A Quick Word to Millennial (and Younger) Protesters and Activists

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

The photo below is of a creation titled “The World is Watching.” The artist is not known. It is located at the Library of Congress which has a long history of collecting Protest Art and Protest Photography. Visually stunning and a reminder that protests and activism change with the technology of the times.

I was born during the last years of what was called the Baby Boom. As a Baby Boomer, I did not grow up from Childhood to Early adulthood with a Personal Computer, the Internet, and definitely not Social Media or a cellphone with a camera.

I learned of protest marches and various forms of activism via word-of-mouth, letters, signs on school and church bulletin boards, and via Black-owned newspapers. Sometimes these protests were featured on the 6 O’Clock News.

Fast forward to the late 20th and early 21st centuries and you have young adults who grew up with everything we Baby Boomers grew up without. Millennials get messages out there in cyberspace in a matter of seconds. They can rally thousands (even millions) of people with brief blurbs and blogs in a matter of a couple of days and occasionally a couple of minutes. There are, however, a few drawbacks.

In addition to creating mediums that make it seem as if a few “likes” on social media has resolved the problem, it also exposes certain tactics that should not be seen by everyone. Social Media exposes protest tactics to our enemies as much as it exposes those tactics to our friends. So let me share the following history. Ignore it; modify it; and/or adapt this in any way you see fit.

The Black American Civil Rights Movement typically had a 3-pronged approach.

Back in the day, you had a set of individuals who could not physically participate in protest marches because they were the folks who were designated to bail you out of jail if you were arrested. The folks who were part of the Black community who had a degree of affluence and wealth were often in this position. Although many of them were out there in the streets protesting.
Another group was the observers. These were individuals who lined routes of marches who watched and recorded what they saw. Sometimes they would stand on sidewalks and pretend to be window shoppers or they would sit near the windows inside places of business so that they could see what was going on outside in order to report what they saw. There were no cellphones with cameras in them back then. Their hardest role was to not intervene when they saw any physical violence. They had to record what they saw.
Finally, there were the Black protesters themselves who were trained in non-violent resistance in order to highlight the sheer brutality of their oppressors. They were trained to endure and not fight back.

Now, I am not at all advocating for any of you to quietly endure any form of brutality and violence as you fight against this onslaught of abuse from the administration of Felon 47. What I am suggesting is that you create a 3 or even 4 or 5-pronged approach to how you protest and advocate for the causes you believe in.

Right now, activism is highly tied to how much press and social media presence one can generate. That’s not a bad strategy, but the limitations of that approach is that almost anyone can see it. You win most against enemies when enemies do not know EXACTLY what is coming at them all the time. And that is not my original idea. It actually comes from Sun Tzu, a Chinese General and Strategist born around 544 B.C.E. Some ideas stand the test of time. Study those ideas. Onward!

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

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The Hungry Constituents

Posted on March 15, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

If you blow up the photo below you will see a letter written to me from the late Congressman John Lewis from 2008. If you look in the lower right corner of this photo you will see a photo insert of a red file folder about an inch thick. These are all the letters I have received from my representatives over about 4 decades. This was when you received their responses via snail mail.

Letter from Congressman John Lewis and File folder of letters

These days, your representatives respond to you by email. I urge you to call them, contact them, and then print their email responses.

I miss my phone and letter debates with the late John Lewis. I still remember one of our debates that descended into a full fledged argument in a grocery store parking lot in our town of Atlanta. That’s the beauty of being in Atlanta. Many of your elected officials live and shop where you do. So, you can give them your opinion while you check out your groceries.

I bring this scenario up because there is something very different when you receive a physical letter as opposed to an email. The letter has a real signature. Each one of these letters are a personal piece of history. Politics today is quite impersonal—and it is messing everyone up.

We are now confronted with politics as only spectacle—the pithy quote on social media, the doctored video that creates a sense of urgency when there is no need for urgency, or the edited video that creates a fictional persona instead of showing the real person behind the title.

I’m glad Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are hitting the road and going on tour to talk to people all across the United States to find out what real people are thinking.

Communication from a distance is fine. Technology has made it possible for us to share an idea with thousands of strangers. Yet…

No matter how easy posting on social media, text messaging and sending emails are, there is no replacement for speaking to someone face-to-face or listening to a live voice or reading a real letter with a real signature. That personal touch is sorely lacking in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, and it is destroying democracy with almost the same degree of swiftness as Felon 47’s cruel policies.

It is one thing to put your finger up in the wind and assume what you need to do to be re-elected. It is quite another to look a constituent in the eye and answer a tough question or admit you don’t have the answers. Democratic voters are starving for that attention; and I pray our elected officials figure this out before it is too late.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

What Democrats Miss All the Time

Posted on March 7, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I listened to several pundits who criticized Texas Representative Al Green’s outburst at Felon 47’s State of the Union address. They can argue all day long that Green’s behavior went against decorum. They can talk all day long about his behavior being a distraction from more pressing issues. Yet, Democrats miss one salient point which means they are not paying attention to their constituents.

Rep. Al Green did one thing that Democrats don’t seem to grasp—He took the spotlight off of Felon 47. Felon 47 and Republicans dominate news cycles and stick to a script that the Democrats have yet to master or counter.

All damned day long my cellphone is inundated with text messages containing Democratic surveys that all end with them begging for money. Who in their right mind is going to donate to a party that doesn’t seem to have too many members with spines? And who is going to donate money to a party that worries about decorum in the House chamber more than they worry about Americans losing their jobs, and struggling to pay for groceries?

What Representative Green did was shake up the room to the point where the press had no choice but to listen to what Green had to say. Few Democrats, save Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, can grab a headline. And it is imperative that Democrats shift the narrative.

So here’s a suggestion. Call your representatives and tell them point blank that you cannot donate anything for two reasons: the cost of living has skyrocketed and your political party is failing the people it is supposed to represent.

Money talks; and bull shit walks.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

Buzz About Boycotts

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️ Leslye Joy Allen

I’m delighted that folks have decided not to shop on February 28th as an act of solidarity to demonstrate to businesses what our buying power means. It’s a great beginning, but to have real impact boycotts need to last for months or years.

Let me share the following. The image on the left is the now boarded up storefront of what was Buzz Coffee and Winehouse in my hometown Atlanta. The image on the right is from a few years ago. It’s myself and my brother-from-another-mother, actor, writer, poet, cultural curator, and James Baldwin expert Charles Reese. We took this photo sitting at Buzz’s tables on the sidewalk drinking hot coffee out of big mugs.

Buzz was a neighborhood hangout where you might get to view a photo or art exhibit. You might stop by for a breakfast sandwich or piece of pastry. You ran into people you knew and you met people you didn’t know but soon found out the trip was worth it in order to meet them.

Buzz closed a few years ago because the money-grubbing c*nt that owned this little strip of property where Buzz was located raised the rent until the owner of Buzz could no longer afford to stay open. The owner has vowed to reopen somewhere, but so far I haven’t seen any signs of a new location.

Now, there’s a Starbucks about a mile down the street further southwest. I have nothing against Starbucks or people who enjoy Starbucks coffee. Yet, I won’t be going there to get a cup of coffee, just like I won’t be buying Folgers that supports Project 2025.

I only suggest this. When you’re keeping your money in your pocket, take a good hard look at the small businesses in your neighborhood and ask yourself how you can help them? Ask yourself what products can you do without permanently? Then just do it.

Race and Reproductive Rights

Posted on February 23, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I remember a conversation with my late cousin Billie Allen, who was an actor, dancer and stage director. She was here in Atlanta in 2003 directing her close friend, actor Ruby Dee in “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” a play written by Bridgette Wimberly.

The play was about a woman who performed back room abortions for young women who were in serious trouble. The protagonist named “Old Woman” performed abortions out of mercy and out of a sense that those pregnant women were having their futures derailed by unplanned pregnancies.

Billie mailed me a copy of the play before it came to Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, and not long after it had a successful off-Broadway premiere at New York’s Women’s Project Theater in 2001. Turning me into her personal dramaturge again, she and I discussed the hot topic of abortion. Then she shared with me something I did not know.

She told me that back in the 1940s and 1950s, when a Hollywood actress became pregnant and had too many professional and contractual obligations to a studio, she typically went to Puerto Rico to have an abortion.

I soon learned that in 1937, the Puerto Rican legislature made abortion and contraception legal. It also made sterilization legal. That’s the kicker—sterilization. An island with a population of people, many of who have Indian, African, and Spanish ancestry were often seen as expendable.

Puerto Rico’s legislature voted with all of the eugenicist and racist taint that emanated from the United States’ highly racist sterilization programs that were completely in line with the eugenics (racial cleansing) going on in Nazi Germany.

I mentioned to Billie that I had seen a short documentary called “La Operación,” by Ana María García back in the early 1980s. It was a documentary about how people involved with “population control” arrived in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 1960s and sterilized about a third of the island’s women who were of childbearing age.

While there were certainly Puerto Rican women who no longer wanted to have more children, many women were sterilized without knowing exactly what was being done to them.

Puerto Rico was the location of where the first large scale trials of birth control pills took place before “the pill” debuted in 1960 in the United States. Various pills were first tested on a tiny group of women in Boston. Yet, the largest group of clinical guinea pigs were Puerto Rican women; other women of color in the Western hemisphere soon followed.

In 1933 Margaret Sanger, long heralded as a leader in the birth control movement, wrote in Birth Control Review that “Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need …We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.” People of color were the bad stock.

In 1939 in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, one of the architects of the United States’ eugenics movement (and heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune), Sanger wrote that they should use Black male ministers to appeal to Black women to get them to agree to be sterilized. She sought to use Black women’s typical deference to Black clergy to accomplish her mission.

By 1955 biologist Gregory Pincus visited Puerto Rico and found it the best location to test birth control pills. After all, the island had no laws preventing contraception. Pincus and his partner John Rock, a gynecologist, promoted their work as poverty-prevention by making it possible for poor Puerto Rican women to have fewer babies.

And here we cisgender women are right now in 2025. We all worry about losing the right to make decisions about our own bodies; and we should. Yet, early birth control and abortion initiatives were never about women having the right to make their own reproductive choices.

The primary objective was to slow or stop the biological reproduction of any woman who did not belong to an accepted class or status of women classifiable as “white.”

Without fully understanding the racist origins of the state’s reproductive control over women, you will miss its original intent. Reproductive procedures, no matter how necessary they are, remain a political football; and Puerto Rican women, and other women of color were its first sacrifices.

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks via my CashApp.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

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Race and Reproductive Rights