‘The Pink Robe Chronicles: Womanist Wisdom for Healing, Liberation, and Love’

My Mother Never Told Me to Hush!

I am an only-child-turned-holy-disruptor, reared by a mother who never told me to hush and a lineage of women who taught me what Black feminists like Audre Lorde and Tamura Lomax have written about: that silence is the tax Black girls pay when the world can’t afford our brilliance.

Growing up, my voice was my most cherished companion. I talked to myself often. I would recite scripts I’d written in my head to respond to neighborhood bullies. The bathroom was my set and the medicine cabinet mirror my camera. I would also rehearse what I would say to a crush, often ending with a coy laugh, something I’m sure I picked up while listening to the teenagers I was often around. I would also sing to myself and my imaginary audience. I would place a towel around my head tied with a rubber band to keep it in place, then grab the hairbrush and sing all the songs my mom played while we cleaned the house on Saturday mornings or while she talked on the phone with her girlfriends. My mom caught me, and soon after, I became the crowd favorite during Friday night card parties and Saturday cookouts. Between bid whist sets and doing the hustle, my mother would come to my room where I was pretending to be asleep.

“Che Che, get up and come sing for us,” she’d ask.

I’d jump up and walk into the living room in my onesie with the feet in them that made the scratchy sound when you walked. Now on another stage, the white shag rug that laid over the red carpet, I’d look to my mama and ask, “You want me to sing my song?” She would always say, “Yes baby, sing that song mama likes.” I would go over to the stack of albums that sat by the side of the record player and thumb through them until I found it: Debra Laws’s “Very Special.”

I loved playing records. Hearing the needle touch the vinyl and make that static sound made me excited; it was also my cue to get ready. The title song “Very Special” was sung by Debra and her brother Ronnie. I sang both parts. It was a call and response. The adults, usually the women, would be high-fiving each other, saying “I know that’s right. Sing, baby, sing!” It wasn’t that my mother thought I could sing especially well. As a matter of fact, she didn’t really think I was good at all, but that was never really the point. The point was to stand and be heard.

The same was true when I auditioned to be a contestant for the Miss Black Teenage Pageant. My mom asked, “What are you going to do for talent?” I said, “Sing.” She shot me a look as if to say “Girl, this ain’t the living room.” Just like when I was ten, I would rehearse my song in the bathroom mirror. To perform your talent on stage in front of the audience on the night of the pageant, you had to score high enough to be in the top fifteen contestants.

I didn’t make it either of the years I competed, but I sang in the choir at church and school. I was nominated to audition for the Center for Musically Talented to commence training. I didn’t like the music, charge it to my lack of exposure, so I quit. I secured a manager instead. I told my mother that I needed a boom box to practice, and she obliged. Every Saturday morning, I would either walk or catch the bus to Cherry Street in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood [of Pittsburgh], take my stand in front of the mirror, and belt out Shannon’s “Let the Music Play.”

Years later, it dawned on me that my mother’s support of my taking center stage was never about singing; it was about taking up space. A child of the segregated South, my mom came of age in an era when taking up space could be dangerous. Others blamed my mother for the assaults she endured, as if the violence was summoned by her very existence — by her refusal, or perhaps inability, to shrink. This cruel logic is the burden placed on so many Black women: that our bodies are both the site of harm and, unjustly, the reason for it.

To stand out and to speak up about anything was to draw attention to herself in ways that she always paid for, so she hid herself. She remedied invisibility by reading books and escaping to imaginary places where her voice was not unwelcome. Even though she didn’t think I was the greatest singer then, she didn’t want silence to be a forced necessity, so she never told me to be quiet.

I didn’t just sing; I asked questions. In a neighborhood where “Stay in a child’s place” was gospel, I refused to comply. When my mother started dating my bonus dad, she loved retelling how I looked him square in the eye and asked, “How long are you staying tonight? My mom goes to work in the morning.” Sex, faith, violence — nothing was off-limits. After overhearing my teenage babysitter mention a term I didn’t recognize, I marched straight to Mom for an explanation. She never flinched; she simply breathed, asked where I’d heard it, and then answered in full.

That fearless curiosity soon turned outward. I grilled her post-divorce suitors — “Are you married?” — and pressed for answers to harder truths: “Why do you let him hit you?” “Why cook for him after he fights you?” One night, finding her weeping after an argument with Dad, I pulled For Colored Girls from the shelf, read Shange’s poem “Sorry,” and wondered aloud why people keep doing what forces them to apologize again and again. Each time, Mom paused — not in annoyance but in reverence — then spoke honestly. By honoring my questions, she trained me to claim space and to believe that justice begins with an unfiltered voice.

That conviction followed me onto every stage. At the Miss Black Teenage Pageant I declared, “I want to become a lawyer because justice needs help finding its rightful place,” a dream shaped by what I saw women in my community endure. Pregnant with me, my mom filed briefs as a legal secretary — “paralegal” when the title felt safer — and brought home stories of revolutionaries that soaked into my spirit long before I could spell jurisprudence.

By elementary school I was already resisting injustice. When a teacher singled out my Muslim classmate, I didn’t yet know the word racist, but I knew it was wrong. I stuffed eggs in a brown paper bag, ready to splatter her car in protest — until a classmate foiled the plot. My mother was summoned, and she and the teacher recognized each other from high school, confirming my instincts: my protest had merit. Rather than scold me, she polished my audacity. She turned my margin into the center — what bell hooks calls making the outskirts home — because, as Audre Lorde warns, silence ­will never protect us.

When the Central Park Five case broke in 1989, my senior year, I watched justice take a wrong turn down a dark alley, and my resolve to study law blazed even hotter. I wrote in an admissions essay that I hoped to guide justice back to the people who needed it most. Though I didn’t come from a line of lawyers, I descended from cultural workers who took up space to birth, heal, and proclaim: Great-Aunt Bonnie, a midwife; Great-Aunt Annie, a traveling evangelist; Great-Aunt Susie, a fire-talker; Great-Grandmother Mamie, a nurse.

Their witness showed me that a voice can midwife liberation as surely as hands can deliver babies. Ultimately, my mom’s greatest gift was centering my voice and body, equipping me for a different bar — one that measures courage rather than case law. From that inherited margin-made-center, I now preach Afro-centered, Afrofuturist womanist sermons that bend time: honoring ancestors, naming present wounds, and conjuring liberated futures. I speak truth to power, claim space, and help justice finally take its place — because a Black girl who was never told to hush grows into a woman determined that the universe hear her song.

I preach because, despite what the mired US criminal systems posit, I don’t have the right to remain silent in the face of savage church and government politics. I don’t know how to not raise my voice on behalf of the least of those who are they/us that sit at the dehumanizing intersections of white supremacy, patriarchy, and unbalanced socioeconomic class strata. I preach as an act of resistance and acceptance. I resist the backward thinking that relegates women and other marginalized people to the periphery of organized religious proclamation while exploiting and policing our/their bodies. I accept that I am what womanist Renita J. Weems named “a thinking woman of faith” on her blog Something Within. 

Because I know what I know, and it cannot be contained in one religious tradition or flat spiritual trajectory. I preach Oludumare and Yahweh; Jehovah and Nzambi Mpungu; Yeshua and Shango; Mary and Oshun. I preach because it is nefarious not to shout out the worth of Black lives, the value of Black girl brilliance often referred to as magic, and the innovation that is Black embodiment. I preach because I was once a colored girl who considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf. Then one day, “I found God in myself, and I loved her, I loved her fiercely (Shange).” I learned that within me was buried a deep well, known as Source. I learned that I carried “womanist asé — ‘spiritual power invoked by Black women,’” a term I first heard Monica Coleman use during a presentation in 2017, for our well-being from traditional and unconventional sources to unfetter ourselves and our communities from the vestiges of interlaced oppressive systems.

I preach not to save sinners from external forces of evil but to emancipate many from the church industrial complex, where souls desiring redemption are on lockdown in pews beholden to tragic theologies; where Jesus is a bearded white man and God is a neo-Nazi moving folks to build walls of exclusion instead of bridges of collective work and responsibility.

I preach to set the captive free, even when the captive is me. I preach. We preach. My body preaches through womanish gestures, and I wish a ninja would standpoints. My breasts preach sermons of anatomical acceptance when they refuse to be disguised by shapeless and non-pink robes that bear the tried marks of truth telling and wisdom sharing. 

Instead, they stand mostly with assistance to proclaim the acceptable day of God. I am fearfully and wonderfully made! My stomachs, yes plural, preach when they refuse to be subdued by corsets and girdles, all forms of patriarchy, misogyny, and respectability. My hoseless thighs preach as they thunder to and fro, loosening the shackles of the hoodwinked and bamboozled. We preach. I preach with feet marching to freedom’s land, with my hands lifted whether I’m yelling “Hallelujah,” “Fight the power,” “These is bloody shoes,” or “God’s Plan.”

I preach because my momma never told me to be quiet. I preach because my great aunt Susie knew how to “talk the fire out” of people. I preach because my ancestors trust me, and our seeds are counting on me. Why do you do what you do?

Pause & Ponder

Who first told you that your voice mattered?

Whose refusal to hush still echoes in your own speech?

What have you been silencing in yourself for the sake of someone else’s comfort?

What truths are still waiting to be spoken?

What did your mother — or your mother-figure — not say, that shaped you anyway?

And what stories do you carry that deserve to be heard?

What does it mean to speak with love and with fire?

To ask questions that disrupt, not just inquire?

Where were you taught to stay in a child’s place — and when did you outgrow that place for good?

What would it sound like to pray with your full voice?

To shout, to whisper, to rage, to weep — without apology?

Take this moment to honor the ones who let you speak.

The ones who didn’t flinch when you asked hard questions.

The ones who raised you in truth, even when they didn’t have all the answers.

And the voice that’s still unfolding in you — bold, Black, and unbothered by decorum.

Speak, beloved.

And don’t you dare hush.

Excerpted from “The Pink Robe Chronicles: Womanist Wisdom for Healing, Liberation, and Love” by Melva L. Sampson. Copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books. Used with permission.

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910–1985) reminds us that liberation is impossible without community.

But what is community, and what does it mean to “be in” community? Perhaps more importantly once we’ve defined it, what does community require of us?

Murray defines community expansively in her writings, including as a space that is inviting and affirmational. In this space, we (re)define who we are, hope and heal. In this space, we feel whole and supported.

Yet Murray complicates the notion that being in community is designed solely to foster reciprocal support and joyful connection. The wholeness we feel through community is for all, and we must leverage our coming together to create a humane society in which every person can live into their wholeness of being. Ultimately, being in community is a strategy for transformation that requires our active engagement. Which is why we must consider what community requires of us.

When we gather in community, Murray expects that we will actively strive toward radical social transformation. To achieve this transformation, she challenges us to be committed not only to those in our community but to all oppressed people and to the deep work of dismantling oppressive systems.

In both Murray’s day and ours, it can be enticing to blame the ideals, behaviors and transgressions of certain individuals for the subjugation we navigate daily. When immigration raids terrorize our communities, when voting rights are compromised, when working people fail to make a living wage, we look for someone to blame. That is a familiar — and understandable — response.

However, Murray’s vision of community challenges our instinct to point the finger at any single lawmaker, decision-maker or person in power. Instead, she reminds us that individual evil is only one way that systemic and institutional oppression takes shape.

In her sermon “Challenge of Nurturing the Christian Community in Its Diversity,” included in “To Speak a Defiant Word,” a collection of Murray’s sermons and speeches, she suggests that we must instead examine and dismantle “institutional structures.” This work includes recognizing our complicity in these structures, refusing to cooperate with them and strategically dismantling them — together. Murray lived into her own charge.

Consider Murray’s feminism. Her refusal to cooperate with the deep-seated sexism within the Civil Rights Movement sparked a feminist consciousness that would have outsized impact on second-wave feminism. Murray worked toward dismantling sex-based discrimination strategically, expansively and with others. In partnership with leaders like Dorothy Height, she criticized Black women’s marginalization in the work for civil rights.

She used her exceptional legal gifts and strong network to successfully advocate for the inclusion of “sex” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She gathered with transformative leaders to found the National Organization for Women to promote and protect equal rights for women. She later condemned this same group for neglecting Black women’s needs. In her twilight years, Murray worked alongside a pioneering group, including her life partner Irene Barlow, to advocate for broad inclusion of women’s leadership in the Episcopal Church.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable piece of Murray’s charge is recognizing our complicity in oppressive structures. An ever-brilliant architect, she gives us a blueprint for this dismantling-and-rebuilding project too.

First, we must “re-educate” ourselves. This process includes growing our awareness of political and social issues and systemic oppression. We must evaluate our role in these issues and systems while concurrently exploring how we have been shaped by them. (Presently, trainings offered by the Racial Equity Institute are a fantastic starting point for this work).

Next is what Murray defines in her essay “Minority Women and Feminist Spirituality” as “self-criticism.” We must move through an evaluation process that audits our shortcomings and limitations. This process should ready us for growth, which is something we must be open to.

Finally, we must connect. Murray encourages us to gather in person to share personal experiences and feelings that have been unearthed as part of the “re-education” experience. This, Murray argues, is how we achieve understanding and reconciliation in order to strengthen our impact and ability to dismantle systems as a community.

Murray navigated this process herself, as she recounts in her memoir “Song in a Weary Throat.” While pursuing a master of laws during World War II at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Murray lived at International House. Here, her community included over 150 people of more than 30 nationalities who spoke more than a dozen languages.

“Over coffee and cigarettes” Murray listened to people share their resentment over the United States’ “‘superman complex.’” She heard a Black veteran’s all-consuming hostility toward white people, a consequence of his Jim Crow-era military service; the anguish of her Japanese roommate responding to the bombing of Nagasaki, mere months after she herself had been released from an internment camp; the lengths a fifth-generation Mexican-descended American was forced to go to prove her “Americanness.”

At International House, Murray found a community with whom she built a “bond of kinship” and where she expanded her awareness of global oppression, as well as issues that affected other marginalized communities in the U.S. She confronted her limitations and grew exponentially. She gathered with people to share and be vulnerable. This experience, Murray writes, was “a significant step in my own growth; I was learning to see the civil rights struggle within the wider context of all human rights.”

In her adult life, Murray took her place among the long line of champions of justice, working toward dismantling racism and sexism to foster transformation. Yet these and other oppressive systems are larger than any one person or era. The work to upend them is “endless,” Murray reminds us in her personal manifesto, “An American Credo,” originally published in Common Ground magazine.

With this understanding, we must courageously accept the baton that has been passed to us today. If we are to be in community with one another, we must actively participate on the continuum of liberatory justice work in some way.

As Murray offers in “Nurturing the Christian Community:”

We cannot endure.

We cannot withdraw.

We must accept the challenge of continued struggle for transformation.

And we must be future-oriented.

Hope is what must fuel us as we stretch toward a liberatory future with one another.

Our generation is being confronted yet again with the chronic racial sickness of our world. It is good and right for disciples of Christ to do what we can to heal the world of this sickness. At the same time, as a national discipleship leader, my concerns go deeper. I am concerned for Jesus followers not only to bring racial healing to the world and its systems but also to experience deep inner healing themselves. The two are connected.

Christianity is not the white man’s religion. A tradition of Christian faith and practice emerged from the underside of America, from enslaved Africans in the antebellum South. There were no steeples, stoles, or stained glass. This tradition had no such luxuries. The Christianity of enslaved Africans was not a religion of privilege and position. It was a religion of freedom and revolution. Deep in the wilderness of the plantation slavocracy, enslaved Africans would escape to practice a communal spirituality that challenged them to love their bodies and their heritage, and to refuse any conditions that said otherwise. Welcome to the hush harbors, the invisible gathering places where enslaved Africans met to praise the God of the oppressed, pay attention to one another’s needs, and plot the abolition of slaveholding Christianity and the plantation economy. Hush harbors are a place to turn to refashion for our times a Christian community shaped by risky love.

The Terror of the Plantation Economy

The environment of chattel slavery was no walk in the park. Cultural artifacts like the film Birth of a Nation depict Africans as happy with being slaves. Such propaganda numbed and concealed what really took place in the plantation economy. Africans in America were legally and politically considered not fully human. They had no rights that white people were expected to respect and uphold. Any deference given to Black people was out of respect for them as the property of a white master. Black people were legally denied access to the kinds of privileges that uplifted and bettered white people, like government programs, economic self-determination, and voting. Without the honor of human dignity and any rights to ensure their well-being, as property of the plantation economy, enslaved Africans were treated for how they could meet white pleasures. Rape, forced “breeding,” mutilation through beatings, and lynching were only some of the violent bodily tactics white people used to punish and control enslaved Africans. Even the mundane parts of enslaved Africans’ lives were not respected. Enslaved Africans were forbidden to gather or assemble together except under the supervision of white folks. They had curfews to prevent their escape at night. Their leisure was policed to control as much of their time for work on the plantation and to ensure the leisure of the white master and his family. Even the term plantation does not do justice to the racialized economic exploitation Black people faced. Author Nikole Hannah-Jones in her book 1619 calls these Southern sites of oppression “labor camps.” The terror of the plantation economy was a totalizing vision. Every part of the lives of enslaved Africans was expected to be under the gaze of white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.

Theology and Worship on the Plantation

What enables a race of people to exploit the labor of another race? To see them as their property? To colonize the land of Natives and the consciousness of Africans? What must a people believe about themselves to enact terror on another people and on the planet? “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything … , with reverence for the Lord” (Col. 3:22). These words summarize the theology of slaveholding Christianity. And from these few words emerged an entire culture and history of violent desecration of land and peoples. Enslaved Africans had regular opportunities to worship on the plantation in racially integrated churches led by white folks. These integrated plantation churches operated by a separate and unequal rule: Black people and white people sat in the same sanctuaries, but everything else about the worship experience was separated by race, from using different restrooms to separate seating, prayer and Communion rituals, and burial grounds and baptismal waters. Enslaved Africans could also attend segregated gatherings led by Black preachers under the supervision of a white minister and white religious customs. Worship in both of these plantation churches accommodated the terror of the plantation economy and slaveholding Christianity.

The theology of the plantation said that God works through white men to bring the world into order and submission. Most white plantation owners used Christianity, especially the words of Paul, to make Africans docile and numb to their plight, to believe it was God’s will for them to be slaves. Other white plantation owners forbade the enslaved to be taught Christianity because they were worried biblical themes would incite revolution. How can Christianity hold within it these two contradictory possibilities? Race was the theological myth used by wealthy, white, male plantation owners to uphold the chattel slavery economy with a whitewashed, domesticated, heretical Christianity. Only a small percentage of wealthy, white, male plantation owners were actually at the top of the caste. When the owner was not around to be in charge of the plantation economy, wealthy white women were in control. When the owner’s wife was not there, either a poor white man or woman or an enslaved Black man was in charge. Black women and children were always at the bottom. All Black lives were disposable. Race is a powerful myth because the racial caste system has never been consistent. Myths are only as true as people give credence to them and as they function to maintain the status quo. From the beginning of the chattel experiment, poor and working-class white people have shared more in common with Black and Native people than with the white elite. The power of the slavocracy system was that it operated at the intersection of white supremacy, white patriarchy, racialized capitalism, and the theological heresy of slaveholding Christianity.

Hush Harbors and the Plantation

Even if only temporarily, enslaved Africans escaped the plantation economy and slaveholding Christianity by organizing hush harbors. Drawing especially from documented slave narratives, hush harbors have been a treasure trove of study for religion scholars and theologians. The literature on hush harbors has centered two rich debates. First, there is the debate of erasure versus retention of African cultures or Africanisms. Much of the early literature about the period of slavery in the US claimed that the psychic and bodily trauma of the Middle Passage — of Africans being violently forced from their homelands in Africa by European settler-terrorists on ships under the most inhumane of conditions — stripped the first generation of enslaved Africans of much if not all of their memories of their African cultures and customs. Certainly, this cultural knowledge was not passed down to successive generations, the argument went. This psychological and cultural violence was strategic in making African peoples more susceptible to being chattel for white plantation owners. Other scholars contended that hush harbors provided evidence to oppose the erasure thesis. Hush harbors depicted a rich continuity of Africanisms — music, language, religion, stories, and more — that enslaved Africans disguised for their own safety when under white surveillance. Because of the need to disguise Africanisms, the unaware observer could not readily see how enslaved Africans did in fact retain a variety of African customs and practices.

The second debate is over the nature of the Christianity that enslaved Africans practiced. Did enslaved Africans practice the Christianity of the slaveholder, which accommodated their own oppression? Christianity was an empire religion that accommodated the status quo. For enslaved Africans, to accept Christianity was to accept their plight on earth as they awaited their true freedom in the afterlife. Again, by peering into hush harbors, this thesis has been contested. Through the testimonies of enslaved Africans themselves, scholars discovered that Africans in the Americas not only practiced an otherworldly Christian religion that accommodated their oppression; hush harbors that enslaved Africans organized were sites of protest against the dominant Christianity of the slaveholder. In hush harbors, enslaved Africans made plans for permanent escape to the northern parts of the US. Additionally, enslaved Africans carried a hush harbor mindset of freedom with them onto the plantation to both cope with daily terror and plot for abolition without being caught by white plantation owners. This mystical hush harbor was as much a site of interior protest as the material hush harbor was a site of physical protest. These protest actions and mindsets were rooted in particular Christian beliefs that enslaved Africans initially discovered from slaveholding Christianity and then reinterpreted toward revolutionary ends.

These debates have unearthed a rich legacy of the genius of enslaved Africans’ beliefs and practices. In recent times, however, Black prophetic leaders have grappled with the importance of hush harbors not only for their historical relevance but also as a site of contemporary reflection on a more radical model of church and activism.

From “Buried Seeds,” by Alexia Salvatierra and Brandon Wrencher, ©2022. Used by permission of Baker Academic.