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Michael Brown Sr. (C-front) leads a march from the location where his son Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed following a memorial service marking the anniversary of his death on August 9, 2015 in Ferguson, Missouri.
Every August comes heavy and hot, and every year it brings me back to Ferguson. To a particular patch of Canfield Drive, where asphalt still seems to pulse with memory, and to the faces—some familiar, some gone—who gathered under a bruised sky after Michael Brown Jr. was killed. It has been twelve years, and I have learned that time does not heal all wounds. It teaches us the difficult choreography of living with them.
I am no longer the pastor of Wellspring Church nor a resident of Ferguson, but that moment, that street, and that season are stitched into the lining of my soul. Like many who stood in the breach that August and beyond, I am forever changed. Yet the anniversary still stalks me. It waits in the marrow. I have come to see this not only as trauma’s residue, but as a call to hold pain and faith, memory and movement together.
We are a nation that likes its narratives linear: wound, struggle, triumph, and then, cleanly, “moving on.” But Dr. William Bridges' seminal book, Transitions, explains that change does not follow an arrow-straight path. Healing, especially collective healing, moves in spirals. We return to the site of pain not because we are stuck, but because reclamation becomes possible there.
Grief, in this sense, is not an obstacle to overcome but a companion to acknowledge. Each August, I walk through the memories with new eyes: the anguish of a mother’s cry, the rage that spilled into streets, the prayers whispered in the darkness, the negotiations—holy and human—between justice and survival. These memories do not fade. They evolve. As Dr. Edward Wimberly’s communal-contextual model suggests, healing is as communal as it is internal. We do not grieve alone. We do not heal alone.
Anniversaries are tricky things. For those of us who love or lead, who protest or pastor, they can be both holy days and haunted ones. The calendar’s return to August 9th is not just a date; it’s a collision of past and present. And yet, there is something righteous—something necessary—about returning. I appreciate Dr. J. Scott Butler’s work with African American families and faith communities. He notes that our rituals of remembrance are not simply about not forgetting; they are about turning toward justice, healing, and persistence. We mark the pain so we can measure the progress and the promise it demanded.
Recalibration is not about erasing the hard memories. It is about finding a healthy rhythm—acknowledging the wound without letting it define the whole. I have seen what happens to those who try to outrun their pain: it speeds up, nipping at their heels, bleeding into their relationships and rest. But those who pause, who turn and face it, who remember communally, find a different kind of strength. They reclaim not only their narrative but also their agency.
I have been asked, more times than I care to count, what it means to “move forward” from Ferguson. The question itself is a misunderstanding. We do not move forward as if leaving a place behind. We spiral—returning, reflecting, reclaiming, and then stepping into the world again, a little more whole and a little more resolved.
Dr. Stephanie Crumpton, in her womanist pastoral theology, frames this as the sacred work of reclamation. There are points, periods, and places of pain that must be revisited, not to wallow, but to witness. To name what happened, to honor those who suffered, and to insist that the story is not finished. This is righteous recalibration. It is the refusal to let trauma have the last word.
For me, Wellspring was never just a sanctuary for Sunday worship. It was a field hospital, a strategy room, a place where the rawness of grief and the audacity of hope could mingle. Twelve years later, I see that the real work was not about “fixing” the community but about empowering it to claim and transform its wounds. This is what gives anniversaries their sacred power: they force us to reckon with what remains undone, and they invite us to remember what has been survived.
If you are reading this and carrying your own anniversaries—of loss, of violence, of moments that split your life into before and after—hear me: the spiral does not mean you are failing. It means you are human. It means you are, perhaps, doing the most courageous kind of living. The recalibration of grief is not a denial of pain but a disciplined, even holy, engagement with it.
For some, this engagement might mean returning to the page each year, journaling the surge and echo of anniversary memories. Others may find comfort in creating space for quiet prayer or lighting a candle in remembrance. Some may choose meditation in the mornings of those significant days, or gathering trusted companions to reminisce and bear witness together. These personal practices, humble as they may seem, offer gentle scaffolding as we walk through the spiral, making meaning of the pain and shaping hope from memory.
We show up to the hard places, year after year, so that our communities and we are not defined solely by what broke us. This is both psychological and theological truth. Scholarship reminds us that faith is not the absence of suffering, but the willingness to integrate it into our stories. Likewise, healing is a shared responsibility, and power exists in naming and narrating our pain, especially for those whose suffering has too often been silenced.
Twelve Augusts have come and gone. I have left Ferguson, but Ferguson has never left me. Each anniversary is both an ache and an altar—a place to lay down burdens, gather lessons, remember names, and recalibrate the soul.
We spiral, yes. But we spiral upward, carrying not only pain, but promise—and the call to keep remembering, reclaiming, and becoming, with a steadier and more resolved soul.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, and scholar-practitioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
“I really want to be able to discuss polarizing topics,” she said. “But as long as it’s a safe space.”
This common sentiment reflects recent data on students’ attitudes toward speech on campus: a 2024 Knight Foundation study found that 91% of students value free speech as “very important” or "important," while 64% of students believe colleges should offer “safe spaces” on campus, with only 15% opposed.
But what do students really mean by “safe spaces”? Some students use the term to refer to spaces that are physically safe, especially amid growing fears about ICE on campus. Other students use the term to refer to emotional safety, reflecting spaces where authentic conversation on controversial topics is expected, but with rules: no slurs, for example, or no dehumanizing others. Still others feel that, in safe spaces, certain ideas or viewpoints should be forbidden, because of the harm that they cause.
With such a range of definitions, it’s no wonder that the phrase itself has become polarizing. Some view safe spaces as a must, while others view them as a reflection of weakness or lack of resiliency in my generation. Some have proposed “brave spaces” instead, where students are encouraged to speak with courage about controversial issues. As a 2025 college graduate, I often felt intellectual whiplash on Harvard’s campus, between the promotion and decrying of spaces as “safe,” the introduction of new “brave” spaces, and trying to sort out which was which and what meant what.
As someone who spends my new professional career engaged with speech on college campuses, I propose clarifying the term “safety” in this context, with historical precedent.
In 1958, philosopher Isaiah Berlin gave a speech at Oxford entitled “Two Concepts of Liberty.” At the time, Berlin responded to increasingly intense clashes between liberalism, socialism, communism, and other ideologies, each claiming to champion “freedom.” In response, Berlin proposed two frameworks of liberty —negative and positive — aiming to add nuance to the term.
Negative freedom can be described as “freedom from,” as in freedom from restriction. It’s the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, because you are a free person. In contrast, positive freedom is described as “freedom to,” as in, the freedom to have certain entitlements or rights, the retention of which may require some limitations on your negative freedom. For example, because everyone has the right to life, you are not free to murder, and because everyone has the right to free movement, you are not free to evade paying the taxes which fund highways.
This distinction helps resolve conflict between those who view freedom differently. If John were to accuse Sally of being “anti-freedom” for supporting taxes, and Sally in turn called John “anti-freedom” for refusing to contribute to the roads she had the right to travel on, a third party could remind them that in fact they were both “pro-freedom,” but just defined it differently. When someone speaks casually of freedom, they could reasonably be asked, “Do you mean freedom from, or freedom to?”
So how does this all relate to safe spaces? I suggest that the same question, “from, or to?” when applied to the term “safe space,” could have a similarly clarifying and depolarizing effect. When students ask about a safe space, we could ask, “Safe for what?” or “Safe from what?” In doing so, we could better understand their expectations and see how they align with our values. Similarly, when offering “safe spaces,” we could clarify, “This space is safe from non-campus affiliates,” or “This space is safe from slurs.” To step it up a notch, we could even say, “While this space is safe from hateful speech, it is safe for competing viewpoints to be heard and considered.”
Certainly, we cannot 100% control what will be said in a space. But debating whether we should have safe spaces is so ambiguous that it's unproductive. Instead, defining what we mean by them can move the term from a political buzzword to a clarifying statement about what a space is meant to be.
Shira Hoffer is the founding Executive Director of The Viewpoints Project. A 2025 graduate in Social Studies and Religion, she served on Harvard’s Intellectual Vitality Committee for two years, advising and presenting on new strategies for promoting constructive disagreement on campus, and is a practicing mediator in Massachusetts courts. Her senior thesis explored differing campus speech behaviors between religious and secular college students.
A person holds signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion outside Peace Hall in New Port Richey, Florida on July 18, 2026.
Don’t look now, but we seem to have a moral panic on our hands.
The term moral panic, at least as a social science concept, is relatively modern. It was coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1972 book “Folk Devils and Moral Panics.” Moral panics emerge when large numbers of people start to freak out about something that doesn’t warrant the freak out.
When I was kid, there was a moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons, the role playing game. It was sparked by the tragic suicide of a gamer and quickly led to various Christian groups insisting, in the words of one Georgia pastor, that "the game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons."
Moral panics are seductive to journalists. CBS News’ “60 Minutes” host Ed Bradley interviewed Gary Gygax, the creator of the game, in 1985, asking “If you found 12 kids in murder suicide with one connecting factor in each of them, wouldn’t you question it?”
Gygax responded, “I would certainly do it in a scientific manner, and this is as unscientific as you can get. It’s nothing but a witch hunt!”
Gygax was right, but it took a while for people to realize it.
History is full of similar episodes. Some were entirely silly — like the 1950s hysteria about comic books corrupting the youth. But often they take real concerns and legitimate issues and turbocharge them. The child-abduction panic of the late 1970s and early 1980s was sparked by some actual, horrific child abductions. The understandable fear among parents led to a kind of mass hysteria.
Moral panics form a bit like “perfect storms” with just the right conditions. But they differ in three ways. First, storms are easy to predict. Second, when you’re in a deluge, no one disputes that you’re in one. But when you’re in a moral panic, the people panicking can’t recognize it until it’s over — sort of like when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the other week “Woke 1 was crazy.” She didn’t think so when she was fomenting Woke 1.
Which brings us to the third difference: Humans don’t know how to create hurricanes, but they do know how to create moral panics.
Consider the freakout over AI data centers, which are proliferating across the country. A recent poll found that more people would rather have a nuclear power plant or steel factory in their community than a data center. That’s bonkers.
Panic-peddlers are pushing even crazier stuff. Steve Bannon’s “War Room” is describing AI data centers as “weapons labs” to be used on Americans. His “tech correspondent” claims that data centers are like the embryonic “neurons of the Antichrist, that’s what we’re witnessing. The false messiah.” A Kentucky farmer who turned down a $26 million dollar offer for her property explained to CNN that part of her reasoning is that the vibrations from data centers“vibrate at a low frequency that can bring up cortisol levels.”
We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this moral panic isn’t entirely homegrown. Fracking induced a similar freakout 15 years ago, and foreign governments played a role in fomenting it, hoping a moral panic would block the practice the way a similar one killed the nuclear industry for a generation. It would not shock me if we’re seeing something similar today.
Not all concerns about data centers are so crazy or even unreasonable. They do use a lot of water, though not nearly as much as some claim. They can cause electricity rates to go up. They’re ugly. And, if you’re freaking out about what AI will do to your job or to American society, taking it out on data centers makes a certain amount of sense.
Politicians, as a class, tend to indulge moral panics. Which is why it’s no surprise that Republicans and Democrats alike are racing to get on the “right” side of the issue.
Consider Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, up for reelection this year. Texas has prided itself in being the most business-friendly environment possible, enticing Big Tech to flee California for the accommodating Lone Star State. Just last November, Abbot boasted that a $40 billion dollar investment by Google proved that “Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”
Now, Abbott is throwing Google and Big Tech under the bus. By failing to win over local communities, he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “ They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them.” He added, “That’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”
AI is coming. The only question is whether America should take the lead or let China. If your answer is “America,” then data centers are the price. If your answer is “China” then by all means keep freaking out.
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Black wealth is rising but the racial wealth gap is widening. From Douglass to Mays to today, the freedom struggle's unfinished business is ownership.
From Emmaus, Pennsylvania and Staten Island to Veterans of Foreign Wars posts in Kansas, Tennessee, N. Carolina and more, as well as the Ohio State Fair's butter cow theme (and deviled egg recipes), the celebration of America 250 continues throughout the rest of the sesquicentennial year.
Added to the recent Sail250 tall ship event culminating in Boston’s harbor attended by millions was part of the country’s s 1776 official birthdate of independence, but the persistent calls for Black freedom of the last two centuries are still ignored.
Two men, a century apart, stood before audiences and did the same audacious thing: they read the historic words aloud. In Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass took the founding scripture of the republic and turned it into an indictment: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
In 1967, at Morehouse College’s centennial commencement, President Benjamin E. Mays opened not with celebration but with a catalog of slander — Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun, Louis Agassiz and Henry Grady — the learned apparatus that had declared the newly emancipated “a little less than human.”
Strip away the century between them and both men make one demand: refuse the status the country assigns you. “A man does not have to accept the view,” Mays told the Morehouse men, “that because he is a Negro, certain things were not meant for him.”
That is the whole Black freedom tradition in a single breath.
But Mays did something Douglass could not yet do — he predicted the current era. Discrimination in the future, he warned, “will not be administered by poor whites and the people who believe in segregation but by the ‘liberals’ who believe in a desegregated society but not an integrated society.”
Mays said they would “wine and dine with us in the swankiest hotels, work with us, and still discriminate against us when it comes to money and power.” He named the practice: our institutions are “by design kept on short grass.”
You only need to look at the ground beneath us.
The National Urban League titled its 2025 State of Black America report a “State of Emergency.” That emergency continues in President Donald Trump’s recent false screed in the National Address propagating election lies as the Voting Rights Act erases access; affirmative action is eliminated; and the machinery of fair treatment in schools, businesses, institutions and organizations is switched off.
The deepest number is a paradox: Black wealth is rising while the racial wealth gap widens. Black families’ median net worth jumped nearly 58 percent from 2019 to 2022, yet the dollar gap grew past $240,000 — because a small share of a large base compounds faster than a large share of a small one.
Black households hold about 13 cents for every white dollar at the median. That is Mays’s short grass rendered as arithmetic, and Douglass’s promissory note is still marked as insufficient funds.
The Black freedom struggle always carried an economic-justice wing, and it was the engine room, not the fringe. A. Philip Randolph was a socialist. Bayard Rustin, who architected the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a democratic socialist.
And Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — Mays’ own student — was murdered in Memphis in 1968 where he was launching a Poor People’s Campaign with sanitation workers that fused race and class. “What good is the right to sit at a lunch counter,” King asked, “if you cannot afford a hamburger?”
Out of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference where I served as Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, came Operation Breadbasket, then PUSH, then Jesse Jackson, Sr.’s Rainbow Coalition — his insistence in 1984 and 1988 that a Black preacher could assemble a multiracial, working-class majority around economic justice.
The late Jackson drew that blueprint; the new movement inherits it whether it knows the names or not. But an honest elder audits the ledger: the Rainbow moved the platform and never captured enough machinery to convert votes into durable Black wealth.
Those views deserve respect, not ridicule. They represent the voice of a people who have buried too many children waiting for beautiful theories to pay out. Pragmatism is not timidity; it is scar tissue.
Along with Jackson, Douglass and Mays were not only prophets — they were builders, editors, fundraisers, and institution-makers who held the prophet’s fire and the steward’s ledger in the same two hands. They displayed radical ends with disciplined means.
Which calls up the hardest question: in a technologically disruptive, media-savvy age, how do Black folks survive?
The threat is concrete — Black workers are far likelier to hold the jobs automation eats first, in customer support, office work, food service, and production, while too thin a pipeline runs into the fields the new economy rewards.
Survival is the short-grass mind. The word this moment demands is sovereignty — moving from labor to ownership of equity, intellectual property, and capital. Moving from being the audience on platforms to owning the platforms and the story that runs on them.
The entrepreneurial signal is already there: Black-owned firms grew about 57 percent from 2017 to 2022. But they remain roughly three percent of American companies and one percent of revenue.
Formation is not the bottleneck; capital, contracts, and scale are. The fight Mays named — equal consideration for the tax and philanthropic dollar — is today the fight for venture capital, credit, and procurement. Politics that does not move capital toward ownership is decorative.
The through-line from Douglass to now is simple: the freedom this country grants on paper, it withholds in capital. Every generation’s task is to convert the paper into property and the property into power.
This generation’s task is to make certain that when the AI economy is finished being built, Black entrepreneurs are counted among its owners — and not merely among its displaced. Take us off the short grass, and we will show you what we grow.
Dr. Lamell J. McMorris is the founder of Phase 2 Consulting, and Greenlining Realty USA; serves as Senior Vice Chair of the National Urban League Board of Trustees and is author of The Power to Persist. He is the former Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
