary in his own way,” Thompson said. “A person who stands up for the least, the last, and the lost, the oppressed. People recognize what he’s done. He’s not one to self promote.”
Well before the Nov. 21 celebration, Thompson recounted to The Informer how she and Hagler first crossed paths as members of a local clergy group that met weekly. She said that Hagler told her and other colleagues about opportunities to engage marginalized populations in the District.
Those efforts, Thompson said, eventually turned international as she joined a delegation that Hagler organized to Palestine in 2016.
“As we went from place to place and met with Palestinians and got their perspective on what life was like for them, pretty much under Israeli occupation, it certainly gives you an appreciation for what’s going on right now, particularly what’s going on in Gaza right now,” Thompson, a co-covener of Ward 8 Clergy and Faith Leaders, told The Informer. “I really appreciated his thoughtfulness and support, just meeting with the officials that were there and seeing how he engaged and how active he was just really left an impression on me.”
King, a man who calls Hagler his mentor, also credited him with opening his eyes to the plight of the Palestinian people. He also said that Hagler never hesitated to challenge the theological perspective that solidified the Black church’s relationship with Israel.
“The Black church really was going along with Israel [being] God’s appointed people,” King told The Informer. “Graylan went up against many Black preachers to deconstruct their understanding and theology as it relates to the Biblical text, when it came to Jews and their belief that that land was given to them, thus being able to treat the Palestinian any kind of way.”
When King founded New Hope Baptist United Church of Christ in 2012, he consulted Hagler in the church’s creation and the facilitation of conferences and workshops centered on the conditions that Palestinians are facing.
“He was very much the forerunner of our church, getting that up and running and bringing in some impressive speakers,” King said about Hagler. “Because of his name, he could pack those conferences out.”
Throughout the years, King would continue to study under Hagler, who he said demonstrated a knack for actualizing the word of God in his organizing work. As King noted, well before he met Hagler, Hagler solidified his legendary status when he thwarted Exxon’s plans to create a super gas station across the street from Plymouth Congregational.
By the early 2000s, the site in question would become an affordable senior living community named after Plymouth Congregational.
“I got to experience him in a very real way as it relates to how he saw ministry in the community,” King said. “He really understood how to take care of the community in a way that is very beneficial.”
The magic of Hagler’s ministry, King said, centers in his ability to bring together various strains of the movement to achieve a common cause.
“Often what we experience in the church is that you have people in the academy, the theologians who are doing all of the research… but they stay stuck in the academy,” King told The Informer. “Then you have people in the community carrying out our faith and there was an isolation there. He really worked on that piece to try to lessen that chasm between the academy and the community, because when the academy and the community come together, we’re much more thoughtful about how we address theology from a much more practical sense.”
More than 50 Years of Leadership On and Off the Pulpit
Hagler, a native of Baltimore, has more than 50 years of transformational political activism under his belt— much of which he conducted in D.C., Chicago and Boston. He currently directs Faith Strategies LLC, an engine of political ministry that connects faith leaders to social justice movements.
By the time that Hagler assumed the helm of Plymouth Congregational as senior pastor, he had achieved several feats as an organizer, including his formation of the Black-Latino coalition that helped Harold Washington become Chicago’s first African-American mayor.
Throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s, Hagler railed against not only Exxon Corporation, but the Control Board, which he criticized as a tool of congressional white supremacists. He also led Plymouth Congregational in the creation of a food pantry, all while leading campaigns against South African apartheid and forming coalitions in support of workers and impoverished people. The activist and faith leader fulfilled that duty as co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and Black Homeownership Strike Task Force, an affiliate of Empower DC, a grassroots organization dedicated to organizing residents to shape their lives.
During the pandemic, Hagler criticized the quick federal response to D.C. Jail conditions, as experienced by mostly white Jan. 6 insurrectionists. He also advocated for the launch of a halfway home for returning citizens in Ward 7 and helped displaced condominium owners of Talbert Street in Southeast receive mortgage relief.
Hagler stepped down as pastor of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in the fall of 2022, after three decades at the helm. He would, however, continue to participate in the human rights struggle, going as far as discouraging the D.C. Council against what he called its reliance on draconian policies that are reminiscent of the “War on Drugs.”
“As decades-long, punitive strategies of the drug war persist, overdose deaths also continue to climb, the rate of incarceration grows, and mass criminalization still disproportionately harms low-income and Black communities throughout D.C.,” Hagler wrote in his Oct. 31, 2022 Informer op-ed. “We need to be using our common sense, following the evidence, and provide treatment rather [than] incarceration. This is the only winning strategy that there is, and this is the only way to slow down, if not stop the high overdose and death rate that currently persists in our community.”