Justice, Memory, and Pilgrimage w/ Jeanelle Austin

Amid recent protests and unrest in Minneapolis over immigration enforcement actions, the work of young people leading movements for justice feels more urgent than ever. In this episode of Breathe In Place, Montague Williams sits down with Jeanelle Austin, racial justice organizer and lead caretaker of George Floyd Square, to explore how pilgrimage intersects with justice, memory, and presence. Jeanelle shares her experiences guiding visitors through sacred and wounded spaces, showing how bearing witness can be both a spiritual practice and a call to action. DISCLAIMER: This episode deals with themes of racial trauma, police brutality, and mourning. 

Learn more about The Pilgrimage Innovation Hub by following us on Instagram: @pilgrimageinnovationhub

Transcript

Montague Williams (00:00:19):

Welcome back to Breathe In Place, a podcast about how pilgrimage can help young people find purpose, resilience, hope and meaning in a complex and confusing world. I'm your host, Montague Williams

(00:00:56):

After the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In 2014, protests erupted across the country as young people, many of them teenagers and college students took to the streets in record numbers. Six years later in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, a new wave of youth-led protests swept the nation. Young people, organized marches, held vigils, stage, die-ins, and refused to let the country look away. For many of them, this was their first encounter with the weight of racial injustice in such a vivid and public way, and it changed how they saw themselves and how they saw others. Jeanelle Austin was one of those young people. Before she became known as an organizer or a caretaker, she was a student stepping into this work alongside her peers, protesting, asking hard questions, and discovering her voice in the midst of national turmoil. Her story is a testament to how often it is young people who lead the rest of us.

(00:02:10):

They lament first, they move first. They refuse to let the moment pass in Jeanelle's early experiences, which shaped not only the leader she would become, but the way she understands presence, justice, and what it means to show up. Jeanelle Austin is now a racial justice organizer, curator and leader who serves as the lead caretaker of George Floyd Square and the executive director and co-founder of Rise and remember formally the George Floyd Global Memorial. She's also the founder of the Racial Agency Initiative, a leadership coaching company focused on racial justice, diversity and inclusion. As of this recording recording, she's also running for state senate in District 62 in Minneapolis. We recorded our conversation a couple of months before recent happenings in Minneapolis with the presence of ice and the related deaths and protests. Even though we don't talk about what is currently happening in Minneapolis, I think my conversation with Jeanelle has a lot to say to the current moment we are living in.

(00:03:25):

Jeanelle is deeply connected to the practice of pilgrimage and brings a profound understanding of what it means to journey to sacred and wounded places. As someone who not only tends to the memorial at the site of George Floyd's murder, but also leads others on pilgrimages there, she helps visitors learn how to enter that space with reverence and a willingness to bear witness. Just a disclaimer, this episode touches on themes of racial trauma, police brutality, and mourning. So if you have young children around you, you may want to listen to this at a later time. We hope you'll enjoy this conversation with Jeanelle Austin.

Jeanelle Austin (00:04:10):

That organization is in a phase where they are having to figure out how do we educate people on an event that happened before they were born? How do we educate people on a story that they don't remember? Realizing that that is another level and another layer of memorialization and pilgrimage and storytelling and oral history where you have to figure out how do you transfer the stories from one generation to the next and so that they can embody it as their own story, as a part of a collective story. And they can tell the stories, not necessarily because they bore witness to it, but because they know it and they've internalized it and it's theirs because they are a part of the collective.

Montague Williams (00:05:03):

Hi, Jeanelle. It's good to be with you.

Jeanelle Austin (00:05:05):

Hi, Montague. Thank you for having me.

Montague Williams (00:05:07):

Thank you for being on the show. You live in Minneapolis and regularly work with a site and a story that has impacted the nation and the world in recent years. So how about we just jump to it and tell our listeners a bit about who you are in your journey as a leader in the work that you do?

Jeanelle Austin (00:05:32):

Absolutely. I'm, as you say, from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born and raised. I grew up in a Christian family, both my parents ordained when I was a teenager and turned pastors. Later on I went to private Christian schooling. My entire life I've learned the ABCs with Bible verses, so that's how deeply steeped my journey has been in Christian tradition. Fast forward, when I was in high school, I wanted to take a missions trip to Southern Africa and my church was a poor church and I didn't know how to raise the funds for the trip, and so I reached out to some churches that my friends at school were connected to, and I never forgot that this one church, one of the most wealthiest churches in the Twin Cities, their youth leader had contacted me and we had a phone call and he told me that they couldn't support me because I wasn't a member of their church.

(00:06:56):

And that did something in me because I couldn't figure out why that me coming from a poor black church in the community, that church being a very wealthy white church wouldn't partner. I just thought we were all one big happy family in Christ, and I learned that day that we weren't when I went to college, that experience when I was 15 years old shaped my choice and my decision to take a first year seminar called Body of Christ Unity and Division. And it was there that I learned about, I call it the church family tree and who split when and where and how we became about, but I also used my time in college to really do a lot of racial reconciliation work.

(00:07:59):

I actually ended up designing a conference called, do You See What I See? And facilitated race dialogues on our college campus to help students think about the ways in which our experiences though we're going through the same degree programs maybe are completely opposite and different just because of our cultural experiences in this world and on this campus. And I started doing a lot of programming. When I got to grad school, I went to Fuller Theological Seminary. I did design more programming around race and racial justice and equity, and it just started to become a thing. Now I was doing it as a hobby. I wasn't getting paid for these experiences. It was just in me to say that we need to have these kinds of conversations and how do I create spaces for people to do this?

(00:09:04):

I became the director of operations for the Pinnell Center for African-American Church Studies in 2015. And in that time and in that role, we were dealing with a national cultural climate of black lives being taken through state sanctioned violence. Trayvon Martin had happened in 2012, Mike Brown in 2014, Sandra Bland, 2015, you had Freddie Gray. You had going forward in 2016, Alton Sterling, Philandro Castile back to back. There were constant narratives being put forth in the media and because now we have cell phones, they're being video recorded. So you can see what was happening to us as a black community before growing up, it was like a rumor mill. Someone would come to church and talk about what the police did to their son. And the image of law enforcement in the United States, especially when you're growing up young, is always one of reverence and one of possibility and ideas of being a savior in a time of need. And so then seeing these, or hearing the stories, it made it a lot difficult to believe. But fast forward a couple decades now, we're actually seeing what is happening to us and the whole world is bearing witness and we have to decide and make a decision, what are we going to do about it? And I'll never forget, one of my friends, Dr. Tamisha Tyler, she said, we have to show up and protest. We have to have an embodied action and response to the injustices that are happening for it to stop.

Montague Williams (00:11:09):

Were you in school with Tamisha at this time or This was after

Jeanelle Austin (00:11:14):

Tamisha was in school. I was working full time. I had graduated. Tamisha was still a student,

Montague Williams (00:11:23):

So she said, we have to show up. We have to be there. We have to put our bodies in this,

Jeanelle Austin (00:11:28):

We have to put our bodies on the line. And we went downtown to Los Angeles courthouse, we marched, we protested, and I remember that first protest with Trayvon Martin. So this was back in 2012, actually, 2012. I was still a student. I was working full time and I was a student in 2012, and I remember getting down to the courthouse and there was a pastor who had stood up on the makeshift stage and had a bullhorn. And the youth had this look in their eyes of, we need you to say something in this moment. There was pain grown men were crying, and there was this one pastor, I have no idea what their name was or what church they were affiliated with, but I just distinctly remember them saying, come to my church on Sunday. And I thought, this is a major failure. These people need something right now. They need a gospel right now. They need good news. They need hope. They need inspiration. They need fight, they need justice, they need leadership. And if the answer was just wait until Sunday morning and I'll have a sermon for you and you can fill in my cues,

(00:12:56):

It just wasn't the right response. It forced me to start thinking about what does justice look like? What does the response to injustice look like? And when I became the director of operations for the Pinel Center in the summer of 2016, after the back-to-back killings of Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling, I remember had watched the videos and I was just in tears and I couldn't stop crying. My body would not stop crying, and I had to figure out how to get it together because once I got to work, I would have to then support the students who were navigating the same weight. Students were calling me saying, I can't go to Greek class. I'm like, don't. They were calling and saying, what do we do? How are we going to respond? Is there going to be a candlelight vigil? And I decided that we would not do a candlelight vigil because I had paid attention to the various candlelight vigils that we had done throughout the year, and people weren't showing up anymore.

(00:14:05):

People kind of felt like as long as the Pinnell Center hosts something, we can vicariously say that we showed up through them. I think it was the vigil that was for Freddie Gray and DACA. There was five people who showed up to that candlelight vigil, and four of them were speakers. And I realized, okay, people aren't responding, so we need to protest. And we organized a die-in protest on the steps of Fuller Seminary. What I wasn't prepared for was the response we received from the region. Folks were coming up from Orange County, UCLA, USC, Azusa students from around the Los Angeles area had heard about it and were making their way to Fuller Seminary to protest with us.

Montague Williams (00:15:03):

Can you just share for our listeners what is a die-in?

Jeanelle Austin (00:15:08):

Oh, yes. So back in the 1960s, one of the tactics that was used during protests was called a sitted, where young youth protesters would go to a diner or they would go to a space that they weren't allowed to be, and they would just sit and they would not get up, and that was their form of peaceful protest. So fast forward, one of the strategies that black youth activists started using during these protests for black lives because black people were being killed and their bodies were being left on the streets. Mike Brown's body had laid there for four hours in the hot sun in the south before they even removed it. So in protest, youth started doing what they termed die in. So rather than sitting someplace until they were forcefully removed, they would lay there and they would lay on the ground in solidarity with the families and with the now ancestors, those who had been deceased to demand justice.

(00:16:22):

And folks would do it in the middle of the street, folks would do it in the middle of whatever space or place that they could occupy as a protest. Essentially, they would just become dead weight if someone tried to forcefully remove them. We held one at Fuller Theological Seminary at the main steps of Payton Hall, and we all laid on the ground in the hot sun of July in Pasadena, California in protest, and we had speeches from different students. One of the speeches was read by Delonte Goldstein, but it was written by one of our students in Sacramento who was a black male police officer, a studying for ministry.

Montague Williams (00:17:19):

Wow.

Jeanelle Austin (00:17:19):

And he wrote a profound letter that captured the tension that he was experiencing of being both a police officer and the black man and seeing the injustices and wanting and calling for his fellow officers to do different and to be different and to do their work in a way that allows black people to live. And so that was the event that we coordinated and it launched my work as an activist. I would say prior to then, I don't think I would've ever considered myself an activist as much as from that point, showing up in marches, learning how to protest and strategize, showing up politically and figuring out how do we make systemic changes, showing up for different conversations with different political leaders and trying to infuse a new imagination of how we can do better and how we can be better as a society because it would have to be a systemic change.

(00:18:37):

I ended up leaving my job at Fuller in 2018 because of exhaustion. I was completely depleted. I actually was depleted in 2016, and I stayed an additional two years because I dunno, I was told that I just needed a few weeks of vacation and then I would be all right. Apparently a few weeks of vacation just wasn't enough, and I left my job. I moved to Austin, Texas, and I slept for six months just to rest and allow my body to recover. I actually went to a chiropractor and took a stress test and the chiropractor told me that my stress levels were off the charts and there was no way that he could help me until my stress levels came down. And so he prescribed long walks, deep breaths, and until I can get my stress levels down, and that was it. Those two things, long walks and deep breaths.

Montague Williams (00:19:46):

It's interesting how the calling into justice work into activism does call for embodied work, but it does take a major toll on the body.

Jeanelle Austin (00:20:00):

Yes, absolutely. And that was the question that I had when I woke up. I say in January of 2019, and I'm like, okay, I am in Texas and I don't know what to do with my life. And I had that very question, how can I do this work for racial justice without burning out? I begin to realize that joy is a completely different kind of energy and an underutilized resource. And I often reflected on the Bible verse and Hebrews that says Jesus, for whom the joy set before him endured the cross. And I began to realize the way in which joy and suffering interplay and interacts with one another. And joy does not necessarily mean the absence of suffering and suffering doesn't mean the absence of joy. In fact, I began to explore the idea of joy, having this reciprocal feedback that actually gives you energy to continue to move forward.

(00:21:13):

And I started my company Racial agency initiative with this tagline of pursuing racial justice with joy because my hypothesis was when you do something well and you do something that you're really good at, it takes a lot less time and it takes a lot less energy because you love it so much and it gives you so much joy. It's when you're begrudging about the thing you have to do that it feels like it takes forever and it takes so much more energy. And so I began to look at pursuing racial justice through my skillsets and my gifts and my talents, and not just through what needs to be done, because when I'm just doing the work that needs to be done, that makes me more exhausted that much more quickly. But when I am doing the work that I'm naturally gifted at and skilled at, I can sustain in the work a lot longer before I actually need to take a break or actually need to take a rest.

(00:22:21):

Not unlike if you're marathon training, right? If you know how long you need to go before you need to take that sip of water or before you need to grab that Twizzler and allow your body to recover. But that then also requires building a team, understanding your strengths, but then understanding your weaknesses so you can have people around you utilizing their strengths as well. And so when 2020 had come, so I spent 2019, I ended up launching my company in about August. I had to spend time as a black woman. The idea of becoming an entrepreneur and launching my own business thoroughly scared me. I already had issues with setting my own prices when people were asking me to speak

Montague Williams (00:23:19):

Sure

Jeanelle Austin (00:23:21):

Because it's this thing that we're just trained to always give and serve mentality and give and serve.

(00:23:29):

And so I ended up going through a program to train women of color, especially black women, to become entrepreneurs just so I can build my confidence to start my own business. And I ended up launching in August and doing racial justice leadership coaching, basically helping people do that work of finding what they were good at and applying it to racial justice to help bend the needle forward. And then COVID hit. And then what I noticed in 2020 when COVID was starting to become a thing and cities and governments were starting to shut down, black people were still getting killed. We couldn't go anywhere. We could go for a walk once a day, go to the grocery store once a week. We had a social distance, so there was nobody around us. You couldn't touch your elders, you couldn't touch your loved ones, you had to quarantine in a bubble with your family. And yet, I was still watching on the news and social media, black lives being taken during this time. And I asked myself a question. I said, how is it in America that everything can stop except for the killing of black lives?

Montague Williams (00:25:02):

Wow,

Jeanelle Austin (00:25:03):

How does that work? The whole world is on pause, but black people are still dying. And I began to take note of the names of the people who were dying to police violence. And then in May of 2020, on May 26th, that Tuesday morning, there was a text message in our family group chat that said, this just happened right by your house. And then there was a link. And I opened the link and I began to watch it and it got about five minutes in. And I said to myself, I know where this leads. I cannot watch it. And my family, because my family home was two blocks away from where George Floyd took his last breath. They had gone to the protest, the initial gathering of neighbors just trying to figure out what happened, how do we process the initial creating of a memorial there? And then that evening, my sister texted me and asked if I would come home and do the work that I do at home.

(00:26:14):

And at first I said no. And the reason why I said no was because of my experience organizing in Los Angeles and my experience working with pastors. And I'm like, organizers and pastors are saying they're extremely territorial over their flocks, and I did not want to be in that space. I just got through this healing journey and going back into that space where people are people, I just didn't want 'em for my life. And my sister came back a day later that Wednesday and said, no, we really need you to come home. And at that moment, I interpreted her message to say that mom's struggling. She wants all of her children accounted for. You're the only one who is out of this state. Dad had died just a year prior.

(00:27:11):

Our family was just going through, and now the city is in uprising mode. So I decided I'd come home. And so I booked a one-way ticket for that Friday, May 29th. I just settled my affairs in Texas and I flew home thinking I'd be there for a week, maybe two maximum. I joined a few different protests, but it quickly triggered all my trauma. I think there's a book called The Body Keeps Score, and that is definitely true. My body remembered every protest that I had ever been in, every vehicle that I ever stopped with my body to keep it from coming into a crowd of protesters with women, with strollers, all of those experiences just relive themselves. And I had to take a step back and I said, I cannot protest in the way that I used to protest if I'm going to stay healthy.

(00:28:14):

So I decided that every morning I would walk down to the memorial and tend to it. In 2016 in Pasadena, there was a man by the name of JR Thomas who was killed by the Pasadena police via baton beating. And in response to that injustice, my friend Julie Tai, who was the director of chapel at Fuller, she held one of the chapel services and created a memorial to black lives on those main steps of Peyton Hall and her husband and myself. We all worked to maintain and keep that memorial going for the entire academic year. And so I had this background and experience of Memorial caretaking, and so I decided that this is something that I could do because what I learned that year was that memorials are sacred and people typically don't move things that they deem to be sacred or understand to be sacred regardless of your religion or faith tradition.

(00:29:28):

There there's a reverence for the sacred and in what is now called George Floyd Square. When George Floyd had first taken his last breath, indigenous women came and had cleansed the space. The community was saying, this is a sacred space. People were walking around with sage to cleanse the atmosphere. There was different religious traditions present, different chaplains present to hold space with people. Youth were doing circles in the middle of the street, healing circles. In the middle of the street, there was a song and dance. There's four different traditions, religious traditions that are connected to George Floyd Square. And so there was this over presence of spirituality in this protest and I and in that place and in that place, yes, in the place. And so the decision to protest by caring for the ways in which people were memorializing our dead and the way people were grieving publicly, which in these United States, we don't do well.

(00:30:45):

We do not grieve publicly well. We don't make space in our work life. We don't make space in our personal life. We don't make space in our communal collective lives to grieve. And I think that's a result of capitalism, this concept that time is money and you need to keep going, going and move forward. You get 10 seconds off of work to go to a funeral, and then you have to be back at work. People don't give space for grief. And because of COVID, people had nothing but time and space. And to watch the public grieve collectively across religion, across race, across socioeconomic class, across neighborhood boundaries, it was just a phenomenal site to see. And to see that also as a form of protest, the longer that people stayed and continued to occupy the space and practice mutual aid and care for one another and sing songs of music and spit rhymes and do dances and play horns and lay flowers or draw art and offer all of that to one another as a public grief offering, we begin to create something that just does not exist in this country.

(00:32:25):

And normally a government authorities would bulldoze these kinds of spaces after someone has been killed usually, I mean, the max people usually get is like three, maybe four weeks before the government is like, okay, we're over this. We've got to clear this out and set things back to normal. But that didn't happen. And I think it's because of the way COVID created time for people to show up, and the people kept showing up and holding space, and then the neighbors took it upon ourselves to care for the space and be responsible for it. And the neighbors closed down the streets and the streets stayed closed for over a year. And the rallying cry became no justice, no streets. And people were really looking to demand and expect from our government to do right by black lives, not just after we have died, but while we are alive,

(00:33:29):

What do those systemic changes look like? And so this work of memorial caretaking and keeping the voices of the public alive, keeping their protests alive through the extension of their offering at the memorial, turned into working with the family of George Floyd to create a nonprofit to govern all of the offerings because there were thousands of them in George Floyd Square took on the size of two blocks by two blocks. Now when you come, there's a fist erected at every entry point. And so when people ask us, well, how large is George Floyd Square? We say It's fist to fist. So there's a 12 foot fist at 37th in Chicago. There's a 12 foot fist at 39th in Chicago. There's a 12 foot fist at 38th and Columbus, there's a 12 foot fist at 38th and Elliot, and then there's a 14 foot fist dead center at the intersection of 38th and Chicago.

Montague Williams (00:34:32):

Let me ask you a question about this. So part of your work, well, first of all, your way of protest in this particular place shifted. And it sounds like your way of protest was tending to this ground, tending to this place, tending to the kind of stories that make their way through. But you also just said that people would leave things, thousands of items would show up, and there's some preservation work that goes on. What does a week of preserving this? What are they stuffed animals, flowers?

Jeanelle Austin (00:35:10):

Yeah, the memorial offerings,

Montague Williams (00:35:12):

Yes.

Jeanelle Austin (00:35:12):

Yeah. So they range range from large art murals. We actually just finished restoring one of the art murals that someone had vandalized. We continue to work with the original artists where we can and when we know them, because of the Visual Artist Rights Act that exists on a federal level, artists have the rights to their own pieces. And if you amend or alter their piece without their consent, they can sue and win. They have the rights to their own pieces. So because this is a justice movement and oftentimes artists are exploited, we thought that this is a great opportunity for us to practice justice with our local artists and continue to be in relationship with them. And so from the Mourning Passage, which is a list of 169 names painted onto the street to the, say their name cemetery, which is 160 headstones of names of people who've been killed by police and or vigilante violence to painted rocks and crystals and crucifixes and teddy bears, someone left a helmet bear.

(00:36:27):

I saw once a person walk their bike through the square, they opened up their water bottle and then they poured their water into a plant that somebody else had laid as an offering. So it was like a layer of offerings, an offering on top of an offering homes painted onto the street. What was a gas station called Speedway is now painted as the people's way where people continued to gather and meet every morning at 8:00 AM and every evening at 7:00 PM brass solidarity organized with brass instrumentalists who wanted to do something. And so every Monday at 5:30 PM they continue to gather even now in 2025, and they play play protest music, and they play justice music and they fill the air with a sound of offering. And so it's an ongoing protest, and the work of conservation is to keep outside what we can keep outside and in protest, and then what can no longer be outside.

(00:37:41):

We bring inside and do the work of art conservation to preserve it so that way we can then exhibit it as an extension of the memorial as an extension of people's protests. And so we have two foundational principles that guide us as memorial caretakers. And that's one everything that somebody's offering, therefore nothing is thrown away. And two, the people are more sacred than the memorial itself, and we're people over property all day every day. And so we use those two foundational principles to help guide us on how we do our work and how we care for the space and how we continue to make sure that the voices of the people are not erased.

Montague Williams (00:38:24):

Why do you think people leave these offerings at different pilgrimage sites? That is a common practice at pilgrimage sites like this one that is remembering unjust action death. It's often the case that people do bring a variety, like you said, a range of memorial offerings. What is it that people are doing? What have you noticed? What have you heard that makes up this practice of leaving something there?

Jeanelle Austin (00:39:00):

Yeah, when you ask that question, there are three stories that come to mind. The first story is of a black woman who left a bassinet and someone in our community thought the bassinet was ugly and shouldn't be there, and they weren't a memorial caretaker, and they actually got rid of it and they threw it away. And sometime later, the woman came back and it was a rainy day, and she got caught under one of the tents with one of our memorial caretakers, and she asked her, she said, where is the bassinet? And the memorial caretaker was like, I don't know. I've seen it before, but I don't know where it is. And the woman said that bassinet belonged to my deceased baby.

(00:39:56):

And it was a part of her, it was a part of her grief, and she had offered it as the offering because it connected her deepest pain with the pain that we were going through collectively as a society, collectively as black people, and it was special to her. I also saw a little white girl, maybe around the age of five or six. She was in the memorial with her mother, and she is bearing witness to all of these small offerings and trinkets and toys and baby blankets that are existing there. She darts across the street and runs over to the people's way, and her mother is like, what are you doing? Where are you going? She goes into the people's bookshelf and she searches and she finds a toy bandaid there, and she puts it on her wrist, and then she comes back over to the memorial.

(00:40:57):

She takes it off her wrist and she lays it in the memorial. So this kind of practice of she found something, decided that she can make it a part of herself and then takes it off of her wrist so that way she could participate in this collective effort to demonstrate what she believed, what I call creative expressions of pain and hope, whether she was feeling pain or whether she was feeling hope in that moment, I don't know, but I know that she wanted to be a part of something that she saw the community doing together. And then the last story, it was Martin Luther King Day 2021, January 17th, and we had just erected the fist in the center of the intersection. And this father, he's also a white family, his father comes with his daughter, and they had come to the memorial to pay their respects in Minnesota.

(00:41:54):

It's freezing cold. It's in the middle of winter. And she comes up to me hand in hand with her father, and she has this eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper with rainbows and unicorns drawn on it. And she asks, where can I put this? And I looked at her and I said, you can place it anywhere you want. And so I went and I grabbed a rock for her and I said, here's a rock Wherever you decide to put it, just put the rock on top so it doesn't fly away. And she found this space on top of the newly erected fist, and she placed her eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper full of colors of rainbows and unicorns there that day. That was her offering, that was her story, that was her vision. And that was what? Months later, eight months after George Floyd had been lynched. I think this space has become, actually, I use this acronym of Clip Community Liberation, public Grief, pilgrimage and Protest. It's become a place where people come to do one of any of those five things, sometimes more than one at the exact same time. It becomes a place where people are educating their students and their family members about race in America. But it's a safe space to do that. It becomes a place where people can grieve. I remember when January 6th insurrection happened, and I remember being at home and I see the noose on tv, and I see the Christian flag, and I see all of these symbols that were designed to terrorize the Black Mind,

(00:43:55):

And I walked into George Floyd Square. I ran into Pastor James or Pastor Jimmy, and I just wept and I wept in his arms, and it was the only space that I knew that I could go and I can weep and wail publicly, and no one would bat not or wonder why is this person crying? It was socially acceptable to grieve in George Floyd Square, and it still remains a place where it's socially acceptable to grief and it's socially acceptable to have fun and to celebrate, to have parties.

Montague Williams (00:44:37):

Tell me a little bit about that still comment you just made. I mean, we're living in a time where there's backlash to even engaging issues of justice. The word diversity is now a word that organizations and institutions are afraid to use. Even equality can be a term that people are afraid to use. You said that it's still a place, well, first of all, I mean you lead these pilgrimages. I mean, I'm sure you think it's important to lead them. Can you share a little bit about why and have you experienced decline in interest in groups that show up? What do you do with that?

Jeanelle Austin (00:45:18):

Very good questions. So yes, I started leading pilgrimages because when I was doing memorial caretaking, people saw me as a captive audience and they would ask me, well, what are we looking at? What are we seeing? People were traveling from all over the world? And so I just started helping them understand what they were bearing witness to. And then other people I noticed were making incorrect conclusions. So they thought that the names on the street were a list of volunteers that had helped create the space. And I was like, you know what? We need to make sure that we are telling the correct story so that people understand what it is that they're seeing and what it is that they're understanding and helping to shape that, especially if they weren't there in 2020. They really just have no framework for what happened, when to help shape the space and the ways in which their presence continues to shape the space.

(00:46:25):

Then we decided in 2022 that we wanted to create a social entrepreneur program to help community members become entrepreneurs, especially black black community members, become social entrepreneurs, learn what it's like to start their own business. And so we designed a pilgrimage program where we help them file for a business. We paid all of the fees to get them started, and then we serve as their clients. So organizations would come through our organization as rising member to sign up for a pilgrimage, and then we connect them with a local guide who could tell the story through their own eyes and their own experiences. I actually don't lead many pilgrimages now. I've transferred that over to many community members. Every once in a while when a special person in my life comes through, I will lead that pilgrimage for them just because they matter to me and they want me to tell the story through my eyes, and I'm happy to do that. But more often than that, I try to transfer people to the local guides that we have established and allow them to tell their own stories as well.

Montague Williams (00:47:47):

That's insightful.

Jeanelle Austin (00:47:48):

The pilgrimage

Montague Williams (00:47:50):

That's insightful for lots of groups wanting to organize pilgrimages, whether it is going somewhere that's not their home or even locally, it's important to consider that to welcome in local guides, to tell the stories rather than feeling the responsibility to be the now and forever expert of everyone's stories.

Jeanelle Austin (00:48:11):

Absolutely, absolutely. And we're actually working on a new pilgrimage model that would support black youth

(00:48:21):

In August of this year, the National Bureau of Labor Statistics, I think that's what they're called. They came out with a report that said that the young adults are the most unemployed population in our country right now. And among those young adults, black young adults are the highest unemployed within that group. And so we are exploring a pathway to hire young black adults to become our pilgrimage guides. Now, these raise questions because when we first started the pilgrimage program, we picked people who lived through that 2020 uprising experience and who's been in the neighborhood and could tell stories and could tell history. So all of those people were in their thirties or late twenties and have memories that go deep into the history and the culture of the neighborhood. So to make a decision to employ black youth to do the pilgrimage work is going to require a pivot in our imagination of how we tell the stories and how we hold the stories.

(00:49:44):

And this was an important decision for us, not just because we need to figure out how to support black youth, but a couple years ago I took a trip to the nine 11 Memorial Museum and I was spending time with their executive staff and learning from them and how they journeyed through their memorial work of a mass tragedy in this country. And they had some interns or young staff that were like 20, 21 years old, no memory of nine 11 at all. And that organization is in a phase where they are having to figure out how do we educate people on an event that happened before they were born? How do we educate people on a story that they don't remember and realizing that that is another level and another layer of memorialization and pilgrimage and storytelling and oral history where you have to figure out how do you transfer the stories from one generation to the next and so that they can embody it as their own story as a part of a collective story.

(00:51:05):

And they can tell the stories, not necessarily because they bore witness to it, but because they know it and they've internalized it and it's theirs because they are a part of the collective. And so that is going to be a journey that we're exploring about bringing youth into the fold of telling the stories. Some of them will remember where they were. Some of them were at home because their parents would not let them go out and protest during that time. And so they are relying on the stories of the community to be able to share, but it doesn't mean that they don't want to be able to tell the stories. And so we're going to shift our imagination and what does pilgrimage look like when they are youth led, and do they have to have been there to be able to embody the storytelling process and embody the pilgrimage process of learning, growing, paying, respects, grieving, figuring out what is the work of racial justice for our community and our society? And I'm grateful that we are exploring what does that look like now? Because if we plan to exist 50 to a hundred years from now, those folks may not have gone through that with us,

(00:52:25):

But they will still have a responsibility to tell the story. And so practicing that now is essential part of our growth and development as story keepers.

Montague Williams (00:52:35):

One thing I find interesting about that is in your own story, in your own moments of vocational discernment, there was a pilgrimage to those steps there at Fuller Seminary with the die-in that played a major role in your own, your own path, your own sense of purpose and identity and belonging and vocation in this world. And it's interesting to think about how that pilgrimage, that leadership and organization around pilgrimage led you to this point where you're now seeking to help young people lead pilgrimage.

Jeanelle Austin (00:53:16):

That's interesting. It's interesting that you say that. Yes, and I would also even say that I've taken many, many, many pilgrimages even in my own neighborhood because I am a memorial caretaker that work of sweeping 169 names to ensure that they're visible, the work of installing headstones because they've been broken and reinstalling them, the work of cleansing an renda to ensure that there's dignity to that a friend, the process is a pilgrimage process, and you have to posture yourself emotionally and spiritually in a way that feels like that you are honoring your ancestors, you're honoring your community, and you're honoring yourself and you're honoring the family whose loved one this belongs to. And I think all of Memorial Caretaking is a pilgrimage. It's a journey. And I never had thought about it that way until you just mentioned this. Now I have have wept while I've swept streets

(00:54:40):

Just thinking about the names that I am cleaning, but I've also taken pilgrimages to other spaces and 20, what was it, five years? So 2019, I went to Ferguson and did a pilgrimage to Ferguson during the five-year anniversary of Mike Brown. And that was an important experience. We recently took a pilgrimage to Palestine and got to listen to the stories of people who are in deep grief and practice deep hope. I've pilgrimage to down south. I went to the legacy museum and the National Memorial for peace and justice and walks through the spaces and the jars of dirt and the stories that told about slavery and what our people have collectively come through globally as the black diaspora. So I've made a lot of pilgrimage journeys in my life. I just don't think I ever named them as such or knew them as such. I didn't understand pilgrimage as deeply as I do now because now it's a lived experience and it's a part of my practice and it's a necessary part of my personal grounding.

Montague Williams (00:56:25):

Well, just for listeners to know, I mean, I first met Jeanelle in Palestine. We were both part of a group of faculty and leaders who were going to learn about what's happening in that space and engage people, people in their homes, in their neighborhoods. And one thing that I study pilgrimages and I lead pilgrimages and I engage young people about their experiences on pilgrimage. And I will say one thing that was really impactful for me coming back from that was a deeper insight into the post pilgrimage, the post pilgrimage mode of new questions and working ways to incorporate what you've learned and experienced the community that was shared, how to incorporate that into your own life. And I know that you've been doing that and I've actually been engaging the work that you've been doing in light of that. But you just said that pilgrimage, you didn't name it as such, but now you do because you've come to a deeper understanding of pilgrimage. So I have two questions left for you. I actually have a billion questions for you, but we don't have time for that, so we might have to do a part two. I just want to put that out there now. We might have to do a part two at some point

Jeanelle Austin (00:58:03):

A game. Let's do it. This is healing for me, by the way, just being able to reflect on my story and my journey through the lens of pilgrimage. I mean this, I've never done that before, so thank you for allowing me to do this with you.

Montague Williams (00:58:18):

Oh, it's 100% our pleasure. My pleasure. I mean, this is a life-giving conversation for me too. Here's a question. So this question might take you down a billion paths, but we've been thinking here at the Pilgrimage Innovation hub, and we've been working with cohorts of pilgrimage leaders. We've been thinking about how pilgrimage is different from a field trip, a missions trip, a tourism a vacation. There's some things that can connect with some of those in some ways, but it's also different now. You don't have to try to give all the answers because it's a tough one to name at times. But what would you say makes pilgrimage different from those other forms of other common forms of travel?

Jeanelle Austin (00:59:12):

A pilgrimage is different because oftentimes you go with more questions than answers. You are trying to figure something out. And I think pilgrimage is always interconnected with our spirituality and the fact that as humans, we are spiritual beings. And oftentimes with our spirituality comes questions. And those questions are not necessarily just spiritual questions. Sometimes those questions are very practical and very real and very much so embodied questions. But that we have to wrestle with our whole being to fully understand. And I've been on many, many missions trips, and I actually don't even like calling them missions trips anymore. I call them service learning trips. But oftentimes in those experiences, people go with an agenda, they go with a plan, they go with an action that they are going to do to contribute, to practice mutual aid, to do something, to help somebody else's circumstances, to provide relief in some way, and oftentimes provide more complex situations or even harm because we're not really embedded in those communities and cultures. But vacations are for rest, where you don't even have to ask a question, you can just be and do nothing, and that is great. Vacations are needed spaces.

(01:01:00):

I think oftentimes we think of pilgrimage, we think of journey, we think of traveling, physically, traveling, which can be incorporated. But I think we could also be pilgrims in our own spaces and places where we are if we were coming with the questions and seeking for answers and understanding that we just don't have what we desperately need. I remember one day in 2020 I was memorial caretaking and I was pruning plants this particular day. And a father, a white male, middle aged, came up to me and he said, I have a question. And I said, well, you're welcome to ask a question as long as I can continue to do the work that I'm doing. He said, perfect. And he said, I don't understand why my children are marching in these protests.

(01:02:04):

And that began a 40-minute dialogue while I continued to prune plants, a complete stranger, he found me as a captive audience because I was pruning plants. He had no idea that I would be a person who was very well-equipped to hold space with him. He just took a risk. But he came to this intersection, 38th and Chicago. It wasn't even known as George Floyd Square yet, but he just knew people were gathering there. And he came with his questions and found someone who could help him walk through those questions. And I don't even know if I completely answered or help him find conclusive answers, but I was a stop on what I hope was a longer journey and a longer pilgrimage for him of working through his political, racial, communal, social questions of, or that surrounded his understanding of what justice, equity, and a fight for those things looks like. And apparently it looked different for him than it looked different for his children. And I hope, I pray that he found the courage to even have those conversations with his children and walk through that with them and ask them, why are you protesting? What am I missing as a middle-aged white man that you all are grasping as my children? So I think pilgrimage is deeply rooted in a quest for answers, answers that we may never receive. But I think that journey of questioning will open us up to so many things that we never have thought that we would encounter.

(01:04:25):

And people, not just things but people. And I think that is an important part of pilgrimage, is the people that we meet along the way that help shape who we are and who we will become.

Montague Williams (01:04:39):

Well, Jeanelle, you started your company with a hypothesis around joy and justice. In some ways you could say the company is an experiment, an experiment amidst your own life pilgrimage. How's that experiment going?

Jeanelle Austin (01:05:00):

It's good, I guess. I mean, yeah, it was an experiment, and I still feel confident that pursuing racial justice with joy is how we can pursue racial justice sustainably. It doesn't mean that we don't take breaks, that we don't have vacations, that we don't take moments to celebrate and find the good things and not just focus on the bad, but it just means that we can and anyone can seek racial justice and not burn out in the process. It's possible.

Montague Williams (01:05:58):

It's possible

Jeanelle Austin (01:05:58):

It's possible that we could find liberation without burnout, but in order for that to happen, we have to be mindful of the things that do burn us out quickly. I talk about joy being like a complex carbohydrate, which gives us long-term energy as opposed to sugar, which is a simple carbohydrate, and it gives you that high and then crash oftentimes like anger, rage, age, that feeling of I have to respond instantly. Those are the simple carbohydrates, and they get your butt off the couch to move and to do something. But then you have to find your joy so that way you can actually go longer on the journey. And knowing the things that give you joy, learning yourself is so important for me. I'm an introvert and I have a community full of extroverts, and they don't understand why I am not outside as often as they are.

(01:07:08):

They're like, no, where are you? How come you're not coming to this party? How come you're not coming to this event? How come you're not coming to this and that? And the other is because those things deplete my energy. And so I have to be selective onto which events that I go to so that way I can be rejuvenated for our collective experience together. Because otherwise I'll just be grumpy and mean, and I won't have the energy to actually be fully present with my neighbors in my community. So I do things like drink sage tea and CloudWatch, which gives me so much joy and allows me to be centered and ready to go for my day and to encounter whomever that I am going to encounter because I do the things to make sure that my joy is anchored and my life can be sustainable. But that's different for everyone.

Montague Williams (01:08:16):

Janelle, thank you so much for sharing in the ways that you shared today. I think I'm going to go have some sage t and look at some clouds.

Jeanelle Austin (01:08:28):

Yes.

Montague Williams (01:08:28):

But even more, I will sit with what you've shared, and I really hope we can do a part two. I think there are some other parts of your continued story, some of that even behind the scenes work around your own vocation that I think we need to get into at some point very soon. So thank

Jeanelle Austin (01:08:48):

You so much, manag. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you this once, and I look forward to the opportunity to speak with you again.

Montague Williams (01:08:56):

Yeah, let's do it. You've been listening to Breathe In Place, a podcast brought to you by the Pilgrimage Innovation Hub. This podcast is made possible by generous support from the Lilly Endowment Narrative production by Guimel Sibingo, technical production by Danny Martinez and Project Coordination and Guest booking by Wanda Gailey, opening Music by Chaos. If you have any comments or questions about today's episode, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at pilgrimage@pointloma.edu or message us on Instagram at Pilgrimage Innovation Hub. I'm your host, Montague Williams. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next week.