Things That Need Doing
Election Reflections #5: It’s Not the Waking, It’s the Rising
"We'll work with absolutely anybody, or form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind."
That’s how Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the National Black Panther Party (BPP) would describe the impetus behind the unprecedented Rainbow Coalition, who, despite ideologies spanning from black power to southern white pride to Latinx self-determination, were able to do something we still struggle with today -- they saw how they were all fighting for the same cause.
As a result, within weeks, everyone from AIM (American Indian Movement) and Students for a Democratic Society (Euro Americans) to the Brown Berets (Chicanos) and the Red Guard Party (Chinese Americans) among others, had found a home under a shared banner. Fred and BPP Field Marshall Bobby Lee officially met members of the Young Patriots Organization (YPO), one of the Rainbow Coalition’s three co-founding organizations when Fred and Bobby showed up at a JOIN (Jobs or Income Now) initiative launched by Students for a Democratic Society to explore working together.
The seed for the outreach effort was due to a happy accident. Days earlier, Bobby, representing the BPP and members of JOIN/YPO were double-booked to speak at Chicago’s Church of the Three Crosses. They began to see commonalities they didn’t know they had, including what impoverishment was doing to all of them, how the Chicago police was terrorizing them and how their communities were being sucked dry by the Vietnam draft. Bobby shared those insights with Fred, and Fred immediately saw the possibilities, a future where all of them could go where none of them had gone before.
That meeting, understandably tense at first, quickly resulted in a shared awareness of how they were all impacted by the same problems. Bobby Lee was initially reticent, especially seeing the Confederate flag patches on arms. But the more they talked, the more the walls came down, and he eventually said, "My name is Bobby Lee but my real name is Robert E. Lee."
Laughing together erased any lingering suspicions, and in just one meeting, lifelong friendships were established and cemented. With the engagement of Young Lords Party leader Jose Cha-Cha Jimenez, with whom Fred already had a strong relationship after having been arrested together during previous protests, the venerable Rainbow Coalition was born. They held their first press conference on April 4, 1969, the one-year anniversary of Martin’s death.
"Nothing is more important than stopping fascism,” Fred said, “Because fascism will stop us all." Unbelievably, Fred Hampton, the architect of this paradigm-shifting movement was 20 years old when he accomplished this. Nine months later, he’d been assassinated. But the Rainbow Coalition’s legacy didn’t die with him. It evolved into ever-increasing waves of social transformation including the power that took Barack Obama to the White House.
Then, there’s Anna Mae Aquash, the highest-ranking woman within the American Indian Movement (AIM), which, itself, was part of the Rainbow Coalition. Anna, before she was even 21, was at the forefront of Native American civil rights and would remain there until her death. She was 30 when she was killed.
Born in 1945, Anna, a Mi'kmaq tribal member from Nova Scotia, Canada, would move to Boston in 1963 and dive headfirst into activism for urban indigenous peoples. The issues facing them were the same as those facing every disadvantaged ethnic group, including European ethnics who were not yet considered “white”; inferior education, police brutality, economic deprivation and cultural erasure. In This Land Is Your Land, I describe her this way:
On the one hand, Anna was “boots on the ground”. She protested police brutality. She was part of TRIBES (Teaching and Research in Bicultural Education School Project), which taught young Natives about their heritage. She put her body on the line in protests, and she co-founded the Boston Indian Council to tackle issues of urban poverty.
But she was also big-picture. She was involved in everything from a 1970 protest on the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing, to draw attention to the US government’s longstanding treatment of American Indians and its history of treaty-breaking, to the Trail of Broken Treaties march, where protestors walked to DC, occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and presented a list of 20 demands to the United States government.
"These white people think this country belongs to them,” Anna wrote to her sister early on in the struggle. “The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedy-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians."
And that’s exactly what Anna did – her efforts, like the rest of the Rainbow Coalition, laid the groundwork for so much of the change that would come after. We owe an incalculable debt to people like Fred Hampton and Anna Mae Aquash. They weren’t naïve about the massive gap between the society we were and the one we could be. They simply believed, with every fiber of their being, that we could close it. And as impossible as it might be, for them, it was the thing that needed doing.
The video at the top of this post is of people listening to Hozier’s social justice battle anthem, Nina Cried Power, performed with legendary Civil Rights activist and singer Mavis Staples. If you skipped it, you might want to give it a listen. In addition to the powerful lyrics and performance, there’s something poignant about the video itself – the shared humanity evident in so much diversity – across gender, age, ancestry and the like.
“This song,” Hozier said in an Irish Times interview, “Was intended as a thank you note to the spirit and legacy of protest; to the artists who imbued their work with the vigour of dissent, and a reflection on the importance of that tradition in the context of the rights, and lives, we enjoy today. My hope for this video is much the same.”
It’s not the waking, it’s the rising. It is the grounding of a foot uncompromising. It’s not forgoing of the lie. It’s not the opening of eyes. It’s not the waking, it’s the rising.
It’s not the shade, we should be past it. It’s the light, and it’s the obstacle that casts it. It’s the heat that drives the light. It’s the fire it ignites. It’s not the waking, it’s the rising.
It’s not the song, it is the singing. It’s the hearing of a human spirit ringing. It’s the bringing of the line. It’s the bearing of the rhyme. It’s not the waking, it’s the rising.
Though Hozier is from Ireland, throughout his career, he’s cited artist-activists, many from the Chicago blues scene as his musical mentors. Here, he pays tribute to them, name-checking a vast range of people who came before him, who gave voice to justice. The list includes Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Curtis Mayfield, Patti Smith, John Lennon, James Brown, B.B. King, Joni Mitchell, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and of course, Mavis herself – all of whom, in their own way, cried, “Power!” “Power has been cried,” Mavis sang on the bridge, “By those stronger than me – straight into the face that tells you to ‘rattle your chains if you love being free’.”
They remind us that we all have far more power than we know.
Take my experience. My entire childhood was spent on the economic margins. Still, I didn’t have a visceral understanding of poverty until I went to live with my mother who, upon my birth, had left me with the same parents who’d raised her. Despite how Mary and Olden struggled to make ends meet, the anxiety of it all never touched me. Life in that new environment with my new family would be utterly different. By the summer before my ninth-grade year when we moved to the top of the waiting list for government housing, we’d spent 18 months essentially squatting in a condemned house in an otherwise nice neighborhood. In Me and Mary, I described it like this:
The supermarket where I worked was an hour’s walk from my school. I’d send my books home with Josie and Little Joe, and head to work straight from school. On my way back that night, after passing the school, I’d still have another 30-minute walk ahead of me.
The house itself, with its partially collapsed roof and cracks in the walls, exposed wiring and holes in the floor, was all but uninhabitable. We had no electricity or gas, so all meals were cooked on a fireplace that didn’t vent well. We had no running water, but the woman across the street would allow me and my siblings to fill up every container we could from the hose in her front yard once a day.
I rationed that water to use for everything from drinking to washing a set of clothes once a week, and we’d use the dirty water to flush the toilet. I heated water on the fireplace so that we could wash our faces and under our arms before heading to school each day, and we used a box of baking soda for everything from deodorant to toothpaste to detergent–all things I learned from Mary.
Moving into government housing changed everything for me. It gave me sufficient time to start shifting from just surviving to social action. I still had to work, but things like running water, refrigeration and a working stove revolutionized our lives. I could think bigger. So when summer rolled around and I saw hundreds of children going hungry, I had the energy to organize a petition drive urging the City of Birmingham to provide free lunches to the same kids who were free lunch-eligible during the school year.
I could tutor neighborhood kids in preparation for the test that would determine if they got to advance to the next grade, and I could speak at historically white churches on behalf of Richard Arrington, who’d become Birmingham’s first African American mayor. I wasn’t trying to be a revolutionary nor did I have any grand plan. They were just the things that needed doing.
And Richard Arrington? My support for him was not because he was African American. He wasn’t the only non-Anglo running. But he was the only candidate, irrespective of ancestry, speaking in a voice my soul recognized. He was expressly committed to making us a Birmingham for all Birminghamians. And I believed that there were more of us who wanted that kind of Birmingham than those of us who didn’t. Because, despite my hometown’s national reputation, I knew that there were tons of allies of the Civil Rights struggle who’d grown up right there in the Magic City, not just those who’d travelled down from the North.
I’m willing to bet that none of these girls, from the ones holding the signs to the one being arrested, thought of themselves as particularly heroic. For them, they were simply doing the thing that needed doing. Martin, in Why We Can’t Wait, describing this same Birmingham campaign said, “We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.”
But that’s not where agents of empire stand. They’re about one thing – the throne – setting someone up to rule over the rest of us. But what they miss is that the tools of oppression they’re using were designed for a people we no longer are and a world that no longer exists.
You know that feeling when you’re standing on the beach with your feet in the water and the tide recedes, pulling all kinds of things, like bits of the sand you’re standing on with it? That’s what it must be like to have been perpetually in power and to feel it being pulled away by a force we can’t hope to fight. All the voter caging, redistricting and vote purging in the world can’t reverse this tide or stop its rising. Those girls in Birmingham, like the other members of the special army Martin is speaking of, had come into their power. And once that happened, nothing could stop them.
One of my favorite things about Thanksgiving when I was a little kid at my grandmother’s house was how, after a day of family and food, we’d settle down in the living room and watch The Wizard of Oz. I loved that film, and even back then, the notion of how we can be unaware of our power spoke to me deeply. I loved journeying with that cast of characters as the cowardly Lion realized he was courageous, as the Tin Man realized he was compassionate and the Scarecrow realized he was so much more than a “nothing, my head so full of stuffing…” And, of course, Dorothy’s realization that she’d been in possession of her way home the entire time.
Then, there was the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’ll get you, my pretty!”) who got melted by water, the scary flying monkeys who were under her thrall, and the “great and powerful” OZ, who wasn’t all that great or powerful and who gave Dorothy and her companions an impossible task if he was to help them. I’d sit there, every year, and watch this unfolding affirmation of who I was, who we all are. Because the true power oppressors wield is convincing us that we don’t have any. It starts, like Hozier sang, with the “forgoing of the lie”. But it doesn’t end there. Because it’s not the waking but the rising. And what does that rising look like? For us, it all hinges on the vote.
Those who’ve come before us, who lived in an era where an overwhelming majority ruled every facet of American society would be utterly stupefied by the sheer power we now have, but don’t use. Because they understood something we don’t; that in a democracy, the vote is the single most powerful instrument in society. And further, because of the unprecedented sociological shifts we’ve recently undergone, that power now rests in the hands of this new non-heteronormative, non-Euro-centric, non-dogmatic emergent majority represented by everyone from Gen Y on, but fully embodied by Generation Alpha.
In practical terms, despite a century of efforts to disqualify voters, our shifting demography means that in most states and virtually all of our nation’s largest cities, those of us who embrace diversity and believe in equality are already the new majority. We don’t need to gain anything new. We just need to use what we have. We could win almost any race if we simply believed we could and put that belief into action by doing one thing – showing up.
We remember people like Jimmie Lee Jackson, Herbert Lee and Lamar Smith. Twenty-six-year-old Jimmie was executed by uniformed Alabama State Trooper James Fowler for registering people to vote. Fowler was not only found not guilty but promoted and transferred to Birmingham to help keep its growing “Negro problem” in check. But his murderous actions actually fanned the flame he hoped to snuff out. Jimmie’s death would inspire both the Selma to Montgomery march and lead to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Forty-nine-year-old Herbert was also out helping people register to vote when he was executed in broad daylight and out in the open by Eugene Hurst, a sitting Mississippi state legislator who claimed self-defense and was never arrested. Prior to Herbert’s voter drive, only one Negro in Mississippi’s Amite County was registered, and that person had never voted. In the aftermath of his death, organizations like SNCC and NAACP would register over 1,100 additional voters and Eugene would be voted out of office.
Lamar, a 63-year-old WW I veteran was out organizing other coloreds to vote in local elections in Brookhaven, Mississippi in 1955, the same year Rosa Parks took her courageous stand. He was shot at close range, right on the lawn of Brookhaven’s courthouse. The fatal shooting happened at 10 in the morning with dozens of people including the sheriff present. Nevertheless, his killer was never convicted; no one dared or was willing to come forward. His death galvanized the work spearheaded by Medgar Evers and drew thousands of people off the sidelines and into the struggle.
All three of these men, each of them farmers by profession, understood a fundamental truth – that gaining the right to vote could change absolutely everything. They saw this, above all else, as the seed that needed planting, the thing that needed doing. And they did. They, like Fred, Anna Mae and so many others all died with, as Fred put it, revolution on their minds.
Yet, today, less than two-thirds of eligible voters (remember, those aren’t people who are just at voting age, that’s American citizens who are of voting age and who have not been rendered ineligible by the constant whittling of disenfranchisement laws) vote, even in presidential elections, and those numbers go WAY down for other races.
Paul Weyrich, the mastermind behind what I’m calling the 50-Year Strategy (more on that in another post) realized this and used it to give the co-opted Republican party control of Congress. Remember how he said, “I don’t want everyone to vote”? “As a matter of fact,” he continued, “Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” He’d turn this observation into a weapon.
Noting the lower voter turnouts for races that don’t coincide with a presidential election, Weyrich focused their efforts on winning over the congregations of tens of thousands of pastors attending their trainings, then getting people out to the polls at times when their votes could carry the most weight. Control of state legislatures brought with it several other powers; appointments and redistricting among them.
And the results were remarkable: the year they implemented this strategy, the New Right took control of Congress for the first time since their takeover of the GOP itself, and they made unprecedented gains in state legislatures; not just in the South, but throughout the nation. Prior to the 1994 election, Democrats held majorities in 25 state legislatures, whereas Republicans held 8. After the 1994 election, Democrats had majorities in 18 states, whereas Republicans held 19.
(Now, before I go on, I should clarify something. I’m not a party loyalist. The only reason I care about the Republican takeover of Congress is because of the New Right’s/old Dixiecrats’ takeover of the GOP. Democracy hinges on there being at least two major political parties. I just long for the day when both those parties are dedicated to democracy.)
Still, the question I find myself asking myself is, “How is this possible?” How is a dwindling faction in a society where there are more non-churchgoers than churchgoers and where the vast majority believes, unlike Paul Weyrich, in democracy doing this? How have we allowed ourselves to accept the proposition that we’re powerless when we’re immensely powerful, when all we need, like the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow (always my favorite) is already inside us? It all hinges on the selling of a lie, that voting makes no difference, that it won’t matter, that we don’t matter. But it does, it will and we do.
But they’re also, as my grandmother would put it, talking out both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, they try to convince the oppressed that they’re actually free. But on the other, they’re told to celebrate that freedom by the shaking of the same shackles that bind them. “Power has been cried by those stronger than me – straight into the face that tells you to rattle your chains if you love being free.”
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Today, we could make a solemn vow to those who came before us to honor the vote and all it cost them to secure it for us; power we already have, that they purchased for us with their blood. Because the shackles aren’t locked and we’re only bound for as long as we allow ourselves to be.
We need every eligible voter alive to recognize the power we have, then, in every way possible, in every race across our nation, put that power into practice. For instance, in 2026, every member of the House and a third of the Senate is up for re-election. We already have the power to completely neutralize Weyrich’s strategy.
There’s no reason why we should allow anyone back to DC who’s not committed to representing all of us. But the only way that happens is if we start now. It’s not the only thing before us that needs doing (we’ll delve into what the resistance should look like in How to Survive a Bully), but, in terms of our nation’s future, it might be the most critical.
It’s also how we honor them – Fred, Anna Mae and the Rainbow Coalition, Martin, Medgar and the Birmingham girls, Jimmie, Herbert and Lamar, Dylan, Lennon and Woody, Joni, Billie and Patti, Pete, Mavis and Nina. It’s how we all cry power.
Because, in the end, though it starts with the waking, it’s the rising that changes everything.
May you be strong and well to continue your brave and brilliant inspirations!