NIKIA SMITH ROBERT

The Forum’s annual “Arc Toward Justice” Series is dedicated to honoring the legacy of George Floyd and the ongoing need for racial, social, and systemic change. The Rev. Dr. Nikia Smith Robert, executive director of Abolitionist Sanctuary, will ask us to consider Martin Luther King’s arc in terms of incarceration and abolition. Is it bending? What is our work to do? What is the call to action in our time?

As an alumni of the same sorority as early Forum speaker, Shirley Chisholm. Dr. Robert will return to themes from Chisholm’s 1986 Forum “Civil and Human Rights in the U.S. and Third World ” as she invites us to consider the call to ethics and abolition and the ongoing work of justice.

Dr. Robert is a recognized thought leader and speaker on the topics of mass punishment, abolition, religion, and Black motherhood. She founded Abolitionist Sanctuary to build a national coalition of Black-serving churches, civic organizations, and communities to unite against the moral crisis of mass incarceration and the criminalization of impoverished Black motherhood.

In addition to this work, Dr. Robert is also an assistant professor of Ethics and Social Justice at the University of Kansas and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The session’s moderator will be The Rev. Dr. Jessica Patchett who is senior pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis and was previously senior pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison, Wisconsin. She holds a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry in Gospel and Culture from Columbia Theological Seminary.