Freedom Is Never Free: It's Our Turn

In the last few days I have been so damn tired and discouraged and overwhelmed with sadness. I know I'm not alone. There was no justice for Trayvon, and there's not likely to be any. In the struggles for racial justice and reproductive rights, it feels like we're sliding backwards—and we are. A bit. Because freedom is never free, it's never safe, it's always under threat. If we are less than vigilant, our precious freedoms are eroded.

The events of the last few weeks drive home the reality that our freedoms are under threat. But this is nothing new. They are always under threat.

Many lives were utterly transformed by the civil rights and women's movements of the twentieth century. The work of those lovers of justice, their sacrifices, were not in vain. They accomplished so much. The recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act, the verdict in the Zimmerman trial, the NSA spying on Americans, the erosion of reproductive rights in states all over the country—none of these diminish the accomplishments of the brave freedom fighters who went before us.

Some of the best gave up their lives, went to prison, suffered horribly. Their sacrifices and dedication were not for naught. Many of us experience and remember the transformative power of those sacrifices. We have read and heard about them, studied and sung about them. We have ridden on the waves of those sacrifices to experience previously unimaginable freedoms.

Now those freedoms have been not only imagined but lived. We have lived them and tasted them and breathed them in, made them a part of the very fabric of our being. But we have also taken them for granted. We have fallen prey to wishful thinking that those wars were fought and won once and for all, that those battles are behind us, that those freedoms are secure. Sometimes we even forget the high price that was paid for them.

We naively thought that because we ourselves had been transformed by those freedoms, so too had the rest of the country. We failed to recognize the power and determination of the untransformed, the unconverted, the recalcitrant, the small-minded and mean-spirited. We failed to recognize that although progress has been made, our lives are still permeated by systemic injustice—it poisons and plagues our every breath, every step. No one is free of it.

It's time for us to step up and build on and strengthen the progress made by the freedom fighters who came before us. Although it may seem like a heavy burden, although we may have had other plans for our lives that didn't involve struggle and sacrifice, and although it may seem that the obstacles before us are insurmountable, in actuality, this work is a privilege. It's a high and sacred calling. It is the very stuff of life to build communities and networks of activists. We march arm-in-arm with all who have fought for justice throughout history and with all who fight for justice today all over the world. Not only are we not alone, we are in mighty, illustrious company.

For much of my adult life, I have felt wistful that I missed the glory days of the civil rights movement. I would have given just about anything to march with the throng to Montgomery and sing with the Freedom Singers. Silly me. I didn't miss my chance. My voice, my work, my presence are needed. Now. Not only is it not too late, but now is exactly the right time.

It will never be too late to walk in the footsteps of Harry T. Moore, Rosa Parks, Dr. King, Margaret Sanger, Mahatma Gandhi, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Nelson Mandela, and Susan B. Anthony. We still have so much to learn from them. It will never be too late to follow their example, to add our voices to theirs and our sacrifice to theirs. Not only is it not too late, but now is the time. It's our turn. The baton has been passed, and we must not fail to take hold of it. They are counting us, that mighty company, to continue their work and pay the price for freedom. Because God knows it's never free.

Freedom Never Dies: Songs for Days of Grief

Since I heard the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial Saturday night, two Sweet Honey in the Rock songs have been going through my head over and over again. One is "Ella's Song," by Bernice Johnson Reagon. It echoes the words of civil rights activist Ella Baker, who said this in 1964:

Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's son. We who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.

Saturday's verdict is a body blow to every mother, every parent, everyone who ever held a child in her arms. Some were surprised by it, but many were not. The unsurprised are the ones who confront racial hostility every day, who send their black children out into the world and every day fear the worst.

We failed Trayvon, just as we failed Emmett and so many, many others. On Friday I had dinner with a precious three-year-old black boy and his family. I pray to God we don't fail him too. I fear for him, and I grieve that he must make his way through the racial morass of fear and ignorance that continues to plague us.

The other song I can't get out of my head this week is the "Ballad of Harry Moore," based on a poem written by Langston Hughes. Like Trayvon Martin, Harry Moore lost his life because of Florida's—and the U.S.'s—entrenched racism.

From Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns:

May we never forget the history of Sanford, Florida. How could so much happen in one place? It was in Sanford that Harry T. Moore, pictured here, the NAACP's lone man in Florida and the first casualty of the modern civil rights movement, took his last breath after his home was firebombed in 1951.

Moore, a teacher by training, risked his life in the 1930s and '40s, long before Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks came on the scene. He investigated lynchings, protested segregated schools and taught black people how to vote in a state where the NAACP was a banned organization, where, according to his biographer, "no restaurant would serve him, no motel would house him, and some gas stations wouldn't let him fill his tank, empty his bladder or even use the phone."

On Christmas night, 1951, a bomb exploded under Moore's bed at his home in Mims, Fla. It was his and his wife's 25th wedding anniversary. The closest hospital was 35 miles away—in Sanford. There was a delay in getting the couple there. Then there was a delay in getting a black doctor to attend to them. They both died in Sanford. No one spent a day in jail for their murders.

One of Moore's recruits was George Starling, a citrus picker who led strikes in the groves for better working conditions; the work was dangerous and the pay was nickels for a day's labor. It was in Sanford that Starling had a final standoff with a grove owner that set in motion plans to lynch him. He fled to New York for his life.

Decades later, it was in Sanford that 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home in the rain, while being followed by George Zimmerman. Harry T. Moore and George Starling would have been deeply saddened by the Zimmerman verdict, but not surprised. The scenario, to them, would be all too familiar. History is with us always. May we learn and gather strength from it and be inspired by the courage of men like Harry T. Moore. May their sacrifices not have been in vain.

Amen. And amen. Again I say, amen!

My Own Highlander Folk School

I spent much of my day today researching nonviolent resistance (when, of course, I needed to be working on my current copyediting project). Alas, this was triggered by a post that appeared in my Facebook newsfeed about a recent issue of Sojourners magazine devoted to the subject of nonviolent resistance. I was especially intrigued by Jeannie Choi's interview with civil rights leader Bernard Lafayette. Lafayette describes the training in nonviolent resistance he received when he first became involved with the civil rights movement.

John Lewis [now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives] and I were good friends, and he was the one who persuaded me to come to those workshops. I was a little reluctant because I didn't have time; I was a student and had a couple jobs on campus and a job downtown during the lunch hour washing dishes. But through the training, I learned to see the world through another person's eyes. That was an important step in my personal development.

What methods were used to train you in nonviolence?

Myles Horton, who was in charge of the Highlander Folk School at the time, would always ask provocative questions that got us to think and analyze. At one point, he started making some racist comments like, Why do you black people want to be eating with whites? Don't you enjoy being by yourself? I started challenging him and arguing! Now I laugh at how I responded to that. But I learned so much from that experience. The entire training program was to get people to think about how to put yourself in another person’s position and see the world through their eyes. That was so helpful for me in being able to embrace nonviolence.

We practiced "loving, not judging" your opponent, but thinking about the fact that there was a reason your opponent behaves the way they do. It's important to understand that if you want to bring about change. We learned that the idea is not just to get rights, but to behave in such a way that we would win our opponents over. That was the difference between simply demanding your rights and the goals of the civil rights movement: We were concerned about others.

I want to go to that school. I want lessons in how to be an effective, persuasive change agent. Because it certainly does seem that there's a lot of increasingly powerful evil that needs to be resisted these days, and I want to do my best to resist it in ways that are effective and strategic.

Another thing that's driving me is that lately I feel overwhelmed by all that's going on in the world. "I don't even recognize the world I'm living in" runs through my mind on a regular basis. The assault on the workers and the middle class, the scapegoating of immigrants, racial profiling, the ever-widening chasm between the extremely rich and everyone else. My reaction to feeling overwhelmed is to read, because I can't shake the idea that the better I understand something, the better I can cope with it. And there sure is a lot to cope with and understand these days.

Another thing rattling around in my head a lot lately is a theory that I've read recently that we're still fighting the Civil War. That idea is spurring me to learn what I can about the history of the Civil War and race relations in the United States. I found a ton of stuff that I could download onto my Kindle for free: Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Souls of Black Folk, Up From Slavery, to name only a few. Maybe I've enrolled myself in my very own personal Highlander Folk School.