Kenosha, Wisconsin
RNS
The message appeared on signs, T-shirts and face masks in the crowd. Black Lives Matter.
But Sonja Wolfe, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Church Council and resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin, said she was tired of feeling like they don’t.
“I’m tired of feeling like I don’t matter to some people because of the colour of my skin. I’m tired of trying to make others see or hear that this is wrong. I’m definitely tired and fed up with Black people, sinner or saint, being brutalised and villainised out of fear and hate simply because of the colour of our skin,” Wolfe said at a prayer vigil held late Wednesday afternoon at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha.
“I’m tired of wondering: When will it change and when will it get better?”
People attend a racial justice prayer vigil held late Wednesday, on 2nd September, at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin.PICTURE: RNS/Emily McFarlan Miller
Wolfe shared an experience when police were called on her family 20 years ago as they gathered to grieve her stepfather’s death. She shared how she has been judged before saying a word, how she’s learned to fear police even though her father was a member of the Chicago Police Department and she herself served in the military.
BIDEN, IN KENOSHA, SAYS US CONFRONTING “ORIGINAL SIN”
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden told residents in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism. The Democrat sought to draw a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a racial reckoning that has galvanised the nation.
“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400-years-old…slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, where he met with community leaders after a private, hour-long session with police shooting victim Jacob Blake and his family.
The visit marked the former Vice President’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee. While Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family, Trump didn’t mention Blake during his own trip to Kenosha on Tuesday. Where Biden traced problems in the criminal justice system back to slavery, Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism and offered his unvarnished support to law enforcement, blaming the recent violence on “domestic terror.”
“I can’t say if tomorrow God made me president, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Biden said. But “it would be a whole better, we’d get a whole lot further down the road” if Trump isn’t re-elected.
“There’s certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to – but we’re not going to lose.”
Blake remains hospitalised after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him on 23rd August. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.
Outside Grace Lutheran, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Trump’s and Biden’s respective visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.
Justin Blake called Biden “more of a unifier” and credited the Democrat for bringing up criminal justice changes before being asked. But Justin Blake said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”
Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered searing accounts of their struggles.
Porsche Bennett, an organiser for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Biden she’s “tired” at just 31 years old and worried for her three young, Black children. “For so many decades we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding that she’s heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”
Biden answered that, because he’s white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”
But he compared the current era of cell phone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil rights protesters being beaten more than a half-century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non-whites.
“I think the country is much more primed to take responsibility, because they now have seen what you see,” Biden told Bennett, the community organiser.
– BILL BARROW, WILL WEISSERT and SCOTT BAUER, AP
And she said she hoped by sharing her story, the people gathered at the vigil would see her when they see injustice and racism and say, “No more.”
About 200 people – including the head of the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States – gathered Wednesday on the front lawn of Grace Lutheran Church to pray, confess and lament the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
The prayer vigil was organised by the seven ELCA churches in the city. Kenosha also is home to Carthage College, one of 28 ELCA colleges and universities.
“This is an existential threat and an existential reality for Black people and brown people in this country, and it must be an existential threat for white people, too,” said Rev Elizabeth Eaton, presiding bishop of the ELCA.
The vigil followed more than a week of unrest in the city after Blake, a Black man, was shot multiple times in the back by a white police officer on 23rd August in Kenosha.
Protesters continue to call for justice for Blake and an end to anti-Black violence. Rioting and looting also have damaged some businesses in the city. Kyle Rittenhouse – a white 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, just over the Wisconsin border – has been charged after prosecutors say he shot and killed two protesters, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and injured a third.
On Wednesday evening, as the vigil wrapped up blocks away, downtown Kenosha was quiet, and the city’s emergency curfew was lifted after police said it had been “relatively peaceful” for days.
Sheridan Road, one of the main streets through downtown, remained barricaded, with buildings in the area boarded up.
Many of those boarded-over windows were painted with colorful murals and messages.
Some were drawn from faith: “No Jesus / No Peace / Know Jesus / Know Peace.” “Perfect love casts out fear,” a passage from the Biblical book of I John. “This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another,” also from I John.
But Rev Paul Petersen of St Mary’s Lutheran Church in Kenosha said more needs to be done.
“We can’t be satisfied with paint over plywood and slogans such as ‘Kenosha Strong,’” Petersen said.
Several pastors led the crowd at Grace Lutheran Church in prayers of lament and confession – a familiar ritual for Lutherans, according to Rev Paul Erickson, bishop of the Greater Milwaukee Synod.
Their prayers asked God for justice and healing for Blake, punctuated by honks and shouts of “Amen, brother!” from cars driving past.
They asked the people gathered to reflect on how they had been complicit in or benefited from systemic racism and to consider one concrete step they can take.
Then Rev Kara Baylor, campus pastor at Carthage College, offered a few suggestions specifically for the white members who overwhelmingly make up the ELCA. Those suggestions included educating themselves about race and racism, joining peaceful protests and learning how systemic racism impacts policy – not all policies, but, for each person, “the thing you are called to do”.
And, Baylor said, “Be open to a change of heart.”
“Only if we are honest about what is happening can we change the world. We are here to change the world, to change Kenosha, to change our hearts,” she added.
Christine Reardon, who lives near Grace Lutheran Church, and Vivienne Clyne, who attends the church, said after the vigil that they most appreciated Baylor’s message.
“She gave tools,” Reardon said.
Rev Elizabeth Eaton, Presiding Bishop of the ELCA, speaks during a racial justice prayer vigil at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, 2nd September. PICTURE: RNS/Emily McFarlan Miller
Eaton called the crowd to use those tools to get to work and to wrestle with uncomfortable truths in the same way the patriarch Jacob wrestled with God in the Biblical account.
“Jacob was transformed in that night of wrestling, and now we are called to that same night of wrestling – not a night of darkness and hopelessness, but a night of power with a God of power working in the dark, working in the beautiful blackness to transform Jacob and now will transform us,” she said.
“We can’t rest. We can’t stop.”
Unlike many of the others gathered on the lawn at Grace Lutheran Church, Wolfe said she’d realised beforehand she didn’t have anything with “Black lives matter” to wear to the prayer vigil. It didn’t bother her for long.
“And then,” she said, “I realised that I don’t need to wear anything because my skin tells that glorious story.”
