Activists From The United States

"When you hate, the only person that is suffering is you because most of the people you hate don’t know it and the rest don't care."

"Negroes in Mississippi are being “hood winked” and “cow licked” into believing that everything is well with his condition here in the state. State and national officials are engaging in an extensive brainwashing campaign to induce the Mississippi Negro to remain silent and complacent about the rights he is now being denied. Evidence of these brainwashing techniques is found in the every day attempt on the part of some jurist or politician who praises the “so called harmonious race relations,” that exist in the state, and at the same time deny Negroes, regardless to their educational qualification, the right to register and vote."

"Christian friends, we are in a righteous struggle. We are living in a great day, a momentous day, a glorious day, a day that will be forever inscribed in the annals of history and in the minds of men. Now, my friends, I have one or two requests to make and I feel that these requests should be the paramount objective of each person here today. Number one: let us vow to treat our fellow man as we would like him to treat us. Two, let us be in a spirit of cooperativeness."

"I was born in Decatur here in Mississippi, and when we were walking to school in the first grade white kids in their school buses would throw things at us and yell filthy things. This was a mild start. If you're a kid in Mississippi this is the elementary course."

"What then does the Negro want? He wants to get rid of racial segregation in Mississippi life . . . The Negro citizen wants to register and vote without special handicaps imposed on him alone . . . The Negro Mississippian wants more jobs above the menial level in stores where he spends his money."

"He believes that new industries that have come to Mississippi should employ him above the laboring category. He wants the public schools and colleges desegregated so that his children can receive the best education that Mississippi has to offer."

"Medgar showed us that even in the face of adversity, we must continue to fight on. Although he knew he was placing himself in harm's way, he stopped fighting for equality and equity."

"As men living in as highly a diversified and complex society as ours, it is our duty and responsibility to our fellow men and our children to tackle the problems that lie ahead with faith and courage. Faith that is spoken of in the Bible, which in paraphrase says “Only possess the faith of a small mustard seed and you will be able to move mountains and then the courage to withstand the greatest onslaught the enemy can muster, and you are bound to succeed.” No, it will not be easy, but neither does one find it altogether easy to be a Christian in this very sin sick world."

"Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway returning from an NAACP meeting in downtown Jackson. And then you go back there years later, and the blood is still on the driveway. They cannot wash it away."

"The Negro has been here in America since 1619, a total of 344 years. He is not going anywhere else; this country is his home. . . Let me appeal to the consciences of many silent, responsible citizens of the white community who know that a victory for democracy in Jackson will be a victory for democracy everywhere."

"Dyer D. Lum proposed the creation of "co-operative homes," and Voltairine de Cleyre later elaborated the idea: "I would destroy the individual 'home' with its waste of forces and have instead magnificent palaces, spacious grounds. . swimming rooms, bathrooms, everything on a large scale," yet with private rooms for every individual whenever he or she desired to be alone."

"Precisely as water flows to a level when obstructions are removed, just so will social relations flow to equitable conditions when restrictions are swept away. And precisely also as liberty comes in does the assertion of “rights” go out."

"Social intercourse has slowly evolved the Ideal that peace, happiness and security are best attained by equal freedom to each and all; consequently, I can lay no claim in equity to a privilege, for that which all alike may enjoy ceases to be privileged. The important deduction from social evolution is that as militancy has weakened and industrialism widened its boundaries, liberty has ever tended toward such equalization, Privilege finds sanction in equity as right, because it violates the ideal of social progress — equality of opportunities."

"Until my imprisonment I had believed that except for Albert Parsons, Dyer D. Lum, Voltairine de Cleyre, and a few others America was barren of idealists. Her men and women cared only for material acquisitions, I had thought. John Swinton's account of the liberty-loving people who had been and still were in every struggle against oppression changed my superficial judgment."

"The wisest government is that which but responds readiest to the demand to which its own establishment had given birth, and for this reason will yield only as forced by fear to give something rather than risk losing all."

"Established order, being an instituted fixity, excludes reform, and whoever advocates change by that very act becomes an enemy to it."

"Is not the whole long career of the proletariat but the “Martyrdom of Man” strewn with whitened bones, cemented with scalding tears welling up from broken hearts, and stained with the bleeding feet of countless millions?"

"Events are the true schoolmasters, and smarting under the White terror which yearly sacrifices its millions the Social Revolutionist does not hesitate to invoke the Red terror, knowing that here the words apply that “he who loseth his life shall save it.” But how? By words of rodomontade? By inviting others to do by simply preaching the gospel of discontent? No; but by deeds. The Social Revolutionist is not moved by revenge nor by mere impulse. When Alexander II was killed, when Cavendish and Burke were sent to judgment, when John Brown shot men he had never before met, the world understood the full significance of each act."

"To my mind, the very assumption of “natural rights” is at war with evolution."

"Full inclusion requires us to root out all the ways in which we have been tricked into collusion with the oppression of others, and all of us have. It requires us to move beyond our comfort zones. I once heard Bernice Reagon say that being in coalition meant working with people we didn't much like, and we might need to vomit over it for a while, but we had to do it anyway."

"We learn through doing. Bernice Johnson Reagon has said we're stumbling because we have to take the next step."

"There are a lot of young people that came out of SNCC, and not just came out of SNCC, but people who came down in to work in the Freedom Summer and spread out into the country — Mario Savio, right? — people in a lot of the different movements in the country. Bernice Reagon, who also came out of SNCC, and Sweet Honey in the Rock, that group of singers, all those were inspired by SNCC. And Bernice says the civil rights movement was the “borning movement,” right? It was — and SNCC was right at the heart of that borning movement."

"The mighty, mighty voice of Bernice Reagon."

"The concept of "home" has a complex and sometimes convoluted history within Third World feminism. In an oft-cited essay on coalition politics, for example, feminist activist and artist Bernice Johnson Reagon argues for the importance of not confusing home and coalition. According to Reagon, coalitions need to be understood as unsafe spaces, defined by the presence of strangers and characterized by the dictates of survival: "The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive." In the space of coalition, subjects feel "threatened to the core," as though they might "keel over and die." It is for these reasons that "you can't stay there all the time." In contrast to coalition, Reagon characterizes home as refuge-the space of sameness, a potentially nurturing place where you "act out community" and "decide who you really are." Yet even here, she acknowledges that such spaces of enforced homogeneity (what she characterizes as "the barred room") can become destructive." Read in light of Reagon, Moraga's "dream of a unified Third World feminist movement" reflects Moraga's misreading of feminists of color as signifying "home" rather than a coalition. Echoing Reagon's depiction of coalition as a form of survival, Moraga argues that this diverse group of women "are not so much a 'natural' affinity group as women who have come together out of necessity." Yet despite offering a more contentious definition of community, Reagon's essay underproblematizes the concept of "home" itself. Written for a workshop at the West Coast Women's Music Festival, her remarks were given in the context of a black feminist speaking about coalition to a group of mostly white women; given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Reagon characterizes coalition as the "monster" that "never gets enough" and "always wants more." This depiction highlights the burden of representation that feminists of color often feel doing coalition work in predominantly white environments. Yet Reagon's language of coalition sustains a dichotomy of community that leaves little room for the pleasures of difference. Instead, the encounter with the unfamiliar is something with which to make peace rather than from which to take satisfaction. In contrast to home-where there exists at least the possibility of nurturance-Reagon depicts coalition in strictly instrumentalist terms, as a burdensome and disagreeable necessity. While understandable, such a reading of home works to sustain myths of community that equate sameness with sustenance and solace. The strength of Reagon's analysis lies in her capacity to celebrate the necessity of an agonistic feminism that challenges the idea that women share a common experience simply by dint of being women. As she notes, "wherever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building."" Here, Reagon highlights a difficult reality: the work of democratic politics can be demanding and unpleasant. Encounters with heterogeneous others are often frustrating, exhausting, and fraught with misunderstanding. In its call to welcome such challenges, Reagon's analysis enriches contemporary democratic theory. But what would it mean to refuse Reagon's demand that we "not confuse" home and coalition? What if we complicate the very idea of "home"?"

"Slavery was a very violent system. And slavery did not just happen in the South; it happened to the nation. So, as a birthing nation, we are a very violent culture. And I think we are reaping some terrible, terrible fruits from what is integral to being American."

"I’m a historian and a radical, and I don’t see resurging something from the past to address contemporary issues. I think we really have to do something that is of the time we’re in to address what we’re facing. There is a major effort to resolve issues in this society by locking people up in jail. And it is absolutely expanding. So people are going into business, and states almost are going into business. It’s almost like — it reminds me, when I hear about a state like Texas renting itself out, I think about Kentucky and Virginia and Maryland breeding slaves. I mean, there’s a market now for locking people up. And there are states going into it. And there are corporations where people can buy stock into prison industries and prison-based industries. That means you have to build them. There’s a technology to it. And this is major. And I think the civil rights movement addressed an issue during its time. But I think we’re going to all be very challenged to get very serious about trying to find ways to respond in complex ways to what we’re seeing in our society."

"There is a need to understand that we are a culture created by a slave culture and that we still operate out of lessons learned and taught during a time when that system was intact. And so, many of the things that we learn, we learn there, the kind of women we learn how to be, the kind of men we learn how to be. If you can think of the batterers, the leading men of society beating people all the time and integrating it into their lives and into their personality across a 300-year period, you can’t tell me that’s not related to the violence we have to deal with. If you can — if I can tell you about the child abuse that a young child experiences who’s Black on a slave plantation, the battering that Black people experience, where you are whipped for anything, the sexual violence and sexual harassment, we’re talking about 300 years, formative culture in this country."

"We called ourselves, in those days — and I’m talking now about 1962, 1963 — sort of like a singing newspaper. We saw our responsibility as being very connected to making sure as many people as we could reach understood the complexity of organizing against racism in this country and that you were not always in a position of having a large march with lots of cameras present. Sometimes it was very tedious, mundane work, but no less dangerous. And so, we saw ourselves as really trying to keep an open window on the organizing activities going on in some of the most dangerous areas of the South."

"The African American culture is just a rich singing culture. When you take a culture like that and move it into a kind of crisis, a trauma state, which is what you would have to say happened with the civil rights movement activity, then you actually get an expansion and an empowerment and explosion of the singing, because the singing matches the increased energy coming out of the community."

"You actually don’t have to lie about what kind of country it is, that there’s a maturity that’s implied in being able to enter discussions and studies about your history, that we need to see more of, especially in terms of our leaders, who seem very afraid to enter a period where we actually talk about these things."

"It’s a class notion that women should be in the home with children. It is a very narrow strata of females who have been able to be married, have children and be home. Most women in the world are forced to work outside of the home, especially if they have children, because there isn’t any other chance for survival."

"If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition."

"Bernice Johnson Reagon, writing what she called a cultural autobiography, recalled her childhood in the South in these terms: “My father would work from sunup to sundown/and would come home exhausted/eat, and go to bed/My mother would work from sunup to sundown/would come home/and work from sundown to sunup/to work from sunup to sundown again/The bottom line/When a dress had to be made for a play/if my father did not have the money to buy the material that was it/For mama that was just the beginning/She then had to figure out a way to get the cloth for the dress and/stay up all night making it/for this child to be in this play/It's called/making a way out of no way"

"It is very difficult to be born female in this country and not be — not be fearful. One of the first lessons you get is that it’s a culture that preys on girls and teenagers and women. And so you go through your life with this little trail of fear as a girl and as a woman in this culture. And so, the Joan Little case was important to me because I thought, “Aha, they die!” — rapists, you know. I thought it was an interesting idea to add to this culture of fear I was living with. I owe Joan Little a lot."

"The economic impacts of slavery abolition in the mid-nineteenth century have some striking parallels with the impacts of radical emission reduction, as several historians and commentators have observed. Journalist and broadcaster Chris Hayes, in an award-winning 2014 essay titled "The New Abolitionism," pointed out "the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth" and concluded that "it is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.""

"I just refuse to accept that this -- this thing: Like, January 6th if Democrats win, fireside chat if Republicans win -- is the way things just are gonna work now. I don't accept the idea that there's one set of rules for him and another for everyone else. We can't accept a status quo in our elections where, if one side wins, they have to scratch and claw to withstand the lies and the legal challenges and the violent mobs. And if the other side is successful, and they're invited to measure the drapes and gather around the fireplace. I mean, yes, the nature of preserving democracy and institutions and norms is that you uphold them, even for people like Donald Trump who have tried to tear them down, I get that. But I'm just saying that this thing, this, is not a sustainable equilibrium. One side upholds liberal democratic norms, the other subverts and tries to destroy them. It's gonna break, one way or the other. I don't know how it ends up or who wins, but that central struggle didn't dissolve because the insurrectionist won more votes this time."

"Ed Schultz, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes provided us with the very fair coverage we received on MSNBC."

"I absolutely would not be doing this if it weren't for her"

"in one important way these young people are very much like the abolitionists of old: they have a healthy disrespect for respectability; they are not ashamed of being agitators and trouble-makers; they see it as the essence of democracy. In defense of William Lloyd Garrison, against the accusation that he was too harsh, a friend replied that the nation was in a sleep so deep "nothing but a rude and almost ruffian-like shake could rouse her." The same deliberate harshness lies behind the activities of James Forman, John Lewis, Bob Moses (activist), and other leaders of SNCC."

"He didn't seek out dramatic confrontations like the Freedom Riders and the sit-ins, but he did inspire a broad range of grassroots leadership. Throughout his life, Bob Moses bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice. He was a strategist at the core of the voting rights movement and beyond. He was a giant. May his light continue to guide us as we face another wave of Jim Crow laws."

"Moses was very sensitive to the notion that people were dying by following his example. And that led to the point where after Freedom Summer, he dropped out of the movement. I think his influence is almost on par with Martin Luther King, and yet he's almost totally unknown. He spoke quietly, he didn't give big sermons like Martin Luther King,""

"Along with the economic exploitation that the whole state of Mississippi inflicts upon the Negro, there was the ever-present problem of physical violence. As we rode along the dusty roads of the Delta country, our companions cited unbelievable cases of police brutality and incidents of Negroes being brutally murdered by white mobs. In spite of this, there was a ray of hope. This ray of hope was seen in the new determination of the Negroes themselves to be free. Under the leadership of Bob Moses, a team of more than a thousand Northern white students and local Negro citizens had instituted a program of voter registration and political action that was one of the most creative attempts I had seen to radically change the oppressive life of the Negro in that entire state and possibly the entire nation. The Negroes in Mississippi had begun to learn that change would come in that lawless, brutal police state only as Negroes reformed the political structure of the area. They had begun this reform in 1964 through the Freedom Democratic Party. The enormity of the task was inescapable. We would have had to put the field staffs of SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and a few other agencies to work in the Delta alone. However, no matter how big and difficult a task it was, we began. We encouraged our people in Mississippi to rise up by the hundreds and thousands and demand their freedom-now!"

"Judge Clayton looks over, and he wants to know why are we taking illiterates down to register to vote. And so, in a nutshell, our answer is, “Well, the country can’t have its cake and eat it too. It can’t have denied a whole people access to literacy through its political arrangements and then turn around and say, ‘Well, you can’t access politics because you’re illiterate.’” And we won that struggle. We won it in the courts. And it was Judge Wisdom’s decision in the case of U.S. v. Louisiana, where he said, well, we can’t allow the State of Louisiana to have authority over the actual qualifications of voting."

"In our country, I think we run sharecropper education. That is, an education that you can trace, when the judge asked me that question, because in the Delta of Mississippi, sharecroppers were assigned to do a certain kind of work, and so the idea was you only needed a certain kind of education. So, if we carry that forward into the Information Age, then we will have serfs in our cities, just like we had serfs in the Delta of Mississippi in the Industrial Era. And this is the huge challenge facing our country. I think what we need is a movement for our constitutional rights. We need a constitutional amendment, something which simply says every child in the country is a child of the country and is entitled to a quality public school education."

"A SNCC leader who shunned the spotlight, as Ella Baker did, Moses would provide a model of radical activism tempered by a loving spirit that would inspire and sustain those who worked with him."

"In his Harlem apartment in New York, a young Negro teacher of mathematics named Bob Moses saw a photo in the newspapers of the Greensboro sit-inners. "The students in that picture had a certain look on their faces, sort of sullen, angry, determined. Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life.""

"We struggled with it in our generation. What were we willing to do to force the country to live up to its ideals, right? There’s this big gap. Talk about gaps. The big gap is between the ideals the country has and the practices it condones. But so, we had to do that in the ’60s, and this generation is going to have to do the same."

"In Mississippi, in the '60s, what we worked was the demand side of the problem, right? You weren't going to get this country to change the balance of power between the federal government and the states, without the demand from actual citizens saying, “Look, you’ve got to treat us as citizens of the country,” right? So, what we did was get the sharecroppers, by the hundreds, to demand their rights. Now, what every reporter came up to me and said was, “Well, Bob, isn’t the problem your people are apathetic? Isn’t that the problem?” Right? And so, I had to wrestle with that question. But it became clear to me that our problem was: How do we tap into the energy of the sharecroppers and get them to make the demand, because as soon as they make the demand, that question disintegrates, right? It’s no longer something that people — if the sharecroppers are standing out there by the hundreds and the thousands demanding the right to vote, then where’s the apathy? So, we have a similar problem today with the kids. I mean, what is said is, “Well, the kids are dysfunctional. They don’t have fathers who are really…” So, as soon as you get the kids by the hundreds and the thousands themselves demanding what everyone says they don’t want — right? — then that problem disappears. That’s not the problem, right?"

"What happened, I think, was Ella Baker was really sort of the godmother for SNCC. I met Ella in the summer of 1960. And in the spring of 1960, she had taken the initiative to get the student sit-in energy at Shaw, her alma mater, and held off on the big civil rights leaders, to say, “Look, the kids ought to have the opportunity to manage their own insurgency,” right? And so, SNCC was the encapsulation of the sit-in movement, the energy of the sit-in movement, right? And so, that — and SNCC took that energy into the Freedom Rides, because it was the SNCC energy which said to the president of the United States and the attorney general, “It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, that, you know, there’s some danger here. Our lives are in danger, but we’ve decided that, with our lives, this is what we want to do.” Right? And so, SNCC, really, and those students became the example for students all over the country — right? — the idea that students should draw a line in the sand and say, “Look, that’s it. That’s enough. We don’t want to live in this country unless we can change it.”"

"if you think about the civil rights movement, what we were able to do was get Jim Crow out of three very distinct arenas in the country: First, there was public accommodations; second, there was voting rights and access to the political structures of the country; and third, and not well known, access to the national party structure itself — that is, to the Democratic Party. And that was Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 convention of the Democratic Party. And remember, Kennedy had been assassinated. Johnson had been moved into the presidency, but he hadn’t been nominated yet, right? And so, we won those struggles, but what we didn’t win was getting Jim Crow out of education, right? And that was actually the subtext of the right to vote."