CHARLOTTE, N.C. — As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the Freedom Center for Social Justice is asking a question that cuts beneath the celebrations: Who gets remembered?
Through its month-long 250 Years of Resistance campaign, the Charlotte-based organization is challenging the versions of American history that often celebrate freedom while overlooking the people who fought hardest to expand it. The campaign centers Black, queer, trans, immigrant, and faith-rooted communities whose contributions have too often been treated as footnotes rather than foundations.
For Bishop Tonyia Rawls and her late wife, Gwendolyn Woodard-Rawls, who founded the organization together, that work begins with truth.
“It is imperative that we start telling the truth,” Rawls said. “In the absence of truth, real healing can never take place.”
The campaign arrives at a moment when battles over books, curricula, archives, and public memory have become political flashpoints nationwide. But Rawls resists the idea that the struggle is merely about remembering forgotten histories.
“The goal here has never been erasure,” she said. “It has been control.”
Control of whose stories are taught. Control of whose labor is valued. Control of whose bodies, communities, and futures are treated as worthy of protection.
Those themes did not emerge suddenly from a campaign planning meeting. They are woven throughout Rawls’ life and ministry.
Bishop Tonyia M. Rawls is a national faith leader and social justice activist who has focused the majority of her work in the Southeastern United States fighting oppression and discrimination. Raised in Newark during the years surrounding the civil rights movement, Rawls learned early that communities survive not simply through resistance, but through relationships. One of her most enduring memories comes from the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, when her mother walked her through neighborhoods damaged during the uprisings that followed.
“You never tear your own stuff up,” her mother told her.
At six years old, Rawls understood the lesson literally. Over time, she came to understand something larger.
The point was never passive acceptance. It was stewardship. Protect what sustains your community. Fight injustice without destroying the relationships, institutions, and people that make survival possible.
That ethic would shape much of what came next.
Years later, at Duke University, Rawls described herself as “surviving” the institution more than thriving within it, spending time in chapel crypts among dead presidents while navigating spaces that were not built with Black queer women like her in mind. She would go on to found Unity Fellowship Church Charlotte — the first Unity Fellowship congregation in the Bible Belt — before becoming one of the first women bishops in the Unity Fellowship Church Movement.
When she arrived in Charlotte in 2000, she was commissioned to start an affirming congregation at a time when being openly Black, gay, and Christian in the South carried significant risks.
People told her no one would come.
Instead, the congregation grew rapidly.
Looking back, Rawls traces that growth to a simple conviction.
“Love, fundamentally, is the center of every single thing we’ve done,” she said.
She remembers feeling called toward a mission that differed from much of the church-growth language she had been taught.
“I need you to open a door to welcome my children back home,” she recalled hearing from God.
That understanding of love was never sentimental. It became the foundation of a public theology that linked faith, justice, and community accountability.
“Love in its purest, simplest form actually is the most powerful thing,” Rawls said. “Bombs have never done that. Lovers transform the world.”
That philosophy would eventually shape the Freedom Center for Social Justice, founded in 2009.
The organization’s earliest work focused on HIV and AIDS education in Black communities and partnerships with clergy. One of its most influential efforts, the Do No Harm campaign, encouraged faith leaders to recognize the harm caused by anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and practices.
“You start with just getting them to stop causing harm,” Rawls said.
Over time, the work expanded.
Legal advocacy. Leadership development. Ballroom organizing. Faith partnerships. Community education. And eventually, the Trans Faith in Action Alliance, now one of the nation’s most significant gatherings of trans and gender-expansive faith leaders.
What is striking about the origin of that work is Rawls’ willingness to describe it not as an example of visionary leadership, but of personal limitation.
“I said, I have to have a blind spot,” she recalled. “And it was my trans siblings.”
Although she considered herself affirming and inclusive, she realized she knew far less about the lived realities of trans people than she had assumed. As she listened, stories emerged — stories of loneliness, violence, rejection, and survival.
“I was shocked,” she said.
From that inner work, a gathering became a network. A network became an institution. An institution became a place where people could find one another.
That pattern appears repeatedly throughout the Freedom Center’s history.
- Listen.
- Tell the truth.
- Build something.
It is also visible in Rawls’ understanding of Black women’s labor.
For generations, Black women have organized meals, churches, freedom campaigns, mutual aid networks, caregiving systems, and social movements while receiving only partial recognition for the worlds they helped sustain.
“We are used, tolerated, but never recognized,” Rawls said.
That observation sits near the heart of 250 Years of Resistance.
The campaign unfolds across four weeks, examining gender-expansive people in early American history, Southern queer organizing traditions, faith-based movements for liberation, and the responsibilities facing future generations. Throughout, it asks participants to reconsider who is centered within the national story and who remains hidden beneath it.
“The hunter always wins in the story,” Rawls said. “Until the lion gets to tell her story.”
The timing carries additional significance.
At the end of June, after more than two decades of leadership, Rawls will retire from the Freedom Center.
She speaks about that transition not with anxiety but with excitement.
“From the beginning, I was building in a way that my desire was to build leaders,” she said.
The succession plan unfolded over several years, with Executive Director Cameron Pruette gradually assuming leadership responsibilities while Rawls remained involved. The approach reflects a question she believes many movement organizations must confront.
“Can founders actually get out of the way before it’s time?” she asked.
Too often, organizations become fragile when leadership transitions occur. Rawls wanted something different. She wanted the Freedom Center to be strong enough to continue growing beyond her.
“I’m not just excited for the Freedom Center,” she said. “I’m excited for the movement.”
That perspective feels fitting for a campaign focused on history.
That confidence comes from years of intentional succession planning. Executive Director Cameron Pruette has gradually assumed leadership responsibilities while working alongside Rawls to ensure the organization’s mission extends beyond any single leader.
For Pruette, that inheritance carries both responsibility and possibility.
“FCSJ is built on these traditions of shifting culture and building coalitions of resistance. I’m excited that we get to continue the legacy started here by Bishop Rawls, and we get to continue to grow our movement for liberation. We will share the histories, we will fight for the present, and we will create the future.”
The sentiment echoes one of Rawls’ deepest commitments: building leaders capable of carrying the work forward.
History, after all, is not only about what survives. It is also about what gets handed forward.
The final event in the 250 Years of Resistance campaign, The Next 250: Virtual Town Hall, will take place Tuesday, June 23 at 6 p.m. EDT and will be livestreamed. Bringing together activists under 25 and over 60, the conversation will explore what has changed, what remains unfinished, and what future generations are being asked to inherit.
And if Rawls’ life offers a lesson, it may be this: the future is rarely built by the people whose names appear in textbooks. More often, it is built by the people who keep opening doors, telling the truth, and making room for others to walk through.
This work is rooted in community.
Every event you attend, every story you engage with, every conversation you participate in helps shift culture, build power, and move us closer to justice.
Registration information for The Next 250: Virtual Town Hall is available through the Freedom Center for Social Justice.
