Stand Up
Akron Ohio. A great migration destination. The former Rubber Capital of the World. In 2012 young black and brown people, Summer Youth Employment Program participants with whom I was supporting and supervising, told me they never hoped to or expected to have a permanent job, to graduate from high school to have a permanent place to live. Akron Ohio, my hometown.
I was thirteen years old when Wooster Ave. burned in 1968 after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By then urban removal had decimated black home ownership in Central Akron. Most white people had redlined themselves out of the section of west Akron where we lived, and Howard Street — the place where migrants like my father, my cousins, the woman for whom I am named, Rebecca Keith Finney found welcome by more established Colored folk, had fallen into decay.
Langston Hughes had died the year before. We learned his poems informally, since we were enrolled in mostly white Catholic schools, and knew this one from the long poem cycle Montage of a Dream Deferred by heart:
Harlem [2]
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
On May 30th this year I was back in Akron to clean headstones of my ancestors and enjoy a bite to eat at Mt. Peace Cemetery. That evening we joined a demonstration to protest the extra-judicial killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops. There had to have been 1000 people.
Through the miraculous (think about it) technology of mobile phones equipped with video capacity the whole country was able to witness a very intentional killing of a Black man, handcuffed, legs restrained by at least to other cops and a third, Floyd’s murderer, kneeling on his neck, depriving him of blood flow, of breath of life, as he pleaded for his life, his breath, his mother.
Perhaps for some but probably not lost on Black folk, it might have been a surprise, and a new insight into the enormous toll police violence has taken on our lives emotionally, socially, physically; and how the current coronavirus pandemic was doing the same, in numbers not fully acknowledged by our venal, inept and duplicitous national administration.
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Exactly what were we seeing? Was this “just” a racist cop or cops, taking the opportunity to torture a Black suspect? From the expression on the face of George Floyd’s murderer, the casual placement of his hands in his pocket, was it a kind of relaxing exercise after a stressful day? Or was he one of the many neo-Nazi or Klan affiliated men who have infiltrated the U.S. military and police departments all over the country? One of the men positioned to sow chaos and unrest seeking an opportunity to set off a race war?
I suspect (but have no evidence of) the latter, not to exclude the possibility of the former. Need evidence of infiltration? An FBI report from 2006, on white supremacist infiltration of the military and law enforcement has been repeatedly suppressed for fear of cops becoming targets.
It is important to remember the history of policing in the United States. How the Scot-Irish were recruited to bring the system of plantation patroller and enforcer for the plantations of Ireland to the plantations of the U.S South (Irish folks arriving in the Great Hunger eagerly gave up their demonized status as thuggish papists under British rule to become white here in the states). The plantation system was the model for creation of law enforcement in cities North and South. And in the South, first the White Leagues, then the White Citizens’Councils, and into this day the KKK were and are part and parcel of policing since the late 19th century. They are merely the enforcers of a system that marginalizes, criminalizes, and punishes Blackness. That seeks to exploit our labor or eliminate us when we are no longer useful.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that much of the looting and chaos of the past few days was set off by white people with their own agendas, one which inevitably undermines the righteous anger and demands of Black people marching and engaging in civil disobedience peacefully. This moment, this Uprising, is multiracial. It is for the most part taking its direction from local Black-led organizations and the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) who provide community safety, policy, social media and other support to local Black Lives Matter chapters. There are places where that is more apparent than others, for example Louisville, white demonstrators formed a cordon around People of Color protestors to protect them from a militarized and militantly racist police presence.
I began with 1968 to not only remember my experience, but also to suggest whom we should be taking leadership from. M4BL, in Akron the WOMB, organizers with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), those young people schooled in the Black Radical Tradition which brings a potent economic, political and cultural analysis to this moment (which is not a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion moment).
Stand Up (from Harriet)
Chorus
I’m gonna Stand Up
Take my people with me
Together we are going
to a brand new home
far across the river
can you hear freedom calling?
Calling me to answer
Gonna keep on keepin on
I can feel it in my bones
When the movie Harriet came out I immediately bought the title song, Stand Up (from Harriet) and listened to it repeatedly for two weeks. Cynthia Erivo wrote it. I listened to every interview I could find with Erivo to understand her perspective on the movie. When asked why it took so long to make a movie about Harriet Tubman, Erivo said,
“Maybe Harriet herself was not ready and she decided that now is the right time to see and hear her story because of what we are going through.” (Deadline, Oct 30, 2019)
This time, but perhaps anticipating this moment, when peaceful protesters are described as domestic terrorists, the way the southern plantation owner thought of Harriet and her actions as theft of their “property”.
Dream Deferred was the poem of my youth, the poem of the SNCC years. Stand Up is the song, the poem of my elder years. After I saw Harriet I wanted to understand what it means for us to Stand Up today. Where is the brand new home? What river? For us peoples of African descent, for me the great granddaughter of an enslaved man, what does resistance look like?
And since I was teaching/learning from Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s book, Sanctuary, I wanted to understand the protection implied in home, the sense of shelter and safety. In the Buddhist tradition in which I practice we are taught that stream entry, the humility and courage to begin crossing the river is entry on the path of wisdom. The borders and rivers Harriet crossed were far more obvious in the call of freedom than the demarcation lines we struggle to erase today. Sanctuary itself is a defiance of borders and, in this country today, law, so it is unclear how the US can be transformed into the brand new home my people have dreamed of for so many centuries. That the leaderful members of M4BL are Harriet’s children, Ida’s children, Rosa’s children, Fannie Lou’s children, Ella’s children is without a doubt. That we must do everything possible to support them, to take action regardless of our circumstances in unity with them; to protect them, and to recognize their courage for our liberation is beyond question.
George Floyd will be memorialized in Minneapolis on Thursday, June 4th, in North Carolina on the 6th and his funeral and burial will be in Houston on the 9th. In compassion for his family, his community in Minneapolis, Houston and North Carolina, and for all those disregarding the stultifying fear of suffering as they take our righteous claims for redress and abolition of all the tenacles of enslavement into their hands and onto the streets; and because we all can’t and shouldn’t try to go to Minneapolis, I invite all who wish to join in loving-kindness and compassion meditation to sit with me, wherever you are tomorrow, Thursday from 2–4 ET during the memorial service for George Floyd. And after we will struggle, we will rise up, we will stand up and “keep on keepin on to the far shore of liberation.
