ALFRE WOODARD

The Tulsa, Oklahoma-born Alfre Woodard has won four Emmys, a Golden Globe, three Screen Actors Guild awards, and has been nominated for an Oscar and a Grammy in her brilliant career in theater, film, and television. A lifelong activist, she has worked against apartheid in Africa and against racism and sexism in the United States.

Alfre and I met and became friends during the antiapartheid struggle of the 1980s. She joined me on an RFK Human Rights delegation to Uganda on sexual minority rights and Zimbabwe on democratic governance. She has performed in the theatrical version of Speak Truth to Power across the globe.

Alfre Woodard: Your father was a rare politician because he was willing to be transformed by the things and people he encountered. He was able to hear and see and bear witness to the full range of the American people, most of whom were not seeing each other then. Through his eyes we all began to see each other and the possibility of a way forward through connectedness. His vision and his words were a catalyst for so many people of our generation; he affected everything I’ve done with my life since he lived.

From when I was five years old, every day at six o’clock, my father would call us in from outside and say, “It’s time for the news.” I would stand there with my sister and brother, eleven and nine, all itchy and sweaty, and watch “This is Douglas Edwards with the news.” My mother would say, “You smell like outdoors.” My father would be eating. When the half hour was over, he’d turn and say, “What did you think about that?” My sister would say, “I don’t know. I don’t care.” He’d say, “You’ve got to care; you live in the world.” His emphasis was always, “You have a responsibility to know what’s happening so you can do something about it.” I would say, “Well, I think…” this or that, and my sister and brother would say I wasn’t making any sense, and my father would try to sort out my logic, and he would say, “It’s good to have an opinion.”

When I was seven or eight, one evening I burst into tears at the dinner table. My brother and sister giggled. I was a little bit of a hysteric about certain things. My mother looked at my dad like, “Be calm with her,” and he asked what the matter was. I told him, “Two thousand people died in a flood in India.” My father looked solemnly at me and said, “Go wash your face. Do your homework. Maybe someday you’ll be able to help some people.”

Both my parents grew up rural. The land is a great equalizer. It doesn’t care who you are, what you are, what you look like, how you pray. When you put the crop in, it comes up or it doesn’t. When it doesn’t come up for some other family, it’s your responsibility to make sure that family still eats the same as you eat because it could have been you with no food.

It was around that time that the president was shot. Thinking of this still makes me very emotional. The whole elementary school was in a panic. We thought it was the end of the world. All the teachers were weeping; they didn’t even care that there were children around. Everybody said, “Okay. They’re going to kill all the black people now.” Adults thought this was the end. Any hopes we’d ever had were gone.

Two to three years later: There was this group called the Hungry Club—they were the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce. Greenwood was an African American community in Tulsa that was burned down by racists in 1921. They always had a junior high school student address all these black businessmen in Greenwood. It was always a boy, but I told my civics teacher I wanted to do it. My teacher said, “No! It’s the top boy in the class,” but I badgered them until I was selected to give the speech. My father said to me, “I need you to put some things in there for me. I do business, so I can’t say everything out loud, but you can say some things for me.” When I realized I could say those things for my father, it gave me this sense of power—to be told I could speak for my father, who was a self-made man with tremendous respect in the community, it fed into a sense of my ability to do things. My father had his opinion on every crisis every nation had. I never really understood what that meant until I studied your dad in interviews. When I saw him I really began to understand that I had a place not only in my community but in the world. My parents always taught me that I belonged in my world as a person. My influence had to include people everywhere in the country and everywhere in the world. I was seeing the connectedness. When I was listening to your father, he reinforced in me what it meant to have personal responsibility. It wasn’t that you should just think it or talk about it; it meant walking out your door and doing things that were right and just. For me, your father was a personal call to arms, but it wasn’t to arms, it was a call to stand up, to walk, to be active. Every injustice was connected. It wasn’t just that people didn’t have food, didn’t have jobs, and were discriminated against because of the color of their skin; it was that those things were not separate things. Injustice creates injustice; each injustice is connected to all injustices. If you worked on those things, you worked on the full range of it. It takes the transformation of the individual, and it takes a recognition of the connection of each individual to all others. That was the first battlefield, putting your body on the line to work for things. Part of that was transforming people’s minds.

When I saw RFK saying certain things, I got excited. Oh, my God, here is this man who is part of the power structure, who is white, who is affluent, who is speaking his truth, who is putting himself on the line. Not only was this a white man with power, who could’ve been somewhere golfing, saying the things we all said in our houses, he was saying them clearly, out loud on television, about our shared human condition. He was able to put our predicament into words that gave everyone a common language. It was a victory, but it was scary because we knew from experience that when people got close to something truthful and real, they would be taken from us. You know, Malcolm had been killed.

He was taken out because of his transformation. It was dangerous to change—to learn about the connections—but as you start to understand, you become emboldened by the truth. When you stand with the truth, especially when there are repercussions—physical, economic, societal—it makes you a little nervous, but at the same time you feel emboldened. You feel a part of the continuum of people who have told the truth. It’s something bigger than you are. It’s invigorating to step into that moment when you feel that. It’s outside of you. It includes you. The world was on fire in those days. We can talk about what’s going on now, but back then the shit hit the fan every day. I don’t know why we didn’t say, “All is lost. We’re going to hell.” Maybe it’s because we were young and hadn’t become jaded or been so often disappointed. There were other people who were standing up with us. Like now, I see kids charged up. Then, I had never heard anybody doing this, except Dr. King. It was the same awareness that RFK brought to southern poverty. I didn’t live in a city, and I grew up comfortably. The “ghetto” experience wasn’t my experience, but I saw southern poverty, how greedy and choking and strangling that condition is. There were people who looked just like me, and there were also people who looked like the extreme version of poor white people I saw in pictures of Oklahoma and Texas, from the Dust Bowl. It was a world away from power. RFK in his suit and tie brought that recognition back from his visits to those places. Politicians didn’t show up in those places. Your father was a politician and he showed up. I’m getting emotional talking about this.

I was in a coed Catholic school, and all this stuff was going on around women demanding to be seen. At first they’d say, “Oh, my God, shut up.” Bras were burning, people were lying down in the streets to stop the war, Dr. King was being taken up, Stonewall happened. It was a time of “End this war!” The enemy, the racism and classism, was so strong that sometimes we said, “We can’t freaking fix any of this.”

All that was happening when I was in high school. We were allowed to start very intense conversations and arguments, and the first was: “What would Jesus do?” We knew what Jesus would be doing. We knew the radical walk of this prophet. You can’t be talking to me about the Bible, the life of Jesus, and tell me you don’t know which side you need to stand on. The idea was that Christianity had to be active or it was not valid.

At the same time I discovered I was an artist, and I saw the power and purpose of art, the fact that it was also spiritual expression. It all came together, and it was your father—his walk, his ability to embody and demonstrate and articulate not only what our challenges were but also our feelings, without ever alluding to the possibility that it could not be done. We all started to believe. We believed every time we stood up for people, every time we went out with people, every time we had to reach across to people we didn’t really get, but still we knew, “Hell. If you’re in this too, I’m with you.” We hadn’t accepted homosexuality in my community, but we all joined hands because we were all feeling poverty and oppression. When you’re a little baby and you see another little person walking, you stand up and walk. We do that all the time. You see somebody—they don’t even know they’re modeling—and you go, “Oh, OK.” That’s what RFK gave, I would say, to everybody between nineteen and forty. Stand up and walk. This is what’s vital and, at the same time, this is how you’re forming that more perfect union. This is how you are patriotic. This is love of country. Love of country is reflected in your love for the people of a country. That was the other thing: I had never heard of a politician, a person in power, before RFK, talk about love as a part of the solution.

It would take balls to talk about love now. “I want us to create love. I want everyone in this country to feel loved.” The whole idea of feeling personally charged, that’s what our activism was. I remember in ninth grade, you would look at the history and the documents and then you would look around you and nothing you saw supported what you had read. You spoke the pledge, you studied the preamble, and all that because it was history and you had to learn it. Your father was the first person in charge—when I say in charge I mean he was the attorney general, he was a senator, he was legitimate, he was a leader—it was the first time I heard a person in his position connect the incredibly horrific conditions and attitudes and situations that a vast number of Americans were facing. He made the connection to us not living up to our principles. Not only is it not right, not only is it inhuman, not only is it not compassionate, it’s totally off the court from what the documents say. It’s illegal, or it should be; it’s unconstitutional. If those laws don’t reflect the Constitution, they have to be changed, and you can change the whole system.

I think of those contemporary prophets like Gandhi, like Martin, like Malcolm, all of them and all the ones not known, who said it’s your obligation as a person who loves this country to change the laws if they go against the founding principles. This is a tough part to talk to you about, Kerry. He just thought everything was possible. I thought then that the whole country saw it. I thought when he was running for president that it was going to be it. We were going to be Americans. We were going to change that status quo. I thought we had succeeded at that point. Then you lost your daddy. We lost our shining big brother. There was a lot of anger, discouragement, despair. It seemed to say: Anybody who gets close to effecting fundamental change is gone. Just settle down and go along and make the best of your own life. But once he had ignited that fire, once he called us to our feet, once we walked our walk, there was no turning back.

This is the deal: you’re not going to see it happen. But that is the point. You stand up and walk when it’s your turn because before that somebody walked for you. People have been walking for generations in this country. You have to know that once you’ve been transformed, you can’t go back on it, because somebody you looked to has paid the price, and even more so after that, you owe it to the continuum to step up.

Sometimes you get tired, sometimes you get discouraged. Some days I’m laughing because it’s so ridiculous, but I keep coming back to the power of, “We have seen dark things, and we’re going to be the boys and girls who keep standing up because somebody stood up for us and somebody is standing up with us now.” Besides trying to create joy, it’s our purpose to redefine what it means to be in community, neighbors, a nation, a world.

Things were happening on the front here, in the states, of course. One of the things that Robert Kennedy opened people’s eyes to was the fact that America was not an island. Whatever injustices one human being was capable of, all human beings were capable of. Injustice does not recognize borders. As an activist, I realized that the struggles were happening on all the continents. A realization like that opens up the world the same way the internet opens up the world. I was drawn to Africa. I started to bond with like-minded people, trying to be of assistance to them in their struggles. I got to South Africa first. The Ripples of Hope speech that RFK gave in Cape Town was a game changer for those people, those students, because they had been isolated. They were living in a toxic space, and your father brought new life, new energy, there—truth and the possibility of enlightenment. It was a game changer for us too because we got to see him there as well. He was working on many fronts at the same time. That reminds us as progressives and liberals that, instead of bickering, we can all work together. The times demand that we work on all these fronts. I found myself very deeply involved in South Africa, with the South African struggle, and people here would ask me, “Why are you so concerned about the things there?”

When RFK talked about the challenges we have, he always showed us how they were all connected. When somebody’s liberties are compromised, all liberties are compromised. When somebody is starving, you are starving, too. We are all part of the community of people who need food to live. Justice is a universal truth, a gift of God. It’s what you’re born with; it’s part of what makes you a human being. If you’re standing for that, you have to stand wherever people need you to be. Sometimes it feels like we’re all running back and forth, but we have to keep listening to everybody everywhere. We have to open people’s minds.

RFK did this by telling his truth and making himself vulnerable. It was his vulnerability that revealed his strength. He saw what most of America wasn’t seeing in those days. We have to tell the story, that’s the thing. We have to keep telling the story. You have to take the time to tell the story completely. We all think we’re new, but we’re part of a continuum.

When I get tired, y’all are going to keep going. That’s true to RFK’s message. Once you’ve been called to action, you can’t rest with it. Once you’ve been awakened, you know that activism is not a pastime nor is it a luxury but a way of life, as necessary as breathing. You’re grateful when somebody asks for help. Ten blocks from your home, no matter where you live, you get to put that awakening into practice. That’s where change truly happens.

I always say, “I don’t know what I have to bring, but I’ll show up.” We have our bodies. Your body showing up is powerful. It says, “This person believes your life has value.” If you’re RFK, you give people the language. “We have common needs.” He could’ve been sailing, he could’ve been doing anything he felt like doing, but he knew his presence would give people a lifeline. Can you imagine those black dads and grandfathers and uncles, how they felt sitting there when he came strolling through their slave quarters and touching their babies? That’s a life changer. Showing up can be a life changer.

We all need to keep inspiring each other, charging each other, emboldening one another. We are our own army. We are peaceful warriors, but we are warriors. We have to be. Justice and peace is as old as mankind. The thing is that we are slowly, slowly winning these battles, but we gotta show up on the battlefield with love and action, or the battle goes another direction.