The Dungeons Shook in Jesus’ Name: Juneteenth, Abolition and Black Christian Imagination

What’s So Special About Today?

It is Juneteenth. Juneteenth is the day that we as Black people celebrate the (sort-of) end to slavery. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers came to Galveston, Texas with news that the war was over.

It’s like Miss One said, “Now that you’ve freed us, we can all go back to running our business.”

“Miss One’s the name and if you haven’t guessed by now, numbers is my game, and now that you’ve freed us, we can all go back to runnin’ our business.”Image: Pinterest. — “Miss One’s the name and if you haven’t guessed by now, numbers is my game, and now that you’ve freed us, we can all go back to runnin’ our business.”
Image: Pinterest.

Of course, this notice came two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. On another day, we might spend time just screaming about that lag. Two and a half years is a long-ass time.

On this day, Black people find creative ways to honor the message. Some people host community events or cookouts. Some folks hold festivals. Some dedicate their sermons or classrooms to this story. Some people hold poetry readings.

How will we celebrate Juneteenth 2020? How do we celebrate freedom in the midst of a global health crisis, an ongoing economic emergency, unending state sanctioned (and rewarded) violence at the hands of police officers, transphobic and patriarchal violence at the hands of people we’re forced to call “brothers,” and continued climate emergencies?

How?

Chile. Ionno.

But I do know that our most magnificent ancestors dreamed a world beyond even this one. They knew that the People could fly. They found ways to protect themselves and others. Even if it meant running away. Or poisoning their captors. Or finding creative ways to ruin their captor’s wealth. They stole themselves. Because we were (and still are) capital.

It is in their honor that we call ourselves abolitionists. This reflection is especially designed to support Black Christians who need to remember who we are.

When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous, but dismay to evildoers.

Proverbs 21:15, NRSV.

A Story

About two years ago on my block in Bed-Stuy, someone was arrested. The young person shouted out “every time, I’m so sick of y’all, every time.” It was clear this was not their first meeting. I woke up to the commotion of cops banging on nearby doors looking for him. They were not efficient. And in their failure to knock on the right door, they’d disrupted everyone’s slumber. I could see neighbors peeking from their windows. I eventually left my house, hoping to be a visible presence on my way to work. But by the time I was outside, the young person and the police had vanished.

A white resident of our block (I will not call her a neighbor) was standing outside with her two small children.

“Did they talk to you while you were out here?” I regret asking.

“I have no clue what happened.”

She was unbothered. I wondered what her children were making of this display. My time-traveling hunch is that this’ll be a moment they’ll passively understand themselves as White. Perhaps this story would become a dinner party story someday. I can see it now.

“I grew up in Bed Stuy in the 2020’s, actually, Todd. And let me tell you, I saw people being arrested when I was a kid…”

When this resident put eyes on the young Black man in cuffs, she said without missing a beat, “I guess we’re safe now.”

I was so angry that I walked away. I felt my blood boiling. I felt the space behind my eyes getting hot with tears.

Gentrification is deeper than “trap yoga” and novelty one-item-only restaurants. Gentrification imagines that Black people removed from our community will automatically mean safety. Gentrification requires the cooperation of multiple institutions, including police, schools, banks, courts and of course, housing.

This resident had been taught that she was safer without us. She had no ties here. No awareness of names or faces. No reverence for who this street is named for and who goes to what church and whose children come over for the holidays. She was powered by a casual and polite patience. She was protected while she innocently and benevolently prayed that we would be gone.

I imagined that she would silently pray for us to “leave” (or be removed) so she could settle in peace.

I guess we’re safe now.

These are nice folks, not violent ones. They voted for Obama (like the parents in Get Out) and went to the Women’s March.

Here’s the hat. Here’s the safety pin. They hold up these artifacts as museum-like proof that they couldn’t be our enemy.

But still, they say, I guess we’re safe now.

Instead of wondering where this young person would go, how his absence would impact his family, if she needed to use her White skin to at least de-escalate the violent dragging, or even curiously wondering what he could have done to be picked up so early, she saw this entire event as a project aimed for her safety. The lack of human compassion was astounding. Predictable.

I guess we’re safe now.

As a Christian minister, I believe that this logic comes from imagining God as a cop who punishes, polices and even favors. Octavia Butler named Him as the “big-cop-God.” Some have been taught that Heaven “has walls” and so should we. We often project our hopes and desires for our own power onto God. You can tell a lot about a person by how they imagine God. And how they dream.

My nightmare is that early-morning snatch-ups will be routine. That we would become so accustomed to the violence of hyper-militarized police forces that we might consider it normal. Necessary, even. That we would forget who used to live here because they have been “disappeared,” as Dr. Angela Davis would say. My fear is that we would replicate these dynamics even among ourselves by punishing our children in school when they don’t wear the right tie or bring the right folder.

But for this resident, my nightmare was somehow her sweet dream. Because if someone else could be responsible for moving folks from their homes, it would not be her responsibility or fault. She and her family could be “safe now.”

Guilt-free.

What Our Ancestors Require

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. -- Galatians 5:1 NRSV

I first heard the word “abolition” as a girl at the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York. I heard this word every time we rehearsed the church history in May for our Church Anniversary. Our first pastor, Rev. Sampson White, was a well-known Black abolitionist who was responsible for starting churches all along the Eastern Seaboard. Rev. White was a founding visionary whose work connects Alfred Street Baptist Church (Alexandria, Virginia), Nineteenth Street Baptist Church (Washington, D.C.), Abyssinian Baptist Church (Harlem, New York), Court Street Baptist Church (Lynchburg, Virginia) and my home church, Concord Baptist Church of Christ. This is not an exhaustive list.

(I got this history lesson from Rev. Dr. Gary V. Simpson, who happens to be the leading pastor of Concord. Happy Father’s Day Weekend, my guy.)

Freedom was risky and dangerous. Church ought not be a space that numbs us to the pain of our siblings. Church is where we should be empowered to use the most ethical concepts of our faith towards the project of freedom. According to our own church history, Rev. White encouraged Concorders to use their homes as safe havens for self-liberated people. When we celebrate our church anniversary, I reflect on the courage and integrity necessary for freedom.

image: ConcordCares.orgRev. Leonard Black — image: *ConcordCares.org*
Rev. Leonard Black

But his story is just the beginning.

What urgently compels me to call myself an Abolitionist Christian is the story of Rev. Leonard Black. In 1847, the very year Concord was founded in a Downtown Brooklyn living room, Rev. Leonard Black wrote a memoir about his experience as an enslaved person. Rev. Black would come to be one of Concord’s pastors with a notably short pastorate. Union Theological Seminary’s Church Historian Rev. Dr. James Washington (bless his memory) did some digging and found that his tenure was so short due to the Fugitive Slave Act.

Rev. Leonard Black was a self-liberated pastor.

As a self-liberated person (not “runaway”), his freedom was conditional. The Fugitive Slave Act required “free states” to return self-liberated persons back to their former “owners.” When things popped off, he had to leave his very public post as pastor at Concord and get himself somewhere safe.

This Freedom Life is not a game. It is not a brand. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Rev. Black was enslaved.

He found his way to Brooklyn and enjoyed the illusion of freedom for some time.

Became a whole pastor.

And in the middle of serving, he had to dip again.

Jesus the Stressed Christ.

Hear ye him:

This is the cover of Rev. Leonard Black’s memoir. This image is credited to Encyclopedia Virginia.

“It is a matter of astonishment that slavery has so long existed, and yet that its enormities have taken so little hold of a people professing to be Christians. In a country whose inhabitants dipped their hands in blood to establish FREEDOM, there are over two and a half millions of human beings, entitled to all the rights of white men, held in absolute bondage. Are the people of this nation aware of this fact? Thousands of times has this awful truth been reiterated in the ears of American Christians, and yet from the profound indifference which yet generally exists on the subject, we are led to ask, Do the people of this nation realize the fact? More than any other nation on earth we boast of our liberty, our refinement, our advancement in the arts and sciences, our railroads, our various facilities for intercommunication, and all the outward appliances to render life comfortable. We have seized upon the very lightning of Heaven, and commanded it to bear our messages from one distant point to another without the intervention of time, literally annihilating all space: and we not only boast of these things, but we aver in the face of the abhorrent fact of slavery, that we are the most virtuous nation on earth!”

In other words, how the hell did y’all learn how to harness “the very lightning of Heaven” to transmit messages across the nation, but y’all still practicing slavery? How you figure out how to send people into space while refusing to figure out how to feed people with dignity in a pandemic? You mean to tell me space missions are more immediately possible than guaranteed housing for everyone? All this science and technology, and y’all still racist and useless? Make it make sense.

Given the legacy of Slave Patrols as the proto-police, I cannot in good conscience call myself a Black Christian without also committing to the call of abolition. I thank God for political education and reading groups where we can chew on these ideas in community. Because it would be a disgrace to people like Leonard Black, Sampson White and Harriet Tubman otherwise. I want to be worthy of their (involuntary) sacrifice.

If we meet on the Other Side, I hope to be embraced by their smiles and hugs. I want them to say, “Alright now! Here comes our daughter!”

I would be so damn embarrassed if I got to Heaven and my ancestors roasted me.

“Y’all had some cute tee-shirts, sis. You’re not your ancestors? I still can’t believe you put our names on tee shirts and still championed 8CantWait. Girl. Is this is what y’all been calling Woke? OK, Sis.”

A friend of mine said, “we must interrogate why the same folks who ran to theaters to celebrate Harriet Tubman last year wince when they hear the term abolition today.” Thanks James Howard Hill Jr. And Yikes!

It is what it is.

Rev. Black’s story teaches me that the State will always surveil and track Black folks. No one is exempt from State Terror called Slavery. Yes, even pastors. And that should humble every single one of us who attempts to preach the gospel. We have not arrived.

On everything, comrades, the collar is not going to save you. If you decided to follow Christ because you thought you’d be saved from certain doom on Earth, whew chillay! The stole will not protect you. The robe does not un-Blackify you. There is no baptism for a Black Christian that renders us bulletproof.

Celebrity, even religious celebrity, will not insulate us from the Evil of this World. And shame on any one who believes we are covered just because we have a few degrees, titles, letters or a glossy headshot.

Perhaps that is why Jesus spends so much time telling the people, “please, do not go Live on this sermon and do not take my picture. I am really trying to not be yoked up by the State. You are giving the Roman Soldiers my coordinates right now, at least blur my picture?”

Those of us who hold the gospel sacred must remember that this is not a platform for the sole purpose of going viral. This gospel, the gospel of Rev. Leonard Black, Harriet Tubman and Jarena Lee, ought to be one that sets people free. This is the gospel that reminds people they can live into the best version of themselves. This is the gospel that refuses to replicate toxic and colonizing theologies that do violence to trans people, queer people, disabled and chronically ill people, undocumented people, and women.

Heaven help you if you’ve checked more than one of these categories at a time.

The Homework

Abolition cannot be a cutesy metaphor for us as Black Christians. It is a major part of our history. We must explore the stories of Black Christian abolitionists, resist the Evil of Easy Theology today, and figure out what a Free future looks like. Enough of this cotton candy Christian “name it and claim it,” “you deserve it,” “Lord Jamighty” “my god can beat your god’s ass” theology. We need the kind of God-talk that settles and makes roots when it can, and gets us THE FCK out when it must. It already exists.

Because Rev. Black AND Lauren Olamina taught us.

To me, modern Christian abolitionist theology means a world without prisons. Periodt.

I know there is a place prepared for us. I believe in a world without police (or policing mechanisms). If I told you what is there, you can also imagine what is not.

The abolitionist desires:

Dignified housing
Quality culturally responsive education
Healthy and delicious food to nourish our bodies
Affirming and inclusive healthcare
Compassionate services for emotional/spiritual/mental wellness
Spaces to dream and imagine
A green near-future that invests in Earth-healing industries

It’s why we believe this.

Abolition is not a euphemism. We said what we said. We can reorient our world to care for each person before harm is done.

And when folks do inevitably cross lines, we can restore folks and get them what they need to be well. Until then, let’s close jails, raise the age, ban the box, and give folks a clean slate so they can provide for themselves in this present capitalist society. These reinvestments are pathways to abolition. I’m clear an entire revolution must take place to turn this world right side up. It’s going to take more than people kneeling in kente cloth and painting yellow murals (on streets I can’t afford to live on) to get there.

Abolition is about building the infrastructure that can hold the complexity of human needs outside of prisons and policing.

Abolitionist artist and filmmaker Tourmaline said, in a now viral tweet, “When we say abolish police. We also mean the cop in your head and in your heart.” If we are free, we need to think about how we imprison ourselves and others. We need to think about the scripts we play in our head about what a “real man” looks like and how a “woman should behave.” We need to pay attention to the things we tell our bodies. What good is defunding police if we still regulate and police the most beautiful parts of ourselves?

The challenge: Outside is closed for the foreseeable future. Take this time to enjoy the abolitionist imagination. Beyond the Zooms, panels and Digi-Conferences, what is freedom? You’ve probably watched as many Zooms as I have by now. What concrete steps can you take today in service of your people? What does abolition look like for you? What does it taste like? What are you fighting for? Who do you see by your side? What glimpses of heaven have you seen that can be modified for your own community?

To my Black Christian comrades, never forget that the dungeons shook and the captives were set free. That’s not a metaphor. It’s not flowery poetic language. If we can take anything literally in the Bible, let it be this:

25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26 Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. (Acts 16:25-26).

This is the call to abolition. Get in the spaceship, we’re going to Saturn.

Did you get the message? We are free.

Parts of this reflection were adapted from a submission to Chicago Theological Seminary’s “Let’s Get Free: A Case for Abolition Theology.” It was a digital roundtable offering, starting with Darnell Moore’s talk and a few responses from Black pastors and faith leaders. You can view the video and reflection series in its entirety here.
The lead photo on this reflection is from Encyclopedia Virginia. The people in this photo are formerly enslaved folks at a convention in D.C. The caption reads at the above link: “IMAGE: Washington, D.C., 1916. “Convention of former slaves. Annie Parram, age 104; Anna Angales, age 105; Elizabeth Berkeley, 125; Sadie Thompson, 110.” National Photo Company Collection glass negative.”
The linked memes and reaction videos are intentionally curated. I am a Black Queer Millennial who uses memes/vines/reaction videos as a teaching support. It is common on Twitter, for example, that people will use reaction videos to communicate. I want to also acknowledge that doing so (without context) might be understood as turning people into jokes. Any reaction video that you see here is intentionally linked because sometimes Hazel London can say things that I just can’t. Hot take: Memes and reaction videos are cultural work.