The light of freedom

This morning I woke up on a sofa to the sounds of my grad student friends getting ready for class. I shuffled around in my jammies and Brooke made us some coffee, and the day begun in earnest. She worked on a paper while gleefully ditching a class. She’s struggling to write a peer-review paper to an almost all-white Planning Department that gets at the centrality of power, the racism inherent in white folks designing the neighborhoods, houses and lives of low-income folks of Color in basic terms. I’m writing a bazillion emails to students, hoping to get one or two to write me back so we can meet about the campaign I’m working on. Brooke stops for a second and describes a paragraph about white supremacy culture in planning committees and departments, and I argue that while it’s useful to point out, concrete examples about the power relationship between the department itself and the institution of planning (it’s not the only majority white Planning department, I hazard to guess) - and provide suggestions for how to change that dynamic.

Brooke leaves, conference calls about, and eventually I get dressed and set out for the highlight of my day. Brooke has informed me that two SNCC field organizers, Wazir Peacock and Hollis Watkins, are speaking - first at Duke and later at North Carolina Central University, an Historically Black University. I decide that since no students have yet returned my phone calls/emails, I’m going to both.

It was inspiring and humbling to hear the stories of these two men who faced guns, dogs, beatings, but all the while were supported by amazing networks of local people, to get African American people registered to vote. I’d read the amazing book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (the author is Charles Payne), so I had some idea of who these men were and the role they played in the Civil Rights Movement. But never did I think I’d get the chance to hear them, particularly in a college meeting room in North Carolina. They were both from Mississippi, which contrasted with many field organizers who weren’t organizing in the places they grew up.

Here are links to interviews with each of them:
Hollis Watkins: http://www.lib.usm.edu/%7Espcol/crda/oh/watkins.htm
Wille Wazir Peacock: http://www.crmvet.org/vet/wazir.htm

Their message was clear: national organizers need to be respectful and not trample on the slow, patient work of organizing on the ground; white folks still have to organize in white communities against racism; the media didn’t portray an accurate picture of the inside workings of SNCC. There were many more, but they’re far better read in the book, I can’t do justice to a 500-page book in a paragraph.

Hollis Watkins is still organizing in Mississippi - he founded a leadership-development organization called Southern Echo.

OK, well, it’s 1am and I have a bus to catch tomorrow, so I have to leave it at that. But as my brain processes the insights from tonight, I will post them here, I promise.