Disciple: Growing a Movement
Lift Every Voice completes its three-year grant and looks to the future
By Summerlee Walter
In 2010, Beth Crow had an idea: What if the Diocese of North Carolina leveraged its strong youth program to begin addressing issues of race, injustice and reconciliation? Inspired by the journeys throughout the South integrated groups of Civil Rights activists undertook beginning in 1961, the lead youth missioner rented a bus and recruited more than 40 youth from throughout North Carolina for a 9-day ride across the state. She called the program The Freedom Ride, a nod to the journeys that inspired her, and immersed participants in the racial history of North Carolina from the days of institutionalized slavery through the Civil Rights era to the efforts taking place today to address historic wrongs.
The Freedom Ride was a success, but Crow felt like the work was unfinished.
“Working in youth ministry, I witness the challenges our young people must deal with day to day, from subtle to blatant signs of racial discrimination, to coping with the stigma of being an undocumented child in the United States, to their own personal struggles with sexuality and acceptance,” Crow said in 2015. “Teen years are challenging enough, but with these added burdens our youth can often feel helpless and alone. We seek to provide a safe and honest space for conversation as well as help equip our youth with the tools for change in the example Christ taught us.”
In 2014, Crow took the next step in the Diocese’s youth and young adult programming around race, social justice and reconciliation when she applied for and received a three-year, $138,000 Jessie Ball duPont Fund grant to finance Lift Every Voice (LEV), a 2015-2017 program involving high school and college students from across The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Diocese of Botswana and the Anglican Diocese of Cape Town. The original grant proposal focused on the historical truths of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina and apartheid in South Africa with an eye toward producing youth ministry resources addressing race and reconciliation. By the time the initially funded program wrapped this summer, however, LEV had transformed into something much bigger.
DIFFERENT COUNTRIES, SAME INJUSTICES
For the first year of LEV, Crow stayed in familiar territory. For one week in July 2015, more than 70 young people and adults from the Dioceses of North Carolina, Upper South Carolina, Northern California, Western Massachusetts, Southwestern Virginia, Texas, Botswana and South Africa gathered in central North Carolina to explore the United States’ history of racial conflict while beginning to dream about how they could take what they’d learned back to their own dioceses. That summer’s journey revisited some of the places from the 2010 Freedom Ride, like Stagville State Historic Site, a former Durham plantation, and the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, but the conversations were different because the voices involved had become more diverse.
Viewing the Hall of Shame at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in downtown Greensboro had a particular effect on the group. Housed in the F.W. Woolworth’s building where in 1960 four North Carolina A&T University students staged the lunch counter sit-ins that would galvanize a movement of peaceful protest, The Hall of Shame installation features photos of some of the thousands of individuals — some well known, most little known and many never identified — who died during the Civil Rights Movement.
“When the tour guide was telling us Emmett Till’s story, that really spoke to me,” Mandy Jantjies, a three-year LEV participant from the Diocese of Cape Town, said. “That was a perfect display of how cruel America was at the time. He was just a boy.”
Jantjies and her fellow South African participants had the chance to share some of their own country’s shameful past the next summer when LEV travelled to South Africa. Ninety youth and adults visited Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, where he lived as a political prisoner for 27 years, and the Amy Biehl Foundation, started as a center for reconciliation by the parents of a young white woman murdered during apartheid by four black men, two of whom now work for the organization. They learned from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest who lost both hands and an eye when he was targeted with a letter bomb for his work during apartheid. The mutuality of reconciliation – the necessity for both parties to engage and actively seek amendment and forgiveness – was the common theme running through the summer.
“I learned through Lift Every Voice that reconciliation doesn’t have to be this instantaneous, superhuman thing. I think that reconciliation is grounded in real feelings and real experiences, and that, if anything, that’s what we should be striving for, that realness,” Leighton Harrell, a three-year LEV participant and member of Nativity, Raleigh, explained.
Participants easily drew comparisons between the struggle for equality that happened in South Africa during apartheid and similar struggles throughout United States history. They also saw the parallels between the two societies today.
“I will always remember the importance of being enlightened by new experiences, people and information,” Eden Segbefia of Durham, North Carolina, said.
SHARING THE WISDOM
Throughout the first two summers of LEV, participants discussed how to carry forward the work of reconciliation during the 51 weeks of the year they were not together, but the focus of year three was work in diocesan groups to discern next steps for their communities. Gathering for a week in July 2017 at Haw River State Park in Browns Summit, North Carolina, participants spent time each day reviewing and sharpening their skills in nonviolent communication, exploring more deeply the racial and economic histories of their countries, considering examples of resistance and reconciliation in response to injustice, and learning from each other about the work already happening in each diocese. Diocesan groups also spent hours discussing their individual communities’ needs and brainstorming ways to impart to others the lessons and skills they learned during LEV.
All of the educational sessions were planned collaboratively by young adults and adult leaders and led by young adults, many of whom participated in all three years of the program or had experience leading conversations around race, racism and reconciliation through their own diocesan programming or on their college campuses. Both the adult leaders of LEV and the young adult participants view young people as key to the future of reconciliation.
“It’s very common that it’s said that youth are the future of the Church, and we’re now seeing that the future of the Church is anti-racist and anti-sexist and anti-oppression,” Harrell said, “and so I think that, going forward, the Church is going to move in that direction because in my experience that’s the direction young people want to take.”
The truth of Harrell’s statement is apparent from the seeds of Lift Every Voice already taking root in other dioceses. The Diocese of Northern California, for example, started a program called Pathways in 2015 and held its second event this spring. Originally, the group wasn’t sure they could pull it off.
“[We said], ‘We don’t have too much history in California. What would we talk about?’” Elizabeth Potts, a youth who helped bring Pathways to life, explained. “Very soon after that…we realized that was absolutely not true.” During the first year of Pathways, participants visited Captain Jack’s Stronghold, where members of the Modoc tribe held their ground against the U.S. Army’s removal attempt, and a Japanese internment camp.
“It’s a completely different animal to say, ‘They have issues over there. They’re having racial issues. They’re having spiritual issues. They need to work harder on reconciliation,’ but instead saying, ‘We have this history, and we still have work in reconciliation to do,’” Potts explained.
The Diocese of Upper South Carolina is also in the early stages of planning a similar LEV-style experience, and the youth and adults of North Carolina and the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia are meeting via video call to discuss ways to bring what they’ve learned into their churches. Some youth in North Carolina are exploring the possibility of speaking at churches around the Diocese or conducting portions of the training they received throughout LEV. Both Nativity, Raleigh, and St. Paul’s, Cary, have already scheduled events featuring people and training used during LEV.
The work also continues in South Africa and Botswana. In Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana, Kgololo (Papi) Mmipi and Busiswa (Busie) McBrian-Mpungose have collaborated to bring a soup kitchen to the mall outside of the Anglican cathedral. They are now working with Pete Crow, a member of Nativity, Raleigh, and the Rev. Dr. Leon Spencer to secure the funding they need to launch an NGO focused on social development.
“Ever since I joined this movement, a lot of things became a lot clearer,” Mmipi explained.
In Cape Town, the young adults are planning a series of workshops with a focus on the most pressing issues facing their peers: HIV/AIDS, depression and teen pregnancy.
What’s striking about the initiatives growing out of LEV is their diversity. While some, like the work happening in Northern California, follow closely the Freedom Ride model adapted to a state’s unique history, others incorporate the ideas central to LEV in smaller chunks so more people can access them. Other work, like that happening in Gaborone and Cape Town, grows out of the heightened social awareness and sense of empowerment the young people feel after experiencing LEV. The feeling of empowerment has been especially important for youth in southern Africa, where young people assuming leadership among older adults is less socially acceptable than it is in the United States.
“One thing that I want out of the next year is that this ministry continues because there’s still so much to talk about,” Harrell explained. “It may feel good, I think, to leave here and know that we talked about race and we talked about these issues, but I think that it takes more than a couple of tough conversations to really make an impact in the Church and the world at large, and so I think that through more ministry and through more learning and teaching and healing and tough conversations, we can get to a place where we’re making a real difference.”
Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.
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