Navigating the complex interplay of spirituality and activism, we unravel how our beliefs shape our fight for a just world. The episode becomes an exploration of how radical questioning can unearth miraculous new possibilities and how written words can act as a vessel for love and service. We probe into the heart of our actions, seeking the emotional and spiritual intentions that drive us. Rahiel and I unravel the threads that connect systematic theology to our personal belief systems, and how these frameworks can provide solace in the face of adversity while underpinning the resilience needed in community activism and the pursuit of justice.

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Black women helped launch the Civil Rights Movement in 1955. Today, we are still leading the charge. Meet six activists who are as fearless as our forebears.

Rahiel Tesfamariam: Urban Cusp

Rahiel Tesfamariam traveled to war-torn Darfur in 2005. While there she asked a local boy how he had managed living under such harsh conditions. He told her it was because he knew God loved him. “That was a turning point,” says Tesfamariam, “seeing the power of the mind. That boy, because of his faith, was able to endure; what he had in his mind allowed him to make it.”

The experience led Tesfamariam, 33, to found urbancusp.com, a site that publishes lifestyle, faith and entertainment articles designed to combat negative images of African-Americans in media. “What young people internalize daily shapes who they are,” she says. “The music they’re listening to shapes their understanding of Black masculinity, or sexuality, and part of launching Urban Cusp was to provide an alternate reality that depicts African-Americans in an intellectual, spiritual way.”

The youngest of eight children, Tesfamariam was born in Eritrea during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War. When she was 5, she moved to the U.S., and was raised by her brother and sister in the Bronx and Washington, D.C. At an early age, Tesfamariam was keenly aware of class inequality and how people are segregated. As part of her school’s gifted and talented program, she had access to opportunities that her peers in the remedial program, which was housed in the school’s basement, did not. She also witnessed the fallout of the crack epidemic that swept through D.C. in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. “I didn’t understand why people lacked compassion for others’ realities,” she says.

After graduating from Stanford University, Tesfamariam moved to D.C., where she worked at grassroots Black publications, such as Experience Reality magazine and The Washington Informer. But after her trip to Darfur, she wanted to do more than write about the problems she was seeing, so she quit to pursue community activism. She worked on antiviolence conferences and participated in D.C.’s 40 Days of Increased Peace initiative, which sponsored a wellness fair, hip-hop summit and block party. “The idea was to pack the summer with events so kids would be so busy they couldn’t do anything to harm themselves or others,” says Tesfamariam.

In 2006, Tesfamariam became a licensed minister. She attended Yale Divinity School, focusing on liberation theology—the intersection of spirituality and political issues. Starting Urban Cusp was a way for her to combine her journalistic skills, her faith and her activism to empower young people to change their communities. The site gained an instant following when it launched in July 2011, thanks to her connections to Black ministers and their congregations. Today, Urban Cusp is read in more than 200 countries. “Social consciousness empowers people to change their reality,” says Tesfamariam. “Keep them informed so there’s no way people can be apathetic. Create a sense of righteous anger, and people will be compelled to do something.”

Ciara Taylor: Dream Defenders

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Both developments have attracted considerable attention. But for the most part, major media outlets have treated them as separate phenomena — like events taking place on two different continents — even though thousands of protesters declared explicitly that they were boycotting stores on Black Friday.

So, what about the obvious question: Have the protests contributed to the sales decline?

Vast quantities of data about American consumers are churned out daily, and you might expect that it would provide an answer. Businesses, investors, academics and policy makers rely on that data. The problem is that for illuminating answers, you need to ask the right questions.

Last Sunday, for example, the National Retail Federation, a trade association, released its annual survey of holiday shopping. As usual, it was heavily covered.

The federation announced that for the holiday weekend through Saturday, nationwide year-over-year sales had dropped 11 percent, a startlingly big number. The extensive survey data, along with anecdotal information compiled by the federation’s chief executive, Matthew R. Shay, suggested a variety of reasons for the sales decline. These included pre-Thanksgiving discounts by retail chains, ever-present cheap deals on the Internet and the still-shaky fiscal condition of many Americans who have not entirely recovered from the recession.

But when I listened to a recording of the conference call held by the federation with reporters on Sunday afternoon, I found that the conversation didn’t include a single word about the nationwide protests that closed some malls over the holiday weekend, obstructed traffic in big cities and flooded social media with appeals for Americans to stop shopping. Events like those weren’t examined by the survey. Protest wasn’t on the federation’s radar.

“That’s not an area we’ve ever gotten into,” said Kathy Grannis, a spokeswoman for the federation, when I asked her about it last week. The federation has traditionally avoided touchy subjects, leaving it up to the retail chains in its membership to talk about them if they so choose. And last week, the big chains generally weren’t saying much about the boycott.

Macy’s, which was the target of a demonstration on Black Friday at its flagship store in Herald Square, declined to comment. Tara Darrow, a spokeswoman for Nordstrom, said that chain wouldn’t comment about its holiday sales, either. “In relation to the recent protests,” she said, “we have experienced some activity at a few of our stores across the country, but the impact has been really minimal.”

Perhaps the lack of solid data is why most mainstream news reports didn’t examine a possible link between the protests and flagging sales. These apparent omissions lit up Facebook and Twitter. For example, in a Twitter post on Wednesday, Shaun Abreu, a recent graduate of Columbia University, said: “The media is straight up downplaying the impact #BoycottBlackFriday had on the 11% decrease in sales. Let’s take it through Christmas then.”

I asked some of the boycott organizers how effective they thought they had been. They were able to provide detailed information about their roles in promoting the protests on social media but had no data about the effects of their efforts on retailers.

Rahiel Tesfamariam, the founder and publisher of the online magazine Urban Cusp, created the hashtag #NotOneDime on Twitter on Nov. 24, after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who this summer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed man in Ferguson, Mo. Her slogan has been repeated across the Internet.

“The power structure isn’t listening to us in the streets or in the courts, so we are going to have to do it with our buying power,” she said in an interview. With a new hashtag, #BlackDecember, she is calling for people to buy from black-owned businesses.

Separately, a Los Angeles-based network called the Blackout for Human Rights used the hashtag #BlackoutBlackFriday on Twitter in early November, according to Michael Latt, a spokesman for the group. The group decided to include a Black Friday boycott in its protests “because America speaks the language of money, and that’s something that everybody can understand,” Mr. Latt said. But he and Ms. Tesfamariam said that they had not tried to come up with any numbers that might prove they were having an economic impact.

“We think the impact is obvious,” Mr. Latt said. And, he said, protests and, perhaps, boycotts will continue. They are now focused on the decision on Wednesday of a Staten Island grand jury not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, another unarmed black man, who died after being placed in a chokehold.

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There’s no doubt that such protests can galvanize public opinion. But what effects are they having in this prime shopping season? This brings us back to the data. Early shopping numbers are notoriously unreliable, and the National Retail Federation’s 11 percent decline was only an estimate based on a survey of 4,631 people. It divided respondents by income level and age — but not by race — and asked them about their intended and actual purchases, both in bricks-and-mortar stores and online. On the basis of their answers, it extrapolated aggregate numbers for the entire American economy.

The questions in this year’s survey were decided on Nov. 17, Ms. Grannis said, before the grand jury decision in the Ferguson case. In any event, no questions about social unrest have ever been included in the survey. “It’s just an estimate,” she said. “It’s our best shot.”

Other data providers have come up with varying numbers, generally pointing to a decline in bricks-and-mortar sales, along with an increase in online sales, at the start of the shopping season.

For example, data provided by Applied Predictive Technologies, based on sales by national chains with annual revenue of at least $500 million, showed a 3.5 percent decline in same-store sales nationwide for the Thanksgiving weekend through Sunday. Among the top 25 metropolitan areas in the United States, the St. Louis region — perhaps the one most deeply affected by the trauma in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb — had the second-worst performance, a 9 percent decline from the same period the previous year. Jonathan Marek, a senior vice president at the company, said he had no way of knowing what impact the demonstrations and the boycott might have had. “It’s logical to assume it all had an impact, maybe half a percent, something like that, but I don’t really know,” he said.

At this point, I don’t know either. But the question certainly seems worth asking.

The Strategies column last Sunday, about how holiday retail sales may have been affected by recent demonstrations against racial injustice, referred incorrectly to the death of Eric Garner after a confrontation with the police on Staten Island. He died after being placed in a chokehold; he did not die in a shooting.

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A photo of Tesfamariam, 34, wearing the black T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “This Ain’t Yo Mama’s Civil Rights Movement” went viral after the protest marking the first anniversary of the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Tesfamariam, who lives in New York City, donated the shirt to help the museum tell the story of the current resistance movement. The $540 million Smithsonian museum opens Sept. 24.

The T-shirt’s phrase comes from Tef Poe, Hands Up United co-founder, and it announces a new kind of civil rights struggle, the activist said.

“This looks different; it sounds different. It’s a comment of anger, and his resistance,” Tesfamariam said. “Ferguson and Baltimore specifically showed America a form of nonviolent but militant resistance.”

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Curator Timothy Anne Burnside said collecting artifacts like this – especially ones that are visually familiar – is a critical part of the museum’s mission.

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“This shirt represents an important moment in the way people are participating in activism, and the way the work is being shared,” said Burnside.

Burnside and other museum curators try to identify objects that focus on the people and moments that will be remembered.

“We have the opportunity now to … preserve the first-hand account of what is happening,” she said. “Not only to have the chance to collect the artifact, and preserve the story, but to have the conversations with the people who we will be talking about in 50 years, 100 years.”

Tesfamariam said Burnside’s knowledge of the slogan’s origins and her interest in the details behind the protest convinced her that she could trust the museum with it.

“The beauty of the shirt, what it demonstrates is that history is being made,” she said. “We’re making history that future generations will look back on.”

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Rahiel Tesfamariam was arrested in Ferguson, Missouri wearing a Hands Up United shirt.

Heather Wilson

By Brooke Obie

“This ain’t yo mama’s civil rights movement.”

Those were the words emblazoned on activist and public theologian Rahiel Tesfamariam’s T-shirt as she was arrested in Ferguson, Missouri during protests marking the 1-year anniversary of police killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown and the Ferguson Uprising that continues today.

In the three years since neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, black millenials across the country have taken to the streets, demanding justice for black men, women and children killed by police with impunity in what has become the Black Lives Matter movement.

Unlike the leaders of the 1960s, who dismissed victims like teenage mom Claudette Colvin in order to champion the cause of the more sympathetic victim Rosa Parks, the Black Lives Matter movement seeks to highlight, defend and affirm all black lives. At the forefront of this movement, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, are radical activists at every intersection of blackness—including the two queer women and one Nigerian American woman who together founded #BlackLivesMatter, celebrities like singer Janelle Monáe and trans activist and MSNBC host Janet Mock.

Shunning the emphasis on the cisgender heterosexual “respectability” and perfection of victims and leaders of the past, this generation’s protests are loud, angry, rude and intentionally inconvenient for the beneficiaries of institutionalized racism, shutting down highways and interrupting everything from political rallies to brunch to demand that the humanity of black people be recognized and respected.

But at least one tie remains between the movements of the past and today—many protestors and movement leaders are Christians.

A far cry from the right-wing Coalition of African American Pastors that vowed civil disobedience in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the constitutionality of marriage equality in June, many Christians in the black liberation movement are informed by an understanding of Christ as a table-turning, women-empowering, government-overthrowing, freedom-loving, social justice radical.

Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, an ordained elder in the Church of God in Christ and a self-described “queer ally” would certainly count himself among that number. Rev. Sekou—who was just arrested in Ferguson after storming a police barricade with Cornel West and many others during protests for Brown—tells NBCBLK that his decision to fight for black liberation begins with Christ’s example.

“God chose to become flesh in the body of an unwed, unimportant teenage mother in an unimportant part of the world. Then, after living a life dedicated to serving the least of these, He was killed by the State. That’s how I understand Jesus.”

Rev. Sekou also understands Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as far more radical than the sanitized and romanticized caricature he is often reduced to in death. But the idea of Christians as docile, forgiving and long-suffering in the face of oppression—i.e., respectable and moralistic—is pervasive.

Activist Marissa Johnson defies this idea. The evangelical Christian made national news when she led her Seattle chapter of the Black Lives Matter organization in a protest during a rally for popular democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, taking the mic from him and demanding he release a plan to reform policing.

Johnson, who was attacked by Sanders supporters with bottles and boos at the rally, tells NBCBLK that her radical activism is informed by Matthew 10:5-42, a passage where Christ speaks with aggressive urgency to his 12 disciples, instructing them to care for, heal, protect and lay down their lives for others.

She and the other organization members putting themselves in harms way at the rally sparked a nationwide discussion on racism within white democratic and progressive spaces. Sanders has since released a comprehensive criminal justice reform plan, has hired a Black press secretary and has reached out to the organization, as well as other leaders in the movement, to meet and discuss policy. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has done the same as the result of the protests—clear evidence that radical activism can demand the attention of policy makers.

Though Tesfamariam differentiates between Christian respectability and self-respect, she tells NBC BLK, “Respectability will not prevent us from becoming the next hashtag. There must always be a space in Christian theology, particularly for communities of color, for righteous anger and holy impatience.”

Bree Newsome displayed both when the courageous activist climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina State House and removed the confederate flag “in the name of God.”

In an interview with NBCBLK, Newsome describes her decision to remove the confederate flag as a “spiritual battle”:

“[When Dylann Roof killed 9 Black people at Mother Emanuel], it was an attack on the black community, on black organization, on the black church and on black faith, in a space where we have spiritual solace. So on that level, it was a spiritual battle to go up and take the flag down.”

She had intended to remove the flag in reflective silence and to wait and pray quietly until the police showed up to arrest her. However, the police arrived as she was halfway up the pole.

“A cop was talking to me, saying it was not the right thing to do, so I started quoting the Scripture I had been meditating on in the days leading up to the action, just to center myself. In the moment, it was the automatic thought that came to my mind just to say the Scripture out loud and stay focused on the task,” she says.

The words David spoke before he defeated Goliath inspired Newsome’s bold declaration as she clutched the flag in her right hand,

“You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God.”

Newsome, who quoted Psalm 27 as she climbed down the pole and Psalm 23 as she was being arrested, says that like the Pharisees and Sadducees of Christ’s day, Christians can miss the point of the Gospel if they only remain inside the church building while the community is being oppressed.

“Part of [Christ’s] whole message was not to become so fixated on religion that you lose the spirit of God. If you’re taking money from the community to build the church but you don’t feel like you have time or it’s within your purpose to liberate the people, what is this endless church building [fund] for?”

Rev. Sekou echoes this message to anyone who identifies as a Christian:

“For young, poor black single mothers, kids with tattoos sagging their pants—anything less than putting your body on the line for them and being willing to pick up your cross in the case of state violence against them is heresy. You betray Christ if you do anything less.”

Brooke Obie

by Taboola

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On Aug. 10, the day after the one-year anniversary of Mike Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Mo., I was arrested with nearly 60 other faith leaders for blocking the entrance of a St. Louis federal courthouse in an act of civil disobedience. On my shirt was a quote from Hands Up United co-founder Tef Poe: “This Ain’t Yo Mama’s Civil Rights Movement.” The phrase has resonated with many young activists who reject the identity politics, conservative rules and traditional tactics of the church-led movement of the 1960s.

In the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, the new movement for black lives was radicalized by legions of poor and working-class youth who forced the nation to grapple with black rage. They fearlessly confronted a militarized police force, tear gas, snipers and tanks designed for warfare while Americans watched on their television screens. These young people, including countless women and LGBTQ people who have organized many of the movement’s most powerful acts of resistance, have changed the predominant image of black activism in America.

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The front lines of the fight for civil rights are no longer “manned” by the traditional leaders of the black community: well-dressed, respectable clergymen. From Emanuel AME Church’s historical fight against slavery in Charleston, S.C., to the Rev. Martin Luther King’s leadership in the 1960s, the church was the control center in black America’s struggle for civil rights for generations. Its authority infused the civil rights movement with traditional values — hierarchical leadership, respectability politics and the guiding principles of reconciliation and nonviolence.

Today’s movement has dismissed these criteria, operating without centralized leadership and accepting as many straight women and LGBTQ people on the front lines as straight men. Last winter, young activists rejected the leadership of the Rev. Al Sharpton when they stormed the stage of his “Justice for All” march in Washington and demanded an equal voice. Instead, the movement chants a phrase coined by three women, two of them queer: “Black lives matter.”

For this generation, there’s no need to hide behind a veil of purity or wear a suit to have an authoritative seat at the table. This is a movement that encourages all to “come as you are.” Natural. Bohemian. Rebellious. Tatted up. Provocative. Ratchet. It seems everything is acceptable — except the constraining rules of our elders’ day.

Historically, Christian fundamentalism has created hierarchies that place higher value on some lives and alienate others. Churches are often led by charismatic, straight men. Women, in contrast, typically have been forbidden from ordination and the pulpit under long-debated biblical passages calling for them to remain “silent in the churches.” Similarly, scriptural references have been used to keep the LGBTQ community on the margins of church life. The church’s common rejection of homosexuality has granted permission for the rejection of an entire community.

This is inherently at odds with a movement that chants “black lives matter,” leaving no room for footnotes about who is included in that declaration and who is left out. The movement’s decentralized structure has ensured that the concerns of subgroups are not sidelined. After women in the movement pointed out that it had become exclusively focused on police brutality against black men, targeted hashtags such as #SayHerName emerged. Those efforts kept national attention on cases of women and girls, including Sandra Bland and Rekia Boyd. And last month, movement organizers held rallies across the country to bring awareness to the high rate of murder of black transgender women.

This movement’s tactics, as well, have challenged the church’s influence. While the civil rights movement of the 1960s was characterized by nonviolent resistance strategies, this movement has been much more confrontational. Demonstrators have disrupted morning commutes, theatrical performances and athletic events. In Ferguson and Baltimore, where many young people insisted on aggressive direct action such as throwing back tear-gas canisters and casting rocks at police, many clergy members encouraged them to instead “go inside” and negotiate around a table.

If there is a model of revolution that these young people have mirrored most, it’s not King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but rather the radical and countercultural beliefs of the Black Panther Party. Like the Panthers, they have unapologetically celebrated blackness, raising “black power” fists, sporting afros and wearing T-shirts with African imagery. In contrast, the church hasn’t typically been as radical in its rhetoric and tactics. King, for example, opposed the militant arm of the civil rights movement, noting that “black power” carried “connotations of violence and separatism.”

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The black church isn’t unique in its disconnect from young people. Millennials are broadly disaffected with organized religion, driven by their progressive views on homosexuality and a general skepticism of traditional institutions. More than 1 in 3 millennials say they are religiously unaffiliated.

But black millennials are more connected to the church than their peers — about 76 percent of black adults under age 30 affiliate with the church (compared with 64 percent of all young adults in that age group), according to a 2009 Pew study. Likewise, the movement isn’t devoid of religion. Preachers such as Traci Blackmon of Florissant, Mo., Osagyefo Sekou of St. Louis and Michael McBride of Berkeley, Calif., have stood alongside youth in street protests and mentored young activists. And Bree Newsome quoted scripture when she climbed the South Carolina statehouse flagpole in June to remove the Confederate flag.

Still, critiques of the black church’s declining influence have been building for years. In 2010, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude wrote an essay in the Huffington Post titled “The Black Church Is Dead.” Glaude argued that “the idea of this venerable institution as central to black life and as a repository for the social and moral conscience of the nation has all but disappeared.” He blamed the church’s deeply conservative dimension and its disconnect from social issues. Saying the church’s social currency is “memory” was a hurtful and harsh critique for many within the black faith community.

But others, including myself, saw the essay as a challenge and an opportunity to rededicate the black church to its liberation-centered legacy. Even though black liberation theology wasn’t formalized as a school of thought until the 1960s, its practice in the U.S. could be seen as long ago as the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, who said his acts were driven by the Bible.

For churches already rooted in black liberation theology — the spiritual philosophy that Christianity is a tool of empowerment for the oppressed — this movement is an opportunity to reclaim a generation that needs to see Jesus as a freedom fighter, liberator, community organizer and revolutionary. Churches like First Corinthian Baptist in Harlem, City of Refuge United Church of Christ in Oakland and Community of Hope AME in Temple Hills, Md., do not see this moment as a crisis of relevancy, because they have been working at the intersection of Jesus and justice every day. Ministries like these not only preach the “good news” of Christ but also address the school-to-prison pipeline, health disparities in low-income communities and urban gun violence. Churches like these participated in “Hoodie Sunday” after Trayvon Martin’s killing; they lifted up the “Seven Last Words” of black people killed by police; and they supported my #NotOneDime campaign calling for economic resistance in the aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer who killed Brown. These churches understand that Jesus came and died for the purpose of liberation, and his followers should be equally committed to putting their lives on the line for it.

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This month, McBride, who heads the progressive, faith-based Live Free Campaign, was among 1,000 clergy members and people of faith who met in Sacramento to call on California Gov. Jerry Brown to sign a bill to combat racial profiling and improve police accountability. “While not every church has been involved, we know historically this has never been the case,” McBride said. “There have always been a faith-filled minority which has leaned into moments of social crisis and transformation.”

But in large part, the masses are not turning to churches for their social justice marching orders. The ideological and strategic differences between conservative church leadership and this movement have led to a generational wrestling match. While many elders have insisted that the movement assign leaders, tone down its rhetoric and use less-confrontational tactics, young activists have resisted in the spirit of self-determination.

To find their place in black America’s latest uprising, church and faith leaders will have to assess their theological values. A theology that addresses only freedom from sin is incomplete. There’s no way to talk about the story of Jesus without also addressing freedom from oppression.

Every generation should look to its elders for guidance and to the past for inspiration. The struggle for freedom is ongoing, and our fight is intergenerational. But young people must answer their calling and live out their purpose in ways that feel authentic. They must stand at the turbulent intersection of the world as it is and the world as it should be, pushing society out of its comfort zone. It’s an inevitable shift toward a civil rights movement reflective of this new era.

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