Chapter Ten
The Justice Team
Tensing’s trial threatened to cleave the city apart. The shooting occurred three months after Chuck first made his public call to take action around race and five miles south of the Oakley campus where Chuck declared his commitment to racial justice. Chuck had just begun to assemble a team within the church to develop what would become Undivided, and people like Sandra had been part of an outpouring of support for this work. The killing of DuBose “brought what had been happening in the world to our city,” as Chuck put it. State-sanctioned police brutality and racial injustice no longer felt abstract.
When Tensing’s body cam video was released to the public in July 2015, Crossroads organized a prayer vigil that Sandra attended. Five thousand people showed up. The video had inflamed the public outcry for justice because it undermined Tensing’s claim that he had been dragged by DuBose’s car before he killed him. Sandra was tense when she went to the vigil.
“We should weep at what God weeps at, and God is weeping. God weeps at injustice,” Chuck preached at the vigil. Sandra felt relief wash over her. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how nervous she was that her church would try to excuse Tensing’s actions.
The trial of Ray Tensing began in late October, 2016, just before the 2016 presidential election. The Amos Project, a faith-based community organizing group, immediately assembled prayer vigils outside the courthouse and invited other justice-oriented groups to join. Troy, the former pastor turned community organizer on the Undivided planning team, was then the executive director of Amos, and he invited Undivided participants to the march. Sandra noticed white onlookers peering out of windows as she marched with DuBose supporters. Walking along the edge of Over-the-Rhine, she saw a cluster of white women and their children playing in a park that never used to have any white people. Through a mix of public and private investments, parts of the neighborhood had gentrified in the early decades of the twenty-first century. As Jess put it, “It went from attracting junkies to attracting foodies.” Sandra had never been to New York, but people told her those parts of Over-the-Rhine looked like the hipster parts of Brooklyn. Close by was a donut shop that sold five-dollar donuts. The scrutiny of these white people unnerved Sandra.
Sandra was there with the Justice Team, which had emerged after Undivided as an incubator for ongoing action to fight racial injustice. Troy had proposed the idea after the first session of Undivided ended. He believed in the importance of what community organizers called a “long-term vehicle for change” to nurture the inspiration people felt after Undivided and ensure it was properly channeled. The on-ramps helped, but Troy felt they needed something more. As a trained organizer, he knew that even when moments of widespread activism propel social change efforts into public consciousness, the vast majority falter afterward. Too often, activism fails to translate into anything durable. A 2009 study randomly selected ninety-eight efforts to alter federal policy in Congress for analysis and showed that they failed 70 percent of the time. Status quo prevailed most often because it reflected existing distributions of power in society. Even change efforts that demonstrated broad grassroots support for their goals won only 50 percent of the time, no better than flipping a coin.
To have a chance at challenging entrenched power, grassroots efforts had to build a powerful base. Troy knew that Undivided needed to create a venue for people from the program to continue working with one another, strengthening a latticework of relationships that could establish the required foundation. Undivided might have shaped people’s motivations to fight racial injustice, but they needed to deepen their commitments to one another and learn to strategize together about what kind of intentional action they could take. Troy worried that without something like the Justice Team, people’s commitments to racial justice after Undivided could become performative.
Troy’s views formed in part from his research into the historical development of the Christian Right. He realized that much of that group’s strength within politics came not from their standing in the media, but from their ability to mobilize grassroots leaders who took over local Republican Party institutions. Troy learned that the Christian Right’s boots-on-the-ground organizing program had been carefully designed in the 1990s by two men, Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. Robertson was the famous televangelist who ran for president in the 1988 Republican primary. He used his enormous television platform to raise more money than any other candidate, but performed abysmally at the polls. Robertson’s striking loss in the primary sidelined him within the Republican Party, dashing his political aspirations. That campaign taught Robertson a lesson that many political advocates take years to learn—namely, that scale and power are not the same thing.
Robertson had spent years building a communications network that was ineffective for shaping politics. In 1989, however, he attended a fateful dinner where he happened to be seated next to a young political operative named Ralph Reed. Reed had entered Republican Party politics through his involvement with College Republicans. He had a born-again experience when he attended an evangelical church on a lark because he had been feeling unfulfilled by his political work. At the end of the service, the pastor called out to people who were at church for the first time. “This is not an invitation,” the pastor said. “This is a command.” The command was to accept Jesus as their savior. Reed accepted.
Shortly thereafter, Reed was sitting at his desk listening to his coworkers mock people who believed in creationism. To their urbane political ears, it seemed preposterous. They couldn’t fathom anyone would really believe it.
Reed hesitated for one moment but then spoke up. “I believe it,” he said.
They laughed, assuming he was kidding. When they realized he was serious, they laughed again—at him. It was the first of many times when Reed, like many evangelicals living in a secular society, would have to defend his beliefs against the dominant norm. These experiences taught Reed an important political lesson: inaction enables the powerful to maintain their standing. Reed felt that if Christians did nothing, secular modernism would dominate the shape of the world around them. Reed devoted himself to learning to build an active political machine.
Reed spent that 1989 dinner offering his critique of Robertson’s campaign for the presidential nomination. Robertson was intrigued by what the young but experienced politico had to say. Having built his career through broadcasting, Robertson had thought that projecting himself into people’s living rooms each day would be enough to win an election. Reed said the Christian Right might have an effective air game, but they would never be able to win elections or wield any real political clout unless they built a similarly effective ground game. Robertson enlisted Reed to come work for him.
Together, Robertson and Reed sketched an audacious vision for what would become the Christian Coalition, the lynchpin that would firmly institutionalize the relationship between evangelicalism and the Republican Party. Black churches, they observed, had shown in the 1950s and 1960s that faith institutions could develop effective political ground games. Conservative white churches had not yet ventured into this territory, instead focusing on building relationships with media and political insiders. As Reed described it, most white conservative Christians still “had their noses pressed against the glass of the political culture.” So Reed and Robertson set out to penetrate this world, developing what they called a “pro-family agenda” focused on instilling Christian values in public life.
The Christian Coalition’s strategy was built on taking over the local party organizations that constituted the Republican base. Reed started by obtaining church directories and recruiting evangelicals to do the work of local politics. Anyone he found who was not registered to vote would receive a call to register. Then he would train them to do their own voter registration drives, build their own precinct organizations, and effectively take over the local Republican Party without violating the tax-exempt status of the church.
When he first began to contact clergy to ask them to share their church directories or reach out to congregants to ask them to vote, he encountered some resistance. Evangelicals were not accustomed to associating church with politics and resisted the idea of political activity in their church.
“If you choose to disengage [from politics],” Reed would reply, “it will show up on your doorstep in public policies that will undermine and assault your beliefs.”
The Christian Coalition built an army of Christian foot soldiers who took over the local apparatus of the Republican Party. They were no longer pawns in someone else’s electoral game or TV personalities subject to the changing whims of a fickle audience. Instead, they controlled the game itself.
Troy contrasted what Reed had built with what was emerging from Undivided. Sandra, Jess, Grant, and others were moving from a sense of isolation to a sense of community and finding the tools they needed to speak out about injustice in their own lives. But was it adding up to something more?
Troy reached out to Chuck and Lynn to consider that something more. It was like pushing on an open door. All three of them knew that, within Crossroads, the urge to focus only on relationships was like a magnet pulling away from addressing structural injustice—unless they made an explicit effort to create a countervailing pull toward it.
Chuck, Lynn, and Troy worked together to organize an exploratory meeting in downtown Cincinnati in March 2016, after the first session of Undivided ended. They recruited some of the most ardent Undivided supporters to attend, including Carolyn, the soft-spoken, gentle white woman who had become friends with Sandra. Carolyn invited Sandra to attend the brainstorming meeting as well. In total, about fifteen people showed up at CityLink Center, a holistic social services provider in downtown Cincinnati that Crossroads had helped start. The building had the flavor of a slightly upscale government building. Nervous that hosting a meeting about launching justice-oriented work in Crossroads would not be prudent, Chuck thought CityLink Center would be good neutral ground. Sandra arrived with Carolyn, then sat in the back so she could entertain her toddler during the meeting.
Chuck and Lynn opened by describing what they thought the Justice Team could do and how it built on their work at Undivided. People were enthusiastic about the idea of doing something, but cautious about doing this kind of work in Crossroads. The church never overtly focused on social justice. Chuck and Lynn asked attendees whether they thought they could recruit other congregants to their cause. The prospect of resistance from within Crossroads began to crystallize in people’s minds as they considered the question.
Sandra thought back to the first vigil she had attended the year before when Tensing’s body cam video was first released. She remembered how relieved she had been when Chuck spoke forcefully for justice. But Crossroads was a growing megachurch in a divided city in a divided state in a divided nation in 2016. It sought the middle ground, not justice. It contained within it those who were pro-Trump and anti-Trump, Republican and Democrat, pro–gun rights and pro–gun violence prevention. Like many other megachurches, it tried to sidestep most controversial questions regarding race. Sandra knew that some in the community were more accustomed to the church trying to take both sides than seeking justice.
Troy got worried when the meeting began to flag. People had real doubts, and he wanted to do something to try to renew the session’s momentum. Earlier, he had noticed that Carolyn and another woman named Elizabeth had each brought several other people with them to the meeting. Elizabeth was a light-skinned Black woman with curly hair who had participated in the first Undivided cohort with Sandra, Grant, and Carolyn, but in a different small group. Troy knew that the ability to draw others into action is the mark of a good organizer. Impulsively and perhaps too aggressively, he asked Carolyn and Elizabeth in front of the entire room, “Do the two of you want to try leading the work?”
Carolyn and Elizabeth were surprised by Troy’s request, but also thrilled. Troy’s ploy succeeded. The meeting regained momentum with Carolyn and Elizabeth’s commitment to leadership, and the Justice Team became a reality.
In one exercise, all of the participants had to read and enact a version of Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue, the negotiation between leaders of ancient Athens and Melos. The Melian leaders debated how to handle an invasion by Athens. Outmatched by the Athenians and facing sure loss, the Melian leaders could either encourage their citizens to fight and die as free men or survive as enslaved people. Facilitators randomly assigned Carolyn, Elizabeth, and the other participants to be either Melians or Athenians. The exercise excavated people’s orientation toward power, authority, and choice.
At one point, Elizabeth and several other participants were banished from the room because they were asking too many questions. Initially disconsolate, Elizabeth soon became defiant. She realized the game’s facilitator had arbitrarily exercised power by kicking them out. She convinced the others in the hallway to march back into the room with her.
Noticing their return, the facilitator immediately pounced on Elizabeth. “What are you doing back in here?” he asked.
“You can’t kick us out,” she responded. She spoke proudly, thinking she had discovered the point of the exercise. She could stand up to authority.
“I can’t?” he asked. His question felt derisive to Elizabeth. “But what are you going to do about it? You have no power here.” He stared directly at her.
Elizabeth realized she hadn’t thought about what to do next. She shrank back into the wall, deflated by his challenge. She stayed silent for the rest of the simulation.
Later, when they were debriefing the exercise, the facilitator asked her why she backed down. “Who told you your ideas were dumb?” he asked. He had been pushing her toward the next step in establishing her leadership, but she had cowered away. Elizabeth cried.
Designed to uproot people from complacency, the training also equipped them to act on the convictions they professed. Instead of being put off by these kinds of challenging interactions, Carolyn and Elizabeth both finished the week feeling inspired. They each began to shed fears they had long harbored about making people uncomfortable and became more willing to step into the urgency they felt to seek racial justice. Few things are more powerful than people grounded in their own interests, connected to each other, committed to putting their hands on the levers of change. They both returned to Cincinnati ready to build the Justice Team. They decided to put together their own training about organizing for new recruits. They scheduled a meeting for a Saturday morning at Crossroads and invited everyone on their list. They had no idea how many would show up.
Around one hundred forty people, including Sandra, came. Sandra did not want to take on a leadership role, but she was inspired by Carolyn’s commitment to antiracism. She and Carolyn had been getting to know each other through hours at the playground, talking and watching their toddlers together. The combination of Carolyn’s gentle manner and her steely resolve to act buoyed Sandra. Carolyn wasn’t like the other white people she knew. Sandra felt that she could fully embrace her Black identity around Carolyn, even more than she could at home with her husband. And, through the Justice Team, Sandra found a pathway to live out commitments to her Black identity that she had long ignored.
When Sandra came home after the vigil around the courthouse, she wrote on Facebook, “Got to spend some time down at the courthouse this morning praying for those involved with the upcoming Tensing trial. I got to walk a couple laps around the courthouse with some powerful women of God, inviting God’s presence in and around this trial!…What an amazing thing to see people of faith come together from all different backgrounds to support this city in racial reconciliation. Pray for Cincinnati, times they are a changin’.”
The Justice Team had been actively volunteering in the campaign for months. Sandra was uncomfortable with the idea of cold-calling people or knocking on strangers’ doors, so Carolyn and Elizabeth crafted a role for her that played to her strengths: she was to find a prayer or reflection to initiate each of their meetings. Eventually, she started developing these prayer guides not only for their monthly meetings, but also for big events (like the marches and vigils around the Tensing trial), the trainings the group conducted, and sometimes even the weekly phone banks. Sandra loved her role. She pored over her Bible and her book of reflections, drawing on her years of experience in the church to develop appropriate prayers for each event, each crisis.
Her prayers added to the meaning of the work. Over the course of the fall, 250 people from Undivided volunteered for the campaign to pass the levy. The campaign manager for Issue 44, a hardened veteran of state and national politics, noted that municipal levies almost never draw volunteerism like that. “This became a mission [for the Justice Team] to live out its faith in the real world,” he said, “to put their faith in action in the community.”
And it worked. Sandra was thrilled when Issue 44 won so overwhelmingly on Election Day.
The heady joy of working for the first time with a team of people from her church to make change in the world was addictive for Sandra—even though some of her white friends kept disparaging the work. The impact they were having felt tangible, real. She remembers talking to another Black volunteer on the Justice Team. “Man, this is pretty cool,” he said. “A big church like Crossroads, majority white, diving into social issues—and asking what would Jesus really be doing? I’m feeling like the tide is changing.”
But the Justice Team’s ebullient joy was short-lived. By the time Election Day rolled around, Sandra, like everyone else on the team, was exhausted. In the final heady push before the election, the desiderata of everyday life had fallen by the wayside. She needed to catch up on sleep, laundry, grocery shopping, and paperwork from her kids’ schools. But the week after the election brought more emotional upheaval.
Just a few days after Election Day, the trial for Ray Tensing ended, and the jurors went into deliberation. Some members of the Justice Team were at the Hamilton County Courthouse when the judge called the court back into session to announce the jury’s decision. People gathered together on the courthouse steps. (Sandra couldn’t attend because of the impending birth of her third child.) Using his phone to stream a video feed from the courtroom, Troy held a bullhorn against the phone to project the audio into the crowd. They quieted and strained to hear.
After three days of deliberation, four of the twelve jurors voted against a voluntary manslaughter conviction, and the judge announced a mistrial. As news of the decision spread through the weary protesters outside the courthouse, the crowd was eerily quiet. The next day, Troy wrote in his journal, “The pace, intensity and pressure of the past three months was intense, the past three weeks insane, and the past three days, unsustainable.” Hoping to forestall the city’s anger, the prosecution quickly announced it would seek a retrial, creating hope that a different outcome was possible.
Sandra, who had been listening to the news of the verdict at home, gazed at her children’s Black faces. She wondered what kind of world they would inherit as she listened to the judge’s voice. Her despondency felt palpable.