Stayed On Freedom
The Long History of Black Power through One Family's Journey
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A new history of Black Liberation, told through the intertwined story of two grassroots organizers
The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom.
Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.
Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Formerly married activists Zoharah and Michael Simmons take center stage in this eye-opening history of the Black Power movement's global reach. Berger (Captive Nation), a professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell, draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with the Simmonses to chart their involvement in civil rights struggles at home and abroad. The two met in 1965 while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and "their friendship deepened into something more," as they organized on behalf of Julian Bond after he was denied his duly elected seat in the Georgia state legislature over his opposition to the Vietnam War. Berger pinpoints those efforts—"SNCC's first sustained foray into organizing in an urban context"—as an inflection point for Black Power, and tracks the movement's evolution from its seeds in the U.S. to its influence on freedom struggles in Palestine, South Africa, and elsewhere. Along the way, he documents the Simmonses' interactions with prominent civil rights figures, uplifts their fellow "foot soldiers," including SNCC organizer Bill Ware, and details Zoharah's fight against patriarchal attitudes within the movement. Though the couple's relationship gets somewhat lost in the shuffle, this is an insightful look at "the multitudes of Black Power."
