Womens Day: How it would feel to Be Free...

Remember our Sisters in Jails, Prisons, and Detention Centers today.
International Women's Day, March 8, 2010.
Celebrate Women's Resistance!

This is a great (and long) article from the Revolutionary Communist Party about Nina Simone, one of our greatest contemporary resisters, written in the aftermath of her death. It seems appropriate for both International Woman’s Day and a few other things coming up this month.

Nina died in the spring of 2003, which I remember so clearly because the previous six weeks of radio (I had no TV) was nothing but war. As I heard her music soulfully come through NPR that day, I became conscious that was I was hearing was most clearly the truth - which I hadn't heard much of from any media then. I realized this woman was not just a visionary and musician; she was a revolutionary. I suspected it must have cheered her to see the unified global resistance to the war rise up before she died.

A number of years later I encountered Nina's music again - this time in a justice studies class at ASU on social movements. Our professor almost always had a great clip of protest music she played as we settled in for the class session, and Nina was one of her favorites. The Civil Rights Movement yielded to Black Power, which was tempered - not crushed - by the rabid repression and violence that liberation movement groups were met with by police organizations. Nina had a song for it every step of the way.

Nina spent the last years of her life in exile from America, as our government was determined to persecute her for her activism by prosecuting her on tax evasion if she returned. Exile is an extreme punishment we don't talk a lot about, and when we do we're usually referring to throwing someone out of a country or community after at least a showing of some kind of due process - not secretly burying them in the darkest recesses of control units and Supermaxes. Exile is what happens to the incarcerated automatically, though, which is a traumatic separation from their family, community, and daily lives, thrusting them into a world they can't possibly have prepared for that is organized and maintained entirely on the premise that anyone who fails to comply with state agents will be subjected to anything from ridicule and humiliation to massive violence. Some will also have endured the added trauma of prolonged, unrelenting isolation and invisibility. (And that just relates to what they are empowered by law to do to us under certain circumstances.)

Nina had an affinity for slaves and prisoners; she was able to make the connections pretty easily; she knew her history. Slaves and prisoners have been subjected to the most intense mechanisms of state domination and control - done at great expense not because they are irrelevant, but because they help Power control the masses by demonstrating how devastating the loss of one's liberty is through civil sanctions (enslaved by court ordered forfeitures, trapped in a low-paying, unstable job market, immobilized by crushing poverty and debt) and criminalization (with its permanent records, mandatory minimums, aggressive probation officers, attendant demonization, and post-release prohibitions from public resources).

Anyway, this summary of Nina's life also sets the stage for a lot of our issues with the prison industrial complex and militarized police state we have today...

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The Revolutionary Heart of Nina Simone

by Michael Slate

Revolutionary Worker #1202, June 8, 2003, posted at rwor.org

A little more than a month ago I heard Mississippi Goddam playing on the radio. I loved that song and I was really glad to hear it. Then within a half hour I heard My Baby Just Cares for Me and See Line Woman --that was more Nina Simone in one half hour than I'd heard on the radio for years. My heart sank. It could only mean one thing. Nina was gone.

Nina Simone died on April 21 at her home in the South of France. Her ashes have been spread across a handful of African countries, and the world is sad for her loss but a much richer place for having her among us.

I remember the first time I ever heard Nina Simone. I was 17 and living in a segregated neighborhood between Philadelphia and Chester. I lived in an Irish neighborhood bordered by an Italian neighborhood, a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and a Black neighborhood. We were all working class and the hoods were miles and miles of tiny red-brick row-homes arranged in a maze of circles. We didn't mix, except to fight. In the early 1960s my neighborhood made national news when a racist mob formed up to terrorize a Black family who had moved in.

By 1968, I had learned some things and I had friends from the Black and Puerto Rican hoods. On the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated I was parked with my girlfriend outside of her house. I had the car radio tuned in to WDAS, at that time a major Soul station in the city. It was sometime after midnight when the DJ popped on I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free . Everything stopped for me. My girlfriend hit another button on the radio. I looked at her hard and then reached over and brought back WDAS and Nina Simone. She stared at me and sneered, "Please don't tell me you're a n*gger lover." That was the last time I ever saw Beth. But it was the beginning of a long relationship with the music of Nina Simone.

"I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free
I wish I could break
all the chains holding me
I wish I could say
all the things that I should say
Say 'em loud, say 'em clear
For the whole round world to hear
I wish I could share
all the love that's in my heart
Remove all the bars
that keep us apart
I wish you could know
what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree
That every man should be free."

Fifteen years later, a couple of friends were getting married in Baltimore. They both came from Black working class families and were revolutionary communists. Late one night, a couple of weeks before their wedding, they came by my house to borrow Nina's Silk & Soul album because they wanted I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free to be their wedding song. The ceremony was beautiful, the song was perfect--it raised things to a whole other level. It took me years to get the album back. Whenever I saw the brother, he would always half-jokingly explain that his wife felt a special tie to that album--and it was stronger than my tie. I did finally get it back. When I played it I found that it had been played over and over so often that the grooves had almost disappeared, especially the song I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free. I replaced the album but I've held on to that original copy. Those worn grooves are a beautiful testimony to the bond between Nina and the masses of Black people.

FROM BACH TO NINA

Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon on Februarry 21, 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina. As Nina tells it, she was born into music and the big question for her was what was she going to do with it. Nina trained in classical music. Bach was her favorite musician; and she modeled herself after singer Marian Anderson. She wanted to be the first Black concert pianist, and towards that end she attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York for a year until her scholarship expired. She later applied for admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia but was rejected because she was Black and poor...

(pick up the rest of the article here: http://revcom.us/a/1202/ninasimone.htm )

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This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online rwor.org
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Hope for Arizona's Future

I first prepared this post a couple of days ago in haste. Since then I've had time to think more about the anarchists I've met in recent months - those pictured here and those who remain anonymous. What I've witnessed firsthand is that this predominately young group of people get together every week to discuss how to make their community a better place to live for the poor and dispossessed; how to build sustainable communities; how to challenge things like racism, xenophobia, and police harassment of minorities; how to feed the hungry - not as charity, but through shared vegetarian meals that makes hunger visible and the poor less stigmatized; and how to take a more active role in shaping this town without participating in the processes which corrupt it, like politics.

And every week, without fail, they pass a hat to raise a little cash to support a few political prisoners. It may not come to much, but half of nothing is a whole lot more to prisoners of conscience than a little of everything. If I was a prisoner locked away in a hole, these are the folks I'd want to know I existed, because they'd never forget me...ever.

So, as I said in an earlier post, when Marcia Powell died, I knew these were the folks to seek out who would go all the way, if necessary, to make her life visible and meaningful. In fact, it was Stan, the guy up there with the unabashed full-faced smile in the front, who remembered her from the anarchists' "Food Not Bombs" Sunday meals and delivered the only account of her anyone had at the memorial service that wasn't extracted from her criminal record. Rather, it came from his heart, and from her smile.

These are some of Phoenix's anarchists. They reject domination and hierarchy, even when it would be so much more convenient, like when they run their meetings - it's all done by consensus, which can take forever sometimes. Despite appearances and stereotypes, they aren't really all young, white and male - though I've been known to joke that I'm not enough of any of the above to be an anarchist myself. They're far more diverse a bunch than they appear, and have a fairly sophisticated understanding of what's going on in the world.

Unlike a lot of groups of young people, these folks study and work diligently to figure out their role in making this a better place, and most are involved in the community in a number of positive ways - supporting No More Deaths, the Rusty Spoke Bike Collective, Food not Bombs, Copwatch, the Latino community's battle against racial profiling, the rights of prisoners in our county jail, and the dignity and survival of the poor. When the occasion seems to call for direct action, they also put themselves on the line to protest war, capitalist exploitation, hatemongers, the carceral regime, and yes, those damn neo-Nazis (also known as "Friends of Sheriff Joe").

I'd say that as members of the Valley community, our anarchists represent the best of us pretty well. I've never seen a single one do or suggest a criminal act - no one has even fired up a joint or cracked a beer in front of me. I wouldn't be ashamed for a moment to be seen, photographed, or even arrested with them - even though I frankly still don't really know what an anarchist is. The closest frame of reference I have, in fact, is the Society of Friends. These kids hardly even swear - I'm more vulgar (and probably more of a criminal) than most of them. And when it comes to their collective politics, their community service, and their processes of decision-making, that's who they remind me of - a bunch of Quakers. Abolitionists who would live and die for what they believe in - a few John Browns in the mix, maybe (thank god, really) but mostly a bunch of committed pacifists who would hang for teaching someone to read, distributing anti-racist literature, or protesting the Fugitive Slave Act.

Now, put that in their FBI files, and shove it. And remember this if any of them get put away for manifesting the better half of humanity's conscience - find out their name, declare your public support, and pass a hat. Forget the "rights" of the racist pigs to spew holocaust lies and hate: window-smashing stereotypes aside, if these kids can't be free to express themselves in this country, then the rest of us are in a whole lot more trouble than we ever thought.

These Anarchists Rock!

(Photo stolen without permission from the Feathered Bastard's blog at the Phoenix New Times 07/14/09. Sue me.)