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In the summer of 2020, protests erupted across the globe to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matters demonstrations in the U.S., calling for racial justice for Black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade being killed at the hands of police officers.

Months later, while people were still showing up to support this Black social justice movement, the nation grieved the death of three beloved leaders of the last generations Black justice movement.

The late Rep. John Lewis, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, and the legendary baseball player Hank Aaron were a few of the remaining civil rights pioneers of their time. But what set them apart from the protesters in the streets, was what was at the center of their movement decades ago: the Black church. Thats where ideas for certain acts of protest, like the sit-ins of 1963, the Childrens March the same year, and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, came to fruition.

In the book, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, author and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. cites the idea of the Black church as a freedom church, as a vehicle for the civil rights struggle and a way of looking at the world.

Some young activists today, are trying to keep that connection between social justice movements and the church. Alexus Cumbie, who attended church service every Sunday pre-pandemic, said she believes the Black church and the Black Lives Matter Movement share some of the same goals of truth seeking and transparency, repentance and reconciliation.

Christian churches, as a whole in the U.S., have been experiencing a decline in attendance. A new Gallup study found the number of Americans who are members of a place of worship has dropped to fewer than 50 percent for the first time since their data collection began in 1940. The Black church has also seen a decline. The study also showed 31 percent of millennials and 33 percent of Generation Z have no religious affiliation.

The desire for institutions to address racial justice and other progressive policies may be the principle reason millennials are currently moving away from the church as an institution, said Bishop Yvette Flunder, senior pastor of City of Refuge, United Church of Christ, and the presiding Prelate of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries.

Theyre trying to find like-minded millennials who are very interested in doing the work of policy, doing the work of justice, and organizing, Flunder said. And theyre feeling that the church, as it is called monolithically, is not really on board.

These policy issues include justice work, like LGBTQ rights, that Christian churches, as a whole, have historically opposed.

Community members from Brave Space Alliance, Broadway Youth Center, and Renaissance Social Services speak during the Pride Without Prejudice march on June 28, 2020 in Chicago. Photo by Natasha Moustache/Getty Images

Dr. Rev. Gardner, the senior pastor at Plum Grove Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, said that even while young people move away from the church, it remains an epicenter to Black life.

While young Black people are no longer waiting on the permission of the church to go out and take action, those in political power still look to the Black church for direction in the Black community, said Gardner, who also teaches African American history courses on the Black Church and Black protest at the University of Alabama.

Whenever there is an issue in his Tuscaloosa community, he added, whether its over tornado devastation or COVID-19 concerns, the mayor and the police chief do look to the church to help.

So in that regard, when we think about the word epicenter, we think about entities that do more than just one thing, Gardner said. In this way, the church is the prophetic voice of the Black community.

Garnder said faith is what sustained the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and its what the church has to offer in todays movement.

Flunder said she agrees. We [the Black community] are deeply faith-oriented, hope-oriented, she said.

While the Black church as an institution has not always received openly queer folxs, Black queer folxs have always fought right alongside it, Flunder, who identifies as a lesbian woman, added.

Flunder believes that the faces of the fight for Black social justice look more intersectional now than they did a few decades ago.

I have never seen anything quite like the Black Lives Matter movement, she said. The thing that makes it so incredibly unique to me is not just that there are a wonderful group of Black and brown young people out there fighting alongside white people.

Flunder added while she is learning from young people, she hopes they can also learn from the adversities she faced when she was their age.

I am also encouraging the movement not to forget the wisdom trail, the wisdom path, she said. Take a look at our scars, because we still have them.

A Black Lives Matter flag flies near a church on Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. Photo by Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Cumbie, who is a Black queer voice in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, said she understands the importance of the church.

I think that the Black church is pivotal for Black liberation movements, which is why white supremacists target these gathering spaces, she said. And Ive seen it in my home city of Birmingham, Alabama, where four little black girls were killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

On her college campus, she leads a Bible study, and said that many students who attend are queer.

I think that a lot of young Black, queer college students find themselves in these more intimate Bible studies because theyre able to have a more individualized and personalized experience with God and their spirituality when theyre able to ask those tough questions without judgment.

Cumbie said thats one of the critiques of the Black church and all churches not being a space that seeks to answer these tough questions on the minds of young queer people.

Wynston Cornelius is the program director of Gender Bender, an LGBTQ support and advocacy group based out of South Carolina. As a Black trans man, he experienced a lack of transparency in the church.

For most of my life, I heard all are welcomed, and Im welcomed conditionally, Cornelius said, as long as I wear a dress, or as long as my hair is a certain way, as long as Im not questioning whats being preached about, even in Sunday school.

Cornelius said in his own experience, it was not a matter of him struggling with who he is, but the church struggling with who he is.

For most of my life, I heard all are welcomed, and Im welcomed conditionally.

He said that if the church continues not to be accepting of the queer community, it may lead to what he called a devolution, what he described as the continuation of even more churchgoers leaving the institution because of its refusal to meet the needs of all the intersections of Black people.

Flunder said she believes the Black church has work to do on its fragile patriarchy to be relevant to the social justice movements. She explained that Black men have been wrongly diminished and emasculated in various ways in America slavery, Jim Crow, and peonage in sharecropping, and todays industrial prison complex.

One of the few places where our men did have power coming along was in the institution that we created, the Black church, Flunder said.

Within the structures of church walls, women and men are very concerned about making sure that the roles of women essentially dont diminish the roles of men, Flunder explained.

Those strict roles erase the Black LGBTQ community, who are also doing the work for the prosperity of Black people, she added.

The Black churchs role of serving as a gathering site will always exist, and the conversations with that institution will evolve, Cumbie said.

We have to move towards a more radical pursuit of loving, of loving our neighbors, she said.

READ MORE: Black women were vital to the Black church. Here are 2 stories

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Where does the Black church fit in today's Black Lives Matter movement? - PBS NewsHour

Season two of the Omnia podcast In These Times explores Black Lives Matter protests alongside the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in episode one, while episode two takes a look at the laws and policies that legislated Black lives, movement, and security, and consider the lasting impacts of systems including slavery and colonialism.

Faculty members from the School of Arts & Sciences discuss the events of Jan. 6, while two students reflect on the events of the past year, and share a glimpse of their experiences as young Black adults finding their path in a nation that has yet to come to terms with its legacy of racism and white supremacy.

Herman Beavers, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidents Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies talks with Camille Charles, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences, and Heather Williams, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought. They are joined by Breanna Moore, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, and senior Jelani Williams.

The enslavement of Black people was supported by a legal system that included everything from laws preventing legal marriage to those restricting movement and access to education. When slavery was abolished, this system did not go away. Instead, it evolved to include Jim Crow laws and 20th-century policies including redlining and urban renewal. In episode two, two historians and an anthropologist talk about the violence embedded in our shared history and legacies that persist: Heather Williams speaks with history professor Brent Cebul, and Deborah Thomas, the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

Episode one highlights:

5:38: [Heather Williams] I remember saying to a friend a couple of times, This reminds me of the 1850s, the division in the country, but not just division among individuals, but somebody at the helm whos sowing that division and encouraging it. And she said the 1850s? Not the 1960s? And I said, Yeah, 1960s, it was intense. It was powerful, but its the 1850s when the country was so divided over slavery and abolitionists were pushing more and more against slavery. And the pro-slavery people in the South and elsewhere are saying, No, weve got to hold on to slavery.

7:47: [Camille Charles] Certainly, we are a nation founded on the idea of Black inferiority, and because we have never really dealt with that origin story, right, that original sin, we dont educate our children in a way that would address that and then begin undoing it. Right? So that for everything that we might see in society that we would think would make it better, I think theres too much that remains in our society, beginning with K to 12 education, that really just perpetuates that origin story. Or, at least the piece of it that suggests that somehow slavery wasnt so bad and Blacks are to blame for their subpar economic position, right?

12:46: [Herman Beavers] I knew by the middle of 2017 that we were well on our way to becoming a fascist authoritarian state. And by 2021, when 45 left office, thats what we were. So the coup attempt on the 6th, and thats exactly what it was, the coup attempt on the 6th is what happens in a fascist authoritarian state, where people are doing what they think the authoritarian leader wants them to do. So it was disheartening.

The other thing is this, white supremacy and systemic racism have become, if not household words, certainly sort of public watch words. And Im skeptical about how deeply invested people are, particularly white people are, in addressing those things. ... Nothing that Ive seen, including white people participating in street protests, nothing that Ive seen has induced me to think that we have reached at what people are calling an inflection point. Because, January 6 undoes all of that. If we were on our way to it, its all undone. Because for better, for worse, we live on a country whose history is built around the idea that white people are central to everything that happens and everybody else is an add-on or an imposition or an intrusion that needs to be either silenced or erased or removed.

So, the only people that can turn that around is white people. I reject that whole language of white people being my allies, I just reject that because I didnt advance white supremacy, racism. I didnt invent those things. So my expectation is that people who are really serious about engaging white supremacy and systemic racism, they need to take January 6 as the arena in which they need to enter to challenge those things.

Episode two highlights:

9:43: [Heather Williams] The main legacy [of slavery] is, again, the ideology, the belief that I think is, its hard to explain it and describe it. We often think about people like those people who went to those rallies that some of us disapprove of, that call themselves white supremacists, or would not deny being white supremacists, who run around with the Confederate flag and have some excuse for why theyre doing that. And then youve got the masses of white people, including good white people, nice white people, some white people I know and are friends with, who have embedded in them an idea that they are better than other people.

And I think that is the most pervasive, and the most damaging legacy. That more and more, especially young people are trying to throw that off, or trying to question that, or trying to challenge it, but its not so easy to do. And people talk about privilege. Its not so easy to give up privilege. Its just not, even when you recognize it, and a lot of people dont recognize it. They dont even look for it. They dont think about it. But even once you do, when the rubber hits the road, do you really stand by that?

15:13: [Brent Cebul]: We often talk about redlining, the practice of government providing insurance to particular neighborhoods for mortgages, right? And so the classic understanding of redlining is that it denied the benefits of mortgage and lending to black neighborhoods and cities disproportionally, but also Jewish neighborhoods in some southern Eastern European immigrant neighborhoods. But what we often forget is that the white neighborhoods, and the aspirationally white neighborhoods and suburbs, were given favorable status by those same programs. And so not only are they starving poor communities and cities of access to that capital, theyre creating new markets for white families to move out to suburbs. So theres both a stick in cities and a carrot thats pulling white people out. And that it would not be an underestimation to say that that nest egg that a mortgage offers really creates the white middle-class.

23:52: [Deborah Thomas] You asked if anthropology has colonial origins, right? So all disciplines have colonial origins. Humanism as a Western philosophy, of course emerges outside of the scientific revolution, and in the wake of the Renaissance from the 14th to 17th centuries. And central to the emergence of humanism was an attempt to reckon with reason and rationality by developing a new universalism that would dislodge theological conceptualizations of causality in favor of a new idea of man as a secular political subject. And in the process of developing this new secular idea of man, it also located European views of the world as superior to all other possible views.

Listen to the podcasts in full at Omnia.

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In These Times: Black lives and the call for justice | Penn Today - Penn Today

I am wondering if we can put a stop to the violence, police brutality, racism, and murder, so we can just be in peace. There is no reason why Blacks should be treated differently from whites. We all are humans who feel the same and do the same things to stay and be alive on this Earth. Black Lives Matter comes to my attention because I am Black and see how Black men and women are being treated because of a different shade of skin than whites. Where there is justice, there is peace with liberty.

We just want civil rights shown and given because we are citizens of the United States of America. Black people like George Floyd are being killed.

There are many solutions that can solve this issue today. A solution can be something that can make Blacks feel like they dont have to worry about police brutality. More solutions would include having a protest celebrate Blacks, more recognition for Blacks and how they do what they do, more talks about Blacks, and about the deaths of Trayvon, George, etc. Police brutality needs to stop; there shouldnt be police killing Blacks because they are frightened by the color of our skin. Without justice, there is no peace and Blacks will continue to act up, which means we must put a stop to this and put all of our differences to the side and let them be.

This should start happening now and continue on and on for as long as time. There shouldnt be something where people dont know how to feel. Blacks shouldnt have to worry about police brutality when they are getting pulled over by a cop or when a cop asks them to put their hands up. We need to march and make sure that this stops, not now, but forever. We need to come together now and not leave anyone out because everyone is human and has feelings, so leaving someone out because of their race or skin color isnt going to solve anything and wont take us anywhere as a community.

We need to do more that involve the statements and movements of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter should be something that is celebrated or acknowledged at least on a weekly basis.

Tayshaun Washington, OPRF High School

Read more:
Do more to show that Black lives matter - Wednesday Journal

Not long into the official opening of State v. Derek Chauvin on Monday, the voices of community members who protested police violence in Minneapolis were invoked, starting with those at the scene of what prosecutors call the murder of George Floyd. Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell showed the jury a video still image of those witnesses: the teenagers who recorded Chauvins knee pressed into Floyds neck for eight or nine minutes as Floyd cried out for help, along with the others who were recorded trying to offer Floyd aid, and who chastised the officers for using their bodies to restrain a motionless man.

Chauvins defense, meanwhile, doesnt have to provide an alternative theory as to what caused George Floyds death. Yet in his opening statement Monday, Chauvins defense attorney Eric Nelson claimed that what killed George Floyd, in part, was an ingestion of drugsallegedly to conceal them from policeand that the people gathered, who watched Chauvin and the other officers move Floyds inert body onto a stretcherdidnt know the full story. In fact, Nelson told the jury, the angry crowd appeared to officers to be a threat. They called officers names, he continued, causing officers to divert their attention from the man they had restrained beneath them.

Nelsons characterization of the crowd was a revealing moment for the defense, one meant perhaps to appeal to some of the jurors who, when asked their views on Black Lives Matter, had responded, All lives matter. The same officers who perceived Floyds already prone body as an ongoing threat had also perceived the witnesses recording them as a threat. To follow the defenses logic, if Floyd was somehow culpable in his own death, so were the bystanders. To the extent that Black Lives Matter is on trial in this case, it will concern the conduct of the people who stood witness to Floyds death.

Link:
Derek Chauvin Trial Opening Statements: Defense Puts Blame on Witnesses - The New Republic

I read the article about the St. ThomasAquinas student's mask-wearing in the school.

First off, St. Thomas has a set dress code, andthey have updated their policies to keep upwith the changes that occur in everydaysociety, as the article said. I applaud the

young man in having a strong sense ofcommunity involvement. I am wondering if the

paper would have run the story if he werewearing a Blue Lives Matter mask or maybe

even an American flag mask.

I and just abouteveryone that I know who works, unless self-employed, have to follow a dress code. This isa learning experience for the young man to learn from it and grow from it. To the young man:Please don't ever lose your wanting and ability to help people; that is something thathelps us all grow as a people and society.

Tom Eichler, Mogadore

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Letter to the Editor: Black Lives Matter mask dispute was learning experience - Canton Repository