Black History Is Freedom History
This post is part of our online roundtable on Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.’s From Rights to Lives.
Sonia Sanchez once wrote, “Where is your fire? Can’t you smell it coming out of our pasts? The fire of living, not dying? The fire of loving, not killing?” For the most part, everyday people don’t know where to turn when they catch Sonia Sanchez’s fire and want to follow Public Enemy to fight the power. This included me as a high school student in the 1980s, and it includes most students I’ve taught at Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). Few of us have any idea of how to “dig where we stand” to find the Black-led Freedom Movement. As one young person, a twenty-six-year-old video artist, explained recently, “When I was 19, I tried to join BLM. But I didn’t know where to go. Who could I talk to? How could I move? So I just did stuff online.”
This is where From Rights to Lives soars. Suturing together a wide range of scholars, the book allows “everyone to eyewitness the ‘miraculous, magnificent, and messy activism and organizing’ of both the 1960s and 2010s.” A refrain today among those building mutual aid networks is: “We’re all we’ve got.” Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.’s authors take a look at organizers in the 1960s and 2010s and illuminate the astounding wealth of experience gained by comparing the two eras.
I come to this work as a white-bodied movement scholar who learned early that Black history is freedom history. If I cared about making sure everyone was free, including myself, here were the keys to the kingdom. Since my early 20s, I’ve been interviewing veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”), learning from them and sharing what I learn. In 2013, SNCC activists recognized how intense the pressure was on the early organizers of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. They asked the scholars working with them to partner in building a website, the SNCC Digital Gateway. With it, they aimed to share their experiences with the BLM generation and beyond. We also organized a 2015 conference on voting rights that brought the two generations together for four days straight—a long “SNCC-y” gathering with food, plenty to drink, and conversations between the two generations. “We learned they could drink us under the table and still get up at 9am the next day and work!” laughed one BLM member. As SNCC veterans, they “might not be able to pass on material wealth to the next generation,” they told BLM organizers, but they sure possessed “a great deal of informational wealth. Young people shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to organizing.”
Motivated by the passionate creativity of the BLM generation, SNCC activists built a huge digital library of material, sharing an abundance of ideas that worked (and those that didn’t) in the 1960s and beyond. For example, take this April 2023 conversation between BLM-era activists Charles Taylor of Mississippi and Nsé Ufot of Georgia with SNCC’s Courtland Cox. Cox asked what Ufot and Taylor thought of the current political moment. Ufot, a strategist and longtime head of the New Georgia Project, held up a floodlight. People talk of it being the “sunset of democracy,” she said. It was not as if today people were only mucking about on the devil’s playground with authoritarian strong men. Instead, it may well be the 3am-dark-before-dawn: “The truth of the matter is that we’ve never experienced actual democracy. It is not the dusk of democracy, it’s dawn. It’s the birthing. This is new. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. And we are heading into what full participatory democracy could look like. It’s not dark because the lights are being turned out. It’s dark because the lights are being turned on.”
This reframing and bouncing ideas back and forth between the Civil Rights/Black Power generation and those in the BLM era was gathered into a short video, Activist Playbook, which shows tactics that have worked in the Black-led Freedom Struggle over the last six decades. Sometimes these ideas come out in one-on-one conversations. Sometimes they emerge during a meal on the sidelines of a series of “critical oral history” sessions on Black Power. Or when BLM organizers listened to the lessons SNCC veterans took from the 1964 Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and that year’s Democratic National Convention—and then added their own questions to the mix.
These are not one-and-done relationships built between the 1960s and 2010s generations at a single conference or event. Instead, over the last decade, these organizers have built sustained, reciprocal relationships of care and mutuality.
This process has helped in ways no one could foresee. For example, last spring, one of the M4BL(Movement for Black Lives)-era organizers fell under sharp, almost feverish, pressure from a cohort of national Democrats to attend a photo-op with Joe Biden despite the latter’s lack of action to defend voting rights. The M4BL organizer refused. Still, the national Democrats pushed harder: “You have to attend. This isn’t optional.” The M4BL organizer called the SNCC veteran she most trusted. “Does this sound like I should listen and just take the photo with Joe?” The SNCC worker didn’t answer right away. He asked why she was resisting the request. What did she feel was important “at the end of the day, when you’re facing those you feel most accountable to?” He shared a few detail-laden stories about how both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations also tried to manipulate SNCC into photo-ops without accountability to the movement.
She later reflected that, by the end of the call, “you can’t imagine how important it is, to have him to talk with. Here’s someone I trust deeply, like my grandma. That alone is so rare. But then to have him, who’s lived through Mississippi in the 1960s. Freedom Summer. Organizing the Sixth Pan-African Conference. All that concrete knowledge. And to have that person start by asking questions rather than telling me what to do.” She shook her head with admiration. She decided not to do the photo op, despite the mounting national pressure. “I can never explain what it means to be able to call him up,” she concluded. That is intergenerational, informational wealth-building.
From Rights to Lives makes such wisdom available to a wide audience and will for years to come. After all, the mainstream institutions we live within have mechanisms to reproduce themselves, whether in hospitals, universities, schools, law or engineering firms, or corporations.
Activists and organizers have few such established intergenerational pathways for training people year after year. As Dream Defender and archivist-scholar Malu Brooks reflected when talking with the SNCC/CORE veterans in the fall of 2022: “We want our movements to start where the last one stopped, not start at the same place where you all started.”
Hamlin and McKinney help us see the problem clearly: “People have been fighting and coming together around certain agendas and visions” for years. Underfunded public schools, an antediluvian transportation system, substandard wages causing high rates of poverty, and a criminal justice system designed to punish poor (mostly Black) people regardless of actual guilt or innocence lie at the center of “our current societal crises” (251).
If viewpoints were flowers, each of the essays in their collection blooms with shimmering colors and fresh shoots of fern spirals, rosebuds, and florets bursting onto the landscape of the Black Freedom Struggle. I learned much from Scott N. Brooks and Aram Goudsouzian’s essay combining critical race theory and a sports history lens, as I did from Kishauna Soljour’s discussion of ten years of BLM in France. Peter Pihos showed the precise manner with which Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police in the 1960s and 1970s undermined Black officers who worked to make police accountable to Black communities.
Yet a shock of recognition ran through me like a shorn electric wire when American Studies scholar Althea Legal-Miller catalogued generations of white lawmen’s sadistic use of “sexual intimidation and threats, forced groping and fondling, internal examinations and strip searches, forced nudity, sexual assaults, and rape” against Black girls and women in the Freedom Struggle. Those of us interviewing veteran organizers have heard these stories for so long. Few have put forward a way to understand them systemically.
As scholar Adriane Lentz-Smith observed in 2020, over the last 150 years, neither federal nor state governments ever “rooted out sexual violence as a useful tool of white supremacy.” Faced with this failure, BLM activists had to contend with it once again. Legal-Miller deftly sketches out the little-known history of Dorothy Height’s 1963-64 campaign to end retaliatory sexual violence by police against Black girls and women protesting Jim Crow. Height not only gathered evidence, she showed it to the federal government, white women’s Christian and Jewish organizations, and Black-men-led civil rights organizations. She asked them to take primary responsibility for “safeguarding Black women and activist communities” (111). No such help was forthcoming.
Legal-Miller artfully contrasts the ways the Height campaign in the 1960s and the OKC Artists for Justice campaign in the 2010s mobilized “respectability politics.” Height adapted it, whereas OKC Artists for Justice asked, “Who is worthy of justice? Isn’t it every one of us?” Legal-Miller raises points subsequent activists must address: “The nonviolence training used extensively during the CRM did not explicitly include preparation against sexual violence.” King’s strategy to use the brutality of white supremacists against them in the court of world opinion failed to account for “the low-down indignities regularly visited upon women and girls and exposed gendered oversights in the preparation of activists for direct-action protests” (104).
The richness across this book is life-giving. From Rights to Lives belongs on a (digital) shelf every young person can access.
Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.