Good afternoon, loves-
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of being named the Storyteller-in-Residence for the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium Summer Convening. The Consortium is a remarkable organization, filled with people dedicated to uplifting and preserving the full scope of Black history in Alabama. A great deal of this work includes preserving spaces that are historically significant to the Freedom Movement, including doctor’s offices, hotels, private homes, and churches where Black freedom and empowerment were the rule of the day everyday.
The Consortium does the careful and necessary work of documenting our stories. I was nervous, yet honored, when they asked me to give the keynote remarks for the Summer Convening. For years, my elders (many of them ancestors now) told me stories that inspired Moonrise Over New Jessup. For those still with us, the years 1957-1961 evoke powerful memories of love, community, and a deep desire for independence and freedom despite the racist violence and structural malevolence central to the American narrative. The lives of my people are full and complex and not to be talked about in dismissive and trifling ways. So it still sometimes feels like I am stepping out of a child’s place when I give talks about how they lived, how their elders lived, and how all of our long-gone ancestors lived in Alabama. To dishonor their stories would be to disgrace their legacies.
It is a blessing that the elders support and embrace my work. They remark time and again that New Jessup represents lives that they remember. To put an even finer point on it, my Auntie J constantly reminds me to, “Stay out here telling folks that Alabama was more than just the civil war and civil rights.” My calling is to remember with them, and render their stories in intelligent, compassionate, and truthful ways. Black southerners have been living on, and loving on, the soil and their communities. So when folks sneer “Alabama” like the land created racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, that vitriol lands on Black people who have waged the freedom fight in the south for generations.
Black people don’t need, deserve, or want pity or scorn for choosing to stay in the south. Southern Black folks birthed movements. Resistance ain’t new, and our freedom ain’t never been free, but we’ve been taking liberty in ways large and small since we set foot on this soil, and fighting for our right to thrive everywhere, including Alabama. Anti-Blackness isn’t in the soil where my people hunted and grew food, owned businesses and homes. The water where we fished and were baptized wasn’t racist, and the sun don’t rise just to hear white supremacy crow. When folks call Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Florida as places they could “never live” or “can’t stand,” sometimes they mention the heat. But more often than not, the statement is revealed as a blanket objection to the structural inequalities designed to impact every social, economic, and political part of our lives by regimes desperate to stay in power. So say that. Object to systems of inequality with your whole chest, and then, maybe, try to be part of the solution. But the “I can’t stand (fill in the blank southern state)” speaks volumes. The language of passivity is a loud one and needs no translation.
My goal is to be part of the solution. My goal is to tell the truth about the generations who didn’t know my name, but who prayed for me nonetheless. My goal is to do right by my people, which I hope I did in these remarks.
Thank you for watching, loves. Until next time.
Be well,
Jamila
Telling Our Stories, Promoting Our Truth [FULL SPEECH]