Ray Wiedmeyer, Beloved Community Communications Team

Much was heavy on their hearts when Unity Church member Clover Earl and her longtime friend Danette McCarthy met for lunch after the murder of George Floyd and the uprising that followed. Danette’s daughter lives not far from the George Floyd Global Memorial, known as George Floyd Square, and she pondered the distance between the Square and the State Capitol, Minnesota History Center, and St Paul Cathedral. To confirm her inkling, she drove the distance and found it to be just about nine miles. Just a coincidence perhaps, but nine minutes was the amount of time that George Floyd was held under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer before he died. In Danette’s words, “There are these structures, these symbols of power and history, mostly white, and they are nine miles away from the square.” 

Danette’s career in pulling people together through the arts made her ponder what we needed to do to get “square” with our history in which government and church helped codify white supremacy. This led her to the idea of pilgrimage, the idea of walking from one place to the other; a practice she had never embarked upon before. Eventually she would take that walk, that personal pilgrimage of nine miles to see what it would offer. And in her chat with Clover that morning, the idea of personal pilgrimage began to germinate into something much more.

Clover, who had been on Unity Church pilgrimages to Boston and Transylvania to learn of our Unitarian history, knew something of pilgrimage. She saw pilgrimage as a chance to move into a new experience with an open mind and an open heart to seek new understandings. In her words, “over time, we began to see our work together to find clarity and strength as our own pilgrimage of sorts and that we might move that out into the world... and from there the idea of a white folk’s pilgrimage grew.”

They both know that white folks have work to do. But how to move from reading/talking about white privilege and antiracism to a place of deeper understanding? Perhaps a pilgrimage from the places of white comfort (the Capitol, Cathedral, History Center) to a place of Black resistance (George Floyd Square) would be a chance to dig a little deeper. The walk they imagine will give one the opportunity to reflect internally, to process with fellow walkers, and to think more deeply about our own actions for creating a more just world.

Clover and Danette now invite you to a shared pilgrimage called “Hey, White People: A Journey” to walk the nine miles from the Minnesota Capitol to George Floyd Square on Saturday, May 21. There will be four stops on this pilgrimage: the Rondo Commemorative Plaza, the Mississippi River, the Minneapolis Third Police Precinct, and George Floyd Square. In between there will be time to chat, or moments to just ponder the path we are on and the path we all want to create.

Beloved Community Communications Team

“SoulWork” is going to that deep place of truth and value, according to Rev. KP Hong. On Saturday morning, September 25, 2021, over 55 of us gathered for a rich and rewarding program to learn more about how our personal and communal spiritual development intersects with our goal of a multicultural antiracist community. Like the double helix of DNA, the two strands wind around each other and are inextricably linked to help us grow and live into our best selves. 
​
KP, Laura Park, and Angela Wilcox of the Beloved Community Staff Team have been working on the “Double Helix Model of Faith Formation and Antiracism-Multiculturalism,” for many months. This tool is designed to help individuals and ministry teams look at how we work among ourselves at the intersection of “me” and “we,” and evolve in how we do racial justice work.

During the morning event, KP and Alfonso Wenker from Team Dynamics, and Angela and Laura took turns offering perspectives to help provide a framework for the new model. Then, we went into breakout rooms by ministry group and discussed the practices and rituals that bring us closer and connect us to the work we do together.

The Double Helix Model (below) helps us see that there is no dividing line between our faith and our actions. Watch for more information to come about Unity’s approach to connecting faith formation and racial justice — SoulWork.

By Jane Prince

​Several years ago, I immersed myself in reading I should have done decades earlier to be better informed about slavery in America, its aftermath, and Black history. I experienced horror and shame, not only for my country, but for my own complicity as a white middle class American who had enjoyed the privilege of ignorance. 

Until then, I had somehow failed to make the connection between our nation’s ability to compete in the world economy and our willingness to conspire in our nation’s original sin of the brutal, inhuman, immoral institution of slavery of Black Americans. 
Had President Lincoln lived, had Reconstruction fulfilled its promise, had 40 acres and a mule been deeded to freed slaves as the damages they were owed, the playing field might have been levelled between Blacks and whites. But instead, our nation reimbursed slaveholders for the human “property” taken from them through emancipation. The abandonment by the federal government of Reconstruction efforts in the South thrust former enslaved people into a new social order, with Jim Crow laws and terroristic actions that cemented their inability to succeed in America.

For Blacks who fled the South, Minnesota “welcomed” them with systemic discrimination perpetrated through real estate redlining and racial covenants that blocked access to housing. As if that was not enough, this city allowed the plowing-under of the Rondo neighborhood — the center of Saint Paul’s African American business, residential, spiritual and cultural life — for the construction of Interstate 94.

A few years ago Trahern Crews, a nationally known reparations organizer from Saint Paul, shared his idea for an ordinance. He had drafted it as a model for a municipal government program of reparations. I signed on with Trahern to help bring it to reality. As a St. Paul City Council member, I believe local government can and must serve as a means for advancing social change. We were encouraged by the news that the City of Evanston had passed an ordinance in August 2019 to create a process to address reparations, with a dedicated funding source from the city’s new municipal tax on recreational cannabis. 

In partnership with the East Side Freedom Library, we launched the St. Paul Recovery Act Reparations Reading Group in February 2020. The monthly sessions offered history lessons on the development of systemic racism and its effects. The goal was to build public understanding and support for a reparations initiative. At the same time, Trahern was organizing a steering committee that spent 2020 working within the African American community and among allies to build support and momentum. 

By late fall, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the committee lobbied the Saint Paul City Council to pass a resolution as the first step in creating a different future. The resolution included an apology for the City's role in the institutional and structural racism that has denied Saint Paul’s African American community access to housing, jobs, education, and health care. 
It also called for the creation of a Legislative Advisory Committee to create a framework for a permanent commission, to be known as the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission. The commission will be empowered to make recommendations to specifically address the creation of generational wealth for the American descendants of chattel slavery and to boost economic mobility and opportunity in the Black community. On January 13, 2021, St. Paul City Council passed the resolution unanimously. 

The language in this resolution lays out bold expectations for a different kind of future for Saint Paul. This is the beginning of a process that will put reparations on the city’s agenda. Ta-Nehisi Coates has described the fulfillment of reparations as “a world not where the black race and white race live in harmony, but a world in which the terms black and white have no real political meaning.” With all my might, I hope that our City of Saint Paul is worthy of the love, dedication and confidence invested in this resolution. Our commitment must be fervent and enduring. Reparations to right the wrongs of racial injustice must happen here, now. ​