thank you very much so our plenary speaker today I'm going to abbreviate
his very long and amazing bio so we can hear from him
Reverend Starsky Wilson from st. Louis is a pastor philanthropist and activist
he is currently president and CEO of the Deaconess Foundation and pastor of st.
John's Church in st. Louis and if you don't know Deaconess it's an incredible
faith-based grant-making organization that is focused on child well-being as a
civic priority for the st. Louis region and it's a great example of collective
impact that aligns policy advocacy organization and community engagement
with its grant making I can't tell you it's amazing just sitting
and talking to Reverend Wilson just the ideas and reflections upon the role of
museums and libraries and I think his experience when he was appointed in 2014
to co-chair the Ferguson Commission in response to the tragedy of Michael
Brown's death really I think his reflections upon that in addition to his
work at the Deaconess Foundation will set us off on our journey today and
tomorrow so I really thank you so much for making time to be here and we look
forward to your comments thank you [Applause]
good morning it is indeed a pleasure to be here thank
you very much kit and to the team at the Institute for Museum and Library
Services for the occasion to be with each of you this morning I it is
appropriate for me always and of course thanks to the partners at William Penn
foundation and the reinvestment fund as well for support of this convening it is
always appropriate for me to do level setting with folks to let people know my
defaults I am a preacher I am a black preacher in case you didn't notice I am
a black preacher from the south who happens to be
serving at a foundation and spent some time leading commissioned those things
being said in public space I have to let you know because I also serve a very
diverse church at st. John's Church in st. Louis and that church has folks from
all different cultural backgrounds there in the inner city in st. Louis and so I
am reminded at times that I have to give certain people permission to do things
and so I'm going to do this so those in our church who grew up in black church
traditions they grew up talking back to the preacher
what I found out is service to this church in a previous church I served
which is also racially diverse is that my European brothers and sisters find it
rude to speak when other people are speaking
and so I actually have to give them permission so if there are things that
seem to connect with you you disagree with you disagree hold that to yourself
but if there are things that resonate with
you I invite you to speak back to me it might actually help me keep my time just
for the record the other thing actually of context wrong is there's a set of
images that will be rolling on the screen that is behind you I find it
inappropriate with spoken word to invite people into the experiences of people in
very difficult and even tragic circumstances and so I've come to try to
share with folks to get them closer to the experiences that we have had in the
st. Louis metropolitan community since the August 9th 2014 death of Michael
Brown and the following community uprising with different sets of images I
invite you they will rotate on a loop so I'm not clicking through they will
rotate on that loop to invite you to engage in the experience and some of
these things I will connect with throughout the time of the presentation
and if it is the case that you just get tired of looking at me there are better
things perhaps more engaging things to look at there
I'd like to begin with a reflection and a quote from my grandfather my
grandfather RL Turner is the late RL Turner was a cook in the army
and he's one of those folks everyone needs these folks kit when you can't
remember who said something you need somebody to attribute it to and so there
are three or four voices I have like this this is one of the things that I
know my grandfather actually said one of the things he always told me he
said things like every man needs a truck because if you got a truck you'll never
be out of work right he also said things this common wisdom like there are two
things they ain't making no more of time and land
and not giving me any more time and they're gonna be any more land
this common reflection on the fact that there will be no more land produced
there will be no more space produced calls us to be thoughtful about how we
use the spaces that we have he of course was always trying to remind
me he was focusing on the time part do what you can while you can and make good
use of your time be expedient in your engagement be a good steward of that
which God has given you but this piece about land I think is appropriate for us
in time and space today that we're going we're not getting any more space and so
perhaps there's something we should be doing with the space that we have to
make the best and optimal use of that space I am particularly reminded of the
sense of scarcity about land that my gran father instituted to me when I
consider the modalities of public protests that we see taking center stage
today I am it is cognizant this comes to my mind when I
see and remember the images of the Occupy movement taking up space in New
York in public parks in spaces for the sake of recreation community building
and reflection I am reminded when I consider
the meetings that occurred some in the basement of my church to organize with
folks in the BLM the black lives matter movement and network the shutdown
movement that began to spring up in the fall of 2014 stopping up highways across
the country in concert with one another these young people from Chattanooga to
Atlanta to st. Louis who took public space for the sake of shutting down
public op operations in order to get a point and a message across those who sat
in the street and can feel and West Florissant in st. Louis near the place
where Michael Brown's body lay they decided because there was no more land
being produced they would reinterpret reuse and stop up for the sake of
repurposing the land that was used particularly public land
there seems to be it seems to me a desperation about public space I was
reminded of this in August late August of 2014 I got an email I got an email
from a staff person from one of our local museums this email from the staff
person at one of our local museums in st. Louis invited me or my colleague
Mike Kinmen the leader and Dean of the local Cathedral to provide space for a
what was called the Ferguson Freedom Ride a group of activists led by
patrisse cullors one of the cofounders of the black lives matter movement and
Darnell Lee out of New Jersey who is one of the lead
as well helped to organize from coast to coast more than 450 people on - and in
two and a half weeks - descend upon the community in st. Louis and Ferguson the
problem was that with 24 hours left with all of these people who had raised funds
to make it there the public university institution that told them that they
could convene there for four days all of a sudden told them that they
couldn't come when they got a better sense of what they were going to do
the museum official reached out to the church leaders because the public
university decided that they would not house this particular group and so from
public space and public space to sacred space these activists found a place to
abide and to engage there are images you will see here of Patrice and Darnell and
their images you'll see of a sanctuary full of people with black power fist up
because they are in that church space which wasn't very comfortable familiar
just for the record the church didn't have best history or
some of these things about dress code and deportment and behavior and
progressive sexual orientation all these Madison so and so wasn't exactly the
space they expect it but the public spaces turned them our
direction poeple said I'm sorry that's what I
called my grandfather when I'm not in these more formalized settings pawpaw
said there's two things they're making no more of time and land and so when the
public spaces and land turned them in a different direction they found
themselves in the church it seems to me what we've had what we have is a problem
of shrinking public space spaces where we might connect spaces where we might
learn from one that one out of the first spaces where we may grow spaces where we
make dialogue for the sake of getting to a different answer spaces where we may
be exposed one to another come to know one another and dream
together this is part of what I experienced in this shrinking public
space with the BLM movement it is also perhaps what has led to what some would
call the desperate tactics of occupy and desperate tactics of BLM to shut down
spaces and even to reclaim spaces that we thought were ours in the first place
on the anniversary of Michael Brown's death actually the day after the
anniversary on August 10th 2015 there were people actually in this
gathering this gathering of folks whom you seal it by Bree Newsome here and
rahael testa maryam wearing a t-shirt that will be in the Smithsonian Museum
for African American culture we found ourselves barricaded from a public space
in the US federal courthouse here that Cornel West and Reverend Assad Ruffo
sake who overcome the barrier as we overcome that
barrier we're seeking to enter into the federal courthouse to deliver a letter
from a group of clergy to the US attorney but we are barricaded from this
public space and so we began to take a seat I should also say connecting the
sacred and the public part of what we did before we went in was we took sacred
oils from various traditions and we anointed the space for the sake of
reclaiming it for God's people we are clergy by the way as we sought to do
that we then sought to enter the space without being without being let into the
space that was paid for by tax dollars we took a seat there in the front of the
doors and for taking such action in this previously articulated public space we
were summarily erect arrested 73 of us and that morning action later that day
young people led a shutdown of a highway and there were some 120-plus of them
arrested this for you may note it didn't go over well with the governor who had
appointed me to the commission but I want to suggest that this raises a
question what might this have to do with you what might an occupy and shut down
protest modality that speaks to a scarcity of sacred space say about
previously public spaces in the spaces that we have known to be public like
libraries and museums I want to offer that in this sense of scarcity museums
and libraries may well be a redeemed and/or redemptive public spaces for
catalyzing beloved community yeah I very intentionally use this term
that is eschatological that is theological that speaks to our hopes
this term popularized by dr. King of Beloved Community Aegina Bernard Hill of
Louisville Presbyterian seminary speaks of Beloved Community as a multicultural
multicultural multiracial community of love and justice where love peace and
justice were love is the governing ethic this is the space that many of us hope
for it is reflective quite frankly of the work and the aspirations of 3,000
citizens who engage in the Ferguson Commission process gave more than 30,000
volunteer hours to make worth more than 189 policy recommendations and
call-to-action calls to action for various sources of public engagement and
accountable bodies what they said ultimately is that we desire racial
equity in our community we want that for ourselves and that we decided to do this
together the question is how might we resource that in order to get there I
think as I kind of walk briefly through my experiences I want to suggest that
there are a few things we need that museums and libraries may help to
provide that will help us get to this sense of Beloved Community even with the
limited time and space that we have if I was in church I'd say is that
Alright I'd ask you know is it okay that I share that with you before I went
further first I want to suggest part of what we
need is sanctuary now I'm reminded so I serve a small
church small church pastors do everything Matt fat in st. Louis
language small church pastors do earth one of the things I found myself doing
at this small church when I was called to the church you're about 25 people
worshipping in the sanctuary that holds about 300 plus people that didn't make
for a hope filled reality and so every now and then you had to do something and
one of the cheapest things you could do for the sake of helping people know that
this face this building that's almost 100 years old that now seems almost
empty one of the earliest things that I sought to do with I painted stuff and I
you know I don't you know don't don't remind my wife because I don't like
paint stuff at home but I painted stuff at the church I painted sunday-school
rooms I painted nurseries i payment classrooms I planted offices it was
something I could do with the young guys or the churches you know just send your
grandson down here on Saturday we don't paint stuff right and and but one of the
most significant things I paint it was the doors I
painted the doors of every outer door of the church we paint it red
for those who wonder why you see so many church doors red there is a narrative
particularly from Western churches and those with traditions like ours from
Protestant mainline with roots in Europe that red doors of a space particularly
of a church or sanctuary in time of war suggested that it was safe space if a
soldier someone who was fleeing an enemy found their way through the doors then
that enemy who is pursuing would not go over that threshold there were times
quite frankly we had to remind people of this history when on the night of the
announcement of the no true bill in the Darren Wilson case churches were used as
sanctuary and we had to first negotiate with police that when people are running
from tear gas if they come inside the church you can't come in in order to
have in order to work toward the love community in order to get to the kind of
dialogue that we desire our public spaces must be sanctuary now I must
suggest to you that this is not our default because we really don't
understand sanctuary we believe sanctuary is neutral space when
sanctuary is actually safe space and those two things are different
what do I mean I want to suggest the sanctuary affords me things that are
counter to what I see in the world those who do you
that when you work with young people from tragic and traumatic circumstances
and poverty is trauma violence is trauma when they come into a space to do work
with those who seek to serve and support them that can't just be open space that
anyone can say anything they need that needs to be space with boundaries that
needs to be space with perspective and that needs to be space that's consistent
and I'm offering that part of what we need for the sake of fulfilling the
project of Beloved Community through participatory democracy and dialogue and
collective action and our neighborhoods communities and cities is actually
sanctuary we need safe space now now now I know you're saying well it's yeah
everybody's welcome to safe space no our defaults are all
the same museum space that welcomed all of our meetings of the Ferguson
Commission that welcomed mainstream institutions of st. Louis that welcomed
the governor when he wanted to announce that we were going to have a commission
we're gonna work toward our issues that same space I happen to try to go into on
a Sunday with my son and because there was some fights that broke out at the
zoo that's on a place very near where several of our museums are the museum
doors were locked so not only could I not get in but young people who were
fleeing difficulty in another public space could not get in and part of the
understanding part of the defense was that the actual museum was not owned by
the public but rather owned by the Society of donors and members and such
that it could keep people out museum supported by taxes from our zoo
museum district that all of those citizens including those young people's
parents pay in order to make sure its doors stay open this space that is open
for neutral dialogue found its to lock its doors from young people on that
occasion hi the same citizen who was welcome in when I was invited by the
governor was locked out when my son needed to get in there my ten year old
son needed to get inside like the other young people who had been pressed across
the park this was not sanctuary even though it claimed to be neutral
space I want to argue I want to trouble the conversation just a little bit that
you will have about what it means to be safe sanctuary and not just neutral
space and what it means to have a full museum or library culture that
understands this matter such that it is not the default of the security guard or
the staff who happens to work on the weekends to lock the doors
we see pictures here of the church a sacred
space and I even quite frankly recognize the challenge in that the context of
religious pluralism the church or the sanctuary as we have known it in the
Christian tradition the place of the pulpit or the Bema and judeo-christian
circles is not exactly will not serve fully the purposes that we require for
this moment a community is a way to diverse then too many perspectives and
so my sanctuary with the cross hanging and blacklivesmatter signs
even exactly on me the space that will be sanctuary for all we need
space that is sanctuary not only do we need sanctuary but we also need story
one of the great challenges early on and I my first the first week of the
uprising I unfortunately watched from North Carolina the great challenge of
the conversation was that it told one story but the young people from my
church were telling another what I saw on CNN every morning was different than
what I saw in the pictures that were being text to me
stories seek the truth there is a challenge in capital interest
interested narrative shaping and we saw that we see that in all of these uh
prizes because they they're spoken to you through the lens of our biases I
want to suggest that your spaces or spaces where we might in community seek
truth through story not just seek accuracy through detail-oriented
research this is why this sense of truth and
story is why Deaconess Foundation found it critically important to invest early
in August of 2014 in creating a Ferguson youth organizing fund
that we knew that there were people who are telling young people's stories
speaking on behalf of seeking to support but no one knows your story like you and
so our investment was to support more organizing and even to invest in the
Commission's work once we understood that we can influence how the Commission
did its work if this would be as Lindsey Lupo has written about 100 years of riot
commission politics in America seeking to get the best answers off the shelf to
reproduce and process people's emotions so that they felt better about the issue
six weeks later if we were just gonna have some meetings so we could say we
have meetings and we would not actually go to people where they were reach out
to people and hear their pains if we would just make presentations of papers
and never offer people the public space to tell their stories then there would
not be worth investing in but the the definition of collective action requires
us to listen to and to amplify one another's stories the libraries the the
museums become space where we might do that you see some of our meetings going
through these spaces in order to hear people's stories and give them an
opportunity to be heard this is how when we use and think about the collective
impact framework we might actually get to a common agenda on that is actually
common because it is developed in common space
we need sanctuary we need story but we also need sources
this is the part where the preacher says I'm almost done
we need sources the Commission the Ferguson Commission's
report is found at forward through Ferguson org
there you get a sense of the story of people because they're more than 70
folks who talk about how these issues impact them and how these
recommendations may impact them as well I tell people all the time you can
download the report into a little spiral document but it won't have the stories
so that's just a compliment you don't know it unless you know the stories
but the great power that we see there is also in the sources part of our aim was
to suggest that we needed to engage racial equity and it's one thing to have
dialogue and hear one another but it's another thing to do that to have
sufficient supports in that document the community that says that what we desire
is a future of racial equity in our in our region well we lay out is a path
toward racial equity but we did so recognizing that we did not have
sufficient supports and sources to inform our aspirations
within the repositories of these libraries museums it seems to me there
are sources to give context for our lives our hopes and even our tragedies
what would it mean for our collective learning to be fully engaged and to have
engaged and to be engaged by our network our deeply rich resource in our
community of our museums of our libraries I was reminded of this
recently on a research trip to Greensboro North Carolina I was there on
the coincidence of history had the occasion to be there to study the Truth
and Reconciliation the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation project I have deep
interest as life turns right so God gives you these kinds of tragedies
you've got to have context for them so you begin to study and that's what I
began to do I began to study reconciliation processes across the
globe and recognize that the only one carried out an American song US soil was
in Greensboro and so I went there to learn from those folks the Greensboro
truth and reconciliation project while I was there I came to meet a card Barnes a
high school student from Dudley high school who was such an activist I like
people that good troublemakers like that I like him he's such an activist that
when he ran for student body president in his high school that Dudley high the
administrators and local leaders wouldn't put him on the ballot he was
too much of an activist he was connected with his brother by the name of Nelson
Johnson Nelson Johnson was there at North Carolina A&T who is really a
rabble rouser and they said just because you're with him we're not gonna put you
on the ballot but I'll tell you how the people work he got written in and won
the election six hundred to two hundred votes
so there had an opportunity to sit down with card and there we were able to put
in the context I was able to deeply dig into the story of that of that student
movement in North Carolina A&T to to put in conversation with what we experienced
in Ferguson the matter of of troops and state troopers being called out shooting
into North Carolina A&T college over four days a shootout on the campus to
put that in conversation with the Greensboro massacre where people have
been killed by the Ku Klux Klan and a labor rally to put that in conversation
with the sit-in movement that began there on February first in the 1960s
there at that lunch counter and Woolworths and that I was able to piece
together for my meetings at faith community church where the Beloved
Community Center is and my gathering at the International Civil Rights Museum
there at the there in Greensboro downtown but at the same time by
coincidence of history I had the occasion to speak and to preach at the
book at the black lives matter movement national network convening which was
also there
it seemed to me that there was an ordering of context
and source and resource for the movement today with those young people gathered
from all over primarily North America to learn and to convene them to grow on how
they would do their work together to articulate will would be their
collective mode of operation and collective agenda in a space in place
where student movements had begun and really changed the nature of the civil
rights movement but without the connection without the
space of the museum that preserve the story without the the call into account
then they don't have sources and grounding for their work it seemed to me
I this reminded me when I when I went there of seeing the share on the shelf
at the library and the Central West End in st. Louis sister Adams I remember
walking in shortly after the Commission report was released and I saw those
copies of the compliment to the report on a shelf that said new arrivals
treated as if it had an ISBN number was the commission's report inviting
people to read and to engage and I and I thought this is what folks need if we
have an aspiration for racial equity but those 3,000 people who committed to this
process and who informed this document are not the 2.8 million people in the
region who actually need to know it so the library became a resource and a
source for people to get this information then I began to wonder
whether it could also be then a source for accountability what does it mean for
these institutions to be those that keep the scorecard the the data the
indicators to regularly report to the community about what it has said it
desires to do in the libraries to research to resource and to research
that but then also in the museum's to create convening space whereby we can
come back to that which we have said before
so that these things don't become simply resources on a shelf or rather living
documents that are represented to community in spaces so that we might be
accountable to one another and serve as accountable partners I think this can
all happen I believe these the necessity of resources at the necessity of story
and the necessity of sanctuary can be made manifest so that we might build
Beloved Community together in our neighborhoods in our cities and in our
nation but that only happens it seems to me if these institutions choose a game
to belong fully to the people and to the public
there are these critical I try not to fall into the false Western binaries but
some things just capture me one of the critical questions of this
movement with young people is whose streets
one of the rhetorical chants it goes back and back and forth kind of like
call-and-response in the black church the antiphonal course that we see in the
Psalms there is a calling of one and an answer by another young people yeah
whose streets and others call our streets whose streets our streets
this is an invitation not to be neutral but to decide that he will be with the
people this was made more resonant when people decided to come into a public
space and the symphony there at Powell Symphony Hall and to rework and to remix
an old labor song and what they called a requiem for my ground after they dropped
banners over the balcony they began to sing songs together which side are you
on friends which side are you on justice for my brown is justice for us
all this this question in this call was an invitation to decide that they would
be with the people and this is the question for all of our public spaces
and institutions if we decide to be on the side of the people to be ourselves
public institutions then we can make manifest the necessities of
participatory democracy the necessities of collective action that necessities of
collective impact and perhaps even the hope of racial equity in our nation the
first who must decide which side are we on
this is the question I leave with you today with my thanks and gratitude for
the opportunity to share god bless you [Applause]
well thank you so much for leaving us with thoughts challenge and I think of
platform to start our conversation