Forgiveness is Freedom Academy faculty and students on the steps of Washburn Hall on URI’s Kingston Campus. Seated in front, left to right: Chantel Chestnutt (North Carolina Central University), Jayda Ives-Williams (URI), Faith Koliyah (Paul Cuffee School), Hope Koliyah (Paul Cuffee School), Habeeblah Oshinaike (Highlander Charter School). Seated in back, Naarah Miller (Florida A&M University). Standing, left to right: Joseph Amaral (URI), Skip Mark (URI), Catherine John (URI), Marcus Nevius (University of Missouri).

Student scholars in the inaugural cohort of the Forgiveness is Freedom Academy are asked to examine America’s history of racial violence and consider the responses it elicits.

By Marybeth Reilly-McGreen

On June 17, 2015, a mass shooting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, S.C., left nine Black congregants dead. Forty-eight hours later, the judge presiding over the case of their killer, confessed mass murderer Dylann Roof, invited family members of the deceased to address him. The family members hadn’t been given advance notice of the invitation.

What followed sparked shock, then awe, and, for some, anger.

Nadine Lance Collier was the first to address 21-year-old Roof, who had attended Bible study at the church on the night of the mass shooting before he opened fire on the group. Collier lost her mother, Ethel Lance.

“I just want everyone to know. To you, I forgive you,” Collier said. “You took something very precious from me, but I forgive you.”

The Rev. Anthony Thompson followed. He’d lost his wife, Myra, leader of the Bible study group.

“I forgive you, and my family forgives you,” Thompson said. “We would like you to take this opportunity to repent, confess. Live your life to the one who matters the most, Christ, so that he can change your ways. Do that, and you’ll be better off than what you are right now.”

Then came survivor Felicia Sanders. She spoke of welcoming Roof to the Bible study with “open arms.” Then, she said, he killed some of the most beautiful people she knew. “But,” she said, “God have mercy on you.”

Their forgiveness of Roof drew global media attention and prompted provocative and complicated spiritual and philosophical questions. Does forgiveness require perpetrators to express remorse? Is forgiving forgetting? Is forgiveness freedom? Are there times when turning the other cheek is too much to ask?

This past August, local high school students, along with URI faculty and a group of college students from URI and other universities, took up these questions and others at the University’s first Forgiveness is Freedom Academy. URI’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies sponsored the two-week seminar led by Skip Mark, executive director of the center and an assistant professor of political science, and Catherine John, professor and chair of Africana studies.

That the program came to pass is a testament to the collective and coordinated efforts of current and past URI faculty members. Former URI faculty members Bryan Dewsbury, Rebecca Millsop, and Marcus Nevius together secured a pilot grant to plan the academy. Nevius, Mark, and John then secured a grant from the Teagle Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting liberal arts education. The grant will fund the academy for two years.

The rising high school seniors chosen for the program were selected based on their applications, along with recommendations from teachers and counselors.

Sisters Faith and Hope Koliyah from the Paul Cuffee School in Providence were participants in the first Forgiveness is Freedom Academy.

“High school students … should be active participants in community and policy debates about racism, racial violence, and education.”

–Skip Mark, Assistant Professor of Political Science, and Director, URI Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies

“The idea of forgiveness in the human experience presents a unique opportunity for rising high school seniors in Rhode Island’s urban districts to be in community with faculty and students at URI and from historically Black colleges and universities as, together, we study the humanities,” says Nevius, now associate professor of history in the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.

Mark underscored that the seminar was an opportunity for scholars and students to learn together.

“One thing we hammered home is that we don’t know everything,” Mark says. “The whole thing is a discussion.”

“We examine racial violence and forgiveness through the lens of Africana studies, philosophy, history, and political science,” Mark says. “Where does violence come from? Where do we get anger? What is the role of forgiveness?”

The seminar is structured so that students begin and end it by watching the 2019 documentary Emanuel, which explores families’ and friends’ reactions to the shooting of the Emanuel Nine, as they collectively became known. The film shows that not everyone affected forgave as readily as Collier, Thompson, and Sanders.

“For those who forgave at the very beginning, I admire them,” said Melvin Graham Jr., an Emanuel AME congregant interviewed for the documentary. “God truly worked the work in them. Truly.

“I’m a work in progress.”

Dewsbury, now an associate professor of biological sciences at Florida International University in Miami, says he and Millsop were moved to write a grant proposal for the academy after watching Emanuel.

“I was inspired by the film’s themes of forgiveness and the history of Blackness and Black trauma,’ Dewsbury says. “The grant provided an opportunity to build a curriculum around it.”

The academy’s challenging curriculum features a who’s who of philosophical and cultural thought that includes Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. Students read classic and contemporary texts such as Augustine’s Confessions, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night.

In addition to the questions generated by the Emanuel documentary, core and classic humanities questions come into play. For example, how should a person live their life, and how does one act for the good of the world? Dewsbury poses those questions and adds, “The answers require careful engagement with the past to help us understand how we came to be. And then, in knowing ourselves and our community, we are better positioned to move forward with love and purpose.”

Joseph Amaral ’23, rising URI senior Jayda Ives-Williams, and two undergraduate students, Naarah Miller of Florida A&M University, and Chantel Chestnutt of North Carolina Central University, serve as advisors and mentors to the high school students who will take the coming academic year to complete research projects seeded by their work at the academy. The high school students will present their projects at URI next spring.

On a sunny Monday, at the midpoint of the academy, students gathered in Washburn Hall to watch “The Keys to the Kingdom 1974–1980,” an episode of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement, which first aired in 1990. The students watch the first half of the episode, which recounts the desegregation of Boston’s public schools in 1974 and a subsequent protest in South Boston that turned into a riot.

In the episode, a preschool-aged Black girl, Juliane Bond, appears on the screen. Offscreen, a reporter asks, “What do you think’s going to happen when you go to school?”

“When we go up there, we’re going to be stoned. It’s not fair to me because why is it the other way around when they come up here?” Bond says. “When they come up here, we won’t mess with them, so why, when we come up there, do they mess with us?”

The reporter asks Bond what she’d like to say to the people of South Boston.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” she says. “It’s not fair to me.”

As the group watches, John is moved to tears by the child’s comments. “This is part of why I got into education,” she says. John directs the students to consider questions written on the whiteboard behind her: “Are you angry after watching this? If so, what are you angry about?”

Catherine John engages in discussion with students in a Forgiveness is Freedom Academy seminar.

“Anger can be useful. Anger gave us the Civil Rights Movement.”

–Catherine John, Professor and Chair, URI Department of Africana Studies

Hope Koliyah, a rising senior from the Paul Cuffee School in Providence, speaks first. “What made me angry was students not knowing—when they leave their homes in the morning—if they’re coming home again,” she says. Koliyah’s comment is met with nods of agreement and shared anger.

Professor John draws the students’ attention to Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger.”

“Lorde is talking about anger and the relationship between anger, violence, and forgiveness. Lorde says that anger can be useful. I think it’s very important for us to remember that anger gave us the Civil Rights Movement,” John notes. “You, too, can channel that anger into change.

“You can put anger to productive use.”

Mark notes that the students were asked to read difficult texts and participate in challenging discussions. He says he was impressed with their ability to grapple with the content and saw their understanding increase throughout the academy.

“They participated actively in discussions, engaged with us, and spoke their minds,” says Mark. “High school students—especially these students—are more than capable of having these conversations, and they should be active participants in community and policy debates about racism, racial violence, and education.

“This experience,” he adds, “gave them greater confidence that their ideas matter and are valued, and that they can hold intellectual conversations at a college level.”

PHOTOS: SETH JACOBSON

Skip Mark, co-leader of the Forgiveness is Freedom Academy, and URI student/mentor Jayda Ives-Williams.

Revisiting Emanuel

Forgiveness is Freedom Academy participants watched and discussed the documentary Emanuel at the beginning of the academy and again at the end. Academy director Skip Mark reflects on how their reactions to the film changed—and how they were changed.

After we first watched Emanuel, the class sat silently for a long moment. No one spoke as we processed the emotions it had invoked in us. Though I had watched it before, the documentary left me shaken. When we began the discussion, many students struggled to understand how some of the families of the victims could forgive such an atrocious act.

At the close of the academy, we watched the documentary again. The discussion this time had changed. Students focused less on the actions of the shooter and more on the family and the role their forgiveness played in allowing them to heal. They also focused on the role of forgiveness in the broader community—a community that might otherwise have erupted in race riots, as the shooter wanted.

They discussed the role of community and religion in creating conditions that allowed people to forgive despite such tragedy.

Our readings and discussions over the two weeks of the academy changed how the students understood the tragedy. The academy gave them some tools to look at this event in the broader historical context and to recognize its roots in systemic racism that still plagues our country. Watching a second time, they could understand how and why some families had chosen to forgive. They were also more willing to forgive.

—Skip Mark

PHOTO: SETH JACOBSON