Building abolitionist sanctuaries

LOUISVILLE — Last week, the Rev. Dr. Nikia Smith Robert, who leads Abolitionist Sanctuary and teaches at the University of Kansas, stood on the shoulders of U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm, Maya Angelou and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to take her turn addressing the Westminster Town Hall Forum at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her talk is here. She’s introduced at the 38:40 mark.

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“Take inventory of where you enter the Westminster Town Hall Forum and don’t leave the same,” she suggested. “May we all ask ourselves, what will change about how we show up in the world as the result of what we experience here and the mission to invite voices of conscience to address the issues of the day from an ethical experience?”

Durin the final installment of the 2025-26 season, Robert focused her talk on “how we might build abolitionist sanctuaries to repair harms, restore relationships and rebuild more just and equitable systems and a better democracy for communal flourishing beyond poverty, punishment, policing and prisons. The gross injustices we face today have always been death-dealing in the everyday lives of Black and vulnerable people in America.”

The United States “is an empire,” she said, and “this is the same history our federal government seeks to erase to trick us to believe our hands are clean when in fact we are complicit in perpetuating an American empire.”

“When we know our history,” she said, “we can recognize the patterns.”

We’re living “in another episodic sequel of a familiar cinematic horror called ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’” Robert said, and throughout history, there have been many empires. “In fact, Christendom was the state religion of the Roman Empire,” Robert noted. “As Christendom was popularized, Christians were no longer persecuted, but protected, privileged and promoted. Under empire, Christianity became the center of politics and power. Church and state were fluid.”

Jesus was persecuted “for organizing an anti-empirical and revolutionary movement,” she said. After being “ethnically profiled” he was “arrested on a trumped-up charge of sedition, falsely convicted, coercively hanged between two thieves and died an ignoble and deplorable criminal’s death by state-sanctioned execution.”

“The fact of the matter is that Jesus’ cross is contiguous with the carceral state that disproportionately criminalizes and incarcerates Black and brown bodies, many of whom are also racially profiled,” she said. George Floyd died in Minnesota of asphyxiation “just as Jesus did on the cross at Golgotha, the place of skulls.”

White Christian nationalism is not Christianity, Robert pointed out. “What makes America great is our religious pluralism and diversity that champions equality and justice for all — just as much as we fight for the liberation of the oppressed. We need the moral courage of everyone, including communities of faith, to resist empire.” For “those of us who profess Christianity, we must follow not Constantine or Caesar, but Jesus the revolutionary, the first-century abolitionist.”

Abolitionist Sanctuary, which Robert began on Juneteenth in 2021, is a nonpartisan coalition with the mission “to train Black-serving churches, civic organizations and educational institutions to unite against the moral crisis of mass incarceration and the criminalization of impoverished Black motherhood,” Robert said. Its focus is on three programmatic areas: public education through its Abolition Academy, mutual aid support for Black mothers, and narrative-shifting.

When Robert was growing up in Harlem, New York, her neighbors were members of the Central Park Five, who were later known as the Exonerated Five. “I was 10 years old when I witnessed this gross miscarriage of justice in my community,” Robert said. By the time she was 12, “carcerality hit even closer” when she received a Christmas card in the mail from her brother who was in prison. Her mother was 15 years old and living in “abject poverty” when she conceived Robert’s brother, and in early adulthood when she gave birth to Robert. “My mother would go to any length — including bending the rules and breaking the law — to desperately ensure her children’s survival,” she said.

According to a report on the Status of Black Women in the United States, 80% of Black mothers are bread-winners, either the household’s sole provider or a primary contributor to household incomes, “and yet they do so under crushing economic hardship,” Robert said. Black women are poorer than any other group except Native American women, Robert noted, and in all but two states, the average cost of childcare exceeds 20% of Black women’s median earnings.

Four in five incarcerated women are mothers. “The cumulative consequences of locking away a woman from her family are enormous,” Robert said. “When a mother is forced to choose between paying rent and heating her home during a deadly winter freeze and then is criminalized for the choice she makes, it is the system that has failed, not her.”

Many are, as the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon described it, “living an ethic under oppression,” Robert said. Some Black mothers “contravene laws that disadvantage them,” but there are also privileged people who “break laws for their sole advantage and to the detriment of everyone else. Black mothers’ law-breaking is motivated by the preservation of their families,” while law-breaking among privileged people can be motivated by “hubris and power,” Robert said.

“It is one thing to break the law when the law breaks you,” she said, “and another thing to break the law to break everyone but yourself.”

Black mothers “not only break the law, but they break the patterns of empire,” Robert said. Cannon’s “living in ethics under oppression assigns virtue to Black women who do whatever is necessary to subsist, with limited options, against a system, because everyone deserves to survive.”

Society “can benefit from the practical wisdom and moral courage of Black women and mothers” who “teach us a better way: not to condemn and cage, but to extend care, compassion, creativity, courage and community,” Robert said. “These are the values that emerge from Black mothers’ survival that I view as instructive for dismantling systems of empire and to build abolitionist sanctuaries.”

“Abolition doesn’t have to be spiritual or grand,” she said. “Abolition is a lifestyle. I am an abolitionist in everything I do” as a parent, partner, professor, preacher, professional and person, she said.

Robert noted that Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, has said abolition does not mean avoiding accountability. Instead, “it shifts the focus from a reactive, punitive justice system toward transformative justice, centering healing and rehabilitation and addressing the root causes of harm.”

“Here is the truth: Black people are not safe in this nation. The LGBTQIA community is unsafe. The poor among us are unsafe. Anyone who opposes the American government is unsafe,” Robert said. “We need sanctuary.”

Robert closed with a portion of Chisholm’s Westminster Town Hall Forum. The former congresswoman told the audience four decades ago that “it is up to concerned and active citizens, like all of us here in this room, to once again move these issues to the front burner. But we must go back again and again to our benchmark principle: the freedom to determine if our policies and our actions are advancing the cause of civil rights and human rights.”

“You must be able to judge,” Chisholm said on March 13, 1986, “if abandoning affirmative action plans and weakening fair housing plans and gutting school desegregation plans move certain children and adults closer to freedom or nearer to the barbed wire of isolation and despair in this nation.”

“May we take inventory of how we came in and may we not leave the same,” Robert said. “May we go and build abolitionist sanctuaries to repair harms, restore relationships and rebuild more just and equitable systems for a more just and equitable democracy beyond punishment, poverty, policing and prisons. Thank you.”

In a question and answer time, the Rev. Dr. Jessica Patchett, Westminster Presbyterian Church’s senior pastor, asked Robert “what we need to know about our public sphere as we go into election season.”

“Vote your conscience,” Robert urged. “Vote in a way that moves the moral arc closer to justice. Vote as though there is an inextricable link between you and someone else. Even though you’re not being deported, there is someone else who loves their family just as much as you do. Vote for justice.”

“When you vote,” Robert said, “you’re trying to fix a system that may be working as it is designed.”

“To be honest, I don’t think we want the same democracy. I think we want a better democracy,” Robert said. “What is the world you think your children and your children’s children deserve? What is the world we are trying to create? Vote your conscience with the sense of community that says, ‘I am because you are.’”

That, she said, would be a sign we are “moving from individual blame to structural accountability.”