After four years at the school, he took a year off to study at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, before returning, this time as a principal.
“I just felt God wasn’t done with me in the Delta,” he said.
He finished his divinity degree at a seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, working part time in the school’s admissions office. He was charged with helping recruit Black students and helped to start an African American leadership initiative.
Afterward, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi and earned a doctorate in history. He is now a professor at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically Black school in Louisville.
The recent pushback against his work, he said, seems both familiar and surprising. As a historian, Tisby has traced the ways American Christians have tried to claim that the faith is colorblind. The love of Jesus, they maintain, should break down divides between people of different ethnicities.
But rarely, Tisby said, do Christians manage to overcome racial differences. In “The Color of Compromise,” Tisby recounts how English settlers in Virginia faced a dilemma. In their homeland, Tisby writes, the custom was to free slaves who converted to Christianity. In 1667, the Virginia General Assembly decided that, no matter what the Christian faith taught, baptism would not make slaves free.
Tisby recounted some of that history in his 2020 chapel sermon at Grove City College. He had first been invited to speak in 2019 but his visit had been delayed by scheduling conflicts and complications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
School leaders later said they had invited him as a Christian writer who could help the school’s students grapple with racial reconciliation. Tisby, who had spent years in white evangelical spaces, felt he had a message the students there could hear. “What I picked up on was, we’re willing to give you a hearing, but this is not what we typically do,” he said.
A year later a group of alumni and parents from Grove City launched a petition, claiming the school had been overrun by “wokeness” and CRT.
The petition cited Tisby’s speech as a sign the school had lost its way, but school leaders claimed it was Tisby who had changed course. “The Jemar Tisby that we thought we invited in 2019 is not the Jemar Tisby that we heard in 2020 or that we now read about,” they told a board committee.
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Tisby traces white evangelicals’ suspicions of their Black counterparts to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the shooting death of Michael Brown. The protests, which brought the Black Lives Matter movement to national attention, drove a wedge between Black and white Christians, he wrote in a 2019 Washington Post op-ed.
