History reveals a lot of things about human nature: our innate drive towards progress, discovery, relationship, community. Often motivated by a drive to feel safe and flourish. But despite this instinct, history also shows that we’re prone to inflicting and being complicit to grave and violent injustices. We fail, regularly, at living well with our neighbors. In his new book, *The Spirit of Justice*, Jemar Tisby opens the centuries long history of resistance to racism in the United States through the mode of story, and with the lens of the Spirit moving for justice. He asks, what manner of people are those who courageously confront racism? Presenting the lives and witness of over 50 individuals, Tisby examines the way faith threads the life work of these advocates together: not only inspiring their resistance in the first place, but continuing to move through the weariness that so often arises in this work. In this episode, Jemary Tisby joins Macie Bridge on the podcast to discuss the manifestations of the Spirit of Justice in figures such as H. Ford Douglas, Sister Thea Bowman, David Walker, Myrlie Evers-Williams, and many more; the problem of *historical* appropriation with figures such as Martin Luther King Jr.; the women whose stories too often fall into the shadow of their husbands’ legacies, like Anna Murray Douglas or Coretta Scott King; and the ever-present question of why we might look to history as we determine our own ways forward. Jemar Tisby is the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism. He is a public historian, speaker, and advocate, and is Professor of History at Simmons College, an HBCU in Kentucky. Photo Credits: Fannie Lou Hamer, Phyllis Wheatley, Charles Morgan Jr., Anna Murray Douglass, David Walker, Sister Thea Bowman, Myrlie & Darrell Evers. Production Notes This podcast featured Jemar Tisby Hosted by Macie Bridge Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, & Zoë Halaban A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
History reveals a lot of things about human nature: our innate drive towards progress, discovery, relationship, community. Often motivated by a drive to feel safe and flourish. But despite this instinct, history also shows that we’re prone to inflicting and being complicit to grave and violent injustices. We fail, regularly, at living well with our neighbors.
In his new book, The Spirit of Justice, Jemar Tisby opens the centuries long history of resistance to racism in the United States through the mode of story, and with the lens of the Spirit moving for justice. He asks, what manner of people are those who courageously confront racism? Presenting the lives and witness of over 50 individuals, Tisby examines the way faith threads the life work of these advocates together: not only inspiring their resistance in the first place, but continuing to move through the weariness that so often arises in this work.
In this episode, Jemar Tisby joins Macie Bridge on the podcast to discuss the manifestations of the Spirit of Justice in figures such as H. Ford Douglas, Sister Thea Bowman, David Walker, Myrlie Evers-Williams, and many more; the problem of historical appropriation with figures such as Martin Luther King Jr.; the women whose stories too often fall into the shadow of their husbands’ legacies, like Anna Murray Douglas or Coretta Scott King; and the ever-present question of why we might look to history as we determine our own ways forward.
Jemar Tisby is the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism. He is a public historian, speaker, and advocate, and is Professor of History at Simmons College, an HBCU in Kentucky.
Photo Credits: Fannie Lou Hamer, Phyllis Wheatley, Charles Morgan Jr., Anna Murray Douglass, David Walker, Sister Thea Bowman, Myrlie & Darrell Evers.
Where to Find Jemar Tisby's Books
The Spirit of Justice *Available now
I Am the Spirit of Justice *Picture book releasing January 7, 2025
Stories of the Spirit of Justice *Middle-grade children’s book releasing January 7, 2025
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Jemar Tisby: Many of us, when we think about racial justice, what is success? What is victory? What is effectiveness? Well, it's external. A law is changed, a policy is changed, a certain person gets elected or doesn't get elected. But here's the reality. Resistance does not guarantee that you will win. And so the question is, What do you do?
What do you do when, when the odds are stacked again? What do you do when the law isn't passed? What do you do when the wrong person's elected? Do you just give up? And does that mean that all your efforts were meaningless because you didn't win? Well, the longer I do this work, the more persuaded I am that, It is just as important, if not more so, not just what sort of external victories you secure, but who you become along the way.
And I'm convinced that pursuing justice, pursuing righteousness makes us just, makes us righteous. And who we are changes. That in itself is worthwhile, whether we win or not. on an external basis. History has the receipts. You want to know what people truly think, what their real theology is, what their genuine faith is?
Look at history. Because history is not about intentions. History is about actions. History is about what you actually did, not what you say you believe. So I like the, the grittiness and the truthfulness and the rawness and the honesty of history. Tells us who we really are, both positive and negative.
Macie Bridge: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Macie Bridge with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. History reveals a lot of things about human nature. It reveals that we have an innate drive towards progress and discovery of various kinds. We like building things, and we're prone to seek answers to the things we can't understand, the ways of the world, outside of ourselves.
Through history, we can also see our deep draws to relationship and to community as ways of feeling safe and flourishing. And despite this particular instinct, history also shows that we're prone to inflicting and being complicit to grave injustices, often replete with violence. We fail, regularly, at living well with our neighbors.
For Americans, this is particularly evident in our long and ongoing history of racial injustice, starting with slavery and indentured servitude long before our country's founding, Tracing centuries of oppression and inequalities, we land in the present day with a landscape of spaces and systems still shaped by racism, still ripe with needs for change and reconciliation.
We have a ways to go before we are truly living well with our neighbors. The history many of us learned in school, or culturally, also reminds us that progress has, of course, been made. And we know the names of a few key figures well. Advocates like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr.,
who represent a particular image of Black advocacy and righteous resistance. We owe much of our progress to these advocates who have raised their voices from within the depths of inequity. And at the same time, we're prone as a society to romanticize a narrow vision of Black activism. Because, really, resistance has always taken innumerable forms.
Forms which are most often not on the big screen for all to see, choices which make small waves in hurting communities, and which often have met an equal, if not greater, opposite reaction. In his new book, The Spirit of Justice, Jamar Tisby opens the centuries long history of resistance to racism in the U.
S. through the mode of story and with the lens of the spirit moving for justice. He asks, what manner of people are those who courageously confront racism? Covering over 50 individuals, Jamar examines the way faith threads the life work of these advocates together. Not only inspiring their resistance in the first place, but continuing to move through the weariness that so often arises in this work.
Jamar is the New York Times best selling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism. He's a public historian, speaker, teacher, and advocate. He joins me on the podcast today to discuss the manifestations of the spirit of justice in figures such as H. Ford Douglas, Sister Thea Bowman, David Walker, and Myrlie Evers-Williams.
The problem of historical appropriation with figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. The women whose stories fall into the shadow of their husbands legacies, like Anna Murray Douglas or Coretta Scott King, and the ever present question of why we might look to history. As we determine our own ways forward.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks so much for joining me on For the Life of the World today.
Jemar Tisby: Are you kidding me? I've been looking forward to this. Thank you for having me.
Macie Bridge: I'm so excited to be able to talk to you about this wonderful new book that you've put out, The Spirit of Justice, a wonderful collection of historical stories of resistance and black advocacy.
And I'm excited to you about it. interested to kick off our conversation sort of from where I think you were last on for the life of the world talking a little bit about the color of compromise your book a few years ago the spirit of justice in many ways feels like a response building off of those ideas that you started in the color of compromise and i'm wondering if you might share a little bit from your experience personally as a historian as a human as a christian what drew you to these stories of The Spirit of Justice that specifically show up in this collection.
Where were you when you came to these stories and and why now specifically in 2024?
Jemar Tisby: So I'm glad you mentioned The Color of Compromise because The Spirit of Justice is now my third solo authored book. All three books kind of go together. You mentioned Spirit of Justice is sort of a response to color of compromise.
Compromise, and it is, it's kind of the flip side of the coin where, you know, to put it simply, color of compromise is about white Christians behaving badly when it comes to race. Mm-Hmm. , to put it mildly. And then the spirit of justice is about how black Christians, even in the face of racism, stood up for justice, stood up for dignity, but.
Those are sort of bookends. And the book in the middle is how to fight racism. So there's a progression. You don't have to read the books in order at all, but they do kind of fit together. I promise you, this was not my plan. This was just the way it worked out. So the color of compromise sets up, you know, what is the problem?
Why is 11 o'clock AM on Sunday morning, the quote unquote most segregated hour in America. And we go through that history of, you know, Uh, racial compromise and complicity in the church that leaves you, I hope with a sense of righteous anger and it's like, okay, well now what do we do? I see there's a problem.
I want to be part of the solution. How can I help? So that's the second book, how to fight racism. And it's full of practical knowledge. I use the arc of racial justice framework, and then you get to the end of that book, You start doing practical application and taking steps to actively resist racism and you realize Oh, this is hard.
Like, this is not going to be a quick fix. This is going to take a really long time. So how do you keep going, especially when it looks like you're not winning? And that's where the spirit of justice comes in. True stories of faith, race, and resistance. So we can learn about this great cloud of historical witnesses who went before us, and faced obstacles and odds even steeper than some of the ones we're facing today, and yet still tapped into that spirit of justice to find a way to resist.
So that's how they fit together. And that's kind of what I had in mind with the last book.
Macie Bridge: Cloud of Historical Witnesses. Love that. I wonder if you might define for us the spirit of justice as a term and where that fits into your Christian theology or your theology generally.
Jemar Tisby: So that phrase spirit of justice was inspired by Merle Evers Williams.
I opened the book with her and it was one of those moments where I knew if I ever wrote a book on this topic, this is exactly the story I wanted to start with. It was December 9th, 2017. I'll never forget the date because it was the grand opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. She went through this museum and It has in the museum, the actual rifle used to assassinate her husband Medgar Evers back in 1963.
Can't imagine what that would have been like. And then she gave this big public address televised to thousands of people. And then she did a smaller press conference. Only about 20 of us there. I was in the room and I was recording on my phone and a journalist asked her, You know, how does now in the 21st century, in terms of racial justice compared to the 1950s the civil rights movement?
And she said something really chilling. She said, I'm seeing things now that I hoped I'd never see again. And she was basically saying, we haven't come as far as we think that freedom is fragile. And At that point, she said, I don't mind admitting this to the press. I'm a little weary, which was like the understatement of the century because she's in her mid eighties.
By this point, she spent more than half her life fighting for racial justice. And here we are again. So she would have been perfectly within her rights just to say, I'm passing the baton. It's up to y'all now. But she didn't say that. She said something I'll never forget. She said, but there's something about the spirit of justice that makes you determined all over again.
And that just struck me. So, when I think of what is the spirit of justice, unfortunately, we can anticipate evil. That's always going to show up. Injustice is ever present. What amazes me is that even in the face of injustice, there are always people who rise up against it. And I think the spirit of justice is that impulse within people to resist dehumanization, to resist wrongdoing, to want to work to make tomorrow better than today, better than yesterday.
And in every era of history, we see a small but mighty group of people tapping into that spirit of justice to make the world a better place.
Macie Bridge: Yes, and your book is really a collection of these histories which you found. sort of continually circle back to the thing that pulls them all together, that binds them all into or threads them all into one history is this shared faith and this shared spirit that that really glues them all together.
And I'm wondering, are there one or two of the figures from the book that we might go back to that either particularly surprised you in their example of their spirit or their, their faith, or you take the book all the way back to the 1400s through the present day. So you're working, you're working through a lot of people.
And I know as I was reading, there are a number of figures that I think either their faith isn't what is most known about them, or it's a lot of uncovered history that you're bringing out here. So what are one or two of those figures that particularly inspire you or surprised you in the writing process in the researching?
Jemar Tisby: Absolutely. So there are over 50 different figures and events profiled and featured in the book. I mean, I mean, my goal was to give you this flood, this avalanche, this, like I mentioned before, great cloud of historical witnesses. And it was interesting because I knew with something like the color of compromise, where you're talking about racism, there were going to be plenty of examples, no shortage, really what I.
anticipated before I started writing the spirit of justice was I'm going to struggle to find enough people to fill this book with, with folks who did the right thing in the face of it, because it's so costly and it's so rare, unfortunately, among many. Uh, but the opposite was true. Uh, there were so many, um, that I had to, shorten and cut and leave out and all of that.
So in the midst of all of that, a few people stand out to me probably because I didn't know about them before. And that's one of the pieces of feedback I'm getting as people read it is I have never heard of these people. I never knew about this event and they're so grateful to finally get these stories.
One of them is about H. Ford Douglas. He was alive in the 19th century. He was born to an enslaved mother. His father was their enslaver. And so he was very light skinned. He's alive during the Civil War. He's outspoken, you know, throughout his whole life against racism and slavery. But then the Civil War comes along and it's, it's interesting because he passes as white.
So, a lot of times black people who are very, very light skinned will pass as white in order to gain some of the privileges of being white and or to avoid some of the hardships of being black in a racist society. So he passes as white, but not to do either of those things. He passes as white simply so he could join the union army.
At this time before the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people were not allowed to just join up and, and be armed. So he passes away sort of an open secret in his unit. But then one of the things the Emancipation Proclamation did was also say that black people could join up with the union army. So then he's like, yup, I'm black.
And he, he goes and, and actually forms his own all black regiment and they never actually saw fighting in the civil war, but he was so dedicated to freedom that he was willing even to pass as white, not to avoid hardship or difficulty, but to enter into war and battle. So I just thought that was a remarkable.
And we're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a moment, but
Macie Bridge: first, let's pervascent
Jemar Tisby: sort of like Vibrates even through pages and words, even though she's passed away now. What's so interesting is she's part of my biography in the sense that I went to the University of Notre Dame. I got a scholarship called the sister Theo Bowman Award, 18, 19, 20 years old.
I had no idea who she was or what the significance, just, just a name to me. Little do I know our stories are going to intersect even more. So she's born in Mississippi, be. In mid 1900s, and is this little black girl who there's not a lot of black Catholics in general, and even fewer in black Mississippi, in Mississippi, but there's a Catholic school in her neighborhood.
And she joins, she goes to the Catholic school. And can you imagine she's like, You know, a tween, and she's basically like, I want to commit my entire life to the Lord. So as a high school teenager, she enrolls to, to, to, to become a nun and start schooling at a convent. Which is just mind blowing, right? In and of itself.
But then, she's a Black woman, she's got this incredible singing voice, she's incredibly smart, gets her PhD, becomes an educator, and all throughout, she is talking about racial reconciliation, racial justice, what she's really pulling for is that the white priests and bishops would get off of the backs of Black priests and church leaders and let us do our thing is basically what she's saying.
And this is in a time when that was not very well recognized. So she's really a pioneer in that. And she's a woman in that. And she's a woman religious in that. And tragically, you know, she develops cancer that spreads throughout her body. She dies, unfortunately, early, very early in her fifties. Uh, but the mark she left and the impression she made to this day, if I run across people who knew Sister Thea Bowman, she died in early nineties, not that long ago.
They just like, Their whole demeanor changes and it is as if they're talking about a saint. And at the end of her section, I quote one of her friends who says, Sister Thea Bowman is a modern day saint. And I just love her story.
Macie Bridge: It's a, it's a beautiful example of lived faith. I, one of the questions that was coming up for me as I was reading her story in particular, I suppose there are many iterations throughout, throughout all of these stories that you put together of really tension between individual, lived faith and what the institutional church or different versions of the institutional church are standing for.
And I wondered if you might speak to, I mean, this is a issue that is so present today in, in the Christian church and certainly has been historically as well. It's something that I struggle with in my faith as well is what, how, how do we, live as Christians and reconcile our relationship to the church, or do we reconcile our relationship to the church?
And a lot of these figures, I think, struggled with that as well and, or lived into that in new ways. I'm wondering if you might speak to that through one or two examples
Jemar Tisby: in the
Macie Bridge: book as well.
Jemar Tisby: It's really perceptive. There is often a tension between the justice we personally feel should be enacted. and the institution that we're part of, which often is a denomination, a congregation, a network of churches, right?
They're doing one thing and we think it should be going a different way in terms of justice. Now, you're going to see that more often with people like Sister Thea Bowman, who are racial and ethnic minorities, at least in the U. S. context, within the broader Catholic church, right? So That's, that tension is almost always there when you're talking about racial justice.
If you've got a black person in a majority white community institution, whatever it might be. Interestingly, many of these figures in the spirit of justice are deeply embedded in the black church. And so at least on race, there's not that tension. Um, the black church has been the arc of refuge, a place of affirmation and safety for black people amid a society that clings to white supremacy.
And so they're not fighting their institutions in that way. I will say I made a, uh, uh, A very intentional effort to include lots of women in the book, have parody in every chapter, including an entire chapter dedicated to Black women in the civil rights movement. So while Black Christians weren't necessarily fighting racism and racial entrenchment in their institutions, Black women were fighting sexism.
and patriarchy. And so on the cover of the book are two women, Coretta Scott King and Anna Marie Douglas, who we know tragically little about them given their contributions. So Anna Marie Douglas was the spouse of Frederick Douglas, but really without her. He may not have been able to escape to freedom.
She sewed the sailor's uniform that he used as a disguise when he got on a train going north and then she also procured for him freedom papers which were a sort of fake ID. If he got stopped, he could show that, hey I'm supposed to be free and sneak away. And then he didn't have no money. He was a runaway enslaved person.
And so she used money from her own seamstress work to support them. And. He's a fugitive slave for several years until white people in Europe raise money to legally purchase his freedom. So she's harboring a fugitive. Yeah. All throughout that time and they have five kids who she raises and he's gone on extended trips, including a two year trip to Europe where he's giving speeches and, and raising funds for abolitionism.
So she does all of that, gets almost no recognition. I asked people, You know, to identify all three figures on the cover, almost nobody can do it. Even Coretta Scott King, who, you know, should be well known. Of course, her spouse is Martin Luther King Jr. It's important to note Coretta Scott King was into activism and justice and particularly pacifism and nonviolence long before she met.
Martyn Luther King Jr. When they, she was brilliant. She graduated valedictorian of her high school class. She gets entrance into the New England conservatory of music. She's an absolutely splendid operatic singer. And it's in that context where she finally meets Martyn Luther King Jr. And she was not that impressed at first.
First, he was kind of short. He was a dapper dressing kind of a ladies man. She didn't know about him, but they really find alignment on the social justice and the faith aspect. And then after his assassination, I mean, she's side by side with, first of all, she, she makes a big sacrifice to essentially be a homemaker so that he's freed up to do more of the movement work and.
Again, she's brilliant in her own right. So there's a career she could have had, all that stuff. But after his assassination, she has the wisdom and the foresight to start the King Center, pulls together all of his speeches and papers. And that's even why we have a Martin Luther King Jr. to remember. And we're not sort of, Scrambling to search for all of his primary sources, right?
And she goes on to be a global human rights activist. She's anti apartheid, all of these things well ahead of her time. And she gets such little recognition for the leadership, the example, the resilience that she displayed.
Macie Bridge: Yes, and I think you do a really good job in this book of pulling out the ways that sometimes, uh, advocacy becomes romanticized and we're waiting for this, I think you used the word cataclysmic, a cataclysmic event to overturn everything when actually this work of resistance and advocacy and activism It's all in the smaller things.
Not that, uh, uh, Coretta Scott King's work was, uh, uh, quite impactful and not so small actions, but in terms of, of overhauling our history, it has also been sort of covered up in, in, uh, the larger things. ways that we wouldn't expect kind of buried under Martin Luther King's legacy. And that doesn't make her work any less important, but it has, has been covered a little bit.
And that also brings me to, I wanted to discuss with you a little bit more about what your treatment of Martin Luther King jr. In this book, you call him the quotable King, and you have a whole chapter dedicated to the ways that. Yeah. The ways that his legacy have been in some ways extracted from these, these quotable quotes that so many of us are familiar from the, I have a dream speech.
And specifically you use a term called his, or I think you use historical appropriation. A lot of us are familiar with the term of cultural appropriation. I was very struck by the term historical appropriation as I, I consider myself a bit of a historian and I'm often wondering about how are we idolizing our historical figures either on the terms of we have this historical figure and they did some really good things and so we forget about some of their imperfections or the really difficult parts of their history and overlook those or sort of in the case of what you're pointing out has happened with Martin Luther King Jr.
is. We have this wonderful quote that we think stands for that we can use to stand for all we believe in and, and we can put on billboards and throw around social media and hashtags. But are we actually familiar with the stance and the politics and the full theology of what some of those quotes came for the, the, as you pull out The entirety of the I Have a Dream speech isn't necessarily all of King's political stances.
And so I'm wondering if you may speak a little bit to why did you dedicate a whole chapter to King and what are, what, what are some of the takeaways you hope readers have from your treatment of him?
Jemar Tisby: Thanks for pointing that out. Martin Luther King is not your mascot, whoever we are, right? Like we tend to forget the human man, person behind it and make him into this mythical figure, even to the extent that we weaponize some of his stances.
So the quote, And the quoteable king is most often, you know, one day my little children will be judged not by the content, not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. Right. And that gets weaponized for a colorblind approach to racism, which isn't. effective. I mean, like you have to be color conscious in order to push back against specifically racially coded color coded kinds of discrimination.
And so what I wanted to do in this chapter called beyond the quotable King is like, let's move beyond that one quote that we, we all know. And even in that one speech, the, I have a dream speech, it's pretty inflammatory. One of my favorite phrases in that speech is he talks about the fierce urgency of now Mm-Hmm,
And he's, he's speaking against gradualism and gradual change. He's like, we've waited already hundreds of years and decades in the 20th century. The time has long passed for real change. And by the way, it's called the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. So there's that. Jobs portion. The economic portion.
When he is assassinated, he's advocating for sanitation workers striking in Memphis, right? He's about to plan the poor people's campaign where there he, the, the plan is a literal encampment of poor people in the US Capitol until lawmakers sit up, pay attention, and change some things, which by the way, still goes on under the leadership of Coretta Scott King after he's assassinated.
So he's got these economic stances. What really got him in a lot of. trouble, both with black and white people was his anti militarism stance. You know, so he talks about the three evils of poverty, racism, militarism. When he starts speaking out against the Vietnam war, watch out. I mean, everybody's telling him, even black people are just like, stick to race.
You're going to lose your support, all that stuff. And he's like, no, right is right. Innocent people are innocent people. Humans are humans. If it's good enough for here in the U. S., it's good enough for the globe. And he was truly pacifist in that sense and didn't think there was anything constructive going to come out of violence.
So we have to remember that we have to remember the fully orbed man and not just the mythical cultural figure that we've made him.
Macie Bridge: Mm hmm. I want to circle back to the ways that We as Christians who might be, or people of faith who might be coming to these stories, trying to find our own footing in advocacy in our current political and cultural moment, I think that there's immense value in looking back to these historical stories in order to find our footing in the present.
What pulls you towards looking to history in order to move forward in the present? And for the next generation of advocates, why should we be looking backwards?
Jemar Tisby: History has the receipts. You want to know what people truly think, what their real theology is, what their genuine faith is, look at history.
Because history is not about intentions. History is about actions. History is about what you actually did. Not what you say you believe. So I like the, the grittiness and the truthfulness and the rawness and the honesty of history tells us who we really are, both positive and negative. So I think that as black Christians in particular read the spirit of justice, we should understand that we inherit a legacy of resistance, of resilience, of, of, of.
You know, progress, justice, all those things. I think as black Christians look at their stories, they should see that the people who resisted racism, who were white, they're there. And there's some in the book. I talk about John Wesley, I talk about Quakers and, and, and some others, but they're the rare exception, not the rule.
And so it teaches us, if you want to be part of that legacy, you're going to have to go against the majority. You're going to have to go against the norm. And it tells us all the costliness of these things. So one story I talk about is Charles Morgan Jr., who's a white lawyer who I talk about in the color of compromise.
And he, in the wake of the 16th street Birmingham church bombing, uh, where four Young girls are killed. He asks an all white group of businessmen that week, you know, who did it? Who threw that bomb? And he said, the answer should be, we all did it. So he's talking about this idea of compromise and complicity, whether you physically planted the dynamite or not, you didn't do anything to stop the climate of racism and hatred in our community.
Well, I didn't talk about what happened after that. So immediately he starts getting death threats. It's very chilling because not only phone calls, but one time somebody leaves like a piece of paper that lists everywhere his wife and son have been on errands that day just to communicate, Hey, we're following your family.
We know where they are. We can get to them at any time. They end up having to leave the entire state and never return. Even they had to give away their family dogs. You know how, how it is with pets, right? Like a dog is family. And they had to give those away when they moved away. And that's some of the costliness.
I want people to count the cost and looking back at history helps us know both the costs and the strengths. that we have access to. And one of the things I say is that the spirit of justice is alive and active and available today as well.
Macie Bridge: I love the way that you, at one point, you pull out the word radical and look at the Latin root of that word, I think it was, and how the root of the word radical is actually rooted.
And That was one of the things that I kept thinking about as I was reading through these stories is how how we do think associate the radical and the radical actions that we might see or label in advocacy work as we we put that on the oppressed. We label the oppressed as the the radical actors and not looking at the oppressors and the the oppression as the as as the thing that that is in some ways how we are connoting radical and and the ways that all of these stories so beautifully demonstrate the rootedness of of these people in their faith and and in in this spirit of justice and what they're what they're pulling towards that that was just an entire reframing for me that I think is is continually misconstrued in how I hear advocacy spoken about today.
I'm going to be taking that new definition of radical, or old definition, recovered definition of radical, forward with me.
Jemar Tisby: I just thought it was really interesting how We label people like David Walker. That's the section I talk about this root word in. He wrote David Walker's Appeal, which was this call to enslave Black people to rise up, throw off their shackles, run away, or fight for their freedom.
He gets labeled mainly by white people as a radical. When I'm thinking like, well, why aren't we labeling white people? white racists radical. Because you look at what they're doing. They're, they're, they're writing into law. uh, that you know, with the Dred Scott decision, a white man, a black person has no rights that the white man has to respect.
They're not even citizens, so he can't sue. They're enshrining in law in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1890s, the separate but equal so called rule. Right? They're Conducting lynchings to intimidate both black and white people, but mainly black people into conforming to this system of white supremacy. They're hoarding resources.
They're enslaving people. They're building whole separate schools, right? Why isn't that radical? Like that is a radical commitment. to your hatred, to construct an entirely parallel society, one that stands over and crushes an entire people. Um, and yet we sort of reserve that word radical in a pejorative sense for the people who are pushing back against injustice.
And I'm like, David Walker and his pamphlet. are not negatively radical. It is radical in the sense that he wants to uproot the system, pull it up by the roots, but it's not a negative. What's truly radical in the negative sense is the lengths to which white racists and white supremacists are willing to go to enshrine their prejudice.
Macie Bridge: And that's where this unity in, or this, the perspective of coming from a place of faith in so many of these cases was the ironic factor. So many of these figures were, I think of Phyllis Wheatley, using her poetry and, and her commitment to her faith to draw out the truth. The irony in these so called Christians, how, how these people were living their faith.
So you pull out Luke 14, um, verses 28 through 30, um, which I'm reading from the NIV here, but it says, suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won't you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, Everyone who sees it will ridicule you saying, this person began to build and wasn't able to finish.
And you, you bring that out as an example of, of how as Christians, we should be thoughtful of counting the cost of, of prematurely claiming allyship when we're not quite ready to finish building that tower. And I think so many of these examples of how we can be living our faith so much for joining us today and still, still need to be thinking about have we fully made this commitment to finishing the tower that we've, we've committed to building?
Jemar Tisby: No, I know, I know what you're saying. And, and, and I think that's important. You know, that's why I include the example about Charles Morgan Jr. And speaking up was one thing. It takes a And we have a ton of courage to be able to speak to, particularly to your community that you could be ostracized from.
And then that's indeed what happened. So the other part of the equation is the aftermath, the backlash, or some would call it the white lash that inevitably comes with even the smallest gesture toward racial progress. And you remember back in 2020, there was like. Two minutes and 37 seconds where the whole nation was like focused on racial justice.
Yes. And that quickly passed away partly because of the backlash. And I think there were a lot of people in that summer of 2020 who were ready to stand up and be counted as allies who just found it bracing. The amount of pushback that they got, even for saying something like Black Lives Matter or George Floyd should still be alive, right?
The, the, the vitriol that came their way from their own communities, their own families, their own faith communities. And it's not that I think everybody shrank back per se, but I think they did realize in a more personal way, this is going to be really costly.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Jemar Tisby: And I think there were some who did say, uh, maybe not, you know, so, so it's one thing to give a sort of intellectual assent to racial justice.
It's another to stand in such solidarity with the oppressed that, you know, The blows that they receive, you also start to receive. And that's real solidarity. And I would rather people hang back, donate, share on social media than count themselves as allies before they've truly counted the cost.
Macie Bridge: That's a powerful statement.
I, I think that a lot of your readership, I'm sure, comes to this type of a book or maybe this type of a podcast even, and is in that intellectual state of, um, ascent, ready to sort of start unpacking this work. I wonder what is something that you hope that your audience or that you're Folks who are listening today, come away with action wise, of course, read this, read the book and, and see all these examples of Black advocates that have, have dedicated their lives and their actions to, to advocacy.
But as far as our readership today, what's one step that you're hoping people might come away from this with?
Jemar Tisby: The longer I do this work of racial justice, the more persuaded I am that we need to change our calculus about what counts as success. So many of us, when we think about racial justice, what is success?
What is victory? What is effectiveness? Well, it's external. A law is changed. A policy is changed. A certain person gets elected or doesn't get elected. All of those things, and they're all important, but here's the reality. And this is the reality in the spirit of justice. You don't always win. Resistance does not guarantee that you will win.
And so the question is, What do you do? What do you do when the odds are stacked against? What do you do when the law is in place? What do you do when the wrong person's elected? Do you just give up? And does that mean that all your efforts were meaningless because you didn't win? Well, the longer I do this work, the more persuaded I am that effectiveness in racial justice isn't just measured by external changes, but the internal changes as well.
In other words, I think it is just as important, if not more so, not just What sort of external victories you secure, but who you become along the way. And I'm convinced that pursuing justice, pursuing righteousness makes us just, makes us righteous. And who we are changes. because of what we pursue. And that in itself is a sort of victory.
That in itself is worthwhile, whether we win or not on an external basis. And so I wrap all that up in the conclusion of the book. And I talk about four virtues, talk about faith, courage, imagination, and resilience. And what that's getting at is, Look at a lot of these historical figures. They didn't get what they wanted, certainly not in a fully realized form.
And yet they all exhibited faith. They all exhibited courage. They all exhibited an imagination of a world that could be, and they all exhibited resilience. And we can cultivate those qualities too. So you ask what I want folks to get out of it. I want them to, you know, use that old fashioned word, virtue.
and count virtue as part of the pursuit of racial justice.
Macie Bridge: Thank you for that. I'll be mindful of the time and ask you one more final question. In the epigraph of the book, you suggest that this book is for the weary and that they may be encouraged. And so I wanted to ask you, how do you stay encouraged
Jemar Tisby: doing this work?
I did think it was important to encourage people. I find that's most of my work these days. Yes, it's to inform, it's to share this history, it's to educate, but at the end of every talk I give, which kind of inevitably turns into a sermon, I'm just cheerleading, you know, I'm just encouraging people to continue in the struggle, um, even though it's a long, hard road and what encourages me, what gives me hope, history.
Gives me hope, as sort of self serving as that sounds. But really, I mean, I didn't write about her much in this book because I've written about her elsewhere. People like Fannie Lou Hamer, just against all odds. And, Still stood up for Ju proudly, even joyfully doing so. Sister Theo Bowman, right? Merley Evers Williams, who's now in her nineties, you know, still alive.
As we record this, I look at this great cloud of historical witnesses and they inspire me because if they could do it, then I could find the strength to do it too. And not only that, I owe them a debt. I think it's a sacred debt to carry on their work of liberation today. And then the other thing that gives me hope is community.
As cheesy as that sounds, but when you look at the historical record, how could people do all of these courageous acts? How could they demonstrate all of this resilience, all of this courage came from the community. They were part of a small group of people who understood where they were coming from, what they were about.
They had shoulders to cry on. They had people to laugh with. They had folks to dream together with. And just as in the past, so in the present, how do we keep going in this justice work? We don't go it alone. We find a community or you make one. And that's what keeps us going.
Macie Bridge: Find our community or we make one.
It's beautiful.
Jemar Tisby: I really appreciate this. And this is actually the first podcast where I get to announce this, but there's the spirit of justice, which is for everyone, but there's also coming out. Just announced pre orders are open for I Am the Spirit of Justice, which is a picture book for children and Stories of the Spirit of Justice, which is good for readers ages eight years old and up.
So there's going to be an all ages book. package of the spirit of justice from a picture book to the young reader's version to the adult version. And those books, the, the, the young youth versions are going to be available starting in January, January 7th is the official book launch, but you can pre order right now, wherever books are sold.
If you follow me on Instagram or threads or X at Jamar Tisby link is in my bio there. As well as at my sub stack, jamartisby. substack. com, where I go even deeper into these issues. So be sure to subscribe for free or paid. And yeah, so you can pre order those books for the little ones in your life.
Macie Bridge: Wonderful. Bringing the spirit of justice to the next generation.
Jemar Tisby: Yes, exactly.
Macie Bridge: Wonderful. Well, Jamar, thank you so much for joining us on For the Life of the World today.
Jemar Tisby: Thank you.
Evan Rosa: For the Lifeof the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Jemar Tisby and was hosted by Macie Bridge. RI'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu, where you can find all sorts of resources, including podcasts, articles, books, and videos that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to our show, remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode.
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