Karen Christensen was awarded the Betty Brandt Peace and Justice Award for her relentless pursuit to uncover historical truths and advocate for justice for local African American Hoosiers.
When she was in her 20s, Karen Christensen began reading books about the civil rights movement of the 1960s. “I felt like I’d uncovered an uncomfortable secret that none of my fellow white friends knew anything about or cared to acknowledge,” she said this week. “After about the third book, I knew I would work on this problem someday in some way,” she said. But it took her a few decades and a lot more inquiry to figure out how.
Today, St. Luke’s United Methodist Church recognizes Christensen of Indianapolis for her efforts to raise awareness of long-ignored racial injustices here and Black Hoosiers’ often-neglected accomplishments.
Christensen is a founder and current co-chair of the Indiana Remembrance Coalition, an interracial, interfaith group of volunteers based at St. Luke’s. IRC works to commemorate documented victims of racial violence and to foster meaningful dialogue about race and justice.
She receives the second annual Betty Brandt Peace and Justice Award during the St. Luke's Winter Leadership Summit at the church.
The honor is for persons “whose lives offer a model of how the spiritual life of contemplation and a passion for justice work together to express a wholistic vision of the Christ-like life of love of God and love of neighbor,” said Shelly Clasen, director of outreach and justice at St. Luke’s.
“We must not forget that, throughout history, religion has been used to support racism and other harmful biases, whether conscious or unconscious,” Clasen said. “We salute Karen Christensen’s leadership toward eradicating racism and discrimination.”
The award is named after Betty Brandt, who retired in 2023 after leading the St. Luke’s Community for Contemplation and Justice for more than 20 years.
Christensen describes herself as a community activist. She worked in new product development and marketing research in the corporate world.
Christensen has visited the Equal Justice Initiative and other civil rights landmarks in Alabama three times, each inspiring in new ways, she said. She and a handful of others who took a similar trip started the Indiana Remembrance Coalition in 2019.
Under her leadership, IRC memorialized the unsolved lynching of a 19-year-old Black man, George Tompkins, in 1922. The crime was front-page news until authorities whitewashed it. The Indiana Remembrance Coalition bought and dedicated a headstone at Tompkins’ long-unmarked grave a century later. The group also presented evidence that led the Marion County Coroner’s Office to correct the official record of Tompkins’ death.
“In 1922, teenager George Tompkins did not receive justice from his city – neither in life nor in death,” Mayor Joe Hogsett said in 2022 at the memorial program at Floral Park Cemetery. “Today, by remembering and preserving our full history, we commit ourselves to a more just and humane future for all residents of Indianapolis.”
In 2023, IRC and the Indiana Historical Bureau dedicated a state historic marker one block from the Statehouse in downtown Indianapolis. The site is where a group of white men bludgeoned John Tucker, a freed Black man, to death in broad daylight on Independence Day in 1845.
The Indiana Remembrance Coalition has also researched a comprehensive history of racism within the Indianapolis Public Schools and presented those findings at public libraries and other locations. IRC has held a community panel discussion exploring attempts to suppress dark chapters of Indiana history. Another program examined the economic, political, and racial impacts of expanding the city to encompass all of Marion County in 1970.
IRC was among the organizations that succeeded in curtailing a downtown development project on the site of the city’s first cemetery, where excavators have turned up human remains.
“I’m honored to receive this award. Betty Brandt’s guidance and encouragement have meant so much to our organization and to me personally,” Christensen said.
“I’m proud of the work we’ve accomplished. We’ve shed light on racial injustices from our past and we’ve worked to preserve the Black history that is being erased,” she added. “We can’t fully understand where we are today – and how we can move forward – until we know the truth about how we got here.”