ANGELA DAVIS, EVER THE REVOLUTIONARY

I heard Angela Davis recently, speaking at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Lecture, at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Ms. Davis’ speech and comments brought back many memories of the early movement during the Sixties. It also enflamed other ideas that perhaps had lain dormant within my mind.

Her words and presence brought back to mind my own time spent in Berkeley and San Francisco during the Sixties. During those times of political foment and resistance, Angela Davis was prominent in forming the rhetoric of the movement. As I listened to the speech, Ms. Davis’ presence and words, gave off an air of humility, however, about the movement’s composition of ‘all the people,’ not just those up front on the stage. For me, it was her inspired articulation (as one of the spokespersons of the Freedom Movement’s ideology) that helped me in a personal way to focus on what this shaking of the energies was really all about. She was eloquent in her revolutionary framing of the struggle that included this entire nation, whether they knew it or not.

As I listened to her thoughtful and philosophical enunciations, in my own being I honored her, because I realize that I stand on her shoulders, as well as the many, unnamed and ordinary people who took up the struggle at that time.

If the truth were told, we all stand on the shoulders of the Abolitionists who fought to end slavery, and the Abolitionists who fight to change the U.S. Prison/Industrial Complex. MLK, Jr. galvanized the Civil Rights Movement because his rhetoric and actions challenged the white-structural, institutional racism in the nation with our common desire for pragmatic justice. Whether it was for tenant’s rights in Chicago, the garbage collector’s strike in Memphis, or his vehement denunciation of the Viet Nam War his imposing posture against ALL injustice.

It was King, who said that if we find injustice in one place, then we find that it affects all of us—or as he said elsewhere, all humans are bound inextricably into the fabric of all. He was very blunt about the need to have a just healthcare system, and that perhaps this was one of the greatest injustices of all. The center of this fabric consists of the sacred dignity of each human on the planet.

Ms. Davis illustrated a key point to elucidate that the movement wasn’t about celebrity, or who was up front on stage. It was indeed all of us. It had to be all of us to get the nation’s attention and bring about change the way the movement did.

This reminded me, very affectionately, that I stand on the shoulders of my soul mate and mentor, Cherry Steinwender, also Co-Executive Director of The Center of the Healing of Racism, Houston, Texas. Cherry has taught me that my job as a human being is to internalize oneness, and the empowerment that emerges from speaking one’s truth from the source of self-trust and inner beauty.

When Cherry lost her five-year-old son in his battle with Leukemia (most likely sometime in the Fifties), she went to her Catholic Church, in the State of Louisiana, and asked the priest for a plot in the cemetery to bury her son. The priest told her that African Americans couldn’t be buried in the church’s cemetery. Sometimes the cost of death is too great—if you have to choose to give up your dignity.

After this incident, Cherry vowed never again to trust anyone who claimed to speak for God, or some Higher Power, if they mixed their communication into some kind of ‘half-right and half-wrong’ kind of doctrine. She told me that when she made this decision, she left feeling more empowered. The incident sparked a deep trust in her own intelligence—something she had known for a long time.

Later on, Cherry and friends would sit around a kitchen table and openly lay the issue of racism out for open discussion. Their group was diverse, and they found that they could take the risk to talk about a subject that most folks in this nation (most notably European Americans) just won’t talk about in some kind of productive way.

From this point of collective need, they became a community that went on to begin The Center for the Healing of Racism, founded in 1989; since that time individuals and groups, from places around the world, have been impacted in a very positive and healing way. Angela Davis made this point also. She emphasized that community built on trust and respect is the only thing that will keep a movement moving forward to achieve its goals. In her speech, she made sure to tell us that all of us there that night were a community as well. We were the movement.

© ChristopherBearBeam,M.A. 1/28/10