![Religion and the Legacies of Slavery Poster Thumbnail](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/rpl/files/microsoftteams-image_01.png?h=b1487550&itok=m73NdRcc) # We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest: Creating Space for an Honest Reckoning Through Religion and the Legacies of Slavery July 10, 2023 Natalie Cherie Campbell , MTS '18 “That which touches me most is that I had a chance to work with people Passing onto others that which was passed onto me. Not needing to clutch for power. Not needing the light just to shine on me. I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny. Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives We who believe in freedom cannot rest. We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes." “Ella’s Song” by Sweet Honey in the Rock opened each of the six sessions of the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) webinar series, “Religion and the Legacies of Slavery,” setting an expectation for all those present. This series of six critical conversations that were built upon the The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Committee would be more than academically rigorous. It would be a place where personal reckoning became a community struggle. The Religion and the Legacies of Slavery series reached an unprecedented scale for the divinity school, with 2,000 unique registrants (many of whom attended multiple sessions) from 75 countries. However, the vision for the series was inspired by a far more intimate space: the HDS Common Read community. Envisioned by Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB), and facilitated by the HDS DIB office with the support of the HDS Racial Justice and Healing committee, the Common Read program is a recurring community-wide, year-long series of reorientations and common conversations. The program is centered around a shared text to help HDS advance its vision of a restorative, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive HDS. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard Report was the 2022-23 common-read book and now serves as the DIB office’s foundational text. This work aims to support the HDS community’s transformative journey, to help the University implement and expand upon the recommendations in the report, and ultimately to foster a world healed of racism and oppression. It was reading the report for the Common Read and engaging in the corresponding community circle conversations that prompted Diane L. Moore, associate dean of Religion and Public Life, to ask herself a simple but powerful question: “What can Religion and Public Life (RPL) offer in the restorative work of creating a world healed of racism and oppression?” RPL seeks to create programming that enhances the public understanding of how religious literacy can help build a just world at peace. Moore imagined a series that would uplift the work already happening at HDS by bringing together RPL frameworks, DIB’s Common Read, and faculty research in a way that would both educate and ignite the moral imagination of the public. The Religion and the Legacies of Slavery series held a sense of urgency, purpose, and collaboration that caught hold of everyone who heard about it, elevating it far beyond our expectations through co-sponsorship with the DIB office, Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, and HarvardX as well as consistent coverage by the Harvard *Crimson*. But this sort of thing doesn’t just happen. One must already be engaged in work of deep moral fortitude and seeking opportunities to build community for serendipitous and providential moments to unfold. That magical moment when everything clicks to bring about something new and profoundly necessary is exactly what this series was, and it happened because people were already engaged and ready to collaborate at every juncture. ![Diane L. Moore, Melissa Wood Bartholomew, and Sara Bleich offer thanks upon completion of Religion and Legacies of Slavery.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/rpl/files/religion_and_the_legacies_of_slavery_reception-diane_moore_sara_bleich_and_melissa_wood_bartholomew.jpg?itok=9L83v7W-) From left, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life, Sara Bleich, Vice Provost for Special Projects, and Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging offer thanks to staff following the completion of Religion and the Legacies of Slavery.HDS photo/Natalie Cherie Campbell.Opening the first session of Religion and the Legacies of Slavery, Sara Bleich, inaugural vice provost for special projects, in particular the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, reflected on the importance of such a series, saying, “We don’t have a guidebook for exactly how we need to reckon with Harvard’s legacies of slavery. But what is clear is that the work of repair begins with having the difficult but necessary conversations, like the ones that will happen through this innovative webinar series.” Moore reflects, “Performative action itself is a form of violence, so this series, with all the difficulties of large-scale, online interaction, had to engage these topics sincerely and rigorously. My good friend Melissa Wood Bartholomew’s presence was pivotal in this because her immense integrity creates a container in which we can have such conversations.” “Co-creating spaces where these hard conversations are possible requires being in right relationship with someone who is deeply committed to this hard work” explains Bartholomew. “I am a Black woman descended from Africans who were enslaved in this country. This history is difficult, and the current manifestations of this painful history made holding the space every Monday emotionally challenging. I was ready for it, and this is what I came to Harvard to do. But I can’t have that kind of conversation and hold that type of space with just anyone. Diane and I had a relationship beforehand, and based on our prior experiences together, I knew that she was committed to this work and that I could trust her.” Together Moore and Bartholomew were able to tackle questions like how to create a space that acknowledged the land and people, including the more than 70 people of African and Indigenous descent who were enslaved at Harvard University, in a way that went beyond words and into action, and how to facilitate both an internal reckoning for those present and an external reckoning of the tangled histories and legacies of slavery through the study of religion. “Because Diane and I come to the table from different entry points, together we could create a unique approach that stemmed from both the head and the heart,” Bartholomew explains. “This work isn’t done by just thinking or just feeling. It requires a collaboration of the two. You can’t just think your way through this hard history, you have to also allow yourself to feel it. Allowing ourselves to think and feel our way through the heart will help us to create new pathways to freedom and liberation—that is transformative praxis.” The approach to these types of conversations is crucial to Terrence L. Johnson, Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies, and featured faculty for the session, “Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations.” “I want to create a framework of engagement that allows us to change the starting point and then re-enter the debate to generate conversation that is not simply about reports or the archives,” he says. “We can contemplate, debate, and piece together new information. But I believe we’ve come to a particular moment in history in which we must think about how we reimagine institutional cultures and new traditions. Without practices of habit, without rethinking what we take for granted (what’s fundamental about our institutions) then this conversation is simply an intellectual exercise that will not have any merit on the ground.” “Religion has always functioned to promote the full range of human agency from heinous crimes against humanity, such as slavery, to nearly unfathomable acts of courage, compassion, and moral imagination, such as enacting reparations for stolen lands and labor.” Moore explains. “By understanding this power, we hope to give audience members tools to confront the harmful impacts of religion and to enhance the generative capacities in their own lives and contacts, whether they identify as religious or not.” “A primary way we understand the power of religion is by addressing deeply embedded assumptions about religion that are problematic and unquestioned.” Moore continues. “Religion and Public Life realizes that these assumptions don’t exist because people aren’t capable of understanding complexity. Rather, there are simply too few opportunities for people to be exposed to the study of religion and not just one’s own experience of religion.” In the session, “Enslavement in the Formation of Earliest Christianity,” Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity, framed the practice of engaging with complexity as “an opportunity for accountability.” “The Bible does not tell a single coherent or consistent message about enslavement. Therefore, people are accountable for how they interpret and live out the teachings of the Bible. It matters what stories are told. It matters that they are diverse, that they are complex, and that they're true,” King says. “By engaging in a practice of interrogating our assumptions, what stories are or are not being told, interpretations and their consequences, we can cultivate both a humility and a courage built on the understanding that actions do have consequences,” King concludes. “This denaturalizing of assumption is not paralyzing. It is in fact empowering. Assuming the world that we've inherited had to be as it is rather than recognizing it as the product of choices and as one option among a number of contingencies—that is what is paralyzing,” says David F. Holland, John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History, and featured faculty along with scholar Kathryn Gin Lum in the session, “Religion, Race and the Double Helix of White Supremacy.” “When we recognize that there were paths not taken, that there were choices resulting in the things that we've inherited, that the contingency of history actually produces the opportunity to act in our present, we recognize and are reminded that we have an opportunity to shift the arc of history as well.” “If we are to unravel these devastating legacies, we need to have a clear understanding of their origin stories.” Holland says, “And the study of religion is an appropriate, maybe *the* appropriate disciplinary site for an exploration of the connection between binary religious thinking and the power dynamics of racialized colonialism, especially as it relates to the Atlantic system of African slavery and its enduring consequences.” “White supremacy is a belief system with its own symbols, doctrines, and rituals, with the desire to create even sacred texts in the process of the pursuit of its own power. As a belief system that persists even in the face of vast amounts of evidence to the contrary, it’s hard to imagine an academic setting better equipped to analyze, deconstruct, and unravel White supremacy than the study of religion,” Holland concludes. “One of the most basic things that religious traditions do is orient our relationships between people who are living now and people who've lived in the past. A deeper understanding of the ways that we relate to our ancestors can provide all of us with better tools for thinking ethically about accountabilities to ancestors who suffered profoundly and ancestors who perpetrated atrocities,” says Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, hearkening back to his session, “Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories.” “Furthermore, I'm hoping that Harvard Divinity School will be a seedbed of creative thinking about reparation for Harvard as a whole.” McKanan says. “We are the right place for this because we are the part of Harvard that is most dependent on endowed wealth, and because we, as a divinity school, have connections to many of the religious communities that are steps ahead of us in the work of reparation.” Understanding enduring consequences by connecting the past to the present is crucial to reimagining our world, Tracey Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, reminds us, referencing the session, “Slavers and Slavery: A Dialogue with Descendants” which featured her and racial justice advocates Dain and Constance Perry. “One of the things that Dain Perry said in our conversation is there’s an umbilical cord that extends from the violence of slavery to the violence that we see today.” Hucks continues, “If we cannot join those two together and reimagine our messy, violent, complex world for our students, who we’re training to be scholars and leaders, our communities whom we feel accountable to, and our ancestors whom we are accountable to, then we will be in a very desperate moment. “These tragic legacies are alive and present in many forms, as the news on any given day, in any given hour devastatingly and consistently reveals.” Moore says. “We hope that by gaining a deeper understanding of the complex power of religion relevant to historical and contemporary manifestations of racism and White supremacy, that this knowledge will enhance our commitments to reparative action and racial justice and healing in our own times and in our own contexts. Ultimately, these conversations are in service of advancing our vision of a just world at peace, healed of racism and oppression.” “The Religion and the Legacies of Slavery series strengthened our foundation for understanding the broad scope of the work of repair regarding the role of religion, specifically Christianity, and the pseudoscientific race science that Harvard advanced and that supported slavery, racial segregation, and fueled systemic racism around the globe,” Bartholomew continues. “This is sacred work. This is hard work. I hope that we created an atmosphere for an honest reckoning within ourselves, thereby creating a space where we’re breaking our soul ties to slavery.” “I'm hoping that Harvard Divinity School will be a public forerunner for having these difficult conversations. I hope that we will take up a mantle as a space that will hold the moral and ethical principles and values of this institution, its truth, to its highest principles and call upon that. To be a space where we are not afraid to do that. Rather, a space where we embrace it,” Hucks says. “We are telling a story about slavers—the legacy of the captors, the legacy of the owners, the overseers, the ones who were with the traders. It's about the legacy of slavery, but we are also telling a story about the enslaved—the courageous legacy of those who were enslaved that allowed us to see the humanity as well.” Hucks concludes, “It’s a profound moment for us to be teaching leaders who will go out and continue this work. We began the webinar with Sweet Honey in the Rock, we who believe in freedom cannot rest. And I want to be a place and be at a place where we take up as our mantra, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.” See also:- [ Religion, Conflict, and Peace ](/news/religion-conflict-and-peace)