When Dan Berger was a first-year student at the University of Florida, a guest speaker named Zoharah Simmons came to his history class. He credits her with changing his life. “She talked about the civil rights movement in a more textured and three-dimensional way than I’d heard before,” Berger tells The Progressive. “She spoke of organizational culture and power–eternal issues for every person involved in activist organizing–but she simultaneously focused on the bigger picture, the movements for racial and social justice.”
In response to the talk, Berger set out to learn as much as he could about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other groups involved in the 1960s struggle for racial justice. He’s been studying these efforts ever since. Now a comparative ethnic studies professor at the University of Washington in Bothell, Berger has remained deeply influenced by Simmons’s example, and the two have kept in regular contact for more than twenty years. Over time, he’s also gotten to know her ex-husband, Michael Simmons, and their daughter Aishah Shahidah Simmons.
Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, which comes out on January 24 from Basic Books, tells their story; the account is at once both personally and politically revealing, and addresses the many ways that movements for racial justice have developed and changed since the early days of the civil rights movement.
Basic Books
Berger began interviewing each member of the Simmons family in 2014; he also interviewed dozens of other antiracist activists. Their accounts provide a glimpse into the ways social justice movements can fracture, split, and regroup. In addition, the book also provides a powerful look into community building, community organizing, and the psychology of individual engagement.
Stayed on Freedom opens with Zoharah—named Gwen Robinson at birth—and focuses on her upbringing in the segregated South. Growing up, her grandmother made sure that she not only attended church, but also read JET magazine to stay apprised of events that impacted the Black community. By the time Gwen got to Spelman College, sit-ins against segregation were becoming common and she was quickly drawn in. Michael, reared in Philadelphia, also felt the pull.
Both of them ended up in Mississippi as SNCC staffers. For Gwen, this meant facing her peers’ sexism while simultaneously fighting white supremacy. Despite frustrations, she became a leader in voter registration drives and other SNCC campaigns.
Michael, not surprisingly, faced different challenges, not least of them determining how United States military involvement in Vietnam was entwined with civil rights. An evolving anti-imperialist critique led him to demand that SNCC oppose the war and support draft resistance.
In 1963, with the draft hovering over him, both Michael and Gwen were sent to Atlanta. While there, they led an effort that became The Atlanta Project. Berger writes that this was “SNCC’s first sustained foray into organizing in an urban context” and notes that it allowed the organizers to zero in on poverty and overpriced slum housing, dual evils that Zoharah, Michael, and other Atlanta activists saw as being enabled by racism. A Project newsletter, The Nitty Gritty, explicitly opposed the war, supported the growing demand for Black power, and was openly critical of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
These ideas ultimately cost Zoharah and Michael their jobs.
For Berger—and for Zoharah and Michael—The Atlanta Project was an essential component of the Black liberation struggle, a “call for self-determination” that grew out of the intractability of racism.
What’s more, Berger says that he hopes Stayed on Freedom will serve as a corrective to the idea that the Black Power movement was Northern-led. “Typically, Black power is presented as synonymous with the Black Panthers,” Berger tells The Progressive. “The book is in no way meant to diminish the role of the Panthers, but Black power’s origins can be found in the conditions that existed in the South, in the helplessness that Black people experienced during segregation. There are, of course, obvious philosophical and political differences between the civil rights and Black Power movements. But when SNCC started talking about Black power, a dichotomy developed, with ‘good’ civil rights activists on one side and ‘bad’ Black Power activists on the other.”
Perhaps, Berger adds, this is why The Atlanta Project has rarely made it into accounts of SNCC and the civil rights era. “Histories of the 1960s typically portray The Project as the villain of the civil rights movement or they totally dismiss it,” he says. “I hope this book will ignite interest in understanding The Project’s role in Black power’s rise.”
Both Michael and Zoharah were enmeshed in The Atlanta Project’s Black power framework. Nonetheless, after they were booted out of SNCC, they had to find new political homes. Stayed on Freedom tracks Zoharah and Michael’s continued sojourn, a journey that included a brief stint in the Nation of Islam.
While Berger dubs Michael “a died-in-the-wool secularist” whose interests were always more political than religious, he presents Zoharah as deeply invested in spirituality, a concern that led her to the Sufi mystic Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (who lived from 1900-1986 and is credited with giving Gwen the name Zoharah). “Zoharah was always on a spiritual journey,” Berger says. “She grew up in the church and when Michael went to prison for draft resistance in 1969, there was a hole that her political work spoke to, but did not fill. On a deep emotional level, she connected with Bawa and his ideas about faith.” To this day, she remains a devotee.
Zoharah and Michael are now in their late seventies, and Stayed on Freedom is a tribute to their ability to remain steadfast in their work to build Black power and to end racism and white supremacy. Since the 1970s, Michael has worked on-and-off at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), most recently with Roma people in Hungary; Zoharah also worked at the AFSC before returning to college, getting a Ph.D., and becoming a teacher.
Throughout Stayed on Freedom, Berger not only celebrates Zoharah and Michael’s dedication, but also addresses their mistakes and regrets. Among the most prominent was their parenting of daughter Aishah, now a filmmaker. Because they traveled so much for their jobs, Aishah’s care often fell to Michael’s mom and sexually abusive stepfather. “Aishah has made working against sexual violence an increasing part of her life, and she’s struggled with her mom and dad for years,” Berger says. “Healing is an ongoing process for all of them.”