A History of Black Power We Need and Deserve

Even though the Atlanta Project was working in the organizing tradition that SNCC had become known for, it was also trying something bold and new to SNCC—organizing in an urban area. Collectively, its staff brought years of experience and lessons that had prompted them to push not for integration, but for Black self-reliance and power. Along the way, they constantly reflected on what they had learned over the years about power: that the power of white people, whether they were leaders of the Democratic Party or of SNCC’s own Research Department, meant that they often assumed they knew what was best for Black people and tried to dictate the terms of racial progress. To Atlanta Project organizers, this engendered Black reliance on white paternalism. It made Black people internalize a sense of inferiority. Project members set their thoughts out in a seven-page paper that came to be called the “Black Consciousness paper.” Representing the collective wisdom of “all of the Atlanta Project, including [Mendy] Samstein, its one white member,” this paper became the stuff of legends (129).

SNCC debated the paper’s ideas for months—particularly the dual needs for Black people to set SNCC’s strategic directions and for white people to organize white communities to support Black self-determination. But people outside the movement got a hold of the paper and reduced it to a hate-fueled, ideological rant. The New York Times falsely reported that the “Black Consciousness paper” had become SNCC policy and used it as evidence that Black Power was, at its core, antiwhite. Many scholars and writers since have repeated this bad history, most recently Mark Whitaker in Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement. For decades, the Atlanta Project’s story got reduced to an ideological drive to rid the movement of white people. In short, many blamed the Atlanta Project for SNCC’s supposed turn away from the “beloved community” ideal and its presumed turn toward identity politics. In other words, the Atlanta Project and its paper were among the first and primary scapegoats in a years-long drive to demonize Black Power.

This is one of many reasons why historian Dan Berger’s new book is so essential. Providing one of the first detailed accounts of the Atlanta Project and its ideas, his book shows the lie to these long-standing, simplistic accounts. It does so by bringing two under-appreciated lives to the foreground, leaders of the Atlanta Project: Zoharah Simmons (Gwendolyn Robinson) and Michael Simmons. Crafted by the careful hands of a skilled historian of Black Power, Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey provides one of the first, full accountings of the Atlanta Project. More than that, by homing in on the multilayered politics of the Simmonses—who were comrades-turned-spouses and then comrades again—it illuminates the many facets of Black Power that so often do not make the leap from academic to trade press, from people’s lived experiences into a larger public domain. The Simmonses’s life histories, as told by Berger, are the stories of Black Power that the public needs and deserves.

Berger’s expertise in Black Power, deep research, accumulation of publications, and beautiful narrative writing make him well-placed to tell the Simmonses’s stories. Moreover, Zoharah and Michael are excellent subjects to make the leap from archival collections and scholarly monographs to a wider audience. Born Gwendolyn Robinson, Zoharah Simmons grew up in Memphis listening to her grandmother Rhoda talk about voting as “about power, not candidates,” the same kind of framing that she would later bring to SNCC (25). She defied her family’s wishes when she joined SNCC, first as a volunteer and then as a paid organizer and project manager during its iconic 1964 Freedom Summer. Her path to Black Power was thus informed by both how her family viewed Black people’s lived experiences and by the militancy of organizations like SNCC and the Nation of Islam. In later years—during what were arguably Black Power’s heydays of the late 1960s and early ’70s—she promoted Black pride and self-determination in her paid work for the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), through her fleeting membership in the Nation of Islam, as the founder of a food co-op in Philadelphia, and in her job at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Propelling her journey were her politics and her enduring curiosity around faith.

Michael Simmons’s story also shows how the politics of Black Power could gestate in a young person’s life and family experiences. Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1950s and early ’60s, his mother instructed him and his siblings to “Be willing to challenge any authority if you believe you are right” (38–39, italics in original). This lesson coincided with early introductions to various strains of Black nationalism—including the Nation of Islam, through his brother’s membership, and the Revolutionary Action Movement. Like Zoharah, Michael was politicized as a college student and went against his family’s wishes in joining the Southern-based freedom movement, first in SNCC’s Arkansas projects and then in Georgia. Guiding his political development were his staunch anti-imperialist and antiwar stances.

Michael and Zoharah first organized together (and became romantically involved) in the Atlanta Project, which Zoharah (who was still known as Gwen Robinson then) headed. She, a very seasoned organizer with years of project leadership experience already, had faced the wrath of a white South bent on terrorizing SNCC out of existence. For two weeks in 1965, she had been locked up on state fairgrounds with dozens of other Black people who faced daily brutality from police and the local white people whom police deputized. When she and Michael met, as Berger writes it, “Mike looked up to Gwen immediately. She was strong-willed, determined. Most of all, she had been in Mississippi—the front lines” (112–13). Michael was no meek lamb himself. He might have been shy, but he too had faced arrest and the brutality of Southern segregationists. And he was developing a keen understanding of the United States in the world, and of the intersections between racism, capitalism, and global hegemony. Locked up for refusing to be drafted into the U.S. war in Vietnam, Michael continued to organize behind prison walls. Thus, Zoharah’s and Michael’s activist histories cut across points both well-known (SNCC, the Nation of Islam) and underappreciated (draft refusals and periods of incarceration) on the Black freedom struggle’s timeline.

Through the prism of the Simmonses, Berger gives us a Black Power movement that is a big, broad tent. In public memory, Black Power is often reduced to the Black Panther Party—which, though crucial to the movement and in need of further study, was but one of hundreds of organizations pushing for Black autonomy and pride. In part because of this, Black Power can seem small and fringe—but the long movement that Zoharah and Michael helped forge involved a sundry set. There was the sometimes-clandestine Revolutionary Action Movement; organizations like the NCNW and AFSC, usually seen as too liberal to include Black radicals; and protests against prison conditions, U.S. foreign policy and aggression, racial capitalism, and gendered poverty. Berger takes readers from the tutoring projects of the Northern Student Movement to Temple University’s Black Student League and on to the Third World Coalition of the AFSC. This big-tent Black Power helps us to see how many people and organizations were drawn to the movement. It played no bit part in the drama of twentieth-century U.S. history.

Berger also reminds readers that “divides” are often used to understand Black Power and (often reductively) set it apart from other phases of the Black freedom struggle. These divisions relate to region (North/South), tactics (nonviolence/armed self-defense), the role of faith (Muslim/Christian), and “the local and the global” (12). Yet, the Simmonses’s stories dissolve these divisions. Evidencing the circulation of activists between the North and South, Michael cut his political teeth in Philadelphia before being drawn to join SNCC’s efforts in the South. Zoharah’s experiences arming herself in the mid-1960s advance historians’ insistence that nonviolence and armed self-defense co-existed. Raised in Christian households, both Michael and Zoharah were eventually drawn to (and then left) the Nation of Islam. In Berger’s telling, one cannot miss how global events—the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, South African apartheid, the U.S. war in Vietnam, and the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic—shaped activists’ consciousness.

Indeed, the local/global divide is perhaps the one most powerfully debunked through the Simmonses’s living example. They exemplify the Black radical tradition of learning from the global and organizing the local. Well before SNCC issued its January 1966 statement against the war in Vietnam, the couple stood critical of the war and U.S. foreign policy. Michael liked to remind people that “America is not a liberated zone” (89, italics in original). Zoharah was one of the most important people to push SNCC’s antiwar position, as she insisted, “We must come out against South Africa and Rhodesia” (114). They saw connections between what they were doing in the U.S. South and the actions of Black people on the African continent trying to overthrow white rule. They watched as Black men they knew were drafted to fight a war by a government that did not protect those fighting for their freedoms at home. They were witnesses as U.S. politicians maintained segregation domestically while invading Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Well beyond their SNCC years—which ended in early 1967—the Simmonses kept pursuing Black internationalism.

Though its arguments for it are less explicit than those around internationalism, Stayed on Freedom also upends hackneyed views on Black Power and gender. At best, the movement has been seen as male-centered, or worse, as a vehicle for male chauvinism. To be sure—as was no less true for the civil rights movement or the New Left—the Black Power movement could reproduce male dominance and heterosexism. Yet, to see Black Power through the Simmonses’s relationship is to know that some Black women like Zoharah exercised leadership in myriad places. It is also to see that some radical Black men like Michael held deep respect for the leadership of Black women like Zoharah. Moreover, Zoharah’s experiences in the Nation of Islam furthers recent scholarly insights from historians like Ula Taylor, who show that women in the Nation found ways to negotiate its strict gendered prescriptions. At the same time that Zoharah was a Nation of Islam adherent, she was also traveling widely as a paid employee of the NCNW’s Project Womanpower. While she followed rules about seeking permission to travel without her husband, she skirted the rules on dress code. If the larger, nonacademic public has had few chances to see how gender and Black Power had a complex relationship, Stayed on Freedom helps to rectify that.

Stayed on Freedom also shows that it is possible to challenge the popular demonization of Black Power without veering into hagiography. Nothing in the book shows this better than Berger’s care-filled handling of how the Simmonses failed to protect their daughter Aishah from sexual abuse when she was a child. Aishah, Zoharah, and Michael Simmons have all spoken and/or written publicly about this family history in recent years, and so Berger is not revealing a story that the family itself has not already addressed. But he also does not leave the story out of his own narrative, content that the family has already shared it. Indeed, he writes about it head on, clearly showing it is an important part of this “one family’s journey.”

Though young Aishah had told her parents that Michael’s stepfather had begun abusing her, Zoharah and Michael failed to make the interventions necessary to stop the abuse. They created a plan to do something about it, but “they never enacted the plan” and maintained a level of denial instead (259). It took decades, but “Aishah’s persistent activism on the issue [of childhood sexual abuse] made it possible for Michael and Zoharah to confront their failures to intervene at the time—and to speak publicly about it” (302). Berger’s inclusion of this part of their family story clearly takes the Simmonses’s lead, unfolding this harrowing part of Aishah’s life in line with how she has made her parents confront the harm of which they were a part. It speaks to what we might think of as a trauma-informed writing practice, and, I would argue, we should see it as a crucial part, not a peripheral one, to the larger story of Black Power that Stayed on Freedom tells, for it shows how we can look squarely at these individuals, Zoharah and Michael, and ask how they, with their finely tuned and morally inflected politics, could fail the one who most depended on them—and how, with Aishah as the guide, they could work toward redemption.

If all Stayed on Freedom did was debunk the myths about the Atlanta Project and Black Power, that alone would make it a vital read. But it gives us so much more. By unfolding two individual lives that merged and created a politically inflected, loving and complicated family, this book gives us a history of Black Power that is as tactical as it is analytical, as global as it is local, and as based in love as it is in politics.