Editor’s note: The Outlook will run occasional stories talking to Presbyterians involved with grassroots work to address racism and injustice in their communities. The hope: sharing these stories might help people of faith think more deeply about what they are called to do.
Just days after a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile, a 32-year-old African-American man, on July 6 during a traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, two toddlers were shot in a drive-by shooting in north Minneapolis and one of them, a two-year-old boy, died.
Alika Galloway, co-pastor of Kwanzaa Community Church, was speaking in the days following those deaths to middle school students at the 21st Century Academy summer school program. She asked them: “How do you feel about it, and what do you think you can do about it?” They answered: “We don’t know what we can do, and we feel really bad.”
So Galloway offered an invitation to these students – asking them to write a letter to the police, expressing their thoughts. And so they did, a letter which begins:
We feel:
sorrowful,
scared,
disappointed,
and angry.
The young people also called for action, justice and love – “if we continue to be shot at, we will fight back” – and thanked police officers dedicated to protecting them. The teenagers, like many adults, are trying to find the right words, the right course of action, the right way to respond to the violence.
“I believe every Presbyterian is called to do something, but everybody’s something may be different,” Galloway said. “We are called to do something if we are a member of a Presbyterian church. I believe that wholeheartedly.”
The Sunday after Castile was shot, Galloway had a prior commitment to be involved in worship early at another congregation. She returned later that day to lead worship at Kwanzaa – the only African-American Presbyterian congregation in Minnesota – and whens she arrived, she found Meg Newswanger, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Maple Plain, Minnesota, (a nearby suburb) sitting in the sanctuary with about 20 of her congregants.
They had come “just to sit with us in mourning, to grieve with us,” Galloway said. “We couldn’t change Philando’s death. But they came just to bear witness, to say we’re praying, we’re with you,” – to help figure out “where do we go from here?”
Here’s how some other Presbyterians in the Minneapolis area are getting involved and bearing witness.
John Chang-Yee Lee
Lee, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) teaching elder, serves as a chaplain at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, an ecumenical seminary. Some of the seminary’s students are involved with the Kaleo Center for Faith, Justice and Social Transformation, which has been working with the Black Lives Matter movement in Minneapolis to build partnerships with congregations and social justice organizations.
The students are exploring the theological implications and systemic nature of structural racism, Lee said – knowing that “what we say about God and how we engage that in our faith traditions is vitally important and underpins a lot of this work.”
So he has gone to some of the demonstrations to support the seminary’s students and staff members who are participating – including a recent one where some protestors (although not Lee) blocked an interstate for hours and some earlier protests after police shot and killed 24-year-old Jamar Clark last Nov. 15.
“A lot of our congregations are coming in new to this,” Lee said – so part of his work is helping people of faith find entry points into the work for justice.
For the past year or so, he’s also been working with the police chief of a near-north suburb, Columbia Heights, to help police officers and community leaders work through implications of doing their work in an increasingly multiethnic, multireligious setting – which includes an influx of immigrants from Somalia. The police chief, Scott Nadeau, is emphasizing community-oriented policing and outreach. And Lee has been helping chaplaincy interns from the seminary work with the department to help officers consider how their own implicit biases and assumptions might affect how they interpret situations they encounter on the streets.
Work like that involves reallocation and redistribution of what’s been taken for granted – the recognition that “this is a different reality,” Lee said. “To cut through some of the comfort that specifically white communities have had the advantage of enjoying and considering the norm.” With recent events, “we are all feeling the affects” of violence and injustice.
For people of faith, the questions regarding how to respond to injustice cut particularly deep, he said. Those questions include “who is our neighbor, and what does it mean to be our neighbor?”
As a second-generation Chinese-American, born in the mid-1960s and raised in a mostly-white town in Indiana, Lee said the police violence against people of color “is kind of expected and not surprising. It really doesn’t stun me.”
Part of the redistribution of consciousness is for whites to realize that “particularly for communities of color, this is their reality and their consciousness every day,” Lee said. “It has to be on people’s radar. You can’t get away from it.”
As a pastor and public theologian, Lee turns in his teaching to Psalm 22 and what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said about the rhythm of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. In this country, “we’re in another season of disorientation – a protracted, long one,” Lee said, and with “a deep sense of lament.”
The gravity of the situation provides a chance for critique and assessment. And “something will come – if we trust the spirit enough, something will come, it always does.”
Nancy Colby
A grandmother and a lifelong Presbyterian, Colby and her husband had lived at a corner in Falcon Heights right near where Castile was shot during their second year of marriage. “This one, it just seemed like it was so close,” she said.
As the country and the Twin Cities reacted to Castile’s shooting, the words of Micah 6:8 kept echoing in her mind. “What does the Lord require of us?” So in small ways Colby began to reach out to others grieving the shooting.
She went to one of the demonstrations. “I didn’t know what my purpose was – just to be in solidarity.” She approached a young African-American woman, telling her: “I want you to know your life matters a lot.” The woman clasped her in a hug.
Eating at a St. Paul diner, Colby saw something flash across the news the day after a man killed five police officers in Dallas, and for a moment she mistakenly thought there had been another shooting. “Oh my gosh, not another one,” Colby blurted out to a black woman working at the diner. And the woman responded: “We can’t have any more bad news.”
When Colby asked the worker how she was doing, the woman thanked her for asking. “I must admit, I was very afraid of acting out of condescension or tokenism,” Colby said. She went ahead and asked because “I felt I had to bridge the separation any way I could.”
While she feels called to act, Colby said she often doesn’t know where to start. “For me, the gun violence is egregious” – she noted, as Galloway had, that the same week Castile died “two toddlers in north Minneapolis were shot,” siblings riding in a car with their father. “One them died.”
Colby said she saw a photograph of the children’s mother crying. “How can you look at this and not be moved and not weep?” she asked. “That must break God’s heart. Poverty and the gaps between us. I have been stopped (by police) and didn’t get a ticket. Think of what has happened to these men.”
Rob Smith
Smith is pastor of Spirit of Life, a Presbyterian congregation in Apple Valley, a third-ring suburb south of Minneapolis. In his four years at the church, he has seen how “the color of our congregation has changed dramatically” – the result in part of an intentional effort by the session to meet the needs of the neighborhood and particularly of children, which began by starting an after-school program. First one immigrant family came, then others followed – from Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo and more.
That change in the congregation has changed attitudes towards the Black Lives Matter movement too. “Movements and change, they begin grass-roots,” Smith said. As more families of color began attending Spirit of Life, he and the others began attaching the names and faces of sons and brothers from their own congregation to the young black men at risk. “When you see it’s your own children that are growing up into wonderful black men, I can proclaim ‘Black Lives Matter’ and it means so much more. Which is sad to say that,” Smith said – that the value wasn’t already inherently felt.
Smith has become involved personally in the Black Lives Matter movement – marching in public demonstrations after the shootings of Castile and Clark, although he’s quick to point out that he’s a supporter of the movement, not a leader, and that others have risked much more. He’s shared with his congregation that personal involvement; and while not all agree with what he’s doing, “it’s leading now to people saying ‘Next time call me, and I’ll go with you.’ ”
Smith recognizes that inviting change is “difficult. It’s a willingness to risk” – and said he learned from a mentor that sometimes rather than avoiding conflict “that’s precisely where we need to go” – to combine “entering into conflict with always loving people.”
He also contends that “one of the many reasons for the decline of the church, especially among young people, is we have not been willing to risk and lead in areas of injustice. For too long, the church has been the last to come along. It’s because we’re cautious.”
So, when he goes to a demonstration, “I wear a stole. Other clergy may wear a collar. It’s a way to be present – to share the presence of Jesus Christ.”
When Smith goes to a demonstration, he also sees the strength and leadership of others. “It helps you to be open to seeing that God is greater than your own experience, to go and see the passion and sacrifice that people make.”
When Smith went to the demonstration after Castile was killed, “this time it felt more raw,” with more angry voices and arrests. “This one was hard.”
As a predominantly white denomination, “we need to be listening and reading and allow ourselves to be uncomfortable and to enter into the tension,” Smith said. For white people, “the two hardest things to talk about are race and privilege. … We need to talk about it,” to listen and to learn.
Alika Galloway
Galloway is full of both questions and of the conviction that in the face of violence, Presbyterians must act.
The professor in one of her first courses at Johnson C. Smith Seminary was Darius Swann, a former missionary to China and India, who taught that “as Presbyterians if we don’t follow anything but the Great Ends of the Church, we will still change the world. I have found that to be true,” Galloway said. “Our confessions say that in life and death we belong to God. I interpret that as I don’t have the right to take your life, and I have to protest when someone else takes your life. I have to do something.”
She is also convinced that “what we are fighting against is a national culture of violence” – violence is at the root of the problem. “How do Presbyterians create and sustain a counter-narrative?” she asked. “That is the prophetic witness this era is calling for … I believe with all my heart we must do it.”
The middle school students wrote that they feel sorrowful, scared, disappointed and angry. So how does Galloway feel?
“I would say I’m prayerful,” she answered. “In West African culture, you are called to be co-creators with God. So it’s not a ‘pie in the sky, only God can fix it, so we all stay on our knees.’ We understand prayer as prophetic witness, and we are collaborators and co-creators with God. So prayer is the intercession where you receive your marching orders. It is there you are given divine instructions – go there, rest here, wake up here, write a letter here, have the kids bear witness here. Prayer is not static. It’s an action word.”
Full text of the student letter
(Used by permission of Alika Galloway)
July 8th 2016
Dear Police Officers Everywhere and other Grownups,
We are scholars at Kwanzaa’s 21st Century Middle School Academy. Today we write with immense emotion.
We feel:
sorrowful,
scared,
disappointed,
and angry.
Our culture and our race have been put on police bullets.
Bullets….Trayvon martin
Bullets…Tamar Rice
Bullets…Philandro Castile
Bullets…Jamar Clark
Bullets…Sterling
Bullets…Ferguson
Bullets…Eric Garner
We don’t feel that it is ok for you to shoot innocent people.
If we continue to be shot at, we will fight back.
It is not fair that black men and women are being killed and white men and women are given warnings.
You do not have the right to shoot because of the color of our skin.
Why do you want to be a police officer if you are capable of shooting innocent people?
Approach us as human beings, instead of with weapons and guns. Can you treat all colored people and white people the same? Stop the brutality.
Stop the brutality
Stop the brutality
Stop the brutality
Please stop the Brutality!
Why do you continue to treat us like wild animals rather than people in the community?
We are not animals!
We are people!
We live in the community!After you kill us the media tries to make us look like wild animals after you have shot us…
that’s stupid
that’s stupid
that’s stupid
we are on to that game.
Instead of trying to treat us as different, treat us as the same so we do not continue on this Path of destruction.
Path of destruction
Path of destructionBlack people, white people we are all people who deserve to be treated like humans.
We are afraid of the police.
We are afraid
We are afraid
WE – ARE – AFRAID!This cannot be our new “normal.”
We must work together out of love rather than fear.
Police Officers everywhere, enter these difficult situations with the responsibility of protecting our citizens rather than approaching enemies.
Before you attempt to respond, put yourself in their shoes then justice will be served.
You are better than this and you can do better!
We thank those officers who have and continue to dedicate their lives to protect us.
Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you!
We pray for those who were shot and killed Dallas that is not right either.We are so sad that we live like this! We want to live in peace and grow up to be peacemakers instead of haters.
You grownups tell us what is right and yet you do not know or do what is right yourselves.
Grown ups -Stop being hypocrites!
Grown ups -Stop being hypocrites!
Grown ups -Stop being hypocrites!
All: God don’t like ugly!
P.S. Like our Governor said, if I saw my mother arrested and my father shot it makes me wonder whether this would happen to a white family.
We are outraged!
We are outraged!
We are outraged!
How would you feel if that was your 4 year old daughter in the back seat?
You are supposed to protect and love us;
Love us
Love us
Love us
Please keep us safe and get these guns of the street because Black Lives Matter to us as well. No more babies being shot!!!!!
No more babies being shot!
No more babies being shot!
No more babies being shot!
And because Black Lives Matter
We will not shoot each other either.
We will not shoot each other either.
We will not shoot each other either.
All: Enough is enough!
