BARBARA SMITH IS ONE of the leading intellectuals and activists who developed the tradition of Black feminism. A part of a group of Black lesbian socialists, she coauthored the groundbreaking “Combahee River Collective Statement.”
A prolific writer, she has published many books and articles that emphasize the interlocking nature of systems of oppression under capitalism and the necessity of fighting all of them as part of a struggle for collective liberation. But she is no armchair intellectual; she is also an organizer and activist.
Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews her about the lessons from her life in the struggle, from the civil rights movement to Palestinian solidarity and the socialist movement today.
This is not the first time that the radical left in the US has been confronted with an offensive by reactionary political forces. It is often forgotten just how repressive the atmosphere of McCarthyism and Jim Crow was in the 1950s. Yet, the Civil Rights Movement managed to rise and break through the right-wing climate of the time. Could you talk about the political context in which it emerged and broke through? Do you feel there are lessons for a new generation of activists today?
Unless they experienced it directly, very few people, especially white people, recognize just how horrific life was for African Americans before the Civil Rights Movement. The legal and extra-legal repression was extreme. It set Black life apart.
Recently, I was talking with a white friend of mine about him growing up in upstate New York. He told me about his experience of listening to Black music on radio. He said, “It was like music from another planet.” I said, “Yeah, and I actually lived on that planet.”
That gives you a sense of the gulf of lived experience between white and Black people. We faced a white supremacist system of legal segregation, the denial of voting rights, and economic discrimination. All this was enforced by state and paramilitary violence.
The daily message we got was that you did not count, that you were worthless. The Black community told us the exact opposite. That’s how Black people survived as functioning members of society.
I grew up in the late Jim Crow period and experienced its racism. I also remember the Cold War and McCarthyism. Despite being only six years old at the time, I will never forget when the Rosenbergs were executed. I identified with their children and was horrified that their parents were murdered by the state.
People talk a lot about fascism today. Well, we experienced something like fascism back then. But because Black people were not considered important, it wasn’t recognized as fascism.
The contradictions were enormous. Remember, the United States and its allies were congratulating themselves for supposedly vanquishing fascism in Europe, making the world safe for democracy. At the same time, people of African heritage living in the United States endured fascist-type conditions.
It was the United States’ own system of apartheid. In fact, the Nazis studied our history of colonial genocide and Jim Crow to develop their plans for Jews and other oppressed groups. What does that say about the world’s leading and first constitutional democracy?
In these conditions, our community was so much more unified than today. We all had a common experience of oppression. Because of segregation, well-educated, prosperous Black people lived in the same communities as working-class Black people. Our elite was not allowed to live anywhere else. For example, the legendary football player Jim Brown lived in my neighborhood because he couldn’t buy a house anywhere else in Cleveland.
That set African Americans apart from other oppressed groups, which were much more divided along class and other lines. Of course, women and the LGBTQIA+ community had common experiences. But gender, race, and class divisions in those groups led to vastly distinct experiences. For instance, white males with class privilege who are queer or gay have a much different experience than trans women of color. They did not have the uniformity of experience that African Americans did under Jim Crow.
That said, there were class and political differences in the Black community, and it led to different kinds of strategies and tactics for the Black freedom struggle. We had the NAACP Urban League, we had the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and we had the Black Panthers.
Nevertheless, there was a consensus in the African American community that we had to get rid of segregation. That consensus grew out of the institutions the Black community developed under segregation. We had a parallel universe of social and cultural organizations, institutions, and most importantly the Black church.
The Civil Rights Movement emerged in those institutions and grew out of the raised expectations coming out of World War II. People felt like they had defeated fascism abroad and were no longer willing to endure it at home. That feeling permeated all our institutions, especially the Black church, which produced Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
People felt like they had defeated fascism abroad and were no longer willing to endure it at home.
I grew up in a Black Baptist church in Cleveland, Ohio. As I found out doing archival research many years later, it was the most prominent Black church in the entire city, which means it was a very big deal, because Cleveland was one of the ten largest cities in the United States.
We went every Sunday, because our family was quite observant and very involved in the church. My grandmother was a pillar of the church. So going wasn’t optional. It wasn’t like we’d only go to church on Easter and Christmas. No, if it’s Sunday, we’re going. That’s just that. Fortunately, unlike some churches, we did not have several services on Sunday. We weren’t there all day long, although sometimes it seemed like it! During the week, church clubs and organizations also met. Our grandmother participated in those. So we were embedded in the key institution of the Black community.
It became the organizing base of the Civil Rights Movement. As the struggle unfolded, we got reports about what was happening in church. We didn’t just listen to them; we took them as a lead about what to do. We’d get the report and then we said, “This is what we’re doing.” So when there was a boycott of Woolworth in the South, we did the same in Cleveland as the Black community did in other major cities. I love studying this dynamic in the Civil Rights Era.
One of the things in researching the Movement was how Black churches throughout the country supported the Montgomery bus boycott, which is considered the launching pad of the struggle. Congregations around the country raised thousands of dollars to purchase cars, station wagons, so that people could get to where they needed to go in Montgomery.
Just imagine having that level of unity, that level of concentrated financial commitment. Mostly working Black people said, “Yeah, we’re going to raise this money. We’re going to buy this many station wagons and we’re going to drive them down to Montgomery.” Such national support was the only way that boycott could last for a year until victory was won.
Montgomery set the example, and it spread throughout the South. People started stepping out and doing very courageous things on behalf of the community. The confidence and determination of the college students who sat in at the lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, inspired an entire generation of young people.
Everyone said, “Wow, these young people are so brave. If they can do it, so can we.” They inspired people in Cleveland to act. The foundation of our struggle was laid long ago. The city had an amazing history of antiracist struggle, more proactive than many other northern cities. It was a major center of abolitionist organizing because of its proximity to Canada. So abolitionists organized stops on the Underground Railroad in the city and its surrounding towns and villages, particularly Oberlin.
Despite this history, segregation remained a fact of life into the 1960s. So when the Movement stirred in the South, our church became an epicenter of organizing. Our minister was like a force of nature. One day, he read us a letter that he and other prominent people in the city had gotten from one of the nice cemeteries about the burials services they offered. Among other things it said, “Rest assured that no Negroes or colored people will be buried here.” These were the conditions we faced. So when he read that letter, the congregation said, “Amen,” affirming our determination to change them.
We were all unified in this, whether at church, school, or home. There were no contradictory messages in those places. No confusion about what our tasks were. There was unanimity of purpose and goals that grew out of our experience of being second-, third-, fourth-class citizens in the United States.
We were not living in a world of illusion. Of course, we did have some like maybe we believed in magic. We had read Cinderella, so we might have thought the pumpkin was going to turn into a coach, and she was going to ride around in it. We had other books of fairy tales.
But we knew the difference between these stories and reality. We knew that such things didn’t happen and certainly weren’t going to happen for us. We were reality-centered. We were very practical and straightforward about the real conditions of oppression we faced.
The most important lesson from this struggle is that if you believe change is possible, if you organize, if you engage in struggle, you can win. That is the whole history of African American people. We have a history of great faith, great idealism, and great vision.
At no point in the history of the United States were we ever granted anything that even slightly resembles democratic rights and freedom. But African Americans resisted and fought for our rights. In the colonial period, people bound in chattel slavery did everything they possibly could to maintain a human life, sustain connections with other people who shared their horrific fate, and organize small and large forms of resistance.
African Americans participated in the abolitionist movement and the Civil War. Enslaved people even staged what W. E. B. Du Bois called a general strike to topple the slaveholders. Then there was Reconstruction.
But then Reconstruction was decimated because obviously the United States didn’t really want us to be free and decided to roll back the rights we had won. The elites liked the old ways. As people say, the North won the war, but the Confederacy won the peace. But then the Civil Rights Movement won some basic rights through mass struggle.
This is my heritage. It’s where I get my fighting spirit. As an African American and a scholar in African American Studies, I’ve lived and studied our history. I want to gather every single piece of information about what things were like in the past and how we changed them. That just lifts me up. Our stories, the stories of the African American experience in the United States, are so inspirational.
I chose the exact right academic field, a field that didn’t exist until recently, I might add. I helped found it. It has enabled me to spread the good news that it doesn’t have to be the way that it has been or is now. The current regime, for example. It too shall pass, and boy, should it. They’re having cage matches on the lawn of the White House! That was a demonstration of white male brutality designed to intimidate all who are not white male heterosexuals. Someone even had the nerve to claim yet again that Michelle Obama is a man. That sums up this administration’s bigotry.
To confront this horrible new reality, we can and must draw inspiration from our past, our tenacity, our determination, and our refusal to give up. We can learn from our movements’ incisive sense of strategy, the questions we asked and answered in the past and must do so again today. What do we need to do to topple this regime? What are the laws that are in place? What are the practices that are in place?
Under segregation, it was fairly easy to address these questions, come up with answers, and devise strategies. We knew we needed to win our basic democratic rights. That’s an obvious agenda. It also came at a time when at least some people in power were at times open to hearing and addressing our demands.
But it still took mass organizing and struggle to win those. We did what we now call BDS—strategic boycotts.1BDS refers to Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, the campaign to oppose Israeli apartheid.We hit them in their pocketbook with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. All the mass protests and sit-ins eventually forced the powers-that-be to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
The fact that the Supreme Court just decimated the Voting Rights Act demonstrates that the Right is intent on taking us way back. I’m devastated by this defeat. I can hardly even speak about it. I had recently graduated from high school when that Act passed. I didn’t read about it in a book; it happened when I was a young adult.
The absence of a mass response to the rollback of the Voting Rights Act demonstrates our weakness today. We don’t have a unified Black struggle now in the United States. Of course, there are pockets of resistance but not enough to turn back the attacks.
Some people think that all we need to do is to vote. But I don’t really think that’s true at all. Vote for what and for whom? The right to the franchise is different than the effectiveness of the franchise. Of course, I absolutely support efforts to defend Black majority districts. That enables Black people to elect a representative of their choice. That helps everybody, because Black representatives are to some extent accountable to Black people, who suffer greater economic and political oppression today. That compels those representatives to vote for programs that enable people in general to meet their basic needs.
Three things about the Civil Rights Movement stand out in retrospect. First, its longevity: it lasted for more than a decade and gave rise to Black Power, the anti-Vietnam War movement, second wave feminism, and the early lesbian and gay rights struggle. The second thing that stands out is the Civil Rights Movement’s capacity for mass mobilizing: sit-ins, marches, freedom rides, mass rallies, community organizing in the Deep South, support for striking workers. And the third is its radicalization. By 1967, Dr. King was speaking out against the war in Vietnam and calling for a Poor People’s Campaign. Black Power organizations were growing. Could you discuss each of these aspects of the movement. And do you think that a mass, sustained, and radicalizing movement is possible today?
I like to refer to the struggle as the long Civil Rights Movement. It was longer than a decade. Some mark its beginning with the Niagara Movement and the founding of the NAACP at the beginning of the 20th century. But at the very least, scholars start tracking it from the 1940s, when activists launched the first Freedom Rides. I tend to think of the Civil Rights Movement as stretching from the 1940s to the early 1970s.
However you date it, it was a long struggle. Of course, you can’t orchestrate longevity, but yes, longevity is good. The reason for that longevity is obvious, I think. It is rooted in two things. First the depth of white supremacist structures throughout the United States, both South and North. And second the determination of Black people to overcome them. That led to mass, sustained struggle to dismantle American apartheid.
I think of this a lot today, especially now that it is Pride season in June. Where I live in Albany, NY, we have a notoriously mainstream Pride event, as is true in most places these days. Despite renewed attacks on our rights, I wouldn’t even say we have a movement. So Pride events have become watered down and often corporate-sponsored parades.
So we got together after one of our comrades put out a call to figure out what we could do to change this. We met and put together a liberation contingent. It was really exciting and inspiring to people. Our slogan was, “Oppression is everywhere. Liberation is up to us.” Our contingent upheld Palestine solidarity and barred cops and corporations.
Back in the day that was the standard. That we had to have a contingent standing up for that tradition tells you how far we’ve regressed from the Stonewall Rebellion, which was led by trans people of color against the police. That we are back to square one shows how hard it is to sustain a militant liberation struggle.
Some of us like me and my comrades, we’ve been at it for a lifetime. And we hope that we can encourage people much younger than us to realize that you have to be up for a long fight, a lifetime of struggle. I have a dear friend in Jewish Voice for Peace. As with every movement, we’ve had ups and downs. She asked “What should we do? Is it time to bail?” I said, “We just need to hang out. We need to hang out. We just need to see what happens.”
That to me is a strategic move. Now, I don’t have all the patience in the world. But for me, we can’t judge the state of movements too quickly. We need to have a more scientific approach. You can’t understand reality by running just one experiment. You must run it over and over again, and then you begin to think, “Oh every time I do it, this percentage of what I’m looking at turns out the same.” Maybe then you can draw a conclusion.
That’s why I said to her, “We just need to hang out.” And we’ve been hanging out, and we may be making some progress around issues that we’re concerned about. But you can’t guarantee longevity by sheer will power. History doesn’t work like that. You can’t declare, “We’re going to have a really long-term movement around X, Y, or Z.” But everyone must develop a movement mentality that inspires that commitment to the struggle not as a part-time hobby, but as a way of life.
We had the common experience of oppression and institutions that provided an infrastructure for organizing the struggle—the Black church, fraternal organizations, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Now let’s turn to your point about the Civil Rights Movement strategy of mass mobilization. I touched on this already. We had the common experience of oppression and institutions that provided an infrastructure for organizing the struggle—the Black church, fraternal organizations, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
The Black churches were key not just in local areas and cities but nationally. They had formed national Black denominations and conventions. I was just explaining this to a group of friends. I said, “When I say that I was raised Baptist, do not think Southern Baptist. We had nothing to do with that. They had nothing to do with us, and we had nothing to do with them.”
Segregation is behind that schism. The Southern Baptist Convention is quite conservative, white, and segregated. This forced Black Baptists to form their own national organization, which is still the largest denomination that Black people who are observant belong to.
That meant that Black ministers, who were local leaders, joined each other at national conventions. These put them in regular contact across the country. They became a mechanism to convey information, share initiatives, generalize lessons, and turn people out in large numbers at protests.
So the messages I talked about hearing every Sunday from my minister were not just from him. He got them from other ministers in Montgomery, Birmingham, Atlanta, and other cities on the front line of the struggle in the South. That was a real mechanism of collective communication. It wasn’t like the kind of one-dimensional communication of social media.
Back then it was real people collaborating in meetings, talking over the phone, and planning. These institutions were underpinned by real grassroots organizations of all sorts.
For instance, Black women had organizations and meetings in the Baptist Church. There was a Black women’s club movement stretching all the way back to the early 1900s. Through those groups and many others, we had our own means of communication and our own way of setting priorities.
The HBCUs gave us another network. We built these institutions. In our country they might not have been respected or recognized by others, but we had them. We had no choice but to establish them.
Here’s an example: the Modern Language Association, which is an academic association for people who teach language and literature. I was involved in it when I was teaching. But there’s another organization called the College Language Association. It’s a parallel Black institution. Why does it exist? Because the Modern Language Association, up until a certain point, did not let Black professors present at their conferences. That was true of many other professional organizations. So Black people had no choice but to build ones of their own.
Almost every Black professional organization is an alternative one, organized by Black people under conditions of official segregation and, after that, persistent discrimination. Black organizations usually have “national” in their title in contrast to the white-dominated ones for the same profession. For instance, Black lawyers built the National Bar Association as an alternative to the American Bar Association. The same is true for the National Medical Association and the American Medical Association.
These institutions enabled a synergy of people and struggle. They were the product of segregation. That’s why Zora Neale Hurston and others were concerned about what was going to happen to all these institutions after desegregation. As she feared, many became weaker or disappeared altogether. People felt like they were no longer necessary in a supposedly integrated society.
The final part of your question was about the radicalization of the movement. It was really built into racism’s deep roots in capitalism. That led people to develop radical analysis, come up with radical solutions, and put their lives on the line to fight for fundamental social and economic change.
Now, not everybody down with the struggle was radical. Not by any means. But the youth tended to be. And this is really important. Young people were the leading edge of speaking truth to power and fighting back against white supremacy. We have many examples this heroism: from the Little Rock Nine who desegregated Central High School to the students who sat in in Greensboro and the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama.
Their efforts were the basis for founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They were the real deal. Some people think fondly of the Beatles from those days. For me, no it’s not the Beatles. It’s SNCC. If I had lived in the South, despite being young, I think I would have been involved. I idolized SNCC.
Whenever anybody asks what I recommend they read to get excited about activism, I always say Howard Zinn’s book SNCC: The New Abolitionists, which Haymarket has just republished with a new afterword by Barbara Ransby. I heard Howard Zinn speak when I was in college. I got the book the next day and read it straight through.
That book is so remarkable. It captures the dynamism and radicalism of SNCC. We all knew the organization’s leaders. We knew about Bob Moses. As a senior in high school in 1964, I followed Freedom Summer that year. I knew what was happening before James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered. We had so many other martyrs, from them to Medgar Evers and then Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. It was one horrific incident after another.
These days some young people think that boomers are just the worst people on earth, that we don’t stand for anything, that we ruined everything for them. Well, they don’t know about my cohort of people who fought tooth and nail to defeat Jim Crow.
Then there were the urban insurrections. They were the embodiment of, if not a political radicalization, certainly of masses of people saying, “Enough is enough. We’re not taking this anymore.”
I’ll never forget the summers of the late 1960s, particularly the summer of 1967. One city after another went up in flames. That included Cleveland the summer before in 1966. My sister and I watched as federal troops were deployed to impose “order” on our city.
I was also actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement in Cleveland. Like many of the urban movements in the North, it focused on school desegregation, police brutality, and jobs. That was the general agenda of the northern movements.
I joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Cleveland. I worked as a volunteer after I finished high school. It was considered a more radical organization. No wonder I was drawn to it! Our struggle was not just about rights but also about the deep economic and social injustices African Americans faced and their enforcement by police violence.
The Movement was like a school for life. It developed us as radicals, as militants for justice. We studied the society, all the things that were happening, all the violence, all the contradictions, all the absurdities. And we set about changing them all. It was a profoundly radicalizing experience.
When I got to college, there were a few radical students at Mount Holyoke in the mid-sixties, and I quickly gravitated to them. Initially, I did not consider myself a radical. I believed in the beloved community. I believed in nonviolence. I believed that if we just could be kind to one another, everything would turn out all right.
But everything began to shift from Civil Rights organizing to the fight to stop the war in Vietnam. That radicalized us. It radicalized the movement’s leadership, especially Martin Luther King Jr. I went down from Western Massachusetts to hear him speak at the march of hundreds of thousand against the war in New York City on April 15, 1967.
Just two weeks before he had given his speech “Beyond Vietnam” at Riverside Church. That expressed the much more radical world view that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement to challenge US imperialism and increasingly capitalism itself. We set our sights on fundamental social change throughout the world.
You played a central role in expanding the political horizons of the Left in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as well as today. Could you discuss the context in which you and others organized to make antiracism, feminism, and sexual liberation central to the perspectives of the radical left in the United States?
For me a lot of that work was done through the Combahee River Collective. We started it in the early seventies in Boston. Our members already had experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Party, and the movement to end the war in Vietnam.
At the time, the women’s movement was growing, evolving, and flourishing. But we didn‘t see a place for us in it. Overall, it was not informed by an antiracist analysis, and it did not have an antiracist agenda. It also lacked a serious understanding of sexuality.
Most of us in Combahee identified as lesbians and were out or just coming out. So there were at least two parts of our identities that were not being addressed by the movements of that time. Those were our gender and sexual orientation. Yes, there was a lesbian feminist movement, but it did not have a strong antiracist and class analysis.
So our collective developed politics to address these deficiencies. We created an intersectional socialist politics. That culminated in our Combahee River Collective Statement. I never dreamed it would have the impact it has had on subsequent movements.
We created an intersectional socialist politics. That culminated in our Combahee River Collective Statement.
Here’s an example. Friends of mine have been reading Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, about the Jewish Bund. They were really surprised to see that she cites Combahee. I’m delighted that she did, because you wouldn’t necessarily expect it in a book about the Bund in Europe.
But it shows the impact and utility of our intersectional politics. It really made a difference for people who are wondering, “How do I fit in? What kind of politics do I want to do?” I want to underscore that our statement is not just for people who share our identity. It’s for anybody who really wants to get underneath and really go deep into understanding exploitation and oppression and how to overcome them. To do that entails, of course, eradicating the source of all of it—capitalism. But in the meantime, we need some kind of strategic map that shows us a way forward to win immediate reforms on the road to system change.
I think our statement helps us do that today. It’s still amazing to see the impact it’s had. But, hey, we were smart. We were, as Lorraine Hansberry said, young, gifted, and Black. What a great combo! We thought the world was ours, not because we thought we were going to be respected, honored, or anything. We just thought “Yeah, we can do this. We can do this. Let’s just put it out there.” And fortunately, many activists have found it useful.
Not everybody is in lockstep with each other as far as agreement on program or on analysis, but there’s enough in there that a lot of different kinds of people can benefit from. It also offers a vision of how people can work together across differences. We heartily believed and still believe in coalition politics.
And it was always about building the struggle. One result of it was that we managed to build a small but powerful antiracist women’s movement. This sector was diverse and radical. It was very different than the mainstream bourgeois girlboss iterations of a very narrow definition of women’s liberation.
Why has the Combahee River Collective Statement come back with a vengeance recently?
The reason it’s come back with a vengeance, as you said, is because of Keeanga–Yamahtta Taylor’s book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. That put Combahee back on the map and made it so much more accessible.
Of course, I made sure to include the statement in every anthology I worked on. It was in But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. These along with Keeanga’s book are widely read in college and university courses.
None of us said, “Oh, this is going to be transformative.” But it had a positive impact on the women’s movement and the Black struggle. Many in those struggles resonated with what we argued. It was honest. It was not rhetorical. So people said, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s like that. It’s true.”
But it wasn’t all peaches and cream. Demita Frazier, one of the members of Combahee, told me that the reason that some people in Boston did not want to be associated with the Combahee wasn’t because we were lesbians but because we were socialists. The funny thing is that today people appreciate it because we’re socialists.
Now, one of the things that I’m concerned about is some of the ways that Black feminism has evolved. As you well know, I believe in organizing. I believe in addressing actual material conditions that people face and figuring out what can we do to change them. I’m not really interested in pretty ideas for the sake of pretty ideas.
I’m also concerned about a certain introspection. I was recently going to a meeting of Black people and when I saw the agenda, I said to a friend, “The agenda is just so touchy-feely.” And she said, “We need touchy-feely.” Now, I didn’t argue with her, but I was thinking, “No, we don’t.” Of course, it’s important for people to express themselves, but not if touchy-feely leads to the exclusion of what is happening on the block, in the workplace, in the prison, and in the bedroom. If we’re not dealing with what people are actually facing, then we’re just not doing the work.
This is hard to discuss, but there are opportunities that younger Black people have that older generations didn’t. We fought for that to be possible. But now upper-middle-class Black people can mistakenly think it’s always been this way. But it wasn’t. People don’t know what I went through, what your grandparents went through, and this is why we’re here. They go for that brass ring of capitalist success, of entrepreneurship, of elite careers. I just don’t believe those things are solutions to overcome exploitation and oppression. You got to take care of yourself and those who you’re responsible for. But we can’t reduce life to having all the latest gadgets and luxuries. I wasn’t raised that way. And such things won’t advance our collective struggle.
Trumpism and MAGA represent an attempt to roll back all the social and political gains made since the Civil Rights Movement. What lessons from past struggles might be relevant in organizing to stop the rollbacks? How do you think we might recover the energy of the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020?
I’m glad you asked about the George Floyd rebellion. It was an enormous uprising against the racist police system and helped contribute to the mass resistance against ICE in Minneapolis. They were seriously up against it. ICE agents were killing white people in broad daylight. This is the nature of the US government today.
I heard people in interviews say that the reason that the movement was so strong in Minneapolis this year was because of what they learned in 2020. They learned about the vast contradictions of living in the United States, how the system works, and the nature of the state. The city became the epicenter, the symbol of racist police violence and resistance against it. The scales fell away from the eyes of some people. If the lynching of George Floyd had not happened, they might not have understood all this, how to organize against it, and how to engage in mass direct action.
The Indigenous people of Minneapolis also played a key role. I got to know some Indigenous leaders when I taught in the city in the 1980s. They were very instrumental in building the struggle against ICE for obvious reasons. As a people, they have experienced colonization, dispossession, and genocide at the hands of the US government. They know how to stand up to power.
Both the Black and Indigenous communities shared their accumulated knowledge of oppression and resistance. The city’s unions also developed a sustained record of struggle. They built connections across communities so that when the next chapter of violence and dehumanization occurred earlier this year, everyone was ready.
When ICE was deployed in their city, people swung into organized action. They prepared meals and brought groceries to immigrants who were under self-imposed house arrest because they were afraid to go out. That’s what a real beloved community looks like. Not just the words, not just the ceremonies on Martin Luther King’s birthday or during Black history month but real concrete solidarity.
People asked themselves, “What am I going to do? Is my car available? Am I going to get in that car and bring people what they need to survive?” And they did all of that! People engaged in mutual aid and stepped up and faced down the fascists.
The key thing we’ve learned from history is that the struggle must come from below, from the ground up.
This must be just the start of our mass organizing. We’re only at the year-and-a-half mark of this regime right now. We’ve got a real fight on our hands. The key thing we’ve learned from history is that the struggle must come from below, from the ground up. All of us must get organized to take mass action in defense of our communities. That’s the whole idea of socialism from below.
That’s what we saw in the George Floyd Rebellion and the resistance in Minneapolis. People became brave but not fearless. If you’re fearless all the time, you are missing something about self-preservation. Being afraid and being able to assess risk is a way of sustaining life. If you demand fearlessness, you go and do that. In the meantime, we’re going to be assessing over here.
People assessed their fears and came out anyway. And key was that they did this in mass, organized numbers. It was a model of community organizing. People with different politics and probably different levels of consciousness united in struggle. Some people had a very developed analysis of how all these pieces fit together in this late stage of racial capitalism. But not everybody needs to know all that stuff to join the movement. Truth be told, just because I’ve read a lot of books doesn’t mean that I know more or how to organize. It just means that I had time and spent it reading books.
Even as an academic, I never thought my job was to use terms that students didn’t understand. That just confuses people. My job was to share ideas in those books with other people in an accessible way. That should be the role of people with a more developed analysis.
All people from whatever vantage point have knowledge to impart. I’ve always believed in that. You don’t have to be identical with me to share something of value for our collective movement. I’m more concerned about what your vision is of the world we want to live in, not whether you grew up on East 132nd Street in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1950s. You didn’t. But that does not mean you don’t have something to say to me. My family and community, which I love to talk about, taught me that. It is an invaluable lesson about how to be an effective organizer.
My initial response to what people don’t know is not disparagement. If I know that they’re open, it’s more like excitement. So when they say, “I never heard of such and such,” I say “Oh that’s great, let me tell you about it.” We’ve got to have that welcoming attitude and generosity as well as humor to confront this regime. At the beginning of Trump’s rule this time, he was just raining down attacks. There was no way to escape it. It was just all so dire. Every day began with misery and a deep level of worry.
Because of my recent health scare in March, I now feel like I really need to put energy into what I need to do to renew myself on a daily basis. If we don’t renew ourselves, we won’t be the most useful activists. I’m not most effective when I’m torn up inside. I’m most effective after I’ve made a butter pecan cake like I did a few weeks ago. It was an insane proposition, but it turned out perfectly. My comrades and I have also set up a queer TV movie club. Oh, my goodness it is like the joy of my life.
It’s not only been a haven for me but also become a catalyst for us organizing this liberation contingent at Pride in Albany. After a pecan cake on movie night, I was ready again for the struggle! Everybody needs to find ways to keep their spirits up for the long fight we’re in. We face a world of hurt from Gaza to Sudan, Congo, Lebanon, Iran, Ukraine, and right here in the United States.
What examples and lessons from the Black Freedom Struggle can we draw on for today?
I think SNCC is one of the most important examples of grassroots organizing from the past. One of the things I admire most about SNCC is that they were there on the ground. They were not abstract. They went to organize among the people most affected by systemic oppression. They lived with them.
For those activists from the South, they were their people anyway. But since many of the people in SNCC were college students, they were amongst the more privileged of Black people in the segregated South. They didn’t have to drop out, leave school and work to keep their family alive. So they were fortunate. Nevertheless, they said, “I’m leaving school now. I’m going to go to live with my people, work with them to identify issues, and be in struggle with them.”
I wish I’d had the opportunity to be in SNCC. But I was just a little too young. I know people who were in SNCC. They all described the communal and collective character of SNCC. People looked out for each other. They created a culture of struggle that often involved singing. That lifted their spirit in the most terrifying of times. They drew on our deep heritage of struggle. Somebody would lift up one of those freedom songs, which we all learned by heart.
But it wasn’t perfect. Nothing is a model that we can just imitate. There were things that happened in the struggle to women in particular that should not happen within a movement or within any human interactions. That led directly to the building of Black feminism we talked about. So SNCC was not perfect by any means. But some of the most wonderful people who’ve ever been on this planet came together in the former Confederacy, the Deep South, and said, “It’s not going to be the same as it was before. It’s going to be different.”
The SNCC Freedom Singers were amazing. Bernice Johnson Reagon was in the SNCC Freedom Singers and went on to found Sweet Honey in the Rock. I used to have a cassette tape of Fannie Lou Hamer singing freedom songs. She was a song leader. Being a song leader doesn’t mean you have the best Broadway or gospel choir voice. A song leader is somebody that can motivate people through song. A song leader is a person who the music moves in and through and comes out and touches other people. That’s a song leader. And she was one. I got to meet her in 1965 when I was in CORE.
I never met SNCC’s key organizer, Ella Baker. But because of Barbara Ransby’s amazing book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, I feel like I did. Everyone should read Barbara’s book to grasp how Ella Baker and all the young activists in SNCC did the work on the ground to transform the South. They faced down white supremacy and defeated some of its most ugly institutions. Now we’re confronting a regime that’s rolling back those victories. So it’s high time to study the past, learn as much as we can, but think creatively about what to do in the present.
In many ways, we are in a horrific period. How do you sustain hope and not give into despair in this moment? What must we do to rebuild and sustain communities of resistance for the struggle not just against Trump but also the capitalist establishment and the system it defends?
Everyone who cares about the struggle we must build was inspired by what happened in Minneapolis. You wouldn’t expect it to be the epicenter of the struggle against Trump, especially in their dead of winter. It’s different than a lot of people’s dead of winter. It is much colder! But they were just out there. They said, “We’re doing this.”
That was inspirational. So is our history of struggle. We need to hold that in our minds and in our hearts. We’re not alone. We’re not the first to face such trials and tribulations. We know that people have tried, failed, and succeeded before us.
The accolades and the excitement come from the big victories. But people don’t understand that it might be the smallest moments that provide hope and a way forward. You must be open to them. You cannot be arrogant. You cannot be a know-it-all. You must be quiet enough in your soul and in your spirit so that you don’t miss or dismiss those glimmers of hope. You can’t remain trapped in explaining how horrible everything is or pontificating about all the things you know that you think other people don’t know. You need to have that kind of quietness of spirit, some humility, trust, and kindness. We must have patience for what people don’t know and try to see the best in them. If you’re in struggle with people, they probably have something inside of them that that you can touch.
That makes me a political optimist. I have a resilience partly because, as an African American, I was born into a community in struggle. And a community that fought for and won great victories. I’m Black and I’m proud. Because of that optimism, I don’t come at people with negativity. I give them the benefit of the doubt because we need that to build trust and solidarity. We need to be open and willing to learn.
At the same time, you must draw lines when trust is broken. And if your openness is not reciprocated, then you need to put some space in between. But usually, quietness of spirit enables you to give people a break. I’ll give you an example of this from a book I’m coediting about older organizers sharing experiences and advice with younger organizers. In one of the articles, the author was writing about Palestine but didn’t describe what was going on in Gaza as genocide.
I wrote back to my friend and coeditor, “I realize my purpose is not to get everybody to use the same language that I do and to have the same politics that I do. But it has now dawned on me that even though I found this person’s language irritating, these are their politics and it’s better to leave the language as it is so people can read it, debate it, and judge for themselves.” My friend said, “I’m so glad. I’m so glad you saw it that way. That’s called grace.” It’s being able to approach people with grace. I think that I have had arrogance about the things I know and the things I believe. It was like frontal attack arrogant. It was just like, “Ugh, I don’t want to be bothered with that.”
But the thing is that, like I think at this stage of life I’m beginning to understand that everybody does not have to be involved in the same things that you’re involved in, do the same things that you do, in order to have value and be a part of the project we’re doing together. I’ve even come around to understanding what people meant when they told me in the past, “You need to have friends who are not political radicals.” Back then I said, “Why? I don’t think I do. Why?” But having such friends gives you a window into a much larger world and helps you understand how other people understand it. Still, I wish everybody was an organizer!
One of the challenges we face in the United States is building a unified working-class resistance. Some on the Left have argued that we can do so by appealing to common working-class interests and downplaying questions of oppression that often divide our class. What are the pitfalls of that approach? How can we unite the class by precisely challenging specific oppressions from race to gender, sexuality, and nationality?
That perspective of downplaying oppression is not reality-based. It doesn’t have anything to do with actual working people, how they live and function in our communities. It’s a distorted view that has always been inaccurate. In reality, working people are multiracial, multinational, women, queer and trans, and so on. That is the actual working class, not your stereotyped, standard-issue white, straight man, in a work shirt and a hard hat.
Working-class issues also hit queer and trans people as well as Black and Brown people the hardest. The woman who is a healthcare aide who most likely is a woman of color is part of the working class, and she’s dealing with different issues from somebody assigned male at birth. People who are trans, particularly trans women, are amongst the most economically oppressed groups in our nation.
That’s why having an intersectional view of working-class politics is important. We must fight for everyone’s interests in the working class, especially the multiply oppressed, if we really want to win collective liberation. Abandoning anyone will hurt everyone.
That’s even true in electoral politics. You have progressives in the Democratic Party, who say, “The current crew got in to power because they were anti-trans, so I’ll be anti-trans right along with them. That’s the way we’ll win back office.” No, you will not. Why? Because our working-class communities and families include people who are trans, queer, survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. All those things that you think are minor are actually major. They’re a central part of working-class life.
So downplaying our specific issues does not unite us; it divides us. And it pulls our politics to the right, only benefitting our rulers. In reality, all of us in the working class—Indigenous people, African Americans, Asian Americans, Muslims, Arabs, and Latinos—have something to bring to this whole project of liberation. We all have points of view and experiences. We must be open to them and willing to say, “Wow, that’s fascinating. I didn’t know that.” But some people have very limited perspectives. They think reading great white male thinkers is enough, that they don’t need to read great writers of color. The opposite is the case.
We can’t end exploitation without combatting oppression. And we can’t end oppression without combatting exploitation.
If we want to really understand working-class politics we need to read, discuss, and debate everyone committed to the project of collective liberation. That is essential for building a movement to end both oppression and exploitation. We can’t end exploitation without combatting oppression. And we can’t end oppression without combatting exploitation. We can’t end either without combatting both. That’s the only way to get rid of this system.
There are no primary and secondary contradictions like some used to say back in the seventies. Nothing is secondary or unimportant. We don’t live in a monochromatic, two gender, single ethnicity, one religion world. That’s what the fascists want. We need to figure out how to fight and build something different and better. Now the question is how to unite workers by challenging those divisions and the bigotry that comes with them.
This may seem simplistic, but I think that people must first talk with each other. They need to find out what they have in common that they’re concerned about. If everybody’s concerned about the price of groceries, can’t we do something about that together? If everybody is concerned about an AI data center being built in the community like they are in Albany, can’t we work on that together? Can’t we unite and fight to overcome the housing crisis? Can’t we unite to address the affordability crisis?
These are issues that impact everyone in the working class. Uniting around those can help break down the barriers and open space for people to overcome divisions. It can lead people to see each other as humans, go out to ballgames together, and socialize together.
There are so many divisions imposed by our system. Every time we break those down, we’re building the beloved community and the unity necessary for transforming our world. We have so many examples of such work, for example, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in the early twentieth century in the Deep South.
The system tried to do everything to divide those Black and white farmers and workers. Organizers did everything to unite them. Like them, we must resist all the ideology that is poured into our brains that says, “The enemy is here, the enemy is there, the unworthy are there, and the trash over here.” Those terrible ideas are poured into our brains, but they’re not inherent.
The most important thing is to figure out what are people concerned about and where they’re concerned about it. We must ask questions to figure that out. Is the issue in the workplace or is it in the schoolyard? Is it only in the workplace or is it in the clinic too? Where are people in struggle? Who could be in struggle? Where is it happening? How do we talk with them?
The socialist movement has gone through enormous ups and downs throughout its history. What do you see as crucial ingredients to building militant socialist politics for the next New Left?
The most important thing is to study history, learn from it, and keep on developing a clear analysis. Get rid of arrogance. You have to read the tradition of great socialist thinkers—all of them—from the well-known white ones to the less read but just as important Black and Brown radicals and those from Global South. That’s the only way to figure out how all the pieces of the system fit together. We need to know that in order to fight the system.
As far as struggles that point the way forward, I think the most important is the Palestine solidarity movement. It has had strong leadership of young people. It is radical, it is based on solidarity, and it is internationalist.
One thing I want to challenge is this idea that I’ve heard, particularly among young Black women activists, is this thing that rest is revolutionary. I don’t think it is. It’s just common sense. Of course, being able to rest is a departure from the intense grinding that our capitalist system requires of its workforce. We must take time to care for ourselves physically, mentally, and spiritually. But what do you do after that? For that, you need to have a strategy and a plan. That’s what we were trying to develop in the Combahee River Collective.
Look at its three authors, we’re all still here fifty years later. We know something about self-care and maintaining ourselves for the long haul. But what’s sustained us all is doing the work, the intellectual and the activist work. I find this focus on rest and self-care all a bit much, and sometimes I find it infuriating. I hope I don’t offend anyone. I just don’t have time for that kind of discussion, especially today when we’re facing down this regime.
I really started to think about this when I read about the new book, Cleanup on Aisle Five, about the horrible challenges of being a supermarket worker. It’s similar to Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic book, Nickel and Dimed. I’m fortunate that I didn’t have to work like that. I had some other kinds of choices. When I hear people talking about spa days and vacations, I think about supermarket workers. Everybody deserves such self-care. But too often the privileged forget that most people who live on this planet and in this country cannot do any of those things.
Back to talking about building the socialist movement. I think the key is to figure out how to unify all the struggles. We need to think about the connections between the issues we’re working on.
For example, I’ve never focused on environmental organizing. But in this organizing against this new data center, I realized that it is at the intersection of so many issues. Its construction will exacerbate the affordability crisis because of the increased electricity prices, damage the quality of working-class life in the community with its loud cooling system, and damage the environment by drying up ground water. So stopping it from being built is in the interests of workers, the community, and our environment. If we can see these kinds of connections, we can build solidarity and a more unified working-class movement.
We also need to grasp that change is not going to come from the system. But right now, we must fight for every reform. We can’t expect people to wait until after the revolution to come up with some immediate solutions that will help them address problems like food insecurity. That’s where mutual aid comes in and can play a big role in building solidarity and unity. But it can’t be an end in and of itself. I want people involved in say alternative agriculture to remember that that’s not accessible to everyone.
So through all our organizing we need to keep our eyes on the prize of a new society. We’re trying to build something that hasn’t existed previously. I want people to be nondoctrinaire, well-educated socialists committing their time on this earth to doing the work to fight for a new and better world. ×
Notes & References
- BDS refers to Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, the campaign to oppose Israeli apartheid.