The following is adapted from Dr. Jemar Tisby’s new book “The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance.” Available for purchase now.
The United States is at a precarious point.
In the years since the racial justice uprisings of 2020, promises for dramatic changes toward equity remain largely unfulfilled.
Defunding the police didn’t happen. The corporations didn’t come through on their commitments. The racists grow ever more bold in their backlash.
As a trained historian and a full-time racial justice advocate, I am concerned about our longevity in the struggle for justice, especially racial justice. I am worried that people do not have the stamina for the fight.
How do you keep going when it looks like you’re not winning?
People like Myrlie Evers-Williams have the answer.
On December 9, 2017, Myrlie Evers-Williams sat before us. She had salt-and-pepper black hair cropped short, and she wore a patterned red-and-black scarf draped across her shoulders like a queen’s robe.
She held herself with such regal dignity that the wheelchair she sat upon seemed to become a throne. She spoke with a deliberateness and profundity that made us all lean forward to catch every utterance.
We were in Jackson, Mississippi. I was part of a group of journalists and writers who had been granted a private audience with this legend of the civil rights movement on the grand opening day of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
Her words that day helped put contours around what I always sensed from veterans of the civil rights movement and others who had taken courageous stands for justice.
“Going through the museums, I wept because I felt the blows, I felt the bullets, I felt the tears, I felt the cries. But I also sensed the hope that dwelt in all those people,” she said.
Her dedication to justice and her enduring hope in progress were improbable given what she had experienced.
Most people know Evers-Williams as the widow of Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary of Mississippi who was gunned down in his driveway by a White supremacist.
Born in 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar Evers became the first field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP in 1954.
Medgar and Myrlie met at college in Mississippi, and they became co-laborers in the NAACP and civil rights activism. Both shared a strong sense of justice, a deep affection for one another, and an abiding faith in God.
He was killed by the rifle shot of a White supremacist in front of their home on June 12, 1963. The museum at which she spoke that day held the very gun used to kill her husband.
Shortly after her public remarks, she put words to her resilience.
During a small press conference I attended, one journalist asked her about the state of race relations today.
“I see something today that I had hoped I would never see again. That is prejudice, hatred, negativism that comes from the highest points across America,” she told us. Then, with the candor that comes with old age, she said, “And I found myself asking Medgar in the conversations that I have with him: Is this really what’s happening again in this country? And asking for guidance because — I don’t mind admitting this to the press — I’m a little weary at this point.”
At that moment, I fully expected her to expound on the weariness of fighting for racial justice for decades. To vent about her frustrations with people who still oppose the laws and policies that would move us closer to racial progress. To say that she was passing the torch to another generation and that she had earned her rest.
But she took her comments in a different direction — one that pointed to the strength and resolve of the staunchest defenders of justice.
“But it’s something about the spirit of justice that raises up like a war horse. That horse that stands with its back sunk in and hears that bell — I like to say the ‘bell of freedom.’ And all of a sudden, it becomes straight, and the back becomes stiff. And you become determined all over again.”
My mind lingered on a phrase she used: the spirit of justice.
The spirit of justice is the inner force that moves us to demand dignity and respect for ourselves and others. It is the cry of our souls for the world to be a fair and kind place. It is the power that inspires people to speak up when others remain silent. To move when others stand still. To put themselves on the line when others choose to remain comfortable.
It’s the spirit of justice that gives the stamina, the resilience, the hope you need to keep your hand on the freedom plow.
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The spirit of justice has sustained Black people in the United States who endured and overcame race-based chattel slavery, lynching, segregation, and police brutality.
It is the spirit that fills anyone who links arms in solidarity with the oppressed. It is the spirit that refuses to quit even when the odds seem insurmountable.
We need the spirit of justice today.
Perhaps we don’t talk enough in justice work about the spirit that animates activism. Maybe we should be more explicit about the soul strength we need in this struggle.
Learning from people like Myrlie Evers-Williams, who is still alive and ready to become “determined all over again,” reminds us of our inner power.
The same spirit of justice that empowered generations past is available to us today. It has been there for people across time whenever an oppressed people needed it. It is here when you need it too. And, lamentably, it is always needed.
The spirit of justice still speaks.
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