1 WHEN FREEDOM IS THE QUESTION . . .

“OH, FREEDOM”

Oh, freedom

Oh, freedom over me

And before I’d be a slave I’d be buried in-a my grave (oh, yes) And I’d fight for my right to be free.

Make a list of five words like freedom—words that spark in your mind in the wake or the echo of that one propulsive word, freedom. Write a sentence or two about whatever images, ideas, and thoughts each word presents or awakens in you. Now write about the concept of freedom itself, its depth and dimensions, boundaries and borders, its ambitions and longings and essential features. Take a moment to scratch out a few notes before you read any further.

— REFLECTION ONE: FREEDOM DEMANDS ACTION —

This is a good moment to reflect once more on the question of freedom—to explore its history and to illuminate its dimensions, to investigate where we are and to wonder about where we might go next. The word freedom is practically appliquéd on our American minds—we’re born free in the freest country on earth, we’re told repeatedly, and it seems that individuals and corporations alike, people from the far left to the reactionary right, embrace freedom as a positive force and a trumpeted value in some vague and general sense—the sanctimonious Freedom Caucus, the opportunistic Freedom Unlimited Card from Chase Bank, The Courage to Be Free by the insufferable Ron DeSantis, or the electrifying Black Freedom Movement. What does anyone mean by freedom in particular? The answer is difficult to pin down, but let’s try anyway.

The moment can feel like the absolute worst of times: a new and escalating cold war with China; a hot and destructive proxy war in Europe and a preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza underway; raging, racialized police violence unchecked; environmental collapse on full display; fragile and often anemic democratic institutions on life support; religious authoritarianism on the rise; women’s bodily integrity under sustained assault. The overlapping crises threaten to overwhelm us.

But on a different day, or from a different angle of regard, these days can feel like the best of times—twenty-six million people took to the streets in 2020 in response to the police murder of George Floyd, the largest public outpouring for racial justice in history; women across a wide political spectrum have refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights; labor has won historic, game-changing victories, from the Writers Guild of America to the United Auto Workers, and from Amazon to Starbucks; and broad forces are on the march worldwide to resist plunder and extraction and to preserve life on earth. I wake up every day and glance at poet Mary Oliver’s words taped to the wall, capturing a sense of this universal contradiction: “Just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.”¹

Charles Dickens would recognize our contemporary predicament at once: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom; darkness in mortal combat with light. Dickens understood that life is never one thing in isolation from every other thing. Yes, there is exploitation, but there is also resistance; progress, yes, and also backlash. More than one thing is happening at once. If we freeze our focus or draw the frame too rigidly, we miss the noisy, dynamic, frenetic magnificence of life as it’s actually happening.

So I want to expand and redraw the boundaries of how I see and think about freedom as well as the reality that spreads out before us, the world that we encounter every day. I want to rethink where one thing ends and another thing begins, of where to look and what to look for.

“Ah, contradiction,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The perpetual body odor of humanity!”²

Freedom as a living thing and a vital aspiration is partially revealed when we look unblinkingly into the face of unfreedom: if unfreedom includes being prevented from voting, then freedom must involve the act of voting; if unfreedom is in part being forced to attend underfunded, segregated, miseducating schools, freedom embraces integrating into the privileged schools and fighting for an honest curriculum; if unfreedom is having no roof over your family’s head, freedom includes having access to adequate housing; if unfreedom is policies and politics of caging and cruelty, exclusion and dehumanization, then freedom must unlock the cages and abolish those heartless practices. Freedom in fact is always freedom in opposition.

“Freedom Now!” was the call to arms of the celebrated Black Freedom Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the massive social justice movement that generated real social change as well as a language, a philosophy, and a vast soundtrack that contingently defined (and then continually reimagined and redefined) the meaning of freedom. “We Shall Overcome,” a Christian hymn reworked by Guy Carawan at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, became the movement’s anthem. “Oh, Freedom,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom”—popular tunes easily learned by people while marching or picketing—were the brilliant creations of the Freedom Singers.

The Freedom Singers were born as a student quartet in Georgia in the early 1960s. They generated and popularized a turbulent, rushing stream of freedom songs, and they quickly became a project and a pillar of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the militant youth wing of the movement. These new abolitionists were notably impatient for justice—they led the Freedom Rides on interstate buses, the lunch counter sit-ins in the Deep South, and direct-action protests across the land. The Freedom Singers were in the fray, and they built the musical canon from the ground up—field shouts and church music, gospel hymns and traditional folk tunes, catchy jingles and propulsive African rhythms. The communal singing that characterized their approach, a mingling of a cappella church performances with protest songs, became a major educational tool of the civil rights movement all over the world, as well as an empowering ritual for the activists. Before every demonstration or protest or action, we gathered, joined hands, and sang at the top of our lungs to make ourselves bigger and stronger than we actually were, and to chase away that cunning, disarming demon—fear. And when we confronted a barrier—sitting in or standing up, marching or picketing—and the police troops moved in, folks spontaneously once more broke into song: “I Ain’t A-Scared of Your Jail ‘Cause I Want My Freedom.” We were riding on a “freedom high,” which gave us a certain superhuman strength, and, paradoxically, a certain adrenaline-clouded judgment.

At the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, John Lewis, the twenty-three-year-old chairman of SNCC and later the legendary congressman from Georgia, declared, “We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! . . . We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. . . . Wake up America! Wake up!”³ On that note, the Freedom Singers were joined on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Marian Anderson, the first African American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, who was celebrated around the world for an open-air concert she had given on these same steps in 1939 in protest over being banned by the Daughters of the American Revolution from singing to an integrated audience earlier that year; the renowned gospel singer Mahalia Jackson; the popular folk singer, actor, and activist Theodore Bikel; and rising folk stars Odetta, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Their music lifted the marchers and inspired the movement, and soon freedom songs spread like a prairie fire, carrying the message rapidly across the country and impacting folk and rock and commercial popular music for decades: Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep on Pushing,”‘ Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the Staple Singers’ “Freedom Highway,” James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Get Up, Stand Up,” the Neville Brothers’ “Wake Up,” Rage Against the Machine’s “Freedom,” and thousands more. The sounds of freedom were in the community—and on the air.

In the wake of the Black Freedom Movement a liberating spirit was loosed in the land, unleashing freedom’s energy, and a new world heaved into view. Everything felt like music, and the music felt like freedom. Abolishing all forms of subjugation became the agenda and pushed forward. A next wave of women’s liberation rose up in a surge of grassroots truth-telling; Puerto Rican independence seemed suddenly possible; American Indian Movement warriors organized and stood tall for their people’s freedom; gay liberation, Chicano liberation, and disability rights were all at once on the move, and in the mix. Freedom dreams were contagious and, in today’s terms, “going viral.”

This was, of course, not the first time the idea of freedom animated complex conversations and earth-shaking events in the US. For all their contradictions and contested meanings, the American Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and more also rode that freedom highway. Neither was it the first time the sounds of freedom were expressed in song—social movements from the labor movement to the trans movement and every stop in between unfailingly generated a soundtrack of resistance and revolt. The original abolitionists rallied around the freedom song “Get off the Track” in the 1840s, and enslaved people, denied the luxury of open protest, transformed field hollers and biblical verses into music to spread the news on the common wind, perhaps most famously Exodus 5.1, “Go Down Moses” (“and let my people go”). Union troops marched into battle singing “John Brown’s Body,” which emerged from the oral tradition of camp meetings, improvised singing learned and passed on by rote and that evolved into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But the musical accompaniment of this Third American Revolution was so rich and so varied—it spread so far and ran so deep—that it brought forth a fresh idea of freedom and embedded that idea deep into the popular culture.

Today’s movement music rises on that legacy and comes into the world rapid-fire. Here’s the chorus of the Puerto Rican singer and freedom fighter Taina Asili’s “Abolition”:

We call for abolition / Cuz’ we know police and prisons / Were made with a single mission / A racist, oppressive system / So, we work for abolition / Cuz’ we walk in the tradition / Of those who carried a vision / To take us to liberation / So we work for abolition / Abolition / Abolition / Abolition / We work for abolition⁴

The movement was providing a practical syllabus, too—a kind of roadmap for a widespread popular education project on freedom that reached into schools and houses of worship, neighborhoods and communities, factories and farms, workplaces and businesses. The chants were audible and galvanizing—”What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? NOW!”—and the movement was blazingly conspicuous, on full display for all to see.

Like Cuba’s nationwide literacy campaign at that time, Paulo Freire’s groundbreaking adult education projects in rural Brazil, among other popular education efforts, the method was hands-on—learning by doing—the pedagogy was relational and communal, and the curriculum was based on asking big questions, and then posing problems for inquiry, dialogue, discussion, and action. These problems had no simple solutions; these questions, no pat or easy answers. Why are we in the freedom movement? Let’s talk about that. What do we want? Let’s dig deep, and then deeper and deeper. What is freedom, anyway, and how do we get free? Let’s dream a little—OK, now let’s dream bigger and reach further.

Embedded in each question was a message: the people with the problems are also the people with the solutions. But in order to activate and find answers, people must develop a growing sense of their own agency, their own power, and their own possibilities, and they must come to see the situation before them as transient, not fixed. Freire wrote that the oppressed “must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.”⁵ The big idea was change—personal, political, historical, and social. Freedom.

The movement initially created what educator-organizer Jay Gillen calls crawl spaces—the alleys and margins where people can mobilize, organize, and come together as authentic and reliable, in order to think for themselves about what had been before now forbidden: Why are schools and communities segregated by race? Why do some people live this kind of life, and others that other kind? What causes poverty? Who creates wealth? Who owns the land? Who deserves a decent life? Why do Black people live shorter lives than white people? Why can’t I vote? Why is the US seemingly always at war—serial invaders and occupiers of other sovereign nations? Why, why, why? And then, each and every time: What are we going to do about it?

And, of course, from these crawl spaces, a working description/interpretation of freedom emerged, enacted in the streets and carried with the music and the culture. That characterization was not fixed or finished, but was—as always—dynamic, lively, and open-ended, a work in progress just like each of us. We knew that a vital operating interpretation is not the same as an inert dictionary definition; we thought of freedom as a verb, not a noun, and to think of freedom that way was to resist conducting a postmortem on a static concept or performing an autopsy on a lifeless idea. Freedom is a practice—it’s vitalized in day-to-day action: the quiet preparation, and the urgent thrust. Because the movement was moving, the streets alive with struggle, we knew that freedom was not an idle dream. Freedom, in the words of the contemporary activist Kelly Hayes, was “a fire that’s burning in real time. And the blaze is spreading.”⁶

“Words like freedom,” to borrow from Langston Hughes, became active expressions of desire and resolve: to liberate, to rise up, to overturn, to rebel, to abolish, to make a revolution—a “revolution in values” as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. advocated long ago, in order to make a revolution in fact.⁷ Freedom!⁸

Identifying unfreedom carried with it a moral imperative—the responsibility to act. “Don’t just sit there,” Nina Simone instructed from the stage at the Summer of Soul concert in Harlem in 1969. “For God’s sake, do something.” Freedom was an achievement to be won, not a gift to be bestowed. It had no direct link to charity; it was not a grant from a philanthropic foundation nor the largesse of some ostentatious benefactor—let’s call him a “Gentleman Bountiful,” to queer the sexist image of his better-known sister Lady Bountiful, with her perfumed hankies. Freedom was to be seized rather than received. And that’s as true now as it was then.

So freedom was tied to protest and resistance, to community-building and solidarity, to collectively identifying the barriers to one’s humanity and then struggling arm in arm, and heart to heart, to overcome those obstacles. Freedom was neither a stable nor a passive state of being but an active state of engagement; freedom was something to be accomplished in dialogue and struggle with others. Freedom pointed toward personal fulfillment, yes, but in the dynamic, ongoing development of sisterhood and brotherhood: community action and collective liberation.

The dream of freedom has animated countless revolutions and justice movements the world around. It surely breathed life into every anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggle throughout the world in the twentieth century. The people of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa, the Vietnamese and the Cubans—all were rising up, doing something, with freedom on their minds, and, in their minds, freedom was the recognition of necessity.

A telling example from our own not-so-distant history is the abolitionist movement leading up to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln gave his First Inaugural Address in 1861 as the winds of war and secession blew hot and hard across the land—this is the speech that schoolchildren never read because it’s so tortured and so distant from the mythologized image of Honest Abe Lincoln, the liberator, that the country desperately wants to embrace. “I have no purpose,” Lincoln told Congress and the country, “directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”⁹ Say what? You have no inclination to interfere with the institution of slavery? What a disappointment you are, Abe!

The main energy for abolition was being generated by the enslaved people themselves, who were creating a crisis and driving a movement. Resistance and rebellion were, of course, constant within the regime of slavery—a phenomenon that the rulers had to continually account for as the common cost of doing their dirty business—but slave revolts were now occurring in accelerating cycles of unrest throughout the eighteenth century. Enslaved workers were self-liberating in every direction, and then, in 1791, thousands of African slaves rose up on the island of Hispaniola under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture and fought for their freedom against their French masters. In one of the most significant social revolutions in world history, the Haitians liberated themselves from France and abolished slavery in 1804. In 1802, William Wordsworth wrote a poem to the revolutionary leader called “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” that ends with these lines: “Thy friends are exultations, agonies, / And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”¹⁰

The impact of the Haitian Revolution was immediate and severe: a cauldron of insurrection swept the land, and subversive stories circulated with speed and momentum from runaways and maroons and sailors and smugglers until they reached every port and city along the Atlantic. The slavocracy in the US was set back on its heels, freaking out. Abolitionists were on the march, with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass setting the moral tone in the starkest possible terms, and with John Brown and his freedom fighters already martyred at Harpers Ferry in 1859. The abolitionist movement pressed relentlessly forward without hesitation or compromise, doing something and creating an ethical imperative and eventually an irresistible force for emancipation and for abolition. The enslaved resistance and the abolitionist campaigns fanned the embers of freedom from below, massive disruption and disturbance kept rising, and, by the time the flames blew into a firestorm, Lincoln responded.

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address—the one available in most history textbooks—was delivered two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and his words could easily have flowed from the pen of the towering abolitionist Frederick Douglass (and perhaps they did): “[The war will] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”¹¹ This was the angry cry of abolition, retribution, and reparations, the real stakes in the conflict, which was defined by the heroism and sacrifice of the striking and self-liberating enslaved people, and the soldiers fighting, for once, on their side. And these words are important to remember today, almost 160 years on, as we continue to raise the specter of abolition and the demand for reparations for years of unrequited toil—with interest.

But note that freedom, and fundamental social change, never comes from the good intentions or sudden awakenings of the powerful. It always rises from the bottom—fire from below. Lincoln was shaken awake by the rebels and pushed forward into action by the gathering storm. And that might remind us that, in the thousands-year history of organized states, only in the last couple of hundred years has any state extended the zone of human freedom a single iota—and then only when driven by massive upheaval, action, and red-hot fire from the margin to the center and from the ground up.

Freedom lovers and movement builders, activists and organizers, abolitionists and revolutionaries—and eventually masses of people in motion—brought us the end of slavery, and later the dawn of the eight-hour day, women’s suffrage, Social Security, disabled people’s rights, women’s reproductive freedom, public education, civil rights, clean air and water, queer rights, and more. None of this was accomplished without conflict or contestation, and, of course, the ground of struggle was the culture as well as the streets, the factories, and the workplaces, the courts and the schools, traditional politics as well as irregular warfare. There was never a single moment nor a perfect target to strike; the freedom movement was always complex and layered, quilted together by real people acting independently and in harmony.

Think for a moment about the abolitionist activists of 1840. They wrote articles and manifestos against slavery; they made arguments and held meetings, mobilized demonstrations, developed strategies and deployed a wide range of tactics. They organized for abolition. Their opposition to slavery meant that they were a small minority, and it put them in opposition to the Founders, the Constitution, the law, the Bible, their preachers, and their parents. There was no way they could have known that a mere twenty-five years later the slavocracy would fall as a result of their spade work and a bloody civil war. But it did, and that should give us a bit of perspective on our own work here and now.

We can all imagine what we would have done so long ago when history was being made: we’d have built the Underground Railroad, sat-in at the lunch counters, marched across the Selma bridge. In another context we’d have joined the Paris Commune, and, in another, we’d have sheltered and protected Anne Frank. But it’s too easy to know what to do in the past, much harder to choose a path looking forward—and without any guarantees.

No one can escape their era. There may well have been better times to fight the power, but now is our one and only time—we will have no other. Yes, life is a challenge, and there are no commandments to follow, no essence to achieve. But the void before us is also a horizon of infinite possibilities. Now’s our chance, because history is always being made and every moment is “historic.” History has surprised us before, and it will again. We can each choose to be a part of that surprise.

Frederick Douglass lived through the abolition of slavery and the flowering of Black Reconstruction only to witness the reestablishment of the structures of white power and the rise of the KKK. What did he do in the gathering dread and darkness? He certainly did not crumble from “protest fatigue” or the lack of a convenient on-ramp for the struggle; he got up, dusted himself off, and set out once more to organize a mighty justice movement from the bottom up.

Our job, right here and right now, is to become today’s abolitionists—reimagining, resisting, and rebuilding in the name of freedom. The guitar wizard and freedom fighter Tommy Morello urges us to “let freedom ring” in large and small ways, and remember, too, the words of Taina Asili: “Freedom is a journey, it is not a sprint/This is a process, not just a single event.”¹² Abolition can mean a campaign or a project or a movement to tear down a single institution or wall or structure; what I have in mind can certainly embrace the specific or the singular case, but it’s also broader, more extensive, and much more inclusive—abolition as a complete politics. In this sense, abolition is the repudiation and nullification of oppression everywhere, and the struggle against subjugation anywhere: abuse or cruelty of any trace or tone, exploitation in any context.

An aspect of abolition is eradication or removal, true. But the more challenging and more rewarding task of abolition is the work of creation: the building of institutions and relationships, structures and cultures that would make slavery unthinkable, and then prisons and police unnecessary, and exploitation obsolete. Abolition, in the words of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, is “the founding of a new society,” because abolition eliminates a society that could have slavery (or prisons or police), and builds a society where slavery is impossible.¹³ World-building, then, is the true vocation of abolitionists, and, while we don’t and can’t know exactly what replaces it, the aspiration, the struggle, and the process is all we have to lead us to the answer. Freedom is the horizon.