Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

by Angela Y. Davis

The powerful have sent us a message: obey, and if you seek collective liberation, then you will be collectively punished.

and imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. These issues are never seriously addressed.

advocacy of revolutionary transformation was not primarily about violence, but about substantive issues like better life conditions for poor people and people of color.

In many ways you can say that the institution feeds on that violence and reproduces it so that when the person is released he or she is probably worse.

We have to extricate ourselves from narrow identitarian thinking if we want to encourage progressive people to embrace these struggles as their own.

the aftermath of the war, we find one of the most hidden eras of US history. And that is the period of Radical Reconstruction. It certainly remains the most radical era in the entire history of the United States of America. And this is an era that is rarely acknowledged in historical texts. We had Black elected officials, the development of public education. As a matter of fact, former slaves fought for the right to public education; that is to say, education that did not cost money as your education here costs. I’ll say parenthetically—the fight was for noncommodified education. And as a matter of fact white children in the South, poor white children who had not had education, gained access to education as a direct result of the struggles of former slaves. There were progressive laws passed challenging male supremacy.

that the only way to be free is to acquire civil rights within the existing framework of society. Had slavery been abolished in 1863, through the Emancipation Proclamation, or in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment, Black people would have enjoyed full and equal citizenship and it would not have been necessary to create a new movement.

if they had that very narrow individualistic sense of their own contributions, where would we be today? And so we have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that are not restricted to our own lifetimes.