Racial Injustice and Religious Response from Selma to Ferguson (2015 AAR Plenary Panel)

Recorded at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the AAR in Atlanta, GA. The 2015 annual meeting focused on “Valuing the Study of Religion,” which includes pondering how religion has been valued—and devalued—in public spaces. Addressing a variety of social spaces from the legislature to the streets, this panel analyzes religious responses to racial injustice. In 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the historic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, attending to injustice seems more morally urgent than ever. Considering both the historical trajectory that led us to this painful moment and the religious resources activists have employed, this conversation brings together notable voices to offer their assessments of the contemporary situation. Ruby Sales, the human rights activist and public theologian who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s and later founded a non-profit organization dedicated to “racial, economic, and social justice,” joins Cornel West, distinguished religion scholar and democratic intellectual, in a conversation with Professor Imani Perry, a celebrated scholar of African American Studies and Law who has written eloquently about racial injustice and “pathways to freedom, equality, and enriched democracy.”

Panelists:
Imani Perry, Princeton University
Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary
Ruby Nell Sales, SpiritHouse Project, Atlanta, GA

Thomas A. Tweed, University of Notre Dame, Presiding