2024–25 Pyne Speaker Urges Students to Seek Out Justice and Hope

The Groton School community welcomed the 2024–25 Pyne Speaker, the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, PhD, to the Circle for a series of robust discussions about religion, race, sexuality, and justice.

The Percy and Eben Pyne Chapel Speakers Fund was established in 1999 by members of the Pyne family to bring “exemplary role models for thinking and acting ethically” to speak to the Groton School community. Dr. Douglas is a scholar, educational leader, Christian theologian, Episcopal priest, and social justice activist, and visiting professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School for the 2024–25 academic year. 

In a Monday-morning chapel talk, Dr. Douglas took the assembled community members through a brief history of her theological journey.

“If anyone had told me when I was your age that I would be a theologian, or that I would write anything—let alone something that somebody other than me would read—I would tell them that they were well more than delusional,” she said. 

A native of Dayton, Ohio, Dr. Douglas traces her first thoughts of theology back to age 7, riding in a car with her parents on a cold, rainy night. Looking out the car window, she noticed a young boy and girl crossing the street. They were around her age, not dressed for the weather and—in her eyes—appearing to be poor and hungry.

“Tears literally filled my eyes as I imagined their life of struggle,” she said. “In the midst of my tears, I made a vow to one day come back and rescue those two children. As I got older, the thought of those children never left me. Not only did they create within me a deep sense of accountability to the poor and marginalized for our society, especially for those who look like me, but seeing those children also became the foundation for other questions that would later challenge my faith about God’s love, about God’s justice.” 

Dr. Douglas grew up attending St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, the only black Episcopal church in Dayton, and she’d wake up her parents every Sunday asking them to take her to services, where she marveled at the story of Jesus’ birth in a manger. 

Around that time, she also started hearing whispers of the adults in her life about four other little Black girls who had been killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, and how the white man who did it would probably be never caught or prosecuted. She began seeing pictures on the news of police attacking Black demonstrators.

“I didn’t know what I was watching,” said Dr. Douglas, “but those images were seared into my mind.

“It was no doubt those whispered conversations and violent images in my mind that prompted me about that same time to ask my father why white people didn’t like us,” she continued. “I don’t remember his answer, but I do remember thinking that if I could figure it out, then maybe we could do something about that and then white people would stop treating us so badly.”

***

She carried that struggle, along with an intense pride in being Black, to college, where she studied Black philosophers and grew increasingly impatient with the color line that circumscribed and threatened Black life.

“I recognize that as long as the color line existed, far too many Black children would be born into social conditions that foster death, not life,” Dr. Douglas explained. “My accountability to those two children I saw crossing the street became a passionate commitment to dismantle the white racist color line.”

Around the same time, she grew disenfranchised with the church, and the image taught at the time of Jesus as a white man. 

“How could a white Jesus ever care about me,” she said, “and how could I, a Black person, ever have faith in a white Jesus? I didn’t want to abandon the church, but I needed answers. I was experiencing an agonizing crisis of faith.”

Some answers began to come when her college chaplain introduced her to James H. Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation, which dismantled the white appropriation of the church at the time and offered a new view of Jesus’ ethnicity.

“As I read it literally a second time in one weekend, I couldn’t believe my questions were answered,” she said. “I could be Black with a love for Jesus without contradiction. Jesus Christ was Black like me and because Jesus was born in a stable and cradled in a manger, what could be the equivalent of an empty beer case in a ghetto alley, he was one with all those Black children and others who were trapped behind the life-graying color line of inner-city realities.”

 

***

Fifty years later, as the Black Lives Matter movement was still in its infancy, images of dead Black children were once again haunting Dr. Douglas, and once again, she was asking questions about wrong and right. 

“They were the faces of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and so many more,” she explained. “In my mind, history was repeating itself and I wanted to know why. Why were are Black children’s lives as much at risk, if not more so, as they’ve ever been in our nation’s history?” 

Dr. Douglas again needed answers, and this time found some in the process of writing her book, Stand Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. It was bigger than white people disliking Blacks.

“What therefore became clear to me in that part of my faith was the inherently simple nature of anti-Black white supremacy,” she said. “At the same time, my restlessness for God’s justice only intensified. And so today the restlessness for God’s justice has become for me an urgency for hope.”  

While she found answers, Dr. Douglas says she continues to wrestle with those questions of hope.

“‘How really do you keep hoping,’ my son asked? I answered by telling about his great great grandmother. We called her Mama Mary. Mama Mary died when I was around 6 years old. Every time I think about her, I think of those Black people who were born in slavery, died in slavery, and never drew a free breath. They fought for freedom anyhow. They fought for freedom that they knew they would never see but still believed one day would become reality. 

“This is the hope that runs through my bones. It is because they fought for that freedom that I stand here today speaking to you. I began this theological journey with a restlessness for God’s justice. This restlessness remains and, as much as there’s restlessness for justice, it should compel us to participate in acts of justice in the spaces in which we find ourselves. It is in those spaces where we try to enact justice that we find hope.” 

Following her chapel talk, Dr. Douglas visited classes throughout the day on Monday and Tuesday. In addition, a more free-form conversation—moderated by student leaders from chapel, Black and Latinx Alliance, Gender Sexuality Alliance, Groton Feminists, Current Events, Philosophy Club, Cultural Alliance, and Christian Fellowship—was held over lunch on Monday.