Airdate: March 12, 2025
Jemar Tisby: In every era of history, there have been
people who rose up and were willing to resist. And that spirit that says,
"I am worthy of dignity, and I will not accept this kind of treatment for
myself or my neighbor," that's the spirit of justice.
Julie Rose: Hey there, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a
show about sticking with moments that challenge us. Now, you're probably
wondering, "Why would anyone choose to be uncomfortable?" We're wired
to avoid it, but I know from personal experience, and you probably do too, that
sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can manage to stay open and
curious about it. And that is what we're here to explore. So, let's get Uncomfy.
I'm joined by Jemar Tisby. He's an historian and New York Times
bestselling author. His latest book, The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of
Faith, Race, and Resistance, has been adapted into a really beautifully
illustrated children's book, which is called I Am the Spirit of Justice. I am
so pleased to have Dr. Tisby. Welcome! Thanks for your time.
Jemar Tisby: Thank you for having me.
Julie Rose: So, the "spirit of justice" is
just such a poetic, uh, phrase, and the origin story is also really incredible.
Would you tell us how you came to that "spirit of justice" phrase?
Jemar Tisby: You know, sometimes as a historian, you get
the opportunity to live through history, and that's what happened in December
of 2017 at the grand opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. This was a
very important event for the state of Mississippi to acknowledge its racial
history, especially around the Civil Rights movement, and they invited Myrlie
Evers-Williams to speak. Now, folks may hear the name and be a little bit
familiar because of her husband, Medgar Evers, who was killed in front of their
home in June of 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi. Well, Myrlie Evers came back to
Jackson, and she went through the museum, and I didn't realize this 'til much
later, but the museum has, on display, the actual rifle.
And so, I can't imagine the emotions and the, uh, trauma that
brought up, and yet she persevered through that tour and then gave a nationally
televised speech to thousands and thousands of people. And then afterwards, I
was at a small press conference, and a journalist asked her, "Well, how
do, how do race relations now in the 21st century compare to what you
experienced in the 1950s and 60s in the Civil Rights movement?" And she
said something very chilling. She said, "I'm seeing things now that I
hoped I'd never see again." She runs through this litany of, uh, racism,
recent racism that she's seen, and then, um, she says something perfectly
understandable. She says, "And I'm a little bit weary at this point,"
which is an understatement because she's in her mid-80s in 2017.
And, by the way, she's still alive today, so history is not
that long ago. And then she says something I'll never forget, and it's part of
what inspired this book. She said, "But it's something about the spirit of
justice," and then she made this analogy to a war horse that's been put
out to pasture, and then it hears the bell, which she calls the bell of
freedom. And then she said, "The back becomes straight, and you become
stiff, and, and you become determined all over again." And I was recording
at that moment, and I'm so glad I did because I've never forgotten those words,
and I've revisited them often as we pursue this struggle for racial justice,
and we all get weary. And then I remember, "There's something about the
spirit of justice." And so, that's what I wanted to write about.
Julie Rose: Yeah, and if we could just rest on Myrlie
Evers-Williams story for a little more, because you actually go into some
detail about, um, what I think a lot of people, certainly I, didn't know about,
about her, which is that she, like also Coretta Scott King, they were, they
were activists in their own right, both before and after the martyrdom of their
husbands. And, um, so tell us just a little bit more about some of the moments
where Myrlie Evers-Williams heard the call, absolutely, and back straightened
to the spirit of justice.
Jemar Tisby: I'm so glad you bring it up because, um,
the Black women in the Civil Rights movement so seldom get the attention and
the honor and the respect that they're due. Myrlie Evers is one of them. So,
from the very beginning, um, her husband, Medgar Evers, serves as the first
field secretary of the NAACP. Well, that was a joint decision. Myrlie had to
sign on to that because they were doing everything together. They were
basically the only employees, uh, at the time and, and, and certainly the most
involved, and it was very dangerous. So, she had to make the choice to have a
family but to keep them in Mississippi, put them in harm's way, as we saw,
tragically, that was very real in the assassination of her husband, but she
didn't stop there.
So, many years later, she actually, in the 1990s, the NAACP is, is floundering. It's, it's got debt. It's, it's lost a lot of respect and its reputation. Well, she comes back in as chair of the board, essentially, and rights the ship, helps to close the fundraising gap, pay off the debts, restore some of its national prominence. And so, it's sort of a poetic kind of justice thing that, you know, this organization that her husband got killed for serving, she comes back 30 years later and helps to right the ship, so to speak. But also, her husband's killer goes free for 30 years.
Julie Rose: He's known. People, we, like, it was known
who he was. It,
Jemar Tisby: absolutely. It wasn't a mystery. It was not
even a question. It was just a question, it was just an issue of an all-white,
racist jury finding, uh, the, the evidence and still ruling in favor, um, and
in, in racial solidarity with another white person. And so, uh, she perseveres
through that until, finally, uh, in the 90s, uh, he is convicted for murdering
her husband. And I just can't imagine knowing who killed your spouse, knowing
they're free spending time with their family in ways that your spouse will
never get to spend time, seeing his children grow up, spending time with his
spouse, and then persevering through that finally until a conviction comes
through.
Julie Rose: I mean, I can't even imagine what she
experienced during that time, but I could see, I could see a reason to, for her
to sort of say, like, "I can't keep reopening that wound. It's unjust and
it's unfair, but I need to move on," and kind of dropping it and to sort
of keep being willing to go back to that and try to get another trial and get
that conviction is really courageous.
Jemar Tisby: It absolutely is, and that's precisely what
is the core of the spirit of justice. So, when you study history, it becomes
very unfortunately routine to see injustice, to see evil. Like, you, you, you
come to almost expect the bad things. What is unexpected, and what is
remarkable, is that in every era of history and in every sort of permutation of
injustice, there have been people who rose up and were willing to resist. And
that spirit that says, "I am worthy of dignity, and I will not accept this
kind of treatment for myself or my neighbor," that's the spirit of
justice. That's what people like Myrlie Evers-Williams displayed. That's what
the over 50 different people I profile in the book display, and I wrote it not
just so that we would know that these courageous figures lived in history, but
to know that the spirit of justice lives today and is in us to continue the
struggle for justice right now.
Julie Rose: How's it in you, Jemar Tisby?
Jemar Tisby: Well, I, I believe in gifts of the Spirit,
2 Corinthians 7, and, um, I, I, I think one of my gifts is, is teaching, and so
that means being a historian, doing the research, putting it in a way that the
church can absorb and access and utilize. And so, right now, I'm, I'm trying to
draw on the stories from our past to inspire and motivate and encourage us for
the present-day struggles for justice.
Julie Rose: So, aside from Myrlie Evers-Williams, is
there a story that you've been reflecting on for strength quite a bit in the
book recently?
Jemar Tisby: There's so many great stories. Um, I, I
like the, the sort of hidden history, the, the, the stories that may, we, we
may not be as familiar with. So, one of them is Sister Thea Bowman. She grew up
in Mississippi, a Black girl, and her parents sent her to the local Catholic
school, which was sort of a mission school. And from a very, very early age,
she was very dedicated to faith and spirituality, so she knew in high school,
she wanted to become a nun, uh, a Catholic sister. And so, she does, and she
goes from rural Mississippi up to Wisconsin. She had never seen snow before,
and she saw it the first morning, and she, uh, calls her mother excitedly,
like, "There's all this white stuff on the ground. This is great,"
and then it sticks around and she's like, "This is awful." She's not
a, a Northern Midwestern, uh, kind of person.
And she goes on and she becomes a nun and, and she becomes an
educator, and she goes back to Mississippi and teaches in the schools there.
She's also brilliant. She gets her PhD as well, but what is so remarkable about
her is she speaks truth to power in such a loving way. So, she's at this U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is almost entirely white and it's
exclusively men because Catholics only ordain male bishops, right? And so, um,
she's telling them basically that the Roman Catholic Church has treated Black
Catholics like children. "You have told us what to do, where to go, how to
do it, and haven't allowed our own experience, our own culture to inform our
faith and our practice." And she's telling them, "Get out of the way.
We are children of God, too. We have the Holy Spirit. We can lead in our
communities, and we're best positioned to do so. We want to stay in communion
with you, but we don't want to be subordinate to you." And so, she's
speaking these hard truths, but she's singing, she's smiling, she's, uh,
resplendent, even though she's got cancer running through her body at the time,
and she dies a untimely death at a very young age, but she's one of these
people whose spirit, um, you know, you just read about them and, and their
spirit almost leaps off the page to, to say, "This was someone I would
want to be around and learn from and be like."
Julie Rose: And so why does Sister Thea Bowman's story
resonate with you right now?
Jemar Tisby: I think her ability to be very true to her
culture and her people while also navigating a system that's really not built
for her. I mean, it's, it's male led, it's predominantly white. In terms of
geographic dispersal, there, there's less of Catholicism in the South where she
was from. So, all of these things stacked against her, she was able to work
within the system, she was able to work with people, and yet she stayed true to
her calling, true to, um, the Black communities that she was serving, and I think
by doing so, she really taught a lot of people about the expansiveness of God's
kingdom and the different expressions that can take.
Julie Rose: You have spent a lot of your academic
career, uh, engaged in faith circles and writing books about the intersection
of faith and justice and also race. Um, and people may be familiar, if they're
podcast listeners, if they've read your books, may be familiar with a bit of
your backstory that you converted to Christianity into a very white Christian
tradition. Would you tell us about a sort of about a, I imagine that was very Uncomfy
on a lot of fronts to be, like, the only maybe Black face in a, in a church
meeting and sort of how you grappled with that?
Jemar Tisby: Absolutely. Um, my testimony is I became a
Christian through the ministry of a white evangelical youth group in the
Midwest, and I'm friends to this day with some of the folks that I met there,
including our youth pastor. So, it was, you know, authentic gospel and
authentic conversion. And, honestly, it was one of the first places I felt
truly included, uh, but to the extent I ever felt excluded or on the margins,
it was because of race. And I hasten to say that, that what I experienced
wasn't some sort of overt racism, people calling me a racial slur or something.
It's not what they said, it's what they didn't say. It's not what they did,
it's what they didn't do. It was as if racial realities disappeared, um, at
the, at the church doors or the youth group doors, and those realities weren't
part of what the gospel spoke to. So, there's, there was this kind of deafening
silence there.
Julie Rose: So, what, what wasn't said? What wasn't
done? What's an example?
Jemar Tisby: Well, race was never mentioned. Uh, the cultural cues, um, whether it was the music or the illustrations in a sermon were all coming from a very sort of monocultural lens. Now, I'm a teenager. I don't have a sophisticated analysis of this. I just know like, "Hmm, is, does it, do they understand that my experience is a bit different than theirs, and if so, how does Jesus speak to that? How does Jesus minister in the midst of that?" And so, I was, without really being able to put words to it in high school, college, yearning to feel seen. Feel seen by my peers, feel seen by the leaders, and to feel seen by God, because if you never hear about your experience from the pulpit, or in the Bible study, or in the theology books, you start to wonder, "Does it really matter?" And so, that's what I was wrestling with, but I got all the way up to the point of being ordained in, uh, about to be ordained in a predominantly white denomination, then come along things like, you know, Black Lives Matter and all these, um, videos and marches and things like that. And I, like many people across racial and ethnic spectrum, uh, speak up for, you know, justice in these situations, and then when you start to see that even though you may share the same pew, you don't share the same perspective. And so, that was really painful to, to hear, um, people who I had worshiped with, prayed with, broken bread with, uh, feel like they start to turn on me and essentially say that, you know, my stances for justice weren't really Christian, they were outside the gospel, they were too liberal, whatever the label was, right?
And so, this denomination that I was about to be
ordained, in had been an intern at a church and all of these things, had gone
to seminary for, um, I don't know if I was sort of, shown the door or if I
walked out, a combination of both, but for me, the uncomfortable part was, um,
choosing to venture forth from a community that had been so familiar for so
long. You know, it's hard, like, thank, thank God I didn't leave the faith. Um,
my faith is stronger than ever, uh, but it, it, it, it had to shift and it had
to change and the community had to change. And so, I found Christian community
among other people who may not share the same four walls of a congregation, but
people who are like-minded about pursuing justice and trying to love their
neighbor well, and understanding that, uh, Jesus in Luke chapter four proclaims
that, that he's come to set the oppressed free and liberate the captive, and
that's the kind of community that has really encouraged me and kept me walking.
Julie Rose: I could imagine that there were maybe
members of the congregation that you left, or the church community that you
left, that when they've heard your story, they're like, "Darn, I wish I
wish we could, like, I wish I could have known, like, if I, if I could have
done something." Like, what could, you know, if you could, if you could
offer a little insight as to what could have helped you to feel seen and
understood, you know, maybe not necessarily everyone was going to be on board
with all of your views, right? But is there a way, how can faith communities
allow for the disagreement and a level of discomfort within that, but also
create a place where people of all races and sort of political leanings, I
guess, can, can, can, can belong together?
Jemar Tisby: You know, I really think it's a matter of
truth. So often, throughout history, we find that that when there's compromise
and complicity with injustice, which is an important point, right? It's not
always the people doing the most overt things, like in the case of racism. It's
not always the case of the people who are tying the noose or burning the cross
or putting on the white robe and hood. That's a relatively small number of
people numerically, right? A much bigger group of people are the ones who
aren't actively doing those things but who let them happen through their
silence, and so often what triggers the silence is fear. It's fear of what
people will say. It's fear of being ostracized from the community, experiencing
things like I experienced.
And so, what would have helped is people's, um, commitment to
the truth being stronger than their fear of people, right? Bible calls it
"the fear of man." In the final chapter of the book, The Spirit of
Justice, I identify a few virtues. One of those virtues, of course, is courage.
Whether the actions these folks I profile took were big or small, the common
denominator was they had to push through fear, or better yet, walk alongside
fear into the path that truth was leading them. So, what I would have loved to
see in those church settings was people just standing beside me and saying,
"Hey, he's got a point," or "Hey, maybe we should look at our
practice and understand that it's coming from a context, which doesn't mean
it's wrong, but there are broader contexts to consider," or, also,
"Maybe we should look at our neighbors who are, say, seeing these videos
and experiencing pain and sorrow and grief and can we weep along with them? Can
we not simply deny their pain or diminish it, um, but feel just as one part of
the body hurts, so we all do?" So, that compassion there, um, which I
think is, is founded in, in truth and following where truth leads us, but that
also requires courage.
Julie Rose: Jemar Tisby is a historian, a New York Times
bestselling author. His latest book is The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of
Faith, Race, and Resistance. It's also been adapted into just a beautifully
illustrated children's book called I Am the Spirit of Justice. Dr. Tisby, I
heard that, uh, it was your best, your childhood best friend who did the
illustrations in the children's book.
Jemar Tisby: Yes. Uh, you know, I, I, I met Malcolm
Newsome in fifth grade and we were, uh, attached at the hip. You couldn't say
one of our names without saying the other. And we, you know, went to Six Flags
together, and we dreamed about the future together. Never did we dream we would
be writing a book together, but when he grew up, he became a children's book
author, and when the publisher says, "Hey, who can write this along with
you?" I said, "I know just the person." So, it was a blast
writing with my childhood best friend.
Julie Rose: What an incredible thing. The book is called
I Am the Spirit of Justice. Jemar Tisby, thanks so much for your time today.
Jemar Tisby: Thank you.
Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. I'd love to hear about a moment you've had recently where you leaned into discomfort just a little bit. Did it lead to some new understanding? What did you get out of it? Email uncomfy@byu.edu to join the conversation or connect with us on social media.
And in the meantime, check out my other podcast, Top of Mind.
It's a great companion listen to Uncomfy. Over on Top of Mind, we are tackling
the toughest of topics and we're doing it in ways that will hopefully spark
growth and empathy in us. Just search for Top of Mind with Julie Rose on
your favorite podcast platform.
Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes James Hoopes and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.
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