Bree Newsome

It can, quote, "look like a demand for justice, for recognition, for grace." End quote.

Cooper contrasts Obama's theology of grace performed in song in which humans are to rightly respond to an extraordinary gift freely given from above with Newsum's demand for grace performed in her direct action Quote, "A Black girl with the trophy of white supremacy in her crutches is the only sermon on freedom I'll ever need." Yet Cooper still insists that we understand Newsome as putting on a specifically Christian, not secular performance.

The powers that be said to wait, to be patient until the Confederate flag could be brought down, uh, through a proper legal process.

Quote, this is Cooper, "Bree Newsome offered the holiest of fuck that to such foolery." End quote.

Indeed, Newsome herself describes her performance not as a secularization of Christianity, not as an attempt to shift the agent of grace from God to human beings, but as an enactment of her Christian commitments, although in a way that allows for the same sort of equivocation between the worldly and the otherworldly found in Obama's eulogy.

She reflects, quote, "There's no way I could have done that without my faith." Newsome worked with a team of about ten activists to plan the flag lowering.

When they discussed, uh, who would climb the pole itself, they settled on Newsome because of the symbolism of a Black woman taking down the flag, assisted by a white man, a poignant opposition to the symbolism of the flag itself.

Before she could accept the assignment, Newsome stepped away for an hour, during which she prayed.