Launch Party Recap
Pictures and a report from an unforgettable night
On Tuesday night, more than 100 people gathered at the former Grace AME Zion Church, in the former Brooklyn neighborhood, to celebrate the release of Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods.
Joseph “Piko” Ewoodzie hosted and facilitated. Piko is a dear friend and a highly regarded sociologist. We’ve taught together at Davidson College, where is on the faculty, and schemed up a few projects. He is talented writer and a perceptive thinker with a knack for asking the right questions. Tuesday night was no different. One of his questions for me was about faith and how my current work has affected my faith. It wasn’t easy to answer, but it’s one I’ve started writing about for a later post.
Brandi North Williams offered some reflections. She was compelling, of course, in discussing her work in activism, her family history, and how the work from Our Trespasses has impacted her.
I read a few selections from the book. One was from the end of the lives of Abram and Annie North. Another was from the groundbreaking at First Baptist Church’s building in the razed and cleared Brooklyn. The last was from the final chapter, which is more existential than historical.
We visited. We hugged, I signed a ton of books.
When everyone was gone, the car packed and the sanctuary lights turned out, I paused. I stood there inside a haunted cityscape. In one direction were bank towers. In the other was the bell tower of First Baptist standing guard over a government quarter, the fusion of the sacred and the secular. All around me were surface parking lots, the scars of an ill-conceived and cruel land grab conceived by local leaders, funded by the federal government, and run by good white Christians.
Though it seems so, none of those buildings or parking lots are permanent. History proves that the whole neighborhood can be remade.
Next to the old Grace AMEZ sanctuary was a mural collapsing together Brooklyn’s past and its coming restoration, in a form not yet determined:
Somehow, I’ve found myself caught up in that work. For a moment, it was enough to stand and breathe and to say a simple prayer:
”Thank you.”
And now the work continues.
Yes, truly an unforgettable night. Thank you.