you could say this note is late or you could say it’s right on time to celebrate my mom’s birthday! my whole life she has insisted on the importance of friendships, how they sustain us and keep us. happy birthday, Jennifer Chapman.
so. as more of us ask ourselves what a world without prisons could look like, it’s easy to focus on the prisons themselves, the police, the violence, how carceral our culture is. at the conference i went to a couple of weeks ago, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights held a workshop on abolition which focused almost completely on relationships. they acknowledged how prisons break relationships, families, communities. they named that a critical focus of their work is maintaining close connections with incarcerated people and uplifting their leadership in movement. and, they asked everyone in the room to consider, to chart out who has poured into us across our lives. who has taken the time to develop our leadership, and who we’ve poured into in turn. i thought of dozens of people and organizations. so many more people than i can name.
then, i was lucky enough to attend a symposium on the legacy of Ella Baker, that also celebrated the work and life of Dr. Barbara Ransby, last Friday. there were several movement giants there, and all of them all day returned to the importance of collectivity. Mariame Kaba noted, “we have soft places to land because a lot of people worked.” many people spoke about the ordinary people who dared to engage.
pretty much my favorite part of the day was hearing people talk about how much they love Dr. Barbara Ransby (who i hadn’t heard of until that day), about her commitment to organizing, her rigor, her generosity, her intellectual rigor, how she brought Ella Baker to life for them, her sense of humor and revolutionary love. people celebrated what she opened up in their lives, the depth of her mentorship. they loved her in public. in other words, the best part of the day was witnessing a sliver of the relationships.
Dr. Barbara Ransby, in the keynote with Angela Davis, emphasized that Ella Baker had an enormous capacity to appreciate people, she saw the extraordinary in ‘ordinary’ people.
all day, Ella gazed at us. this painting by Robert Shetterly was the image for the program. by the end of the day i thought she was beaming, i felt so invigorated.
celebrating Ella Baker as part of her Black Feminist Breathing Chorus, Alexis Pauline Gumbs invites us to bring our light to every situation.
beaming at you, again.
*Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall last friday