Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition

184 Pages·2018·1.13 MB·English

by  Jeff Biggers

Resistance
ALSO BY JEFF BIGGERS
The Trials of a Scold
Damnatio Memoriae
State Out of the Union
Reckoning at Eagle Creek
The United States of Appalachia
In the Sierra Madre
No Lonesome Road

Per Carla, per sempre
For my billie boys, Massimo and Diego, and their future
For my folks, Mam and Paps, makers of our radical roots
In memory of
Ella Baker
and
William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
That’s starting to be history now.
Right now we’re in a whirlpool of paradigms Beatitudes and messes.
With uprisings
come upwellings of old-fashioned ideas re-shined and green-stamped
ideas brewed for ages before popping out and hailed in headlines Where
did this come from?
And others swirl down into the depths
Forgotten stories of our foremothers
who thrust us up as collective memory dragged them down.
But we were not seeking recognition, we sought only change And still we
seek, forever galvanized
Bringing ourselves to the tables, turning power plays into compromises
reaching our hands out to the bottom where we’ve been instead of
clawing our way up to the top, building change, casting seeds, setting
small fires wherever we can make it, let them spread instead of waiting
for one giant fix to make or break it.
Sustaining the things that make life worth living instead of worth money,
living in ways that
make sense instead of—that other stuff.
—KARA HOVING, “AMRITA: IMMORTAL”
CLIMATE NARRATIVE PROJECT
Contents
Author’s Note: Hope Resists
Introduction: Let Us Now Praise Resistance
1 · We the People, Resist
2 · Let Your Motto Be Resistance
3 · Enemy of the People
4 · To Undo Mistakes
5 · Cities of Resistance
Acknowledgments
Bibliographic Notes
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Hope Resists
If I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.
—Fannie Lou Hamer, “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” 1964
THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT try our souls, as Thomas Paine would say.
On the day of President Donald Trump’s landmark decision to withdraw the
United States from the Paris Climate Accord in the summer of 2017, my twelve-
year-old son Massimo asked me if there was any hope for action on climate
change. His real question: Was there any hope for his future?
It took me a while to muster the words to answer my son’s question. He had
heard me rattle on for years about the realities of climate change, the possibilities
of regenerative cities, and the unending struggle for civil rights. But these stories
suddenly seemed distant—even illusory—against the rollbacks of Trump’s
policies on multiple fronts, not only climate action.
Instead of a lecture on climate change, I wanted to tell my son about a
moment of doubt, sitting in a jail cell in Washington, DC, in 1985, after I had
been arrested in a sit-in at the South African embassy. We had joined a year-long
campaign of civil disobedience, as part of the Free South African Movement, to
draw attention to the American support of the brutal apartheid system of white
supremacy and segregation. As a twenty-one-year-old, I realized that African
National Congress leader Nelson Mandela had spent more time in prison at
Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison, and Victor Verster Prison than I had been on
the planet.
My cellmate was Rev. William Sloane Coffin, my boss at the Riverside
Church in New York City, where I served as his personal aide. A World War II
intelligence officer and former CIA agent, Coffin had led civil disobedience
campaigns against the Vietnam War as the chaplain at Yale. But it was his role
in one of the first Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961, following the
courageous lead of young African American activists, that had transformed
Coffin’s fervent belief in the role of nonviolent resistance.
Coffin smiled at the youthful frustration in my voice. I told him our protests
seemed futile, even hopeless. The apartheid system seemed unshakeable. He
looked at me with the same hesitation I offered my son. He told me what he had
learned sitting in jail in Alabama.
“Hope resists,” he said, shifting on the concrete bench. “Hopelessness
adapts.”
Calling it our “duty rightly,” Revolutionary forefather Thomas Paine had
urged Americans, in one of the most hopeless moments before the American
Revolution in 1776, to “take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few
years farther into life.” The seeds of our democracy, he reminded the
disconsolate, would take root from an American resistance. Paine did not offer a
promise but a challenge to the American colonies. “The sun never shined on a
cause of greater worth,” he wrote in Common Sense.
Every generation must decide how that sun will illuminate the challenges of
our own times. The language may alter, but the tribulation remains the same:
“The sun shines today also,” Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded his generation of
abolitionists in a dark moment of slavery in 1836; “Pray for the dead and fight
like hell for the living,” Irish immigrant and labor leader Mary “Mother” Jones
told a crowd of striking coal miners seeking fair wages and better working
conditions in West Virginia in 1912.
In my own lifetime, Mississippi freedom leader Fannie Lou Hamer
reminded civil rights activists in 1965 that the only way to end segregation in
Mississippi was to “bring out to the light all that has been under the cover all
these years.” Joining thousands of Mexican American students in the streets of
Los Angeles on a spring day in 1968, Chicano leader Carlos Muñoz, Jr., saw the
historic walkouts at the nation’s largest public school system as a counterpart to
the civil rights movement—and a new chapter in an American tradition of
resistance. In leading a successful two-year campaign of civil disobedience to
halt fracking and the storing of liquid petroleum gas at Seneca Lake in New
York, scientist Sandra Steingraber invoked the words in 2017 of poet Ella
Wheeler Wilcox: “To sin by silence, when we should protest / Makes cowards
out of men.”
More than a decade after she launched the “Me Too” movement to empower
millions to speak out on sexual violence and harassment, activist Tarana Burke
was recognized, among many other “silence breakers,” as the Time “Person of
the Year” in 2017. At the historic March for Our Lives rally in Washington, DC,
on March 24, 2018, Emma González read the names of fellow Florida students
killed in the February 14 shooting, stood in silence, and then challenged the
nation to “fight for your lives before it is someone else’s job.”
On February 11, 1990, freed from twenty-seven years in prison in South