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

by Angela Y. Davis

Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to disassociate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very heart of the mid-twentieth-century US freedom movement. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.

I certainly don’t think existing political parties can constitute our primary arenas of struggle, but I do think that the electoral arena can be used as a terrain on which to organize. In the US, we have needed an independent political party for a very long time—an antiracist, feminist workers party. I also think you are absolutely right in identifying grassroots activism as being the most important ingredient of building radical movements.

I do think that a society without prisons is a realistic future possibility, but in a transformed society, one in which people’s needs, not profits, constitute the driving force.

Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008.

The militarization of the police leads us to think about Israel and the militarization of the police there—if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson was Gaza.

We have to extricate ourselves from narrow identitarian thinking if we want to encourage progressive people to embrace these struggles as their own. With respect to feminist struggles, men will have to do a lot of the important work.

Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements—from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements—anchored by women, incidentally—that pushed the government to bring about change. I don’t see why things would be any different today.

If one looks at all of the legislation that was passed, the Civil Rights Act, for example, the Voting Rights Act, that did not happen as a result of a president taking extraordinary steps. It happened as a result of people marching and organizing.

And so Du Bois argues that it was the withdrawal and bestowal of labor by slaves that won the war. And what he calls “this army of striking labor” eventually provided the two hundred thousand soldiers, “whose evident ability to fight decided the war.” And these soldiers included women like Harriet Tubman, who was a soldier and a spy and had to fight for many years in order to be granted, later, on a soldier’s pension.

This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of twenty-first-century Western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimized the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarization of local police departments throughout the country. Police departments—including on college and university campuses—have acquired military surplus from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the Department of Defense Excess Property Program.

The Ferguson struggle has taught us that local issues have global ramifications.

we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as “normal.”

No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism.

let me say that I really love the new generations of young students and workers. Two generations removed from my own; they say sometimes revolution skips a generation. But that skipped generation has also worked hard! Those of you who are in your forties, if you hadn’t done the work that you did, then it would not be possible for the younger generation to emerge. And what I like most about the younger generation is that they are truly informed by feminism. Even if they don’t know it, or even if they don’t admit it! They are informed by antiracist struggles. They are not infected with the emotionally damaging homophobia which has been with us for so long. And they are taking the lead in challenging transphobia along with racism and Islamophobia. So I like working with young people because they allow me to imagine what it is like not to be so totally overburdened with decades of oppressive ideology.

One of the most hidden eras of US history is the period of Radical Reconstruction. It was certainly the most radical period. There were Black elected officials. Then we had to wait more than another century to get them back. There was the development of public education. People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South. That white kids in the South would never have had the opportunity to get an education had not it been for the persistent campaigns for education. Because education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education. And then of course there was the economic development during that brief period. I’m talking about the period between 1865 and 1877, Radical Reconstruction. As a matter of fact, many progressive laws were passed when Black people were in the legislatures of various states, progressive laws with respect to women’s rights as well, not just with respect to issues of race.

As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.

You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement. He transformed in his relationship with that movement. He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the oppressed masses.

we can’t even talk about working-class people anymore. When did everybody become “middle class”? And even those of us who might objectively be “middle class” can still identify with the working class. There’s something wrong with the fact that we can not talk about the working class. I was talking about opening up the discursive terrain to be able to talk about capitalism; this means we have to reintroduce the working class into our discourses.

Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators. But how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism?

the majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them, because they’ve had no access to education or jobs or housing or health care.