On May 26, 2020, police officer Derek Chauvin applied deadly force to the body of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. Coming on the heels of a series of hate crimes and police killings of Black people -- Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky -- protests erupted across the country, like a wind from heaven, filling the room.
Pentecost that year came during the first weekend of protests in Philadelphia, which included looting and property damage along Kensington Avenue and Aramingo Avenue, near where I live. Protesters on the Vine Street Expressway were kettled by police and sprayed with tear gas. Innocent bystanders in West Philadelphia had tear gas canisters shot into their houses. (The city would ultimately pay out $9.25 million in civil rights claims after the events.) By June 7, when PHS staff first returned to in-person work, the Pennsylvania National Guard was deployed throughout the city, and if you walked, rode the bus, or rode a bicycle, you got a small taste of life under military occupation, as routes around the city were blocked by anxious-looking young people in armored vehicles.
On Pentecost Sunday and the first Sunday after, Presbyterians gathered in grief, in righteous anger, in confusion, and in desperation. Unlike in Acts 2, they were not all gathered in one place together. Widespread distribution of the first vaccines against Covid-19 was a year away. Now-familiar routines of masking in crowded spaces were alien. The masks we had tended to be homespun. Congregations, therefore, mainly gathered online or outdoors. Some people worshiped from their parking lots, some from their couches.
PHS had experimented with capturing publicly accessible video that Easter, documenting what I at least at the time thought would be a single Easter under Covid. We applied a similar curatorial practice to documenting Pentecost 2020's acute moment of protest.
What became styled the Racial Justice Collection in the PHS digital archives eventually grew to encompass Presbyterian engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement from 2014 through 2021, including YouTube and Facebook videos, Zoom recordings, and broadcast TV footage. On May 29, 2020, Daniel Vigilante of Grace-Trinity Community Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis surveyed damage on the block near the church and said frankly, "I'm not entirely sure what to do." On May 31, the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Ferguson, Missouri met on their lawn. Their pastor said that this year, just like in 2014 and 2015 during the Ferguson uprising, white people were asking whether we could simply go back to the way things used to be. His message was, no: “The spirit of God is shaking us, and pushing us.” (That congregation would call its first Black pastor, Kerry Allison, in 2021.)
Valerie Miles-Tribble of Faith Presbyterian Church in Oakland, California, told her flock that she struggled to find words for “a country gone insane.” On June 6, Carlton Rhoden, of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles appealed to his white fellow pastors, “If you’re not doing anything, you have your knee on my neck.” The stated clerk of the denomination, J. Herbert Nelson II, reported out anger from the pews -- many Presbyterians complained that a PC(USA)-led march in Louisville used the motto Black Lives Matter: “I don’t understand that. We have a long history in the United States where at many points the only lives that have mattered are white Americans.” On June 7, Amantha Barbee of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia prayed simply, “Thank you for being our calm in the midst of the storm, our light in the midst of darkness.”
What happened after that Pentecost season, when young people prophesied and old people dreamed dreams? The logic of defunding the police for many people then appeared plain. The organizer and theorist Mariame Kaba made the case for police abolition in the New York Times. No institution that demonstrated impunity before the law could ever be reformed; such a thing had to be removed whole from the body politic.
Inside the PC(USA) that August, Rev. Denise Anderson asked a gathering to re-imagine “what public safety could look like in our wildest dreams -- in our most just dreams." The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship went on a six-month study of police abolition. They looked toward Presbyterian history for models or analogues, and I got to help them in their search. In time, some of us got used to donating to community bail funds (virtually made illegal in Kentucky in 2024). Others learned to support people who had already been doing abolitionist work long before 2020 -- like the Amistad Law Project, which works on exoneration and compassionate release.
According to the business tracker of the PC(USA)’s general assemblies, PC-Biz, 18 overtures mentioning “police” were referred from the 2020 Assembly to the 2022 Assembly. By 2024, the Assembly received no overtures mentioning police or prisons. As of this writing, police in the United States have killed 397 people in 2025, roughly in line with the trends of the past decade.
Learn more
Presbyterians for Abolition (2022)
Toward abolition (2021)
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