‘TIL VICTORY IS WON

400 YEARS OF MAKING REVOLUTION & INVENTING UTOPIA

CLIENT: BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY

Public Programs: Issues & Ideas, History & the Future, Social Justice

Barron Claiborne (Left) and Delphine Diallo (Right)

ABOUT

'Til Victory Is Won was a major community gathering held as part of a national observance of the 400th anniversary of slavery in America. Through teach-ins, performances, talks, and more, ‘Til Victory explored how Americans can work together to create a more radical, inclusive, and racially just future for the United States and beyond.

The event gathered an array of thought leaders to look back, forward, and upward. They included human rights activists, investigative journalists, political strategists, historians, authors, visual artists, performing artists, SNCC veterans, former members of the Black Panther Party, and champions in the Movement for Black Lives. The program expanded BPL’s mission to present socially engaged cultural programming and provide opportunities for civic engagement and exploration.

CURATORIAL STATEMENTS 1-6

1. In the Interest of Justice: A Moral Response to Mass Incarceration

The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was one of three Reconstruction bills passed by Congress after the U.S. Civil War. Ostensibly designed to ratify the Emancipation Proclamation and abolish slavery, the Amendment also raised an existential quandary: How would America, its economy fattened by centuries of stolen labor, continue to grow without forcing Black people to work for nothing under threat of death? The answer, and the seeds of today’s incarceration epidemic, lay within a section of the bill that outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” Which meant that for the nation to continually prosper, Black Americans must be made, as swiftly and as permanently as possible, into criminals.

From those seeds grew a system that today costs $182 Billion per year to operate, generating massive profits for an obscure network of investors. Almost seven million people are caught in its grip, most of them Black or Brown. What is the human cost that we all pay? What are the moral consequences of an economic engine that regards children, adults, and the elderly as fuel – or crops? When and how do we tilt the scales toward empathy, restoration, and justice?

2. Hands On The Freedom Plow: Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era and Beyond

Women were always at the front lines in the Civil Rights era - Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Diane Nash, and countless others. The risks they faced were varied and formidable. What made them persevere? Was their relationship to fear and courage different than it was for men? Did they wear the traditional mantle of leadership, or find other ways to spur their cohorts to action? When the demand for Civil Rights gave way to the call for Black Power, did women’s roles change?

As the next generation of activists – including Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, Ericka Huggins, and other members of the Black Panther Party - laid hands on the freedom plow, what was different? What can their experiences tell us about the kind of leadership needed today?

3. Notes On the Middle Passage: A Conversation On the Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Middle Passage made an unexpected appearance in the 2018 film Black Panther, when the anti-hero Killmonger tells the title character to “Bury me in the ocean, with my ancestors that jumped from the ships, because they knew death was better than bondage.” Aside from that reference, public discussion of the historic injury done to Africans and African Americans tends to start with Slavery. But the trauma began much earlier.

How then should we remember the Transatlantic Slave Trade today? As the starting point for so many contemporary forces of inhumanity and greed, how can we measure its impact on our national identity and individual selves? How should we honor the lives it changed and took?

4. Lay Down Your Sword and Shield: How Do We Heal From Endless Battles Against Oppression?

Sethe, the haunted lead in Toni Morrison's Beloved, is counseled throughout the novel to lay down her sword and shield. "Both of ‘em down. Down by the riverside,” she is instructed. “Don't study war no more. Lay all that mess down." The refrain has been widely interpreted as a call for Sethe to lower her emotional defenses and let herself heal from the traumas of slavery.

For those who battle with racial oppression and the legacy of slavery, or who work to simply maintain their defenses in the face of injustice, when and how do we leave the battlefield? By what riverside do we gather to replenish? How do we maintain our capacity for vulnerability and invention when the fight still rages and its injuries still flare?

5. Envisioning Victory: What Will It Take To Win?

In 1845, after publishing his highly publicized autobiography, Frederick Douglass sailed to Europe at the suggestion of friends who feared for his life. In a letter written to fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in 1846, Douglass imagined the hostile reception that awaited when he returned to America, preaching “salvation from slavery to a nation fast hastening to destruction. I know it will be hard,” he wrote, “but I glory in the battle, as well as in the victory.”

We now understand that Douglass’ definition of the battle meant the entire war: not just the abolition of slavery as a law or a culture, but the eradication of it as an idea. To win that vision he was prepared to take steps that others could barely follow. But he wasn’t alone. Harriet Tubman, John Brown and many others each cleared a path, fighting differently and fiercely toward a common peak.

The forces arrayed against us today are the beneficiaries of those who profited from slavery, who viewed Douglass and Tubman as not entirely human and regarded Brown as a madman. What will it take for us to not simply oppose those forces but to win? And our own definition of victory: How grand and far-reaching is that vision? Is there a glory over everything, as Tubman described? Does it drive us toward a more just and radical world as it has for freedom fighters over the centuries? Are we prepared now to make it real?

6. On the Frontlines of Freedom: SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the Movement for Black Lives

In the work of defending our rights and each other, while also inventing the more just world we envision, what are the lessons we can learn from the freedom movements that came before and those that are active now? At a time when people of immense value are cut down in their homes, in public parks, in their cars, for little more than being alive and being Black; when state policies to disenfranchise Black people are growing more sophisticated and efficient; when people of color and people of conscience everywhere are flung to the front lines in the battle for basic freedoms and human rights - what are the strategies we must devise today to imagine tomorrow? How can the activism of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the Movement for Black Lives Guide us on that path?

PROGRAM

SLAVERY IS AN ACT OF WAR: A Tribute to Harriet Tubman
The Dream Unfinished: An Activist Orchestra | Aisha Hinds | Jumaane D. Williams | Ian Brennan

HANDS ON THE FREEDOM PLOW: Women Activists In the Civil Rights Era and Beyond
Robyn C. Spencer | Judy Richardson | Dorothy M. Zellner | Moderated by L. Joy Williams

TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED: A Continuous Reading of the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel
OlaRonke Akinmowo | Bridgett M. Davis | Kali Holloway | Chaney Sims

LAY DOWN YOUR SWORD AND SHIELD: How Do We Heal From Endless Battles Against Oppression?
Sasha Alexander | Noel Altaha (White Mountain Apache) | Mildred Beltré | Moderated by Gabri Christa

ON THE FRONT LINES OF FREEDOM: SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the Movement for Black Lives
Geri M. Augusto | Sekou Odinga | Anthonine Pierre | Albert Saint Jean | Moderated by Kimberly Peeler-Allen

VISUAL NARRATIVES OF LIBERATION: Strategies for Reimagining Utopia
Barron Claiborne | Delphine Diallo | Russell Frederick | Jamal Shabazz | Moderated by Cora Fisher

ENVISIONING VICTORY: What Will It Take To Win?
Shawnda Chapman | Demita Frazier | Nikole Hannah-Jones | Kimberly Peeler-Allen | Moderated by Greg Tate

nOOse
A performance and talk by: Sherman Fleming

IN THE INTEREST OF JUSTICE: A Moral Response to Mass Incarceration
Susan Burton | Liza Jessie Peterson | Moderated by Sylvia A. Harvey

NOTES ON THE MIDDLE PASSAGE: A Conversation On the Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Ann L. Chinn | Saidiya Hartman | Moderated by Professor Mindy Fullilove

HISTORICAL & LITERARY READINGS: Honoring Four Centuries of Visionaries and Freedom Fighters
Aisha Tandiwe-Bell | Tamar-kali Brown | Eisa Davis | Patrick Dougher | Asma Feyijinmi | Chinara Tate
Jason Bernard Lucas | April Mathis | Greg Mays

‘TIL EARTH AND HEAVEN RING: A Dance to Revolution and Utopia
Storyboard P | Alicia Hall Moran | Deejay Reborn | Marika Hughes

BECOMING MS. BURTON: Selected Readings from the Memoir
Read by Susan Burton

FLYBOY 2: THE GREG TATE READER: Selected Readings from the Anthology
Read by Greg Tate

‘TIL VICTORY MANIFESTO
Written and read by Brian Tate

‘TIL VICTORY MANIFESTO

There has been some question as to who we are.
We are people of color and people of conscience. Troublemakers. From city to countryside to all points between, there we are, troubling the water, bringing life. We are the seeds planted by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer and Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown, Joseph Cinqué and Crazy Horse. We change the culture. We make the future. We grow wild.

We have experienced loss that is measured only by the spaces of the people who were taken: Atatiana Jefferson. Botham Jean. Muhlaysia Booker. Lonette Keehner. Sandra Bland. Tamir Rice. Trayvon Martin. Emmett Till. Countless more, a scroll that could touch the sky. Also the 60 million whose stolen labor was made to harvest stolen land and who were shoved into the grave. We hold them all close. We are anchored by that history and we honor them each time we take flight.

There has been some question as to what we stand for.
Is it hard to know? We stand for the Dream: Life. Liberty. The world made better for people who care about the world. The opportunity to tell our own stories of glorious achievement. The right to vote and to drink clean water. We stand for the right to survive a routine traffic stop, to not go missing while walking to the market, to not turn up inexplicably dead, to not have our children hauled off in handcuffs for having a tantrum in grade school or be snatched from us at gunpoint and warehoused for profit. We celebrate our capacity for greatness and our ability to do the unexpected. To become the unexpected. We stand up for everyone in our boundless community to experience all the abundance that they are due, and we will summon all our courage and mettle to see that made real.

Which brings us to where we are now: In the fight of our lives.
Our opponents are astride an engine that is hundreds of years old, fueled by greed, grievance, and white supremacy. They are invested in it. Their lives depend on it. To keep that position they have united their hateful ideologies behind one banner. And they are winning. We are banned at airports, blocked at border crossings, accosted in public spaces. Their armed factions have come for us in churches, synagogues, mosques, and shopping malls. Each violation is made possible because they have changed the culture. Policies and rhetoric once thought abolished are now commonplace. And when more black and brown people are ground to bits beneath that machine, more refugees turned away, more immigrants criminalized and deported, more houses of worship defaced, more rights stripped from the vulnerable, more of the world’s resources shifted unsustainably in one direction, more environmental protections pitched into the fire, and the Dream reduced to something hazy and fleeting, will they pause?

No. Race hatred is the X factor, the xenophobia factor behind which all reason pales. Their greatest fear: Being replaced. Their oldest tactic: Turning us against each other.

We refuse. We choose to unite around moral truth and a vision of the future worth fighting for: the Beloved Community described by Dr. King, the earthly place covered in glory that awaited Harriet Tubman. We know that when one of us is threatened, we are all put at risk. So we will come together. Then we can defeat them, as our grandparents and ancestors did over the decades and centuries time and time again.

Together we can win.
Today we vow to take up a cause bigger than ourselves. We understand that the solidarity it will require will not come easily. We know that our efforts to gather will be imperfect because we are imperfect. But we are compelled. Today we make a vow to selfless listening and cross-cultural healing, and calling things by their trues names: Racism. Fascism. Xenophobia. When confronted by forces we’re told that cannot be changed, we will change them. We will follow the lead of women of color, the first to experience and understand white supremacy. We will give ourselves to the furious clamor we must raise and prepare ourselves for deployment, each of us playing to strength. We pledge to mobilize at the voting booth and in the street, on every stage, page, and canvas we can find.

Today we vow to take up a cause bigger than ourselves. We understand that the solidarity it will require will not come easily. We know that our efforts to gather will be imperfect because we are imperfect. But we are compelled. Today we make a vow to selfless listening and cross-cultural healing, and calling things by their trues names: Racism. Fascism. Xenophobia. When confronted by forces we’re told that cannot be changed, we will change them. We will follow the lead of women of color, the first to experience and understand white supremacy. We will give ourselves to the furious clamor we must raise and prepare ourselves for deployment, each of us playing to strength. We pledge to mobilize at the voting booth and in the street, on every stage, page, and canvas we can find.

Before us is the Mountaintop, the same one climbed by all the freedom fighters and visionaries from our history. Once we address the business at hand we’ll meet there, and dance to our legacy of revolution and utopia. Along the way we’ll listen for the truths that we hold to be self-evident, starting with these:

Dr. Brenda Greene: “We must reshape the master narrative and ensure that our stories are told, as Toni Morrison tells us, from the Black gaze.”
Judy Richardson: “If we do nothing, nothing changes.”
Ian Brennan: “Inequality itself not only leads to violence. It is violence.”
Liza Jessie Peterson: “Black Love is Kryptonite for white supremacy.”
Sherman Fleming: “We wear the noose everyday.”
Kali Holloway: “We fight because white power cannot be reasoned with or politely asked to share. And frankly, there is no ‘happy medium’ between oppression and our full humanity.”

Today we honor the past and look toward the future. All we have is each other and that will be enough: we are the people we’ve been waiting for. And despite any reports to the contrary, tomorrow will still be ours. As for this fight we’re currently in, how long will we keep at it? Until earth and heaven ring. Until victory is won.

Brian Tate 10.25.19
In memory of Charles & Florence Tate
Commissioned by the Brooklyn Public Library

CULTURAL ADVISORS

PROJECT TEAM

Brian Tate, Co-Curator/Co-Marketing Strategist/Writer
Bill Toles, Tech Production Assistance
Jess Song, Project Support
Ed Marshall, Photography
Laszlo Jakab Orsos, Vice President of Arts and Culture, Brooklyn Public Library
Meredith Walters, Director, Programs and Exhibitions Brooklyn Public Library
Joel Whitney, Literary Curator and Manager, BPL Presents, Brooklyn Public Library
Cora Fisher, Manager/Curator of Visual Art Programming, Arts and Culture, Brooklyn Public Library
Gregg Richards, Senior Audio Visual Technician/Staff Photographer, Brooklyn Public Library

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