The honest version of the question sounds something like this: if I keep working for justice and nothing changes, am I still hoping, or have I just refused to admit I lost? Historian Jemar Tisby gives an answer that changes the terms of the question. Hope, as he describes it, is a way of acting and a way of being that stays true whether or not you live to see the result. Many of the people we now honor worked for a day they never saw. They were not foolish to hope.
Why does the long fight feel like a broken promise?
Part of the exhaustion comes from an assumption most of us never examine. We expect serious effort to produce visible change on a reasonable timeline. When it doesn’t, we decide the effort failed, or that we did.
Tisby, a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky, wrote The Spirit of Justice partly to confront that assumption. He describes his three books for adults as a sequence. The first names what went wrong in the American church on race. The second answers the question he heard most, which was what to do about it. The third takes up a harder question: “what do we do when the problem still doesn’t go away?”
He places the timing problem squarely in recent memory: “And there were a lot of people activated in 2020 who didn’t realize that it doesn’t just go away in a couple of months or a couple of years.” Those people were not naive for caring. A problem built over centuries simply will not be undone in a news cycle, and a hope that quietly depends on quick results will collapse when the results don’t come. The question, then, is whether there is a kind of hope that can survive the facts.
What kind of hope survives a loss?
Tisby ends his book with a chapter on virtue, a word he admits is old fashioned, and he lists hope among the virtues he found again and again in the people he studied. He defines it bluntly: hope is action. Then he explains what he means: “Just by taking these actions of resistance, they’re demonstrating the hope that tomorrow can be better than today.”
That definition reshapes the original question. A hope that lives in your mood gives every setback a vote, and you will lose that vote often. A hope that lives in your actions carries its conviction in the act itself. The person who shows up again after a defeat is saying, with their feet, that the present arrangement does not get the final word. Plenty of the people Tisby profiles had every reason to feel bleak on a given morning. What they shared was what they kept doing.
Tisby calls his historical figures a great cloud of witnesses. The phrase comes from Hebrews, and the passage behind it speaks directly to this question. Hebrews was written to believers under pressure who were tempted to drift away. Chapter 11 walks through people who acted on God’s promises, and then it says something startling about them: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13).
The writer treats their unfulfilled hope as the very shape of faith. Their confidence rested on the God who promised, and they died still holding it. Then the argument turns to the readers: “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). In its own context, that cloud is the company of faithful people listed in chapter 11, and the hope in view is God’s promise fulfilled in Christ. Applying the phrase to Frederick Douglass or Fannie Lou Hamer goes beyond what the author had in mind, but it follows his logic. The people ahead of you in the race show that faithfulness can be real without being rewarded on your schedule. The word “patience” here carries the sense of endurance, staying under a load.
Tisby also reached for Paul’s language of being crushed but not destroyed. In the KJV it reads: “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). Paul is describing his own suffering in ministry, and in the surrounding verses he locates his endurance in the life of Jesus at work in fragile people. The passage makes no promise that a particular law will change or that a particular struggle will end in your lifetime. It does promise that being knocked down is different from being finished. Christian hope rests on God himself, and that gives a person reason to keep acting when the trend line looks bad.
When you can’t control the outcome, what can you guard?
Here Tisby makes the move that gives this answer its weight. Looking across centuries of resistance, he notes that progress was never a smooth climb. Resistance often met backlash. Living under those conditions teaches a hard lesson quickly: “You can resist, you can oppose, but you really can’t control a lot. What you can control is who you are.”
That is why he talks about virtue alongside tactics. One of the virtues he names surprised him: imagination, which he connects to the idea of prophetic imagination. He describes it as “the ability to envision a future that is not yet reality.” This kind of imagination keeps a more just world in view clearly enough that you keep walking toward it after the latest loss. Without it, the present starts to look permanent, and effort starts to look pointless.
He also names courage, and he has an observation about where it comes from. Speaking from his own life, he says “it is harder to exercise courage when you are disconnected from your true self.” He believes the figures he studied “had a profound relationship with God that informed them of who and whose they are.” People who know whom they belong to are harder to bend. People who have built their identity on what an employer, a family or a community expects of them will fold when the cost rises.
Lisa Fields described the alternative most people drift into: “That we have settled for comfort over courage.” Her diagnosis is that many lives are compartmentalized, with faith kept in one room and work, politics and public life in others. That arrangement makes the trade easy. If your convictions live in a separate room, you can leave them there whenever stepping into the open would cost you something, and nothing in your daily life has to change. An integrated life removes that exit. When the same faith governs your prayers and your choices at work, giving up a conviction for comfort means betraying yourself, and the betrayal is felt. This is where guarding your character connects to hope. A long fight wears down your energy, but it also keeps offering you comfortable ways out. Character is what lets you refuse them for decades.
Isn’t “work on yourself” just a way of giving up on the system?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Telling people to focus on their character can sound like telling them to stop pushing on unjust structures and settle for inner peace. Plenty of people have been handed exactly that advice in order to keep them quiet.
Tisby keeps resistance and opposition in the sentence, and he is clear that political and legal change still matter: “We should strive for that, but if we don’t get it, guess what? You still did the right thing.” The effort continues. What shifts is what a loss is allowed to mean. He is candid about the record: “And the history of the black freedom struggle tells us we lose as much as we win.” Then he gives the reason people kept going anyway: “It’s because they recognized that right is right whether or not you win.”
Be honest about the limit here. This answer does not make defeats hurt less, and it does not prove the next campaign will succeed. It removes one specific lie, the idea that a loss cancels your faithfulness. If doing right is measured only by winning, every defeat erases the work. Measured by faithfulness to Jesus and love of neighbor, which is how Tisby frames it, the work stands even when the vote goes the other way. That measure is what lets someone keep resisting for forty years instead of four.
What does staying in it for decades look like?
Tisby frames his book with one person. In December 2017, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum held its grand opening under controversy, and several prominent figures withdrew from the event. Myrlie Evers-Williams attended anyway. She is the widow of Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi who was assassinated in front of their home in 1963. The museum displays the rifle used to kill her husband. She toured it, spoke publicly, and then took questions from reporters. Tisby was in the room.
She told the reporters she was seeing things she had hoped never to see again, and admitted she was weary. Then she described the spirit of justice as an old war horse put out to pasture that hears the bell of freedom, straightens up, and becomes determined all over again. Tisby still sounds stunned: “What manner of person is this?” He goes on: “She paid a steeper price for justice than most of us can ever contemplate. Yet she never gave up the struggle for justice.”
She made no claim that things were better than they were, and she did not hide her tiredness. Her hope sat right next to an honest report of weariness and an honest reading of the present. What she refused to do was let either one have the last word. That is the whole argument of this piece in one person: hope expressed as showing up, a character formed enough to keep showing up, and no pretense about the cost.
Tisby will not let the story stay in a museum case: “The spirit of justice is present and active today and can and should empower our activism right at this moment.” Her endurance belongs to the present as much as the past.
Most people will not have someone like her across the table. Tisby observes that many young Black adults are not in church, or not in Black churches, so the intergenerational relationships that once passed this endurance along are thinner than they used to be. His alternative is practical: “when you can’t sit down person to person with a 79-year-old mentor, you can still sit down with the book.” The stories of people who endured are on the record. You can learn from them even if no one in your life can tell them to you.
He also offers a sober word for anxious seasons: “History remembers the brave.” We don’t remember the people who kept their heads down and went along. We remember Douglass, Hamer, Thea Bowman, Evers-Williams. Pressure exposes what we actually believe, and Tisby is honest about both possible outcomes: “So it’ll be a rude awakening for some, but it will be a closer walk with Jesus for others.”
So is it honest to keep hoping? Yes, if hope means what Tisby and the writer of Hebrews mean by it. It becomes dishonest only when hope is treated as a prediction that you personally will see the fight won. Measured that way, almost everyone in the cloud of witnesses was wrong. Measured by whether they did right, kept their character intact, and handed the work on, they were exactly right. For anyone tired of a long fight, the question worth answering is who you will be while you wait for the ending.