by Ghostwrite Mike, Carceral Studies Journalism Guild, Valley State Prison
The 1971 essay that opens volume three, issue number four of The Black Scholar, titled “The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” presented a monumental offering penned by Angela Y. Davis while on trial and housed at the Marin County jail. Articulating the continuity between her own jailed circumstance and the many ways enslaved Black women resisted the institution of slavery, Angela deftly seeded a revolutionary critique of the contemporary women’s liberation movement in the same year that Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison each pushed profound works into the culture analyzing their respective relationship to social and political struggles.
Writing that “the benefits of the ideology of femininity did not accrue to the enslaved woman,” Angela’s essay, which she herself described as a “collection of ideas which would constitute a starting point,” contributed to a tsunami of Black feminist thinking, theorizing, and activism not seen since the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s. It inspired the emergence of a radical Black feminism that departed from the individualistic equality of access objectives of liberal feminism (white feminism), instead calling for what Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin describes as “a whole scale dismantling and transformation of the world they inhabited.” Angela wrote that we are “heirs to a tradition of supreme perseverance and historical resistance,” and urged us to forge toward freedom. From her jail cell, Griffin says, Angela debunked the Black matriarchy myth by inviting an intellectual examination of “Black women’s historical place in the ongoing Black freedom struggle,” and citing their resistance. Be it domestic survival work that kept the Black family alive “beyond biological ties,” or the “more explicit participation in actual revolts,” Griffin credits Angela with transforming “the way we think about resistance.”
A quarter century after Angela’s landmark essay, budding historian Elizabeth Hinton wrote a high school paper arguing slave rebellions were justified through the lens of the Declaration of Independence, foregrounding an Angela-like resistance thesis that would form the historicized vertebrae of her book America on Fire, which chronicles Black rebellions since the 1960s. Calling her work “canonical,” Heather Ann Thompson—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Attica uprising Blood in the Water—told The New York Times that Elizabeth’s “first book [From the War on Poverty, to the War on Crime] showed us where the punitive police apparatus came from,” and that her second “shows us the importance of power and resistance.” Echoing Angela’s intellectual influence, the Washington Post’s review of America on Fire remarked how “not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.”
Mentored by a renowned roster of historians including Thompson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Manning Marable, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. en route to becoming a Professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, Elizabeth was tapped by Jane Kamensky (the historian currently on PBS describing the Revolutionary War for Ken Burns) to curate the Schlesinger Library’s archive of Angela’s body of work, and convene the Radical Commitments symposium that would bring the nation’s leading Black intellectuals together to herald the import of Angela’s legacy, through the lenses of revolution, feminisms, and abolition. That archive holds the evidence of struggle that forms the very DNA of Critical Resistance, LSPC, and AOUON, braided together via the resistance work of folks like Ellen Barry, Dorsey Nunn, Dylan Rodriguez, and Angela. The post-slavery epoch of freedom struggle work owes its intellectual momentum to the feminist historians who teach Angela’s life.
For those of us who stand for count, strip-out in order to attend college classes, and actively resist the civil and premature death prison portends for us by insurgently organizing the cultivation of our shared inside knowledge using the tools of journalism, we don’t just owe a debt of gratitude to the iconic women like Angela, Elizabeth, Ruthie, Ericka, and Toni, whom we recognize by their first names alone; who have sacrificed their bodies for freedom, articulated the philosophy of resistance, and taught us their histories. We also owe to those whose real-time efforts furnish us with the oxygen that enables our self-activity to breathe, transmute beyond the confines of prison, and pulse though the informational umbilical of possibility, the gratitude solidarity engenders among those who apprehend what it means to end a letter with “in struggle,” the way Angela did from jail.
To Tanisha, Alissa, and Uma, thank you for standing in the gap when standing is uncomfortable; showing up when showing up isn’t popular; doing that extra thing, that thing that humanizes us despite our commodification; being the unheralded caretakers of our vulnerabilities, when marginalization avails no clout; being the human glue-guns of action, when everyone else is frozen in fear; and allowing us to speak, create, and contribute when too many dismiss us as irrelevant. Your work is what keeps the patriarchy that created the need for feminist struggle from resurrecting its influence over herstory. ✦
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