Disciple: Confronting Our History

Lift Every Voice brings together young people for difficult conversations

By Summerlee Walter

A group of high school and college students cluster around an aging chimney, reverently running their fingers over the bricks. Gradually their attention shifts to one particular area to the right of the chimney face, the bricks illuminated by the midday North Carolina sun. A few of the young men and women rest their fingers in a small indentation several feet above the ground. Their fingertips fit snugly into the print left by one of the enslaved craftsmen who produced the brick embedded in a chimney located on the grounds of Stagville State Historic Site, a former Durham plantation.

The young people touched history at Stagville as part of the three-year “Lift Every Voice” journey, an initiative of the Diocese of North Carolina designed to revisit the historical truths of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina and apartheid in South Africa. During the week of July 12-18, 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 and slow progress and to begin thinking about how they can take what they’ve learned back to their own dioceses to share in the form of programming around diversity and inclusivity.

Lift Every Voice was inspired by another Freedom Ride the Diocese of North Carolina undertook in 2010. The earlier trip focused on the state’s history of racial injustice, progress and reconciliation from Wilmington to Haw River State Park near Greensboro. Some of the places (Stagville and the International Civil Rights Center & Museum) and faces (playwright and performer Mike Wiley and diocesan youth missioners Beth Crow and Lisa Aycock) from the 2010 Freedom Ride returned for this summer’s journey, but the diverse group of young people from across the United States and southern Africa set this trip apart.

“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. “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.”

Lift Every Voice moved from vision to reality when in August 2014 the youth ministries department received a three-year, $138,000 Jessie Ball DuPont Fund grant to fund the project.

Once the funding was in place, the next step was to recruit team members to plan the event. Formation experts and clergy were of course involved, but Crow also sought out talented young adults to spearhead the programming. Jonathan York, a participant in the 2010 Freedom Ride, was happy to return as a member of the planning team and bring his interest in local advocacy to bear on the week’s theme.

“I’m really passionate about race relations in Durham, which is a really interesting microcosm of race relations in America and worldwide,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of work with an organization called The Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham [which, according to the organization’s website, ‘seeks an end to the violence that is plaguing Durham neighborhoods’].”

York and other young adult team members like Elisa Benitez, a parishioner at El Buen Pastor, Durham, who works with NC Dream Team and The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), helped to give nuance to the week’s conversations around race, gender and immigration issues. Their local expertise supported the Freedom Ride’s focus on North Carolina history.

Many participants who signed up for the journey were seeking that local focus. Gus Williams, a participant from Emmanuel, Southern Pines, was interested in social justice and peace work but wanted to learn more.

“I figured I was not as educated on the topic as I should be,” he said. “[The Civil Rights Movement] is a great part of American history, and I thought I should learn more about it, I should meet new people, I should experience new things.”

“I’m deeply encouraged by everyone who’s been a part of this project, not just the young adults on team, but all the participants who have come with courage and commitment to explore something that can be emotionally challenging to process,” said the Rev. Cicilia Alverez, canon for transition ministry and clergy development for the Diocese of New Jersey. “It gives me great hope for the Episcopal Church.”

[Image: Freedom Ride 2015 gathers for a group photo. Photo by Beth Crow.]

PUTTING A FACE ON CIVIL RIGHTS

When asked which of the week’s experiences had the greatest personal impact, participants responded with one voice: The Wall of Shame at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in downtown Greensboro. 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 Wall 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 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.

“The museum didn’t just display a Martin Luther King or a Nelson Mandela. It displayed everybody. … In South Africa we have those [big names], too, but no one really knows how much people actually fought in the struggle.”

After their experience at the museum, the Freedom Riders met an impressive panel of speakers who shared with them their personal experiences during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and today. Panelists included Joseph McNeil, one of the Greensboro Four, who shared his experience of the first sit-ins in the very building participants had just toured; Raleigh Chief of Police Cassandra Deck-Brown; Dr. Millicent Brown, Associate Professor of History and Sociology at the Citadel; the Honorable Yvonne Johnson, former mayor of Greensboro; and representatives from The Beloved Community Center, a community-based, grassroots organization seeking to form an equitable and just community for all Greensboro residents.

Participants had a chance to integrate some of what they learned into their own experiences during a documentary theater workshop with Mike Wiley, a writer and performer whose one-man shows bring to life historical figures from the Civil Rights Movement. After their visit to Stagville, Wiley guided participants through the process of creating short group performances synthesizing photos and quotations from the Civil Rights Movement. The impressive results can be viewed in the “Read All About It” section of this website.

SEEING THE FACE OF GOD

Worship, music, drama and art formed a significant part of the Freedom Ride experience. The planning team aimed to create a wide variety of worship experiences for participants, ranging from a traditional Eucharist during which the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry preached at Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, to participant-led morning worship under the trees at Haw River State Park, to a guided meditation reflecting on slave narratives that took place in the Great Barn at Stagville.

[Image: Elizabeth Potts, Diocese of Northern California, and Leighton Harrell, Diocese of North Carolina, join hands during the Wednesday night Eucharist at Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill. Photo by Summerlee Walter.]

The week’s various performances, too, struck many participants as worshipful experiences. After the documentary theater workshop, Wiley demonstrated the art form by performing his one-man play, Blood Done Sign My Name, which recounts the story of the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow,
who was shot in the middle of Highway 158 in Oxford. Later in the week, The Beast, a hip-hop and progressive jazz group out of Durham, led a workshop on creativity, improvisation and the history of African-American music.

Reflecting on the importance of music during the week, Murphy Hunn, a participant from St. Ambrose, Raleigh, said, “Music is used for gathering, and it’s used for guidance. It brings people together, and it gives us focus, and it gets us fired up.”

That fire extended to the final day of the Freedom Ride, during which participants from each diocese gathered to plan how they would bring what they learned back to their own dioceses. Plans included weekend mini-versions of the Freedom Ride, honest conversations, talking to diocesan
leadership and engaging local parishes and campus ministries.

Participants from the Diocese of Botswana were especially inspired to advocate for young people in their diocese.

“We need to talk about active participation and acceptance of the youth in parish councils and active decision making of the youth in the diocesan synod,” a representative from the diocese reported to the group.

The Freedom Riders will have a chance to check in on each other’s progress in their respective dioceses during next summer’s leg of the Lift Every Voice journey: a trip to South Africa to learn about apartheid. Applications will become available in early 2016.

Find more photos from Freedom Ride 2015 on Facebook.

[Image: The gathered Lift Every Voice congregation blesses a quilt made during last year’s Province IV youth event (PYE). The quilt will be gifted to the PYE host congregation, Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. Photo by Summerlee Walter.]

Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.