By Ossie McKinney
My mother was a quilter. I watched her take pieces of fabric from different places like old dresses, worn shirts, scraps with stories and stitch them together into something meant to last. Once those pieces were sewn together, they became one. Should the stitching became undone, it would not be without cost. Threads would fray. Fabric would tear. What had been made to warm and protect would be damaged in the pulling apart. 
That image has stayed with me, especially over this past year. When I began my work with the Dr. Emmanuel McCall Racial Justice and Leadership Initiative, I thought I knew what I was being asked to do. I was invited to help research the stories of white allies, people who chose courage over comfort and who had engaged in racial justice work during the Civil Rights era and beyond. My task was to gather those stories and help turn them into resources that could inspire everyday people in the pews to live more faithfully and more bravely.
These were not heroes and not experts. Just people willing to ALLY, to acknowledge that unjust systems exist, to learn from those who have been harmed by them, to listen to their stories and to yield personal privilege so justice can take root.
That part made sense to me. What the McCall Initiative presses us to ask, however, is not only who are the allies, but what is required of us now. Our role and responsibility in justice living is not to admire courage from a distance, but to discern where we are positioned, what we can risk and how our faith calls us to act. Justice, in this way, becomes a practice, not a posture.
What I did not expect was how deeply this work would begin to work on me. For most of my life, my primary language has been worship. I have spent decades leading choirs, musicians and congregations, helping people sing, pray and praise God. I believed worship mattered. I believed it should shape how we live. But if I am honest, I focused more on the outward expression of worship as a lifestyle than on the formative work that worship does within us.
Justice felt important, but separate. This work began to change that. I started to see that worship is not only about what we offer God. Worship reshapes us. It teaches us what and who we value. It reminds us who truly holds power. When worship is real, power is put back where it belongs. When power is out of order, injustice is born. When some people hold too much power and others are crushed beneath it, something has gone wrong. But in worship, everyone lays down their claim to control. Everyone stands equal before God.
Justice is what that looks like once worship leaves the sanctuary and walks into the world, shaping how we live, how we relate and how we take responsibility for one another.
That understanding did not come to me through a lecture or a book. It came through story. And it came through my own family history.
For more than 14 years, I have been researching my genealogy. Like many African-Americans, my family’s story holds both strength and pain. Some stories passed down in my family name sexual violence during slavery and the generational wounds that followed. That pain shaped how we understood ourselves and where we came from.
I recently learned something that stopped me in my tracks. Through genealogical research, I discovered that I am distantly related to Emma Willard, a white woman from the early 1800s who believed women deserved real education, not just lessons in sewing and manners. In 1821, she founded a school in New York that offered women serious academic training, the school founded by my fifth cousin, seven times removed, Emma Willard.
At first, I did not know what to do with that information. For many Black families, discovering white ancestors is complicated. Those connections often come through systems of harm we do not celebrate or excuse. And yet I could not stop asking myself a deeper question. What happens if pain is not the only story we carry? What if we tell the truth about harm while still telling the truth about courage?
Then, as if to press the lesson further, my research yielded another thread. As I prepared for a racial justice pilgrimage, I began studying the relationship between Harriet Tubman and Frances Seward. Frances Seward is often remembered as the wife of a powerful political leader, but she was also someone who quietly supported abolitionist efforts. Her home became a place of refuge for those seeking freedom.
Then I learned this. Frances Seward was educated at the school founded by my cousin, Emma Willard. That was the moment my history met yours. A Black woman shaped by the legacy of enslavement. A white woman shaped by education rooted in conscience. Harriet Tubman. Frances Seward. Emma Willard. Me.
Different lives. Different times. One stitched story. That is when I understood something deeper about the work of the Dr. Emmanuel McCall Racial Justice and Leadership Initiative. This work helps us see that justice is not abstract and allyship is not theoretical. It asks us to locate ourselves within the story and decide how we will live faithfully inside it.
This work is not only about lifting up stories of suffering, though those stories matter. It is also about telling the truth that our lives in this country have always been connected. Not equally. Not fairly. But deeply and permanently.
Black history and white history are not separate blankets folded on different shelves. They are pieces of the same quilt, sometimes torn, sometimes mended, always connected. And when we try to pull them apart, damage occurs. The fabric suffers.
So, when we talk about justice, we are not talking about a side project or a special program. We are talking about how faith shapes how we live. Justice is not something we add to worship. Justice is what worship looks like when it has truly formed us.
This Black History Month, I want to honor what must be honored: the stories too often erased, the ancestors too often unnamed and the courage that carried us here. And I want us to see what has always been true. Our pasts are bound together and so is whatever future we dare to build. Every thread we choose now matters. What we stitch next will be what those who come after us inherit.
My story is your story.
Your story is my story.
This is where the weaving continues.
Rev. Dr. Ossie McKinney serves as Director of Research and Administration for Outreach and Growth with Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and provides research leadership for the Emmanuel McCall Racial Justice and Leadership Initiative. A worship leader, scholar, and storyteller, she explores the intersection of faith, justice, history and formation, helping communities see justice as a lived expression of worship.