Lisa Sharon Harper / Fortune: How Race Broke My Family & the World—and How to Repair It All

Seldom do we think of the study of history as a journey of self-discovery. And if that claim has any truth, it's because we modern people tend to see ourselves as autonomous, independent, untethered, and unaffected by our biological and cultural genealogies. But there's a story in our DNA that didn't start with us. And Lisa Sharon Harper has been on a decades-long journey of self-discovery, piecing together her family's lineage from their arrival on America's shores—via slave boats, through the twists and turns of slavery and indentured servitude, through America's post-civil war attempt at Reconstruction, down into the shadowy valley of Jim Crow and twentieth-century Civil Rights struggle, all to her life in the present. Her book is Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All. Evan Rosa recently spoke with Lisa at length about how race broke her world and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. And in continued celebration of Juneteenth and the Black joy which has transcended centuries of oppression, the Black history that deserves to be named and known, and the Black freedom which is real and yet still not fully realized and repaired—thanks for listening today friends.

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About Lisa Sharon Harper

From Ferguson to New York, and from Germany to South Africa to Australia, Lisa Sharon Harper leads trainings that increase clergy and community leaders’ capacity to organize people of faith toward a just world. A prolific speaker, writer and activist, Ms. Harper is the founder and president of FreedomRoad.us, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap in our nation by designing forums and experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment and common action.

Ms. Harper is the author of several books, including Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat (The New Press, 2008); Left Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Elevate, 2011); Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, 2014); and the critically acclaimed, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong can be Made Right (Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House, 2016). The Very Good Gospel, recognized as the “2016 Book of the Year” by Englewood Review of Books, explores God’s intent for the wholeness of all relationships in light of today’s headlines.

A columnist at Sojourners Magazine and an Auburn Theological Seminary Senior Fellow, Ms. Harper has appeared on TVOne, FoxNews Online, NPR, and Al Jazeera America. Her writing has been featured in CNN Belief Blog, The National Civic Review, Sojourners, The Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine, and Essence Magazine. She writes extensively on shalom and governance, immigration reform, health care reform, poverty, racial and gender justice, climate change, and transformational civic engagement.

Ms. Harper earned her Masters degree in Human Rights from Columbia University in New York City, and served as Sojourners Chief Church Engagement Officer. In this capacity, she fasted for 22 days as a core faster in 2013 with the immigration reform Fast for Families. She trained and catalyzed evangelicals in St. Louis and Baltimore to engage the 2014 push for justice in Ferguson and the 2015 healing process in Baltimore, and she educated faith leaders in South Africa to pull the levers of their new democracy toward racial equity and economic inclusion.

In 2015, The Huffington Post named Ms. Harper one of 50 powerful women religious leaders to celebrate on International Women’s Day. In 2019, The Religion Communicators Council named a two-part series within Ms. Harper’s monthly