“I have never accomplished anything by myself.”
Angela Davis said that the other night as part of her presentation at UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory’s 20th Anniversary and Jefferson Memorial Lecture.
The audience of a couple of thousand people was wildly enthusiastic about her very presence and everything she said. “Oh, well, Berkeley,” I hear you saying, but let’s be real. There’s way too much money in Berkeley today to say that anymore.
But the group of people who came out – a diverse crowd including large numbers of students, some white folks like me and my friends, and a variety of people from other backgrounds and age groups – reflected that core Berkeley idealism. Or, perhaps Oakland activism.
Think on that sentence. Here is a woman who grew up in Jim Crow Birmingham, Alabama, who managed to get first to Brandeis University and then to study in Europe. She was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Her academic achievements alone are evidence of her sharp mind and discipline, but still she says, “I have never accomplished anything by myself.”
Of course, she is and has always been an activist as well as a scholar and teacher, and figured out through her activism the importance of working together with others. Much of her talk and her answers in the conversation that followed with the Chair of the Critical Thinking program, Poulomi Saha, focused on community and collective action.
Hope is never individualistic; it is always collective.
She said that after reminding us that hope has to be created and generated. It doesn’t just sit there.
The title of her talk was taken from a song made famous by Nina Simone: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.”
In explaining why that song resonated so much, she pointed out that what we now call the Civil Rights Movement was originally called the Freedom Movement.
And she quoted Fannie Lou Hamer:
Nobody is free until everybody is free.
That attitude is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. In the efforts by the fascists currently running the U.S. government to undermine the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship, there has been an argument made that the amendment was only meant to cover the formerly enslaved.
But in fact historians of that period point out that the people who pushed for it – and in particular the Black people who pushed for it – always intended it to apply to everyone.
Nobody is free until everybody is free.
Davis said many other things the other night. She pointed out that we can’t always articulate things like freedom – like collective freedom – but we can know it in our bodies. Music and other arts can give us that knowledge.
She said that Brazil is doing a better job of preserving its democracy than the United States and suggested we follow the example of our fellow Americans to our south.
My notes are scattered. I can’t tell you everything she said. But I went home inspired and I wasn’t the only one.