(Sam Powers | Student Life)

Reverend Dr. Otis Moss Jr., spoke about interfaith leadership and social justice as the keynote speaker of WashU’s Interfaith Week, Feb 8th. Moss drew on the scholarship of African American poets, businessmen, and pioneers, and the similarities between music and democracy. 

Moss is a religious leader who is also well known for advocacy on civil rights, environmental justice, and economic inequality and serves on the Progressive National Baptist Convention. He comes from a lineage of civil rights activism, as his father worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In his talk, Moss emphasized the importance of “decolonizing the imagination” to break free from systemic oppression and create new stories that center marginalized communities. He highlighted the work of Afro-Mexican writer Anita Scott Coleman and challenged the audience to confront the limitations of their imagination and the racist myths that have been ingrained in society.

“How do we learn how to dance amid one of the darkest moments in our democracy?” Moss asked.

He read a line from Coleman’s poem “Portraiture”: “Black people are the tall trees that remain after a fire / flame strips their branches / claims their layers…and these trees are the roots for all of us, deep in the heart of the black people.’”

Moss recalled Bacon’s Rebellion, where white and black people working on plantations in Virginia came together to overthrow their oppressors, after which a “social construct of racism” was created to prevent them from working together again. He believes a “wild, unyielding imagination” is the key to breaking barriers between race and religion.

“How do we deal with an imagination that suffers daily where we see strange [racist] things?” said Moss. “I’m going to give you a term that we’ve all heard– ‘black-on-black crime’. When was the last time you heard Irish on Irish crime?”

Moss mentions Robert Smalls Jr. as a figure whose imagination was untethered. Smalls and his family escaped their plantation by stealing a Confederate ship, then went to Pennsylvania and started multiple businesses that made him wealthy, and then returned to buy the plantation he was formerly enslaved.

“Robert Smalls put forth the legislation that established the public school system–all because he had an imagination that would not be limited to the way that racist ideology functions,” said Moss. “Imagination, to that power, can change worlds.”

Moss compared interracial and interfaith cohesion to jazz, where every instrument can play their solos and still create music together.

“Everybody in jazz has the right to solo. Everybody is allowed to bring their own unique cultural narrative to the table,” said Moss.

He compared this concept to creating democracy for everyone in America, not just select races or religions. 

 “If America could learn how to function like a jazz band, and not an orchestra, then in the words of John Coltrane, there may be music, there may be a democracy for us all.”  

Moss remembers his father teaching him not to fall into despair with the current state of the world; he believed it would “dishonor” Harriet Tubman, who had no constitution to appeal to as a slave, but did not despair nonetheless.

“She had no Katanji Brown Jackson or Supreme Court as her friend. She was considered property, but her imagination and faith superseded the mythology. She was constructing something greater,” said Moss. “All you can do is do your work in your time for the next generation. Will they look at us in seven generations and say we had spiritual resilience and resistance? Or are we a people that fall into despair?”

Adam Meti, a senior studying global studies, asked Moss how we can get better at building bridges between communities, especially in times of religious tension that we are experiencing right now.

“Music, food, and stories unite people,” Moss said. “When we use these moments, we go to the heart of who we are as human beings: what brings us great joy and words offering compassion, grief, and understanding.”