I remember when master filmmaker Ava DuVernay started AFFRM which stood for African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement. Later she modified it and renamed it ARRAY which has gone on to release one masterpiece independent film after another by Black women, Women of Color, white Women filmmakers and other Black filmmakers.
Goddess knows that Ava’s television series Queen Sugar remains my all time favorite television series of all time, right up there with POSE. Her film ORIGIN completely shattered every boundary of how a film infused with activism and history could be made and change minds. If you haven’t seen that film, I really don’t consider you a member of the Left if you haven’t done so. If you watch it, you will not be the same. You will never think the same; and every assumption you ever had, you will rethink it.
(Ava DuVernay here with Dr. Suraj Yengde who portrayed himself in the film ORIGIN. The film received a 9-minute standing ovation at the Vienna Film Festival in 2023.)
There was one thing Ava did when Queen Sugar hit the airwaves. She decided that only women, and particularly Black and other women of color, would direct the show. She gave over 40 women directors their television directorial debuts because, she reasoned, if she did not do it they would never be given the chance.
The irony is that DuVernay’s production of Queen Sugar earned recognition as one of the most ethnically and racially diverse crews in television history. Ain’t that something?
So, here’s something to think about. Ava DuVernay has some real badass men around her. Yet, ARRAY was and still is staffed primarily with women; and this company has run like a top since its inception.
So, here’s something else to ponder. Since Felon 47 is hellbent on controlling women, eliminating the histories of Black people and other POC from the record, and granting companies the right to not give a good Got-damned whether any of us will be hired for any job, isn’t it just as plausible for us to not hire or phuck with any of them?
I mean, if I am a Black woman running a successful business and I don’t want to be bothered with sexism or racism, then I can simply not hire any man of any color and not hire any white person of any gender. And what I will be doing will be perfectly legal under the administration of this president. Marinate on that for a moment.
The other day I told a friend about the year I got a chance to watch a Brown Thrasher build a nest in a tall shrub near my carport. I watched her pick up pine needles and leaves, and craft them together until a nest was in place.
I watched her sit on her eggs. Then later still, I heard the sound of chicks; and finally I saw her nudge them out of the nest. Her babies were gone. She left the nest as well. That nest stayed intact, however, for several years.
Then I remember when the late Dr. Sadye Young told me about her father who built whole houses without any floor plans. Although she was then a retired college professor, Dr. Young knew her way around a house. She had learned certain aspects of building because when she was a child, she often accompanied her father when he was building a home. My eyes brightened because my late maternal Uncle Frank could do the same thing.
Both of these men built foundations, installed plumbing, wiring, and etcetera without any floor plans. Neither of these men had college degrees. Both had been apprentices of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. But neither of them set foot in a college classroom and majored in architectural engineering. Yet, the homes they built stood the test of time.
Dr. Young’s father and my uncle had something in common with each other and with that Brown Thrasher. They built homes from scratch. They relied on their observations, practice, and their skills, not on architectural drawings. That Brown Thrasher relied on her instincts.
The current state of affairs in this country is going to require all of us to go back to some basics that many of us have lost. We all have instincts, yet we no longer use them. My late maternal grandmother (born in 1886) could predict when it was going to snow simply by observing whole flocks of birds gathering.
We now rely quite heavily on gadgets and technology and self-appointed pundits to tell us everything. But real knowledge comes from reading, research, study, practice, listening, and observation. It is only when we do all of the above that we can trust our gut instincts again.
As Felon 47 attempts to destroy one institution after another, we better ready ourselves to rebuild from his wreckage. Depending on how bad the damage is, we need to prepare to rebuild from scratch which is made more difficult by a population accustomed to having everything done with the press of a button. It is not going to work like that this time.
This is not a full book review. I don’t have the strength to do that right now. Yet, when you are a historian there are certain books that stay with you because they are so provocative. One of them is “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher R. Browning.
People often forget that the Holocaust in Nazi Germany didn’t just extinguish millions of Jews, but it also exterminated Afro-Germans, Gypsies, LGBTQIA, and people with disabilities. Anything or anyone that was viewed as defective was subject to be put to death. But that’s not exactly what I want to write about here.
The title of this book says it all. This battalion was charged with the duty of marching groups of Jews out to a ditch, having them lay in that ditch; then the battalion would shoot them to death.
The first time they carried out this heinous order, most of the men balked at having to carry out such an awful task. Several men vomited at the sight of the murders; others ran and went AWOL. Yet, most of the men stayed behind and followed their orders.
By the time I got to the end of this book, I was mortified. That same battalion that initially balked at killing Jews that were laid in a ditch now carried out the orders with precision and without blinking. They became professional killers doing a job, not men who once had some empathy, sympathy, and consciences.
We prefer to believe that most people cannot be manipulated and threatened in order to convert them into monsters under the appropriate circumstances. “Ordinary Men“ showed me that it was relatively easy to find and nurture the dark side of human beings.
Those of us who are fighting as hard as we can against the excesses and abuse of Felon 47 need to remember one thing—Felon 47 and the Muskrat are only TWO men. They cannot do what they are doing without willing accomplices.
Stay the course my Fellow Resisters. But watch the people around you and watch your back; and NEVER normalize or explain away bad behavior even when it’s yours.
“Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking.” — Kimberlé Crenshaw
Recently, I responded to a question about the factors that stymied women’s quest for suffrage during the mid-to-late 19th century. I brought up the pragmatism and egalitarianism of suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone whose legacy remains largely overlooked. And therein lies the problem.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have rightfully earned their place in Women’s history. They battled for the vote in ways almost unimaginable. Yet, they both held racist and classist views. Now before you start yelling about how both of them worked in the abolitionist movement, spare me. You can be anti-slavery and still not think the slave is your social or political equal. The inability to shake off one’s sense of entitlement has extreme consequences for everyone.
When lawmakers decided to include Black men as voters in the 15th Amendment without including the franchise for white women, both Stanton and Anthony were rightfully livid, but livid to the point where they then fought against the passage of the 15th Amendment altogether. It passed, however, in 1869 and was ratified in 1870.
Stanton wrote that it was unconscionable and dangerous to give the vote to Black, Chinese or Irish men because they were inferior. Anyone that did not fit a strict Anglo-Saxon and native-born status was considered inferior. Additionally, neither Stanton nor Anthony had thought about Black women voting at all.
Stone broke with Anthony and Stanton over their racism. Orator, writer, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass cut his ties to Anthony and Stanton as well. The tragedy was that Douglass had attended the Women’s Conference at Seneca Falls in 1848 and had been a huge and early advocate for women’s rights. Moreover, it was Lucy Stone’s brilliant oratory that had inspired Susan B. Anthony to join the suffrage movement.
Stone read the political winds correctly. She formed the American Woman Suffrage Association which concentrated on gaining women the right to vote on a state-by-state basis. She knew that Congress was not going to grant the franchise to everyone.
Stone believed that the enfranchisement of Black men was progress. Although she was disappointed that the 15th Amendment did not include women’s suffrage, she did not believe that denying the franchise to others would help women in the long run.
Black men, rather than white women, were granted the right to vote first for a variety of reasons. As a historian, I know that the Republican Party in the 1860s was the party of Lincoln (not the sh*t show it is now) that freed Black American slaves. They controlled both the House and the Senate in 1867 to 1869. They knew that recently freed and enfranchised Black men would inevitably vote Republican and increase the party’s political dominance.
Granting the franchise to white women would have mixed political results as many white women still believed in the lost cause of the South in spite of its loss during the Civil War. They would have voted Democrat which was then the favored party of the former slave-holding South.
Some of Stone’s ideas were tied to her upbringing. She came from a hardworking farming family in Massachusetts. Both of her parents were abolitionists. While quite young, she, along with Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelly Foster helped William Lloyd Garrison establish the American Anti-slavery Society which was founded in 1833.
All of her brothers attended college. Yet, Stone had to postpone her education. She taught school for several years and was able to scrape up enough money to attend Oberlin College, the first college in the nation to accept Black people and women. When she graduated in 1847, she became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree.
Stone had planned to remain a single woman because she feared losing her independence to a husband. She finally yielded to Henry Browne Blackwell’s persistence. Blackwell was also an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Blackwell would learn years later that Stone finally decided to marry him after he met and aided a young slave with her owners while traveling on a train.
When Blackwell asked the girl would she rather be free, she answered “yes.” Blackwell and an accomplice helped get the young girl off of the train and away from her owners. It was that act of liberation that won Stone over.
While neither Stone nor her contemporaries Anthony and Stanton lived long enough to see women receive the right to vote, their different approaches and beliefs underscored a perpetual problem in the quest for women’s equality and the right to vote.
Stone never stopped fighting for the rights of Black people as she continued her fight to get the vote for women. She believed that both causes were interrelated. The same cannot be said of Anthony and Stanton.
The fight for the right to vote for women was often fractured by racism well into the 20th century. Stone’s stances on racial equality and equal rights for women cost her some popularity among some white women. Anthony and Stanton emerged as the face of white women’s suffrage. Yet, Anthony and Stanton also emerged as suspect to Black men and women.
After Lucy Stone died of stomach cancer in 1893, her only child, Alice Stone Blackwell reached out to the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and began the process of repairing the divided women’s suffrage movement. They created a new coalition. Alice Stone Blackwell followed her mother’s mantra to make the world better.
Lucy Stone deserves more historical attention than she receives. Her example should be emulated precisely because she understood the “intersectionality” of gender and race (and the political implications that go along with it) long before Black scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term and defined the theory in the late 20th century. Stone recognized that, no matter how different gender and race may appear, women’s equality was inextricably linked to racial equality. You must fight for both, not just one or the other.
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 