COMING TO THE TABLE
A Story of Racial Healing
Phoebe Kilby began her work in racial reconciliation in 2007, when she first contacted Betty Kilby Fisher (Baldwin) on Martin Luther King Day. Phoebe’s ancestors were enslavers in the United States prior to 1865; Betty is descended from the persons that Phoebe’s family once enslaved. Since that time Phoebe has become a leader in the Coming to the Table organization, which seeks to fulfil Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream “that the sons of former slave owners and sons of former slaves will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” Coming to the Table (CTTT) is profiled at: www.comingtothetable.org
Phoebe and Betty have told their story and lead workshops and dialogues on racial reconciliation across the United States. They continue to assist others interested in improving race relations in their communities.
Yago: Phoebe, you are welcome to this blog called
“Breathing Forgiveness. Embracing the Giant Wound in the Naked Now.” I am very
much impressed by your life story, your honesty facing your past. You are a very
courageous woman and a witness to anyone who wants to heal historical harms and
its legacies. This interview is going to be a great contribution to this blog.
But first of all, could you introduce yourself and the movement called Coming to the Table?
Phoebe: Thank you, Yago, for inviting me to share my
witness and information about our Coming to the Table movement in your blog. I
am Phoebe Kilby. I work for Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) as the fundraiser
for the Center of Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), but another passion is this
movement called Coming to the Table which was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther
King’s “I have a dream” speech.
In this speech he says: “I have a dream… that
the sons of former slaves and former slave owners will be able to sit down
together at the table of brotherhood.” Coming to the Table (CTTT) is a group
that was started by descendants of slaves and slave owners. We are talking
about the enslavement of Africans here in the United States prior to the end of
the Civil War. So CTTT brings together these “connected descendants” to work on
racial reconciliation. However, anyone can join CTTT; not everyone in our group
is directly connected to slavery, but most of us are in some way. It has been a
wonderful experience. I am the President of Coming to the Table, which is affiliated
with CJP. We have our own board, we are on our own, but we are still connected
to the University.
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| Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech |
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| Members of Coming to the Table at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington |
Phoebe: I think that there are several factors that led
me to pursue this racial reconciliation work. Some of it started when I was
younger. I grew up in the City of Baltimore, Maryland, a city that kept African
Americans and European Americans quite separated and where African Americans
were oppressed and discriminated against. My father did not have very positive
racial attitudes. He often spoke disparagingly of African Americans. I grew up
in this atmosphere. We lived in a kind of separate white world, even though
quite a few African Americans lived in the city. Everything that I experienced
was segregated. But, when I was a teenager, the civil rights movement here the United
States began to grow. People were speaking out against segregation and the
injustices. I became aware of the movement, but was rather ignorant of what it
meant.
Luckily, I had wonderful teachers in high school who assigned us books
to read that were eye-opening, books like the “The Autobiography of Malcolm-X,”
“Black Like Me” and “Soul on Ice.” These books exposed these injustices to me
in graphic ways and touched my heart. I felt very much that I was pulling away from
my family and my parents in terms of my racial attitudes and I continued on that
path in college, especially in the papers I chose to write. But then I was also
very drawn to the environmental movement. I chose to go to graduate school and
pursue a career in that field.
In 2003 I discovered the Center for Justice
and Peacebuilding at EMU. I was called to study here because I was very much
against the Iraq war. I had participated in protest marches in Washington, DC, but
I felt that nobody was listening to us. Here was a school where I could
actually study peacebuilding. Back in the early 1970s when I was going to
college, there were no such courses of study. I obtained a graduate certificate
in conflict transformation in 2004, though I was not sure what I would do with
it. While many graduates end up working abroad, I realized that there was
plenty of work to be done in the United States and subsequently took a job with
CJP as its fundraiser.
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| Will Hairston in a CTTT "sharing stories" activity |
Soon after, I met Will Hairston, who is on the
EMU staff and is a descendant of a large slave-holding family. He had recently
worked with CJP to found Coming to the Table. Given my father’s attitudes and
the fact that his family came from Virginia, I wondered if my family had been
slaveholders at some point. My father never talked about it. But Will Hairston and
CJP inspired me to look at this history. So, I started doing the research, and it
was very easy to find out that my family owned slaves. I selected the US Census
for 1840, and there was my great-great-grandfather shown as owning two slaves.
But as I did more and more research, it became a mission to figure this out.
Who had owned slaves, how many, and what could I find out about these slaves? It
was difficult to find information about the slaves themselves, particularly
their names, because they were not considered people back then, just property.
However, I was able to find some records, like wills, estate inventories, court
cases, and other documents, that provided names for some slaves.
With that information I was able to get close
to figuring out who the descendants of my family slaves might have been. It
appeared that after the Civil War, some took Kilby as their last name, which is
my family name. I knew that there were present-day African American Kilbys
living in a town near me, Front Royal, Virginia, and I suspected that they
might be descendants of the people my family enslaved. So, on Martin Luther King Day 2007,
I decided to make the first contact. I sent an email to a woman, Betty Kilby
Fisher (now Baldwin), and surprisingly, she was willing to communicate with me.
That was the beginning of my journey in this work.
I think for a long, long time I have known in
my heart that the way many European American people in the United States have
treated African Americans is wrong and that there remains a great deal of injustice
and unequal treatment of African Americans. I and my family have had a personal
role in this oppression. So it made so much sense to me that I was being called
to do this kind of peace and justice work, not work abroad, but work right here
in the United States to reduce racial oppression and racial harms in a personal
way.
Yago: In 2007 you began this journey of racial
healing. What are you discovering about yourself in all this process?
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Phoebe Kilby with Betty Kilby Fisher and James Kilby
On the Day They First Met
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I began to meet through Coming to the Table other
descendants of enslavers, like Will Hairston and the Hairston family, and descendants
of well-known persons in United States history, descendants of Thomas Jefferson
and George Washington. We talked about how to share our family stories, share the
truth about what they did. And I began to see that it should involve looking
back, not just at my family’s role in slavery, but at everything that has
happened since then, that my family may have been involved in, and I myself may
have been involved in.
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| Winning family of a Fitter Family contest stand outside of the Eugenics Building (where contestants register) at the Kansas Free Fair, in Topeka, KS (Source: Wikipedia) |
It took me a
while before I began to think for myself, starting in my teen years, and began
to reject this racism. I tried to purge it from my thoughts, but I don’t know
if I will ever get rid of it completely. You can tell yourself intellectually
that racism is wrong, but sometimes snap judgements occur in your head and you
think “wait a minute,” that is racism and is coming from inside me. It is
important to acknowledge this, but it took me some time to get to the point
where I could share this honestly with my African Americans cousins. Recently,
I have admitted more about myself, of how I grew up and what I have said and
done. You would think that they would be angry about it, but what I have found
so far is that they appreciate when I tell the truth. So many European Americans in
the United States do not ever tell the truth about any racist thoughts they
might harbor They are embarrassed about it and hide it. African Americans
perceive that there are these prejudices, but they cannot put a finger on it because
it is not as overt as it used to be. So, the sharing of these stories, my
stories, it is really powerful, and the connection is on a very deep level. I
have seen so many others in Coming to the Table doing the same thing.
Yago: Last month, we had the privilege to
participate in the activities of the 20th anniversary of the
Richmond slave trail walk, 20 years of healing the heart of America. Rev. Sylvester “Tee” Turner talked about the importance of becoming aware of how we
use language and how language can perpetuate things or change things.
He said: “one of the things that I constantly try to
do is to encourage people to remove the word slaves from their mentality and
use the word enslaved, because when you are enslaved you are forced into a
situation, when you use the term slave you dehumanize individuals (…)
Subconsciously when we talk about people as being slaves we really perpetuate
the dehumanization of that person or that group.” What would you say about the
importance of language in the racial healing process?
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| Sylvester "Tee" Turner talking on the 20th Anniversary Walk on the Historic Richmond Slave Trail |
Phoebe: We have many discussions about language.
Some people say, you should say “slave-owner” because that is saying what it
was; that is being honest. Others say “no, you cannot own a person you can only
be a slaveholder.” Others say “I don't like slaveholder either; I think we
should use enslaver.” Many of us agree with Tee Turner that we should use the
terms “enslaved and enslavers.” We also tend to use “African American and
European American” more than “black and white.” We are constantly having these
discussions, and people have many different opinions about the best terms to
use.
Yago: Tee Turner also talked about the importance of
breaking the cycles of legacy. He said: “reconciliation is also about
breaking cycles and we have to break the cycle of living out the legacies of
the slave trade. All of us are victims and benefactors of those legacies and we
have to break that cycle.” We carry the history of our ancestors, but still we
cannot be blamed constantly because of what they have done.
Phoebe: Yes, exactly! I believe reconciliation is a
process, something we have to work on constantly. In order to transform the harms, the legacies
of slavery, we need to pursue all four elements of the CTTT approach: facing
history, making connections, working toward healing and taking action to end
the injustices. It is not just about
being honest about our history; we have to connect across racial lines. We have
to find meaningful ways to heal. STAR training has been particularly helpful
for the healing process. And we have to take action. We have a working group
addressing actions that we can pursue. We are looking at how to end the mass incarceration of African Americans
and are talking about approaches to reparations, that is, actions to repair the
harms in a restorative way.
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| "Facing History" Ritual on the 20th Anniversary Walk on the Historic Richmond Slave Trail |
Yago: When you talk about “facing history,” it is about learning, understanding what actually happened. It is a vital step in dealing with the eradication of what has happened. How is it done in practical terms?
Phoebe: I think there are several ways. We have people to help with genealogical research, to help people figure out who their ancestors were and their involvement in slavery. One of our members has her own website called Our Black Ancestry. She helps African Americans find their ancestors. Some of us from white families have been willing to put our names on the website as resources, because often it is our white family records that hold the key information that African Americans need to find their family members.
Some of our members have written or are writing books about their family history, such as Tom DeWolf’s “Inheriting the Trade” about the DeWolf family, who were slave traders out of Rhode Island. And another member of our group, Karen Branan, will soon have her book published about her family’s participation in a lynching.
Betty has published a book about her life and her
work in civil rights: “Wit, Will and Walls.” We also share a great deal of information about the history of enslavement and its legacies and aftermaths on our Facebook page. There are many postings daily. All this helps us to have a better understanding of and face our history.
Yago: It looks to me that through the legacy of
the slavery trade, we are imprisoned by what our ancestors have done, because
it is not only the way I look at myself, but also the way people look at me. If
I want to be healed from my past, but still people look at me as the one
carrying the legacies, that will keep perpetuating our common past. You already
talked about how your childhood deeply affected you; how from time to time you
discover yourself with racist thoughts still engrained in your subconscious.
How are you breaking the cycles of legacy in
your life? How is your healing journey being processed? We have to deal with
the past and at the same time, paradoxically; we have to break with the past.
Phoebe: Absolutely! We have to break free! I think
that it requires constant self-examination, looking at where I may have blinders
to my own prejudices, and discussing that openly with my African American cousins
and encouraging them to point things out to me if they see something in me, in
what I do or say.
I do not have any children and neither does my
sister have any children, so we have an opportunity to end the racism that
passed down from my father. But, I do have some grandchildren through marriage,
my husband’s grandchildren. By demonstrating to them a different way of
thinking, I surely hope that I will never pass something like this on to them.
Their parents feel that way too. Hopefully, we can be constantly vigilant to
see where these prejudices are and try to keep that racism from manifesting
itself. And then, if you do that, it lessens any racism that will be in subsequent
generations, or at least I hope so. And also, my African American cousins
introduced me to their children and grandchildren. Even now they are inviting
me to family events like birthday and anniversary parties. I was just invited
to Betty’s mother’s 91st birthday party. Only her family was there,
and I walked in. It was all African Americans and me, a single white woman. So,
it is also for them to show their grand children that they are welcoming me to
these kinds of important events. It is creating a connection that perhaps will
reduce any racism on their part. Because African Americans also have prejudices
against European Americans, because of how they have been treated. If we get to
that point where we are looking at each other as human beings and not judging
based on the colour of skin, we will have achieved quite a bit toward
transforming the harms and breaking the cycle of the legacies of slavery.
Yago: It is very interesting, because as we are
talking about the importance of language in this process of reconciliation, you
look to me very intentional taking African Americans “cousins”. What do you
mean by that?
Phoebe: Good question. When I made my first email
contact with Betty in 2007, I received an email back, and the title Betty put
on it was, “Hello Cousin.” She started calling me cousin from the very
beginning, before she even knew me well. Using the word “cousin” means to me “we
are family.” So they call me cousin, and I started calling them cousin too. That
seems to work for us. It makes us feel like we are acknowledging our
connections and possible blood relations. We have not done any DNA testing. But
when I mentioned DNA testing to Betty’s brother, James, he said “I don’t think
we need DNA testing, I already feel like you’re family.” That comment was precious to me.
Yago: As you say they are very welcoming to you,
they have a warm attitude towards you. What are the values you are getting from
the African American community now? What are you discovering in all this
reconciliation process? In which way they are helping you to be more human?
Phoebe: I think that they are showing a lot of mercy,
forgiveness and love to me. Considering what they have gone through in their
own lives, the oppression they have felt, and the fact that they have this
legacy of slavery, they could have felt great anger toward me. But they have
not, and what this gives me is hope that we can change things. They have only shown
me love and forgiveness. And if I can show them love and really work to make
amends for what my family did, what I have done, then we are making progress. I
see possibilities for the human race, that even when major harms have been committed,
historical or current, we can work through those and get to the point of
reconnecting again at a human level. We can bridge the divide between those who
have been traumatized and those who have created trauma. Reconciliation can
happen if we embrace truth, mercy, justice and peace.
Yago: Tee Turner also said that the first step in
reconciliation is acknowledgement; the second one is forgiveness from the
victim, the third repentance of the perpetrator…
Phoebe: … and apology.
Yago: Do you differentiate between repentance and
apology?
Phoebe: Repentance perhaps encompasses a bigger
dimension. I think it would include internal recognition of the harms committed
and perhaps also apology to the persons harmed.
Yago: And he kept saying that the fourth step in
the reconciliation process must be accountability. And that goes together with
the most difficult stage in reconciliation, because we can acknowledge the past
and repent… but accountability is also bringing equality to the relationship in
all the dimensions, even the material one… We are talking of reconciliation, not
only institutionally but starting at the one to one basis. We have inherited a
lot of privileges that we have to acknowledge.
Phoebe: Absolutely! Yes, I agree.
Yago: We are encouraged to differentiate ourselves
from the system we have inherited, a system that is giving me a privilege that
keeps undermining others. What is the role of accountability in your life and
in Coming to the Table?
Phoebe: So, I can tell you what I am exploring
personally right now. And the word I use is reparations - something to repair
the harms. I have talked about this with my African American cousins. After apologizing,
I said to them that I needed to do something to make amends for my family’s
role in their oppression. And their reaction was… “You don't need to do
anything Phoebe… you didn’t enslave anybody.” And I said: “Yes, but it was my
family who did. If I do not make amends,
then who will? How will the harm ever be repaired?” So, I thought about it and
after some time, I came up with an idea. I said to them: “It seems that your
family is very interested in education and you want your children and their
children to have a good education. So what if I could do something to set up a
scholarship endowment that could benefit your grandchildren, and great grandchildren?” They
thought that this was a very good idea. So I am talking right now to a foundation
about how to do this. By setting up a scholarship endowment, I am taking money
that I have inherited and putting it to the benefit of their children.
I should also mention that prior to this most
recent work on monetary reparations, I took action to repair harms done to
African American Kilbys by working with them in their community of Front Royal,
Virginia, to gain recognition of their work on school desegregation during the
civil rights era. Rather than recount
that work here, I refer you to an article I wrote about it on the Coming to the
Table website
(see link).
(see link).
Yago: This is a personal level. How do you
envision it at institutional level? Is there any action that has been taking by
Coming to the Table? Advocacy perhaps?
Phoebe: Yes! Advocacy! We have a group that is
interested in justice issues. They have spoken out with regard to the Travon Martin situation, saying that we need to address the targeting of black males
by law enforcement. We are also interested in addressing the problem of mass incarceration
of the African American men in the US. We hope to partner with other groups
working on these issues. And we are having a conference call later this month
exploring the issue of reparations. So, this work is not just facing the
history and making the connections and working towards healing. We have to act.
Yago: Very often a prophetic voice is not
welcome. And this can happen with the “white community” that does not want to
deal with the task of transforming historical harms. It has probably not been
easy for you to work as president of “Coming to the Table.” Do you feel
supported in your work, personally and as organization? How are you dealing
with the demands of your work?
Phoebe: There was an article about me and my cousin
Betty on CNN.com in 2010 (see link). We
spoke honestly about our history. Some of the comments we got on the story were
very negative and unpleasant. Of course,
some were positive as well.
Yago: What was the main content of the article?
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| Betty and Phoebe Kilby first met in 2007. They are linked by a slave past. |
This Coming to the Table work is very much a
journey, a process, a relatively new movement.
Those of us who have joined the movement are pursuing reconciliation
between African American and European Americans in some way. We have not focused very much on talking to people
who do not think like us. There are many people who have ancestors who fought
in the American Civil War for the Confederacy. They may be very proud of that, and
some say that the war was not about slavery, but about the states’ rights. Many
people do not like to think about slavery and how their family might have been
involved in it. I think that at some point I and others in Coming to the Table
should engage more with people who do not think like us, to see if there is a
way of influencing them to recognize the legacies of slavery.
Yago: The
Coming to the Table vision for the United States is of a just and truthful
society that acknowledges and seeks to heal from the racial wounds of the past,
from slavery and the many forms of racism it spawned. Is there any attempt in
Coming to the Table of including the voice of the indigenous peoples of the
States?
Phoebe: We have talked about that. There are members
of Coming to the Table who have indigenous roots and are interested in that.
But it is not a central part of our work.
There is so much work to do regarding African American and European
American issues that we so far have not chosen to branch out into other areas.
The indigenous peoples of the United States were subjected to many indignities and
injustices, but in different ways than the African Americans. Generally, indigenous
peoples were not enslaved. They had their land taken away, were forced into
reservations, but it is a different kind of legacy, not to diminish it, it is
just different. Coming to the Table has a lot on its plate already and has
limited funding, and there are other groups that are addressing legacy of
mistreatment of Native Americans.
Yago: What about Coming to the Table addressing the
current situation of Latino immigrants in the States?
Phoebe: We are not doing anything in that regard for
the same reasons as stated for indigenous peoples.
Yago: Is it there any kind of networking with
other organizations working for the Indigenous people and Latino rights?
Phoebe: We are not doing this kind of networking.
Maybe we should, but we are not right now.
Yago: How many are you currently? How do you connect?
Yago: How often do you meet?
Phoebe: We meet as an entire community once every two years. The next meeting, our National Gathering, will be May 23-25, 2014, during CJP’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute on the EMU campus, Harrisonburg, Virginia. Our local gathering groups in Seattle, Washington, San Francisco Bay area, California, Pasadena, California, Richmond, Virginia, and New York, New Jersey meet monthly or several times per year.
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Dedication of a Historic Marker Honoringthe Kilbys Work on School Desegregation
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Yago: The next question is about your vision of
the future of Coming to the Table. You have already talked about the lack of
enough funding and also of so many things to be done. What are the measurable
areas of growth in Coming to the Table, things that realistically can happen?
Phoebe: I think that Coming to the Table can definitely
expand its membership to well over a thousand members. And I would like to see
more local gatherings groups. We have five very active groups that meet in
Seattle, WA, San Francisco Bay Area, CA, Pasadena, CA, Richmond, VA, and New
York / New Jersey. I would like to see local groups in many areas where we have
a concentration of members. We hope to start groups in Washington DC, and Baltimore, MD, and we
need to have some in the Deep South. Because our 850 members are spread out across the US, it is difficult
for members to connect face-to-face. You can talk on the phone or communicate
by email or Facebook, but it is not like sitting across the table from somebody.
So, we would like to have gatherings groups in all areas of the country,
including the Mid-West. And then there are a number of us who would like to
initiate more work in the area of reparations. We have done a lot of work to face the difficult history, to connect
across racial lines, and to work for healing the feelings of trauma. We should now be at the point where we can
focus on taking action to repair the harms, such as addressing the mass
incarceration of African American men and the targeting of African American
youth by police and other groups. Some
European Americans are also considering ways to personally make amends to our
African American “cousins.”
Phoebe: Yes, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding really gave us a gift. It is a wonderful resource, not only for
our movement, but also for the STAR program and others. It is practical manual
that describes in detail an approach to facing history, making connections,
working toward healing and taking action. For example, last month, Betty and
I, were speaking at the University of Virginia. They had a conference on Virginia
Universities and their Race Histories (See link). It was very helpful to have a manual to
show them how they might approach this work in their own context. So, it has
been a real gift to us that will be helpful to others embarking on this journey.
Yago: Do you have other groups who are taking this
manual as a guideline for their processing racial healing?
Phoebe: All our local gathering groups are using the
manual.
Yago: What about other educational institutions?
Phoebe: Not yet, as far as I know. This was the
first conference like this in Virginia. So, we were there to bring this
message. I think that we still have a way to go. Most universities in Virginia
seem to be focusing more on the slavery period and not on what has happened
since. They did not speak much about the legacies of slavery. The Transforming
Historical Harms Manual would be a good guide for other universities and
institutions to work on racial reconciliation more comprehensively.
Yago: Phoebe, thanks a lot for your sharing. Your
life example is a wonderful witness for many of us who are trying to find
creative ways to transform historical harms, its legacy and aftermath.
Phoebe: Many thanks to you, Yago. Thanks for your wonderful work!
