Speech at Davidson College (February 12, 2013)
Thank you so much and good evening everyone. First of all it is a pleasure and an honor to be here at Davidson College to help you celebrate Black History Month. I always welcome the opportunity to come to North Carolina because I spent a number of years of my own activist career doing work in this state.
So first of all, let me say that Black History Month falls in the month of February, about which people used to complain because it’s the shortest month of the year, but there are specific reasons, including the birthday of Frederick Douglass, why we observe Black history during this month. And I should also say that since we began to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King in the middle of January we’ve extended our February celebration so now at least we have a month and a half. And those of us who recognize the constitutive role that Black women have played in the struggle for women’s rights in this country continue to celebrate Black history during Women’s History Month, which means that we now have two and a half months to specifically recognize Black history. That’s not that bad.
Black history, whether here in North America, or in Africa, or in Europe, has always been infused with a spirit of resistance, an activist spirit of protest and transformation. So I’m happy to be invited to address the topic of social protest and transformation from the sixties to the present.
When we celebrate Black history it is not primarily for the purpose of representing individual Black people in the numerous roles as first to break down barriers in the many fields that have been historically closed to people of color, although it is extremely important to acknowledge these firsts. But rather, we celebrate Black history, I believe, because it is a centuries-old struggle to achieve and expand freedom for us all. And so Black history is indeed American history, but it is also world history. There is a reason why in 2008 there was such a planetary euphoria when Obama was elected. That a Black man who identified with the spirit of the historical struggle for Black liberation could be elected president of the United States was a cause for rejoicing everywhere in the world, because people everywhere have identified with this sustained struggle for freedom or what Cedric Robinson calls “the Black radical tradition.”
It is a tradition that can be claimed by people everywhere. Regardless of race, regardless of nationality, regardless of geographical location. Moreover, Black Americans have been the beneficiaries of solidarity generated in all parts of the world. Frederick Douglass traveled to Europe to gain support for antislavery abolition. Ida B. Wells traveled to England and Ireland and Scotland to generate support for the antilynching movement. And then of course Canada offered sanctuary from slavery. When the Fugitive Slave Law prevented those who escaped from slavery from finding refuge anywhere inside the United States, the Underground Railroad had to extend up to Canada.
And then of course we can talk about cases such as the Scottsboro Nine. My mother was one of the many activists who joined the struggle to free the Scottsboro Nine in the 1930s and the 1940s. An international campaign developed, although it would be many decades before the last of the Scottsboro Nine were freed. In the 1950s there was a notorious case in North Carolina known as the Kissing Case. In Monroe, North Carolina, in 1958, a young Black boy about six years old kissed a white girl with whom he was playing and was arrested on attempted rape charges. I mention this case not so much because of its spectacular character, but because of the media attention generated in Europe that eventually led to the freeing of this young boy. And then of course there are numerous political prisoners who have been the beneficiaries of global solidarity movements. I include myself among those political prisoners.
When I was in jail there were campaigns literally all over the world. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, in Europe, in the former Soviet Union, in Germany—both East and West. You heard from Professor Caplan…about the current case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose plight is the subject of more public discussion in Europe than here in the United States. And then of course the founding of the Black Panther Party not only captured the imagination of young people all over the United States within a very short period of time; there were Black Panther Party chapters in every major city in this country. And you’ll have the opportunity to hear from the head of the Black Panther Party in Winston-Salem, next Monday I believe. But Black Panther Parties were created in places like New Zealand. Maori people who were struggling against racism in New Zealand created a Black Panther Party. In Brazil there was a Black Panther Party. In Israel there was a Black Panther Party.
So I want us to think about the very capacious framework within which the protests and struggles for Black liberation evolved. People all over the world have been inspired by the Black freedom movement to forge activist movements addressing oppressive conditions in their own countries. In fact you might say that there has been a symbiotic relationship between struggles abroad and struggles at home, relationships of inspiration and mutuality. The historical South African freedom struggle was inspired in part by the historical Black American freedom struggle. The Black American freedom struggle was inspired in part by the South African freedom struggle. In fact, I can remember growing up in the most segregated city in the country, Birmingham, Alabama, and learning about South Africa because Birmingham was known as the Johannesburg of the South. Dr. Martin Luther King was inspired by Gandhi to engage in nonviolent campaigns against racism. And in India, the Dalits, formerly known as untouchables and other people who’ve been struggling against the caste system have been inspired by the struggles of Black Americans. More recently, young Palestinians have organized Freedom Rides, recapitulating the Freedom Rides of the 1960s by boarding segregated buses in the occupied territory of Palestine and being arrested as the Black and white Freedom Riders were in the sixties. They announced their project to be the Palestinian Freedom Riders.
So I want us to think about this more capacious framework within which to consider Black history. I want to express concern that our collective relationship to history in this country is seriously flawed. Of course many of you are familiar with the William Faulkner quote that bears repeating: “The past is never dead. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And so we live with the ghosts of our past. We live with the ghosts of slavery. And I wonder why in 2013 we are not vigorously celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Do you find that strange? I know that Obama issued a proclamation on December 31 urging people to celebrate the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, but I don’t know anyone who did. Do you? Then I’m also wondering what will be on the agenda for the 150th anniversary of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Maybe another film?
So I want to pursue this theme of living with the ghosts of our pasts. I’ve been asked to talk about the protest movements of the sixties. But those protest movements would not have been necessary—it would not have been necessary to create a mid-century Black freedom movement had slavery been comprehensively abolished in the nineteenth century. The movement we call the “civil rights movement,” and that was called by most of its participants the “freedom movement,” reveals an interesting slippage between freedom and civil rights, as if civil rights has colonized the whole space of freedom, that the only way to be free is to acquire civil rights within the existing framework of society. Had slavery been abolished in 1863, through the Emancipation Proclamation, or in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment, Black people would have enjoyed full and equal citizenship and it would not have been necessary to create a new movement.
One of the most hidden eras of US history is the period of Radical Reconstruction. It was certainly the most radical period. There were Black elected officials. Then we had to wait more than another century to get them back. There was the development of public education. People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South. That white kids in the South would never have had the opportunity to get an education had not it been for the persistent campaigns for education. Because education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education. And then of course there was the economic development during that brief period. I’m talking about the period between 1865 and 1877, Radical Reconstruction. As a matter of fact, many progressive laws were passed when Black people were in the legislatures of various states, progressive laws with respect to women’s rights as well, not just with respect to issues of race.
I’ve been thinking that if we really manage to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and we have another couple of years between now and the sesquicentennial of the Thirteenth Amendment, every person in this country, from high school to the postgraduate level, should read W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. In the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s. And I’m making this point because what happens when 2060 rolls around? Will people still be addressing these same issues? And I also think it’s important for us to think forward and to imagine future history in a way that is not restrained by our own lifetimes. Oftentimes people say, well, if it takes that long, I’ll be dead. So what? Everybody dies, right? And if people who were involved in the struggle against slavery—I’m thinking about people like Frederick Douglass, or Ida B. Wells in the struggle against lynching—if they had that very narrow individualistic sense of their own contributions, where would we be today? And so we have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that are not restricted to our own lifetimes.
One of the things I did in North Carolina in the seventies was to battle with the Klan because the Ku Klux Klan really controlled this state. I was telling some people during dinner that I can remember when there were big billboards of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan welcoming visitors to the various cities and towns of North Carolina. And members of the Klan appeared publicly in their garb. As I told people at dinner, I helped to organize two major marches in Raleigh, North Carolina, through my involvement in a multiracial organization, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. We had some of our white members hang out at the Klan bars in order to gather intelligence about what the Klan was planning. We were actually very frightened that they might—given the history of the Klan committing violence against Black people, not only in the past, but then in the sixties and the seventies—we were afraid that they might be targeting us.
When we speak about the Klan as symbolic of the whole edifice of racism, when we think about racial segregation, we often assume that it originated in slavery. But the Ku Klux Klan was founded in the aftermath of slavery, right? Racial segregation was instituted in the aftermath of slavery, in the aftermath of Black Radical Reconstruction, in an attempt to manage free Black people. What did it mean during those days for people who had been historically subjugated and kept in chains to have the opportunity to express themselves freely? Well, there were those who did not want to see this. Of course there were those who wanted to bring slavery back into the picture. But there were many strategies that were used to manage free Black bodies.
Had those strategies not been implemented, such as the violence associated with the Ku Klux Klan, such as the convict lease system, which created the basis for the punishment industry today, had that not happened free Black people would have been far more successful in pushing for democracy for all people in this country. The struggles of the 1960s would have been unnecessary if Black people had acquired full citizenship in the aftermath of slavery. But when we focus our attention on the southern struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s, specifically when we think about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, we inevitably evoke Dr. Martin Luther King. We also think about Rosa Parks, but we should be focusing on Jo Ann Robinson as well, who wrote the book The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.
These are the people whom we have to thank for imagining a different universe and making it possible for us to inhabit this present. There was Claudette Colvin, too, who has a wonderful book, Twice Toward Justice. All of you should read it because Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus before Rosa Parks’s action. Claudette Colvin was also arrested before. You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement. He transformed in his relationship with that movement. He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the oppressed masses.
Then of course there was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. I think that the larger symbolic meaning of the deaths of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair, who were killed that Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama, has to do with the snuffing out of the lives of Black girls, who thus never had an opportunity to grow into women committed to the struggle for freedom. And it’s interesting because some months before they were killed, there were the children’s marches. During the children’s marches in Birmingham, children who stood up to the police, who stood up to the firemen with their high-power water hoses, and their dogs were responsible for some of the most dramatic moments of the entire campaign. Children were committed to justice. All of this gets erased when you obsessively focus on single individuals.
So let me return again to this theme of the Black freedom movement, the civil rights movement. The freedom movement was expansive. It was about transforming the entire country. It was not simply about acquiring civil rights within a framework that itself would not change. There has been an attempt to co-opt that movement for purposes of creating a historical memory that fits into the smaller frame of civil rights. And I’m not suggesting of course that civil rights are not important. There are still many significant civil rights movements in the twenty-first century. The struggle for immigrant rights is a civil rights struggle. The struggle to defend the rights of prisoners is a civil rights struggle. The struggle for marriage equality with respect to LGBT communities is a civil rights struggle. But freedom is still more expansive than civil rights. And in the sixties there were some of us who insisted that it was not simply a question of acquiring the formal rights to fully participate in a society, but rather it was also about the forty acres and the mule that was dropped from the abolitionist agenda in the nineteenth century. It was about economic freedom.
It was about substantive freedoms. It was about free education. It was about free health care. Affordable housing. These are issues that should have been on the abolitionist agenda in the nineteenth century, and here we are in the twenty-first century and we still can’t say that we have affordable housing and health care, and education has thoroughly become a commodity. It has been so thoroughly commoditized that many people don’t even know how to understand the very process of acquiring knowledge because it is subordinated to the future capacity to make money. So it was about free education and free health care and affordable housing. It was about ending the racist police occupation of Black communities. These were some of the demands raised by the Black Panther Party.
I live in Oakland, California, the city where the Black Panther Party was created in 1966. We still have major issues with police racism, police violence. I spoke not long ago at an event in celebration of the seventeenth birthday of a young man who had been recently killed near one of the high schools by the police. Then, let’s remember that Trayvon Martin would have also been eighteen, right? How many of you are familiar with the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party?
I find it so interesting that certain moments in the history of the Black freedom struggle can be very easily incorporated into a larger narrative of the struggle for democracy in this country, and then there are others that get completely ignored. I don’t think that there is a single person in this country who doesn’t know the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, probably very few people in the world who don’t know his name and that’s wonderful. Let me add that the new monument in Washington is really quite striking. I understand that they are going to remove the misquoted phrase that says, “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” MLK actually said, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for peace. Say that I was a drum major for justice, a drum major for righteousness.” Yet the monument is actually quite striking. On this Martin Luther King Day, the day of Obama’s second inauguration, I happened to be in Washington, DC, attending the Peace Inaugural Ball organized by Andy Shallal with Mos Def and Sweet Honey in the Rock. When the ball was over a small group of us decided to visit the monument. I didn’t realize I would be so moved by this monument, but it was quite amazing to witness it at two thirty in the morning, when no one else was there. We were able to walk along the wall and read the various quotations inscribed in the wall. It made me feel that we have indeed come a long way, but at the same time we have regressed so much. So how do you address that contradiction of progress and regression at the very same time? I mention this because there’s a reason why most people never have the opportunity to look at the Black Panther Party “Ten-Point Program,” because those points are still very much on the agenda today. Those aspects of the struggle that are incorporated into the official narrative of American democracy are aspects that can be considered to have achieved their own closure. So Black people have civil rights. It’s no longer necessary to struggle for civil rights. Thus the struggle for freedom can be relegated to the past. But of course, this is true.
I was originally planning to read the ten points, but I think I will ask you to Google “Ten-Point Program Black Panther Party” and you’ll see among the ten points, “We want completely free health care for all Black and oppressed people.” Read this point now at a time when people are troubled about the health care program that Obama supported, which is better than nothing I suppose…but not too much better than nothing. You will also find the point that says, “We want freedom for all Black and oppressed people now held in US federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails.” Now that we know that there are 2.5 million people behind bars, as Professor Caplan pointed out, and that, according to Michelle Alexander, there are more Black people incarcerated and directly under the control of correctional agencies in the second decade of the twenty-first century than there were enslaved in 1850.
Social protests from the sixties to the present…if we have a hard time grappling with history or acknowledging how we inhabit our histories, this trouble with history can also be seen in the way in which our current mass actions are often subjected to a media process, a mediated process of becoming stale news. So that something that happened as recently as a year ago—the Occupy movement—gets pushed to the back of our historical memory. That movement erupted with such force and in a context that made connections with events in Egypt and events in Tunisia, and then in the fightback of public workers in Wisconsin. So clear—those connections were so clear at that time. And then there were encampments in every major city in this country, and a lot of small cities, too. And all over the world.
As a matter of fact, I personally had the opportunity to spend time at the Occupy site in Philadelphia [cheers and applause]—I guess Philadelphia must be in the house—in New York, in Oakland, where we had this amazing, amazing march to shut down the ports. And then Berlin, and London. The Occupy movement contained and still contains so much potential. So I want us to think about the promise of that movement. We cannot assume that simply because the tents are no longer up—although they remain in a few places—doesn’t mean the struggle of the 99 percent has been dismantled. Didn’t we learn a great deal during that short period of time? The Occupy movement made it possible for us to talk about capitalism in an open, public way, in a way that had not been possible since the 1930s. And so I think we need to celebrate this new possibility and recognize that we still inhabit a political space created by the Occupy movement. We shouldn’t take the position that now that the tents are gone nothing is left. There’s a great deal left. There’s a great deal of activism around evictions especially. Then of course, more recently we witnessed the reelection of Barack Obama. By this time everybody who may have been hoping that Obama was the messiah realized that he was simply the president of the United States of America. Simply the president of the racist, imperialist United States of America. And of course, we’re all hoping that things will turn out better during this term, but they won’t if we don’t stand up and do the work we’re required to do.
We learned a lot from that election. It was actually quite incredible. Even more so than the first election. During the first election most people were myopically focused on the individual who was the candidate, right? This time around, many of us were really afraid that the Republican candidate would win, which would mean disaster with respect to political issues. I remember saying to everybody, I am not going to sleep until I hear Romney’s concession speech. I remembered in 2000 I went to bed thinking Gore was the new president, but then woke up to an eight-year nightmare. Of course, Romney hadn’t even written his concession speech; he had only written a victory speech, so it took a while. But what we learned was that people—young people, Black people, Latinos—people did not allow the voter suppression measures to turn them away. People waited for five and six and seven hours—they sometimes waited in line for seven hours. You might have thought that this was the first election in a free South Africa. Let’s not forget the exciting phenomenon that was this past election. It tells us something about our country and what we are capable of achieving.
Now let’s talk about the gender gap: many more women voted for Obama than men: 55 to 44. But among Black women 96 percent voted for Obama compared to 87 percent of Black men. Of Latinas, 76 percent compared to 65 percent of Latinos. But as I was saying earlier, what do we do about the fact that a majority of white men voted for Romney? That is scary. It’s really scary. It tells us something about the persistence of racism, too. But at the same time we learn that white men no longer have exclusive control over the national agenda. This is a major victory! Incidentally, if you are a white man, you don’t necessarily have to identify with that collective “white men” about which I am speaking.
I want now to reiterate a few things that I had said earlier about the campaign on immigrant rights. First of all, let me just say that—and this is a major critique of Obama. I have many critiques of Obama. I think Guantánamo Bay should have been shut down by now. And we should not have gone into Afghanistan. At the same time I try to use a feminist approach that allows me to work the contradiction so that I can be supportive of Obama and I can also be extremely critical of him at the same time.
Among other things, I am critical of the extent to which our political discourse has become so flat. For example, we can’t even talk about working-class people anymore. When did everybody become “middle class”? And even those of us who might objectively be “middle class” can still identify with the working class. There’s something wrong with the fact that we can not talk about the working class. I was talking about opening up the discursive terrain to be able to talk about capitalism; this means we have to reintroduce the working class into our discourses. Poor people—I mean if you can’t talk about the working class, how can you talk about poor people? How can you talk about unemployed people? How can you talk about all of the people who’ve become a part of surplus populations created by global capitalism and the processes of deindustrialization that first began to happen in the 1980s? So we also have to talk about immigrant rights, because immigrant rights are very much linked to that process of globalization. I think it’s good that Obama is planning to push for immigrant rights, but it is about more than the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act is important, but it’s a little drop in the bucket. It’s hardly a beginning step. And let me say also for those who are opposed to the DREAM Act because it provides pathways to citizenship for people who are in the military—again, you can be opposed to the military and at the same time support the DREAM Act. Just as you can support gay rights within the military and you can say at the same time I want to dismantle the Pentagon.
And also the activism around LGBT issues, and again, not only around marriage equality—I don’t know why everything begins to focus around marriage equality. You know, it may be that marriage equality is important as a civil rights issue, but we need to go further than simply applying heteronormative standards to all people who identify as members of the LGBT community. As a matter of fact, what was so exciting about the gay rights movement during its feminist phase, I would say, was its critique of marriage, especially since the institution of marriage was used in an ideologically oppressive way against Black people during slavery, and then later—you remember when Bush argued that what people need is to get married? Poor Black people, all they need to do is get married and suddenly all their problems are going to disappear? When I say critique of marriage, I’m not talking about a critique of relations of intimacy and emotional connections, and the ties that we feel with people with whom we would like to spend our lives. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the institution as a capitalist institution that’s designed to guarantee the distribution of property.
We should also in our activism incorporate strategies to minimize Islamophobia and xenophobia. Defend Muslims who are seriously under attack because of efforts to equate Islam and terrorism. And even people who have little to do with Islam are under attack. Sikhs, for example, who have been killed because their turbans have been misread as Muslim. And as I said before, immigrant rights are so important and it’s not just about the DREAM Act and paths to citizenship; it’s about welcoming the people who do so much of the labor that fuels the economy: the agricultural labor, the service labor, people who perform the labor that Black people used to perform. This should be considered a part of Black history and a part of the Black freedom struggle.
And then if I had time, I would talk about issues of disability. I’m beyond my time now, so I’ll just tell you what I would have talked about had I had more time. I would have said something about food politics and the capitalist production of food that has made so many people ill and has created so much suffering for so many animals. I would have talked about Palestine to a greater extent. And it seems to me that the Black freedom struggle gets extended in many ways in the twenty-first century, and those of us who identify with the struggles of Black people for freedom in the United States of America should clearly identify with our Palestinian sisters and brothers today.
Finally, however we might want to engage in progressive and transformative activism, there is one principle we should remember. This principle is associated with Dr. Martin Luther King and should be the slogan of all of our movements: “Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”