Between 15 million and 26 million people in the U.S. report having participated in a Black Lives Matter demonstration, the New York Times reported in July. As protests continue, it is likely that those estimates have increased, making this perhaps the longest and largest period of sustained protest in US history.
Black-led resistance to state and white vigilante violence is not new. Professor Winston Grady-Willis, chair of Black Studies at Skidmore, recounts stories of Black-led resistance from another period of widespread rebellion in U.S. history, the 1960s, in his book “Challenging US Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977.” In this interview, Professor Grady-Willis shares insights from his book as well as from his own history as an activist on the meaning of activism, intergenerational organizing, challenging conservative institutions, and more.
Do you consider yourself an activist? How would you describe your activism?
Yes, I would consider myself an activist. For me, there’s so many dimensions to activism. When I think of activism, I think of speaking truth to power. The context may change, the specific issues may change, but this willingness to challenge what is problematic, to refuse to be silent, those are some of the things that activism means to me.
And it meant different things at different moments in my life. As a high school student, my activism was often via being editor of the school newspaper. Then as a college student I got involved- really as a foot soldier, not a leader- with the coalition Free South Africa, which was this group that was really critical in terms of the anti-Apartheid movement at Columbia, specifically around the issue of divestment. One of the key leaders was Barbara Ransby, who is this amazing Professor now, at the University of Illinois-Chicago, who has written the quintessential biography of Ella Baker. She was a senior at Columbia my first year there. And I’m a first-year student and I’m just in awe of her, right? Because she just personified speaking truth to power.
As a grad student, some of those elements of activism stayed the same, but there were changes. My friend then later fiancée- we’ve now been married for 27 years, it’s amazing - we were grad students at Cornell, and we were part of this group called Action Against Rape and Misogyny- “ARM.” This was a group of graduate students, mainly graduate students of color, and some progressive white graduate students, that saw the reality of misogyny on campus. A classmate and colleague of ours, in our department, had been raped. Our group was to call attention to this spectrum of misogyny — with rape at one end and jokes, comments, sexist comments on the other end — and really do a lot of work, not only with graduate students but especially with undergraduates. This was at Cornell. So, that’s activism in a student context.
In between my undergraduate and graduate years, I was a schoolteacher in Harlem and a schoolteacher in the Bronx. And again, I was involved, not in a leadership capacity, around issues of violence, of police violence, against Black and brown folks in New York City. We are familiar now with George Floyd’s tragic murder, or Breonna Taylor’s murder, other folks, vigilante violence, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery. In the 1980s in New York City there were other names. Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart, Ashanti Bartlett. There were these grassroots efforts to try to challenge this culture of police brutality, and this was the 1980s, mind you.
What was the relationship like between younger student activists and Elders within the Black freedom struggle?
Particularly between the 1960s and the 1970s, we see a really active, dynamic interplay between folks who are older and folks who are younger. Not only that, but we have this interplay between student activists with SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and individuals irrespective of their age who were often referred to as local people. You could be a student activist from upstate New York or Chicago or Seattle Washington and find yourself in Alabama, Mississippi, or Georgia having to interact not only across generational lines, sometimes across racial lines too, but also across cultural lines. How are you engaging with folks who have spent their entire lives in the deep South constantly under the most intense threat of but reality of violence and terrorist violence?
Students, particularly Black students, usually came to these experiences with a sense of humility. They understood that they had not experienced what these local folks had experienced. Older activists, particularly grassroots activists, were really encouraged by the energy, the willingness, the courage of younger activists, and what they would try to do is impart some wisdom, not necessarily to tell students to slow down, but to be aware of the entire environment around them. And you would have really interesting moments, where student activists would come to a particular place in the South and they would talk about the need for folks to register to vote, and sometimes they would encounter Elders, Black folk, sharecroppers, who’d say I’m not voting. You might get my kids to vote. I’ve seen too many people lynched; I want absolutely nothing to do with this voting business.
But then those same Elders, almost in the same breath, would then say, but if you are audacious enough to be down here risking your lives, I absolutely respect that. You can live with us. And when members of the Klan come looking for you, at night, we’ll be on our porch, rifles in hand, to protect you.
What roles did grief, rage, and imagination play in the Black freedom struggle in Atlanta in the ‘60s and 70s?
If we’re talking about emotion, there are so many sites for the expression of it. Often in the songs that individuals would sing. Whether it’s the freedom songs of enslaved Africans or the freedom songs that protesters would sing, it’s about an almost ancestral connection. So many activists would say that at the moments when they were the most afraid, when individuals would start to sing, that’s when spirits would be lifted. There was this connection on whose shoulders you stood.
I mean this sincerely; it is okay for folks who are engaged in struggle to cry, to grieve, to acknowledge and embrace that activist moments are often incredibly lonely moments. They are moments when you may feel very much alone. And sometimes you just have to sit with that for a moment, but also embrace a spirit of humility… there have been generations of individuals who have experienced as much and I would argue worse in a lot of ways. But they continued to move forward.
The other thing, though this doesn’t just go to your question, is that it’s really important for folks to engage in self-criticism. This is not from me, this is what I learned from Black nationalists in Harlem and in Brooklyn, that we can critique the larger society, we can critique the work that particular politicians and leaders, or the absence of work, that they are engaged in. But it is also incumbent on ourselves to engage in self-criticism, self-reflection. I can challenge white male supremacy, but if I’m also not challenging my own heterosexism, if I’m not challenging or at least acknowledging the fact that unlike when I was younger, I now benefit from socioeconomic class privilege in ways that I simply didn’t before going to college — if I’m not willing to interrogate those issues as I’m engaged in those struggles, then at the end of the day I think that there’s a spirit of integrity that’s missing.
The other thing, and I think younger activists are getting better at this, is the need for self-care. The key thing that Black power movement activists especially- folks connected with the New African People’s Organization or the Black Panther Party- have often said, some of it is documented, but some of it is just in conversations, is “we were trying to take it to the Man and deal with challenging systems of oppression. But we weren’t taking care of our families, we weren’t really paying attention to whether we were living healthy, not just physically, but emotionally.” That’s really important to do.
In some of the conversations that I’ve had with other young people engaged in social movements, I’ve often heard frustration with what we are and especially what we aren’t taught, in K-12 as well as in college. How, as students, can we resist “dominant narratives,” both to inform ourselves for our own activism, but also to grow the institution?
One of the things that students can do is read outside of your regular class context. When I was in undergrad, we didn’t have Black Studies or Africana Studies. The summers after my sophomore and junior years specifically, I did a lot of self-directed reading. This wasn’t in a classroom context… I was just at home in Denver doing this reading.
If some students said “Professor, if you had to come up with like five books for people who are engaged in various struggles, what would those books be?”
First, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Alex Haley and Malcolm X. Then “Assata: An Autobiography” by Assata Shakur. Third, “David Walker’s Appeal” by David Walker, then “The Making of Black Revolutionaries” by James Forman, and finally, “A Voice from the South” by Anna J. Cooper.
I don’t care what order you read the books in. There are so many other books too.
The other thing that students can do is put pressure on faculty, like myself, and say “hey look, we would like to see this embedded in the curriculum. We would like to see more courses, not only in Black Studies, but throughout the curriculum, that interrogate issues of power, that interrogate issues of race, of patriarchy.
When we talk about campus climate, when we talk about diversity and inclusion, programming is fantastic. Work in residence halls is absolutely necessary. But for me, at the end of the day, the most important manifestation of diversity and inclusion has to be in the curriculum. Because that’s where, intellectually, students, faculty, and staff, engage with the life of the mind. If diversity and inclusion are not expressed in the curriculum itself, then I don’t care how many students of color are on any campus brochure or on any website. If there isn’t true diversity of expression in the curriculum itself, we have a problem.
In terms of the interview, is there anything else I didn’t ask that you would want included?
I think we all have to be cognizant of the immediacy of this moment, but also recognize that we can’t accomplish everything in the next few weeks or months. There is this immediate moment, and then that there is this longer arc of struggle. So my advice is don’t get discouraged or despondent if you feel that you’re not throwing everything that you possibly can, whether it’s because of COVID-19, your situation at home, you’re just trying to stay healthy and stay sane in this current moment. And so, you say, I’m not involved in struggles in the way that I would like. There is always tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, then next week. If not next week, next month. If not next month, then next year. I mean it sincerely. There’s going to be a number of immediate responses, some of which are really really good. Some of which- particularly some of the corporate responses, which have this sort of self-interest of their own which is motivating some of what is going on- are not. When you’re in this for the long haul, then you realize, I don’t have to do everything right now. I can do what little I can and if doing what little I can means I just need to stay sane, or help be a caregiver for siblings, or help be a caregiver for a parent who’s not doing well right now, or just taking care of self. But knowing, hey in a couple of months, I can do something else. And that is okay.