GREENFIELD — When she retired last spring as pastor of Ashfield’s First Congregational Church, Kate Stevens knew her work was hardly done.
After helping her husband, John Hoffman, with the farm work at Charlemont’s Wilder Brook Farm, she prepared for working the deeper soil she’d been contemplating for months, and years, before: finding the roots of racial tensions that have been growing in this country for centuries.
With Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” as an impetus, Stevens, a Pittsburgh native who had never traveled in the South, set out for a three-month pilgrimage to learn all she could about the civil rights history that she believes is far more encompassing than many of us in the North realize.
Traveling 6,000 miles in 90 days, Stevens was inspired to visit Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative and its National Museum of Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum in Birmingham, Ala. The museum explores slavery, lynching, segregation and mass incarceration in America on a site where enslaved people were once warehoused. Its Memorial for Peace and Justice, through powerful abstract sculpture, is dedicated to more than 4,000 African-Americans who were lynched by white Americans.
She also planned to visit, and volunteer at, the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, N.C., which does “place-based organizing” on community justice issues. But her journey, which began in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. — where she toured the Natural Museum of African-American History and Culture — led also to Richmond and Charlottesville, Va.; to Durham, Chapel Hill and Asheville, N.C.; to the Highlander Center in eastern Tennessee; and to Charleston, S.C.; to Atlanta, Ga.; Selma and Montgomery, Ala.; as well as Jackson, Miss., Memphis and Nashville, Tenn. before heading to Berea, Ky., Ohio and Pittsburgh.
Stevens will give a talk about her journey, “The Road Home,” today, July 7, at 10:15 a.m. at the First Congregational Church, 43 Silver St.
“Though this country prides itself on principles of democracy and justice for all,” a notice for the event says, “in actuality, the U.S. was founded on the practices of genocide and slavery …. This history, while devastating, is also a story of resistance and determination.”
Stevens explained, “It’s not that I’m studying somebody else’s history; I’m studying my history, as a white person. We didn’t just get to the place we are right now, with the war on drugs, locking up young African-American men. It had a whole history … This is really more about white supremacy.”
Seeing herself as a student who spent her time at museums, churches, lectures, questioning people as she traveled, Stevens said, “It’s not like if you want to learn about white supremacy or the racial history of this nation, you’ve got to go South. I know I could stay right here. But the South has to be dealing more — it’s right up in your face: the statues, the Confederate flags, the old slave markets, the old lynching sites. I feel like they have to deal with it. And they’re the ones building these museums, putting this information out to learn from.”
And after visiting those sites, like a civil rights museum in Jackson, Miss.; the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; the Southern Poverty Law Center in Birmingham, Ala.; Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery; and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.; Stevens came away with more and more questions.
“I wanted to better understand the racial history of this country,” she said. “It just felt like I was called to go, and I heard some amazing speakers. I felt I was just this sponge absorbing everything. And what I’m trying to do now is squeeze the sponge: how to share what I’ve learned in a way that’s real, confessional and my truth telling.”
In a lot of cases, Stevens says she “just lucked into” being at the right place at the right time, showing up in Greensboro for its annual commemoration of the Feb. 1, 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in that gave birth to sit-ins throughout the South.
By chance, she was also on hand in Montgomery for the annual commemoration of the 1965 Bloody Sunday attack on marchers and the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march from Montgomery to Selma. Stevens, who has been attending Greenfield meetings of Racial Justice Rising, the organization that is sponsoring Saturday’s talk, and who took part in the 40-day recent Poor People’s Campaign commemorating the late Rev. King’s action, said, “I didn’t feel I was well educated in high school or college” about the real racial history of this country.
“So I went as a student, to learn about our racial history,” she said. “What I feel I’m learning more and more is that what I was looking at was white supremacy in chapters,” chapters that are continuing to be written: “the war on drugs, mass incarceration, redlining. It’s right up into the present,” including voter suppression and rolling back the Voting Rights Act.
She says, as someone who’s lived her entire life in the North, that there are Northern biases and misconceptions of racism as a Southern problem.
“This is one of the problems,” she says. “The North thinks of (racism) as a Southern thing. But in every chapter of this history, the North is completely complicit, financially, economically. In every way. The slave ships, the cotton. We’re the ones who got the most profit. The cotton mills, the money in the slave trade, and even some of slaves came through the North. Coming back from the South makes me want to study more about the role of the North, the role of church.”
After touring a place saturated in reminders of what took place, where the emotions are close to the surface and the history isn’t largely intellectualized as it is in the North, “I go down to the South to look at the history, and now, even more, I’m trying to figure out what was the reality through all that time here — and own that. Because that’s where I live. … It made me think, ‘What are we marking in the North? What are we owning? I feel like through these conversations, these readings, I’m learning new things. It’s changing. I’m still figuring it out.”
She says, “This is the very heart of what it is to me to be a minister, to be a human being; to others as beloved human beings also. I see this as a continuation of my work. The church could be, and should be, a leader around issues of morality. Not just taking a stand on more or less guns, or on health care. It’s about changing the moral narrative.
“So any work I do around this — and I’d love to do more outreach to churches, to do workshops and preach — I feel this is the very heart of it.”