News
Jemar Tisby Talks ‘The Spirit of Justice,’ Unsung Black Heroes, and Fighting for a Better World
Not long after they first met, Anna, born free, encouraged and equipped Frederick to escape slavery. They soon married.
“What’s interesting about Anna Murray Douglass is she caught a lot of flack just for being Douglass’s wife because she was unlettered,” Tisby told Faithfully Magazine during an August interview. “She was not formally educated. Neither was Douglass, but obviously, he was literate and very good with words. So a lot of people were like, this is a mismatch ….Which couldn’t have been further from the truth.”
The Douglasses were married for 44 years and had five children before Anna died of a stroke in 1882 at the age of 69. Frederick went on to remarry fellow abolitionist and suffragist Helen Pitts, who was White. However, Frederick was buried next to Anna at Mount Hope Cemetery in upstate New York.
Tisby, New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism, features Anna in The Spirit of Justice alongside dozens of other inspiring figures.
Douglass is just one of 50 diasporic Black figures Tisby points to who, through their resistance, advocacy or activism, “courageously confront[ed] racism instead of being complicit with it.” In telling their stories, he examines what can be learned “from their example, their suffering, their methods, and their hope.”
In the following interview, edited for clarity, Tisby discusses the title’s origins and the inspiration drawn from figures such as Coretta Scott King, Elias Camp Morris, and Sister Thea Bowman. Tisby shares insights on these historical figures and their representation of justice across different eras.
The conversation also delves into the distinctions between resistance, advocacy, and activism, highlighting the importance of recognizing various forms of justice-oriented activities. He also discusses the necessity of telling the whole truth about history, especially in the face of revisionist narratives and what he describes as a “whitelash.”
Finally, the conversation turns to the complexities of political affiliation, resilience amid societal discord, and the importance of community and self-care in sustaining justice work.
Faithfully Magazine: The first thing I want to dive into is the title. Where did that idea come from? And what do you mean by “the spirit of justice?”
Dr. Jemar Tisby: I can definitely trace it to December 2017, the grand opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. There was a press conference with Murray Evers Williams. A journalist asked her, “How does the 21st century and what we were going through at that point, compare to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement?” She said, “You know, I’m seeing things that I hoped I would never see again.” And she said, “I don’t mind telling the press I’m weary.” Now, mind you, at this point, she’s in her eighties. Then she said something that astounded me. She said, “But there’s something about the spirit of justice.” She said, “It rises up, and it makes you determined all over again.”
And something clicked in me and said, “That’s it.” That’s what’s remarkable about justice. It’s not that there’s evil in the world. It’s not that people do wrong things. That happens all the time. What’s remarkable is there are always people who rise up to resist it. So, to me, the spirit of justice is that through line, it is that commonality between. It’s the difference between people who choose to remain silent and those who speak up, those who choose to remain passive, and those who are active. And, you know, for people of faith, I think we can think of the spirit of justice as the Holy Spirit, inspiring us to assert our God-given dignity as image bearers and people made in the likeness of God.
FM: The book cover shows Coretta Scott King, Elias Camp Morris, and Anna Murray Douglass, which is an intentional choice. Why did those three make the cover?
Jemar Tisby: I think I was giving people too much credit because most people can’t even identify Coretta Scott King. So my hope was there would be one identifiable figure and two people that you kind of didn’t recognize and wanted to know more about. I wanted people from different eras. So you’ve got the civil rights era. You’ve got the antebellum going into the Civil War era with Anna Marie Douglass, and then you’ve got the Jim Crow era with Elias Camp Morris. Each of these figures represents the spirit of justice in their own way. So, hopefully, it draws folks in. Then the background is this red tint over a painting of enslaved people arriving on the shores of North America. So the backdrop is this black oppression, but in the foreground are the people who worked against it.
FM: So is it safe to say that perhaps then one of these three figures, among the 50, inspired you the most?
Tisby: I wish I could have put all 50 on the cover. They’re inspirational in their own ways, really and truly. But, you know, my mind kind of comes back to a few figures. One is Sister Thea Bowman. She’s born in Mississippi in the 1930s. She’s a Black girl who ends up going to a Roman Catholic school in her tiny town. And she’s got a really tender heart for the things of God. Gets baptized into the Roman Catholic Church as a young girl, and then as a teenager, senses a call to holy orders and ends up becoming a nun. And she’s highly intelligent. She goes on to get her Ph.D., and she becomes an educator.
She’s also passionate about racial reconciliation, racial justice. She’s also coming up in the Roman Catholic Church during the 1970s and ’80s, where there’s this transition from civil rights to Black power, from saying Negro to Black. The way that works out in the Roman Catholic Church is Black priests and congregation members are like, “Yo, this predominantly White male clergy has been telling us what to believe, how to believe, what to say, how to say. We have our own voice. We have our own agency.” So she comes along as a woman who is encouraging the Roman Catholic hierarchy to let Black people have some self-determination within the Roman Catholic Church and to truly make the church universal, as its name implies.
Advocacy and Resistance
FM: Early on in The Spirit of Justice, you mention resistance, advocacy and activism, and their differences and commonalities. Why did you think it was necessary to draw out those distinctions?
Tisby: I’m glad you asked. I think it’s important. I included a breadth of figures doing a wide variety of activities, some we may not initially think of as justice-oriented, like having a family. I categorize that as resistance because anything you do to assert your humanity in a world that is bent against you is a form of resistance. It can be mundane. It can be writing poetry. It can be going for a walk outside. It can be starting a school, whatever it might be. That’s resistance.
But it may not be conscious resistance. You getting a good night of sleep is not necessarily you consciously thinking, “I’m sticking it to white supremacy.” But it is, because it’s built on Black labor exploitation and the lack of rest. But you may not be conscious of it while you’re doing it. Advocacy is more conscious, and it’s a supportive role primarily. It amplifies, it builds awareness. I think for a lot of people, especially White folks in 2020 with the racial justice uprisings, they got catalyzed, so they started sharing posts on social media. They started attending events, reading books, hosting book clubs. Those kinds of things are advocacy. You’re amplifying. You’re building awareness.
But then there’s another step or another category of resistance, which would be activism. I think that’s what we traditionally think of. It’s the marches, it’s the protests, it’s the boycotts, it’s the community organizers, the nonprofit leaders, the people on the front lines, sometimes literally putting their bodies on the line for justice. These are the folks advocates sort of prop up and lift up in support. But they’re more direct, frontlines folks.
Telling the Whole Truth
FM: You also emphasize telling the whole truth about history, that if we’re going to claim the heroes then we have to tell the whole truth. Why is that important?
Tisby: I just think we need these stories now. We are facing, honestly, a whitelash to what we saw in 2020. We don’t have to get into this, but in many ways, it’s a whitelash to the first Black president and what happened there. Most recently, no sooner did we have these historic racial justice uprisings in 2020, the calendar turns over to [20]21, and we have an insurrection. The Confederate flag in the U.S. Capitol building. So that’s part and parcel of what else has happened. The rise of White Christian Nationalism, anti-CRT, defunding D.E.I., rolling back affirmative action provisions, opposing African American Studies curricula.
This is an opposition to history on two fronts. One, it’s an opposition to this triumphant, heroic story of American history that’s one of perpetual progress. Yeah, we had these blemishes of slavery and segregation in the past, but we’re over it now. See, America is fundamentally good, and we always eventually do the right thing. It goes against that narrative. The other thing that opposing this history does is it robs us of our power. See, if we knew the stories, if we knew about Anna Murray Douglass, if we knew how Coretta Scott King struggled and thrived and fought even after her husband’s assassination, if we knew about Paul Cuffee and Robert Smalls and the rest, then we might sense our own power to continue to resist and to continue work for justice. So this is subversive history, and it’s a history that we need right now to continue to move toward a more perfect union.
The Evangelicals for Harris Call
FM: You participated in the Evangelicals for Harris Zoom call. Are you an Evangelical for Harris?
Tisby: So I introduced myself as a Christian for democracy. You know, there was space in the way it was pitched to me in the invitation for Evangelical-adjacent people. That’s where I would put myself. I simply call myself a Black Christian, but I know Evangelicals, even if I don’t use the label myself. So I felt some interest in speaking to that group. And then, for Harris. I mean, for me, it’s not like a sort of blanket endorsement. It’s just saying that in this two-party system, when the choices are Trump and Harris, I’m voting for Harris because I want to preserve the peaceful transfer of power. I value basic adherence to facts and truth. And obviously, there are ways and areas that we need to push this administration on, but we can do that. Whereas with the other party and the other candidate, the people in general would have no say. He’s answering to a very narrow constituency, if any at all.
The Reality of Project 2025
FM: Project 2025, a far-right conservative blueprint for refashioning the federal government under a Republican president, has a lot of people ringing the alarm. But do you think this is something that could realistically come to pass?
Tisby: Absolutely. The first Trump administration was a dry run. January 6, 2021, was a dry run. The infrastructure for willfully subverting democracy wasn’t quite in place. You even had Republicans and other conservatives, like the secretary of state in Georgia [who] were like, “No, we’re not going to just overrule the will of the people.” Project 2025, 900-plus pages, all kinds of ins and outs. But fundamentally, what it wants to do is replace key figures with folks who are loyal to Trump and will do whatever he wants.
FM: Do you think he really wants to be a dictator?
Tisby: This is my opinion. I think fundamentally, Trump wants to be the center of attention. He stumbled into winning a presidency that even he didn’t think he could win. And then he can send a tweet, and the whole world pays attention. That kind of attention, that kind of focus, that kind of “everyone listens to me” is unparalleled. I think he will do absolutely anything to get back there. I think he’s actually less interested in power than some people are. But he will use authoritarian style tactics to make sure that he stays the center of attention. So, to me, I think fundamentally Trump is about attention, and the presidency is a means to an end. If his pathway to the presidency subverts democracy, then so be it.
Resilience Amid Religious Infighting
FM: How do you stay resilient amid the kind of discord we’re seeing in general and also within Christianity, like the name-calling and attacks on education, educators, equity, and then even personal attacks on your faith?
Tisby: I think fundamentally, the most important thing for me to sort of keep my head about me is you find your people. Here’s the thing that folks don’t see on the other side of an exiting, a deconstructing, a decolonizing journey, is you only see what you’re leaving. You only see the community that you’re losing. You don’t anticipate the community that you gain on this journey of justice. So that, for me, has been the real sort of expression of the church, the people who are the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, doing good in the world but also loving well.
So, the group chat is a lifeline, right? When I can go to certain cities and visit people, because we’re all spread out. But the long night over dinner and conversation, that’s really recreation in the classic sense of recreating. To me, it’s becoming much more about daily small habits and practices that keep you healthy. I have a stretching routine in the morning. I have a journaling routine. I have an exercise routine. Because I’m a very big believer, and increasingly so, in this mind-body-soul connection. So if we’re not doing what we can to keep our bodies healthy and even our [minds] sort of more positive and expansive, all of this stuff gets harder. So it’s self-care, but not just the let’s go to a spa and do essential oils. But what does it look like on a daily, practical basis?
FM: Is there anything you would like to add that we didn’t touch on?
Tisby: The question that kept popping up for me with this book was: How do we address the question of how do you keep going when it looks like you’re not winning? Not all that long ago, a lot of us were resigned to another Trump presidency. An ascendant White Christian Nationalism, the demoralizing state that we experienced post-Covid, post-George Floyd, all of that stuff.
We had this brief glimmer of maybe things might change. Then, not only did they go back, but we may have lost ground. So how do you stay in the struggle? How do you keep on fighting? To me, it’s these stories. Jesus spoke in stories, in parables, in narratives so people could understand and so that people would get inspired, it would teach us. So I end the book with four virtues. I talk about faith. I talk about hope. I talk about imagination, resilience, [and] courage…. Those are the things that I hope people get out of the book. I hope you get inspired to continue on this journey of racial justice by learning the real, true stories of people who came before us, and, because of their faith, tapped into the spirit of justice to keep fighting for a better world.