St. Louis (MO) Board of Aldermen
23 November 2018
James Croft (524 words -  3:20)

Good morning and thank you to Alderman Reed for asking me to join you this morning. I’m James Croft, I’m clergy at the Ethical Society of St. Louis. We are a Humanist congregation, which means that we don’t teach belief in god and we don’t pray. So, this morning I’m going to give my invocation in the form of a story.

I moved to St. Louis from Boston in June 2014. My friends back in Boston didn’t really understand why – when I told them I was moving here they responded, in their harsh Boston accents, “Oh I’m so sorry!” It was more like a beloved pet had died. And certainly, coming here was a move out of my comfort zone. But I was following a calling. I wanted to come here to work at the Ethical Society and to serve this community.

Two months after I arrived Mike Brown was killed and – we all know what happened. I got involved with clergy of many different religions to respond to that, and so began many months of street protests and marches and panel discussions.

Because of this work I was invited to speak at a big community meeting in Chaifetz Arena. Some of you may have been there. A whole bunch of clergy up on the stage talking about what we should do about racism. But halfway through that meeting young protesters decided they had heard enough, and they marched up onto the stage chanting “Let us speak! Let us speak!” Luckily Traci Blackmon, who was the MC that night, realized the importance of what was happening and gave over the mic to the young people.

I will never forget, never - there was one girl – 11 years old, baby-faced and hardly tall enough to see over the podium - and as she spoke of what she had seen on the streets of her city, her eyes shone with intensity, her face radiant with conviction. She said to the crowd:

“I want you to tell me how you really feel…Mike Brown didn’t get the chance to say how he felt before he died. It’s almost inhuman. What makes humans human is because they have feelings…But what most these people do is that they say how they feel…and how motivated they are, and what we should be doing – but they don’t do it.”

And the audience roared.

My job as clergy – and your job as elected representatives of this city, is not just to say how we feel, and how motivated we are, and what we should be doing, but also to do it.

So, let us have the courage to step out of our comfort zones to confront injustices we may not even know exist yet.

Let us work alongside people who are different to us – people of all religions and none – to better our community.

Let us listen to the most marginalized voices, and know when to hand over the mic.

Let us feel what the communities we represent feel – even when they have no chance to tell us themselves.

And let us not just say what should be done – let us do it.