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Beloved Family,

We, the Board of Trustees of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. (SDPC) are writing to voice our collective concern, grief, and outrage at the continued dehumanization of all Black people. We are intentionally centering our Black trans kin at this moment. 

In the last few weeks, our country has been rightfully and righteously responding to the murders of Black people with courage, conviction and care. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have inspired national and global demonstrations and uprisings. We are heartened at the display of justified and holy dissent because we know that Black lives matter to God. 

As an organization of Black clergy and lay people committed to Black liberation, it is our duty to fight for every Black life. Every Black life matters to God. This includes the lives of Black trans people. It includes the lives of all Black women, both cis and trans. 

Within the same time span that we have arisen to protest the above-mentioned Black lives taken violently, we have had the murders of the following trans kin:

• Tony McDade, a Black trans man, was killed by police in Tallahassee, Florida.
• Nina Pop, a Black trans woman, was stabbed to death in Sikeston, Missouri. 
• Riah Milton, a Black trans woman, was killed in Liberty Township, Ohio.
• Dominique Rem'mie Fells' mutilated body was found near Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. She was a Black trans woman.

The murders of our people are brutal and ungodly. 

We speak their names, we honor their lives, and we mourn with their families and loved ones. These people have become ancestors too soon. 

But it is not enough to show up in death. It is not enough to bring flowers to funerals. We must show up in life, too. We must look internally to challenge our own transphobia as it exists in our own imaginations, conversations, sermons, and communities.

We must do the workaround transphobia that we ask others to do around racism. We must challenge the evils we have inherited. To do so, we must look internally at our scriptures, hymns, doctrinal beliefs, and licensing and ordination processes. It is past time to ask, “how does this uphold violent gender expectations and transphobic binaries?” As Black Christians committed to Black liberation, we have already found ways to free ourselves through the faith of our ancestors. Using that muscle memory, we must use an intersectional analysis to cut through the lies that patriarchy, homophobia, ableism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and colorism have forcefully taught us. In other words, God loves us all. Though our society is ordered to protect White, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied Christian men who own property, we believe in God's economy. Nobody should be left out. 

We must actively resist our temptation to turn away. 

We commit, as an organization, to the continued unlearning of transphobia. We turn ourselves towards the God who made us in Their image. We look to the faces of our beloved Black trans kin and see divinity, humanity, creativity, and Black joy. We recognize transphobia as one facet of White Supremacy. 

We recognize misogynoir (towards both Black cis and trans women) as yet another related branch. When Dr. Moya Bailey coined this term, she was urging us to see the ways Black women (cis and trans) are vulnerable to co-constitutive forces of oppression. As an organization that empowers clergy and laypeople to do the work of justice in Black churches, it is impossible for us to care about Black churches without also caring for the material realities of every Black woman. 

Even at the time of this letter's writing, Oluwatoyin Salau's story horrifies us. Salau, a 19-year-old Black freedom organizer in Tallahassee, Florida, detailed her brutal sexual assault online from a man she said identified himself as “a man of God.” She subsequently went missing and was sadly found dead. We mourn with her loved ones. We are haunted by one of the last statements she made online: 

“I trusted the holy spirit to keep me safe.”

Such Anti-Black violence convicts us as people of faith. We confess that our silence has allowed this violence to go unchallenged. We acknowledge that our churches are sadly not consistently safe places for every Black person. Given the state of our nation, it is even more crucial to make sure that our faith homes are safe for every Black person. 

We find ourselves disoriented by the continued assaults throughout our community. We are embattled with a global health crisis, economic turmoil, touch starvation, and now daily reminders that this world does not love us or our flesh. But we know, as Baby Suggs preached in Toni Morrisons' Beloved, that “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard.” 

We strive to be a community where all “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Isaiah 40:5). 

As we hold these things together, we remember that we must also hold each other. We must hold on to God's hand. We invite you, our Proctor family, to commit to the liberation and thriving of all Black people. This commitment includes, and is certainly not limited to, the liberation and thriving of:

• All Black trans people
• Black cisgender women
• Cash-poor Black people
• Black children and Black elders
• Black undocumented people
• Black Muslims
• Black non-religious people
• Black nonbinary people
• Black disabled and chronically ill people

None of us must be sacrificed for the comfort of anyone. 

Our commitment to Black liberation must be broad and expansive, always looking to the margins for guidance. We must be honest, within ourselves, about our own role in upholding those margins. We must wonder why the margins exist. In doing so, we might all become free. For this is the mission of Christ.

In the name of a Christ who came to break the chains,

The Samuel DeWitt Proctor Board of Trustees