Wisdom of elders whose minds are stayed on freedom
some learning from civil rights leaders who have kept leading
Funny coincidence: the person who taught me the Four R’s (which I talked about in last week’s Substack) also wrote about the Four R’s. And in it, Shilpa addressed a REALLY important part of their power which I left out: they can help us shift out of the “this is the right way to do change work” and into “all of these ways are necessary,” which is so much better for the work and also so much better for those of us IN the work. Here’s a link to Shilpa Jain’s substack post on the Four R’s!
I mentioned that I got to go to some conferences this summer thanks to a research grant, and I wanted to spend the summer sharing my MANY learnings. Since today is the Fourth of July, I thought I would start with lessons I recently learned from some of America’s freedom-defending heroes.
When I went to the 22nd Century Initiative (22CI) conference in June, I went because it was a gathering of pro-democracy/anti-authoritarian organizers from all across the country, many of whom I’ve seen do amazing work on the ground in local settings. (If you’re excited about Zohran Mamdani’s recent primary win in New York, you have the Working Families Party to thank, at least in part. They were a big part of this conference!)
What I wasn’t expecting was that the conference planners would make sure that throughout our four days in Atlanta, we would benefit from the strategy, historic knowledge, and battle scars of people who have been organizing in the Southeastern United States.
Our opening plenary featured Courtland Cox and Shirley Sherrod, who had been instrumental leaders with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Strategy and Generational Wisdom
Mr. Cox told us a story about when he was working on John Lewis’s speech for the 1963 March on Washington. They were both in their early twenties and committed to a clear vision for justice. They had included something in the speech about “One Man One Vote,” said Mr. Cox, which was apparently radical enough that the Catholic Bishops threatened to pull out of the March because they found it incendiary. Bayard Rustin told them about this eleventh hour concern, and they told him if the Bishops wanted to walk out, they could. The audience applauded enthusiastically at this point, but that wasn’t the message Mr. Cox was bringing.
Bayard Rustin brought A. Philip Randolph in to meet with them. Mr. Randolph was the founder of the first national Black-led labor union: the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He was a legend in the movement. (I mentioned him in my qualifying exams about the history of labor and anti-labor movements in the US.) He told them he had been organizing since the 1920s, and he had envisioned this march, officially called a March for Jobs and Freedom, since the 1940s. He said if they insisted on keeping the speech as written, those decades of work would collapse. “So we removed it from the speech,” Mr. Cox said simply. They had been made aware, he explained, that this work had involved decades of effort and that mattered. He suggested that our strategy incorporate the wisdom and work of those who had been on the ground for years as well. For many of us who are newer to the work, who have great clarity about what is right and wrong, that is incredibly valuable. And it needn’t come at the expense of the work that came before and makes our current work possible. What Mr. Cox didn’t need to point out was that despite leaving out that phrase, John Lewis and he and many others in SNCC radically changed the trajectory of the US Freedom Movement, even pushing movement elders to be bolder at certain points, and definitely pushing the movement to recognize the connections between Black jobs, Black enfranchisement, and confronting militarism during the Vietnam War.
Lessons that carry forward
Ms. Sherrod talked about three lessons that stick with me in relationship to her work as a young organizer fighting for Black people’s right to vote. One lesson was that initially there were a lot of people in the rural Southern Black community where she was working for whom the students’ issues didn’t feel significant, or at least were not worth the risks involved. But their kids saw it differently, and that changed the stakes considerably. “Til that jail was filled with their children, they didn’t want to get involved. But at that point, they were willing to address why their kids were there but also so many other issues: farmers losing land, violent sheriffs, all the issues that intersected.” People’s stakes in a specific thing can help them see the connections to other issues. Usually, though, they need to have a stake in something to start that connecting. (I’ll have a whole newsletter on just that theme from a different workshop I attended.)
Another was the lesson to meet people where they are. Ms. Sherrod was organizing among poor farmers and she was interested in economic equality for Black people as well as their right to vote. She learned that some other farmers had discovered flowers were a much more lucrative crop, and for months she tried to get her folks on board with this new idea. They pretended to be interested because they were working with her on other issues, but nothing really moved forward. Eventually, she said, “I don’t get it; you could make $10,000 for an acre of flowers instead of $700 for an acre of peanuts.” They finally told her, “Look; if someone asks what we grow, we can’t say ‘flowers.’” She could have saved a lot of time by listening first and strategizing together and openly, she implied. It’s a lesson many of us end up having to learn over and over again. By many of us, I might mean me.
The lesson that I just can’t shake, though, is her lesson about land ownership. Ms. Sherrod talked about how one of her learnings was the importance of financial independence for a successful movement. The farmers, she said, could come up with bail money and weren’t beholden to employers who could take away their livelihood if they got involved in the civil rights movement. She then talked about the decline in Black farm ownership—it is today less than 1/3 of what it was at that time—and she noted “the other side realized what a threat [our economic freedom] was.”
It wasn’t until I was talking with some other participants the next day about how inspired we were by the opening panel that one of them said, “well, she IS Shirley Sherrod,” and someone else said, “the one Obama fired?” that I realized how her experience with Black farmers in her youth had informed a career dedicated to Black farmland reclamation in the South that some of my own friends have gotten involved in as the movement sees a resurgence. Sherrod got involved in organizing as a teenager after her father was murdered in 1965 by a white farmer over a dispute about livestock. She has spent the rest of her life working for justice and for reconnection to the land. Having seen what Deb Haaland accomplished as Secretary of the Interior during the Biden administration, I find myself wondering what Shirley Sherrod could have done had a doctored video by the right wing not caused the Obama administration to panic and fire her from her position within the USDA.
As I spend more of my time thinking about the connections between funding and social movements, I will keep coming back to that learning about land ownership and freedom from retribution, and what it means to us today. This is absolutely entangled with some Indigenous activists naming that land ownership is theft—that privatization (commodification) of land strips away our ability to be in real relationship with the land and is an invisible illness in our nation. It also stands in tension with the point that many BLM activists and prison abolitionists have made in recent years that our policing system is set up to protect property rather than life, which creates fast divisions between those of us who own property and those who don’t. A whole community of police and security has been created to protect us from our non-property-owning siblings, even if we didn’t ask for that protection or that division. And in a country where Black communities that achieve financial freedom and land ownership have been repeatedly targeted for destruction by vigilantes with the support of police and by policies that undermine Black freedom and independence, Ms. Sherrod’s point requires my serious attention.
Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash
Connections to the current moment
Courtland Cox was asked by the moderator of the panel about how he had sustained energy for “the struggle” over so many decades. He commented, “We used to talk about how freedom is a constant struggle, and that just seemed like words. But as we continue to see the same issues, it resonates more.” Mr. Cox was an organizer in Lowndes County, Alabama, nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes” because of the horrific violence reigned over by the county sheriff at the time. So when I heard him say that, I found myself thinking how awful it would have been to think that the life-threatening work in which he was engaged might go on forever. And after so much sacrifice, for him to look around and tell us that this moment was uniquely horrific, but that people like him had faced horror before and won, so we could learn from those lessons, it broke my heart a little that he had to keep fighting after having fought so hard for so long already. As an aside, this was a theme throughout the conference. Because the 22CI conference centered the wisdom of Black and Latinx organizers from the Southeast, many of whom were connected to previous generations of activists, they brought a both/and message I found really helpful amidst the current “this is the worst thing ever to happen in this country” vs “stop calling it fascism” (and sometimes vs “my people have been living with this for generations, it’s no different for us”) perspectives. More than once I heard speakers saying this moment was distinct, and yet the horrors they and their predecessors and ancestors had faced and conquered offer us a way forward.
Mr. Cox was always focused on building power, even as a college student at Howard University who studied and organized alongside Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture). One of the lessons he wanted younger activists to learn from his own experiences was this: “They’re not going to change their opinion,” he said of the right-wing. “We have to replace them in office. That we should be in power with our views is fundamental. It was powerful then, and it’s powerful now.” He went on to talk about the power of the Black Power movement and of the LGBTQ+ movement that arose from Stonewall, and then he emphasized the point: “They should not hold any instruments of power that can hurt us.” For Cox, this wasn’t just a statement; as I heard it, it was an organizing strategy. His work hadn’t just been for Black enfranchisement in order to vote in slightly less racist people; it was to elect people who would fight for them. As we participate in absolutely vital public actions like the “Hands Off” and “No Kings” rallies, we want to celebrate that commitment to democracy. But I believe what Mr. Cox was reminding us was that democracy in and of itself can’t be the final goal but a midpoint as we work to elect people who will fight for us, not only harm us LESS.
One final note:
At the beginning of the panel, Mr. Cox and Ms. Sherrod were asked what they believed was key to staying in the fight for justice. Mr. Cox talked about a friend of his who had said the secret was to “wake up each morning with your mind stayed on freedom.” Having sung that song at so many protests over the years, I thought it was sweet but simple advice not really strong enough for this moment in the work. At the end of the panel, Mr. Cox evoked that same line, and the weight of it finally hit me: part of our work right now is to wake up each morning with our minds stayed on freedom even though it feels foolish to hope. I think of mentors of mine who went to jail and would sing that song in the jail cells (if they could get away with it), and how one of the verses was “can’t hate your neighbor with your mind stayed on freedom.” They sang that even in places like Bloody Lowndes where there was lots of reason to hate and little reason to hope. I found that humbling.
I hope you have a safe and happy day off if you were lucky enough to get today as a holiday. I hope you find renewal for our continued work together. I remain grateful to be in the struggle with you.
peace,
Sandhya