Report from Ella Baker Organizing Fund visit to Standing Rock

This report reposted from the Ella Baker Organizing Fund.

The Board of Directors of the Ella Baker Organizing Fund and our supporters from the Korean American Community just finished a four-day visit to Standing Rock, North Dakota. We were an ethnically diverse, multi-generational group of persons with complex and long involvement in movements for civil and human rights, Black liberation,labor organizing, immigration rights, and other critical issues of our time. We went to offer a donation demonstrating our solidarity with the Dakota Access Pipeline Water-Protectors’ struggle against the U.S. government and greedy corporations attempting to invade and contaminate the sacred lands of the Lakota-Sioux people of the Northern Plains and their precious water sources. We presented a letter to Indigenous elders inviting the Lakota-Sioux people to a collaborative project to liberate our peoples. We proposed that Native leaders use their reservations to offer refuge to Black people who are victims of murder, imprisonment, and institutional violence. In addition, we proposed to use the reservations to grow medical marijuana to obtain funds for this revolutionary work. We hope to build on a historical relationship between Native People and African Americans that began during our enslavement. Despite our vast and variant experiences with other mass protests and the mobilizing of responses to basic human needs, few of us were prepared for the sheer scale of the encampment we saw at Standing Rock reservation on the banks of the Cannonball River.

We did not visit only a group of protesters and water protectors, but also a highly organized, self-made and self-sustaining town of 12,000 inhabitants. It was huge, astonishing, and it was developed in an incredibly short period of time; a testament to the superb organizing of the First Nation People. The campsite was complex, subdivided in various areas that functioned like small neighborhoods. The community contained institutions and centers that provided all of the basic needs for a people’s survival, including: food, clothing, winter supplies, shelter, medical care, healing therapies, education, orientation, childcare, communication, (solar-powered) energy, governance, and spirituality spaces. All of these centers were innovative and creative; for instance, the housing options ranged from RV trailers, to yurts, to traditional tepees and wigwams, to “tarpees,” made out of tarp that built upon the tepee structure, and improvised Quonset huts. Moreover, all of these necessities and goods were offered for FREE. The way the camp was run envisions the world we want to live in.

This "town" was a gathering of folk of almost every race, age, gender, hue and culture on this earth. People from all over this country and the world came to support this struggle. We even encountered folks from Indigenous Nations of Brazil, from Palestine, and from Lebanon. The best of humanity was present. Folks would often walk around the camp offering donated goods to people in need; an elder in our delegation received snowshoe-nets from a passer-byer who noticed he was having difficulty walking on the uneven snow and wanted to attend to his need. The air of the camp was infused with a spirit of love, generosity, and concern for our fellow water-protectors, for nature, and for the earth. People stayed and worked despite the bitter cold of North Dakota that averaged 27 degrees Fahrenheit.  For some of us, the community of the Standing Rock encampment revived memories of Tent City in Washington, DC, The Poor People’s March, the Gwangja Uprising in South Korea, and a massive civil action when plantation workers were thrown off the plantation in Mississippi. This experience reawakened our belief in a “beloved community.” Through bottom-up organizing, Standing Rock has laid the groundwork for an alternative community, showing us what is possible for our movement work. We, lovers of freedom and justice, DO have the ability to create a new world based on love and justice.  

At the core and leadership of this great demonstration were 700 Native Nations from all over the Americas who kept their culture, their history, their leadership, and sentiments of love and respect at the center of all activity.  Orientation, which occurred daily for new and old volunteers, emphasized the need to respect the Native’s decisions and decision-making processes. Volunteer leaders would explain the history of this struggle, the core principles and values of the First Nation People, and what allies - non indigenous people - may or may not help them with. This meeting serves as the bedrock of education for allies to understand what it means to be “indigenous-centered” and to reflect upon “settler-colonizer” attitudes and the ways even well-meaning allies may often impose on the indigenous people. We were also often reminded that this is a peaceful protest and that the spirit of the warrior is motivated by and fights with love. Various speeches made at the Sacred Fire, a communication center of prayer, offerings, and announcements, reiterated the importance of respect for the Lakota-Sioux people’s decisions. Speeches also spoke to the various ways in which Native People have struggled against and suffered at the hands of the United States, naming various massacres and genocides, such as Wounded Knee and the Sand Creek Massacre. In these speeches, they would note how they continue to suffer today, and also remind water-protectors how to conduct themselves at this camp in a way that respects Native traditions, especially the need to respect elders. This constant communication and repetition helped this movement stay strong and not be “colonized” and hijacked by protesters acting on their own agenda. To you our Dear Native Brothers and Sisters, we bow to you; we honor you; we respect you for teaching us the power of love as the most powerful weapon for freedom and justice.

Spirituality held ample space at Standing Rock, particularly Native American traditions, but other religious traditions from across the globe were present, fully respected, and welcomed. Native American spiritual traditions were present in the commonplace activities of the camp. Everyday began with a prayer ceremony by the water in which people of all faiths were invited to participate and pray in their own way. The Sacred Fire was kept burning day in and day out, 24/7 by Fire-Keepers. The sacred fire was a place of prayer where people could burn sage, and offer tobacco and other herbs to the fire. Evenings were filled with chanting, the beating of drums, and dancing. On Sunday December 4th, there was an Interfaith Ceremony where people, of various religious and spiritual traditions from around the world, from Christians, to Quakers, to Buddhists, came to express their deep solidarity with the Lakota Struggle.  Every speaker lead a prayer, chant, or whatever method is utilized in their tradition to pray and give thanks for and power to this movement. This ceremony continued with ease while U.S. drones and helicopters zoomed over our heads. It was an incredible display, with prayers in various languages, in which spirituality was not only present in a political community but actively utilized to support and give power to our efforts.

After the interfaith ceremony, a prayer circle was being formed, where all water-protectors would make a circle, holding-hands around the entire camp to pray. Before the circle was completed, the camp received an announcement that the Army Corps of Engineers were halting Pipeline Construction. It was a powerful moment receiving such a message with the spirit of prayer among us, and as thousands of U.S. Veterans of all ages and ethnicities were arriving to protect the waters. One member of our delegation arrived in North Dakota on a plane full of veterans who were so moved by the resistance at Standing Rock that they came to flip the script of history and shield First Nation people from attack from the very government they had put their lives on the line to serve. Some accredit the Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to stop the pipeline to the power of prayer and spirituality. Others believe that the government did not feel comfortable attacking thousands of former U.S. soldiers. We were blessed enough to be at Standing Rock, a historical event for our people’s movements, at the moment we all received this exceptional news.

Standing Rock demonstrated the powerfully ways in which spirituality can be used as a tool to support our movements and move our people forward. The leadership and superb organization of the First Nation People has shown what is possible for our revolutions. A self-sustaining community lead by the most oppressed that not only provides all of the needs necessary for a people's survival but actively focuses on fighting for freedom and justice. This is a unique and powerful example of revolutionary work. This is the kind of work that makes us believe that revolution is possible in the 21st century. To the leadership of Standing Rock, we honor you and hold you close.

We have had a fruitful and successful encounter. Several Native Nations have expressed interest in our collaborative proposal. We hope to move forward in the upcoming days and weeks visiting various Native Nations across the country to speak about the prospect of investing in the Medical Marijuana Industry, and creating a haven/refuge for Black people. We hope to build coalitions with and also provide refuge for other oppressed people in the United States.

We, The Ella Baker Organizing Fund, promise to continue using what we learned from our visit to one of the greatest gatherings of freedom fighters in modern times. We will continue to nurture our relationship with Native People and will share our experience with everyone we come in contact. We vow to always use the “power of love” as a centerpiece in our work.

We give thanks and honor to all those who participated in this demonstration, particularly the Native People who have brought us together and welcomed us into their lands and their struggles for justice.


Dear Brothers and Sisters,

We are members of The Ella Baker Organizing Fund. Our Board of Directors and donors are composed mostly of veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, namely from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). We are committed to the recruiting and training of Black youth to become full-time organizers in and for oppressed communities.

We have come to you to show our support and make a donation to your campaign to stop the destruction caused by the U.S. Government, corporations and all those who are disrespecting our earth and the sacred lands of our First Nation People. We hope to meet with the elders and leadership of this noble cause.

We also come bearing a proposal to continue and honor a long-standing alliance between Black and Native people. Black and Native people have struggled together for our collective freedom since the time that Black people were first enslaved and forcibly brought to the Americas.  We ask that our people, the descendants of enslaved Africans who are still today being killed and jailed, be allowed to move to reservations and work together with Native people to build a life for our collective youth and future.  To do this we need to raise 30 to 40 million dollars to hire and sustain 30 to 40  organizers and build and develop schools, clinics, farms, vocational and skill trainings, communication technology and all the institutions needed for our people's survival.  Native reservations have the legal right to provide refuge to an unwanted people just as they did during the days of the Underground Railroad.

To raise the resources needed, we ask you to consider making land available for the growing of medical marijuana. Corporate thieves, who actively support and have created legislation criminalizing marijuana that is responsible for the mass imprisonment of our people, are now the beneficiaries of the rising medical marijuana industry.  An overflowing quantity of Black youth enslaved to the prison industrial complex has paid the biggest price for the criminalization of marijuana. Yet, there are no people of color growing legal medicinal marijuana. Instead, tobacco giants are beginning to invade and seize this industry. However, we can produce medical marijuana and use some of the proceeds toward funds vital to the hiring of organizers and the building of institutions fundamental to our survival.

We would love to hold our first strategy session together here on this site where the spirit of struggle is alive and well.

Supporters from the Korean American community have also joined our delegation and donation to express their solidarity with Native and Black communities.

Thank you for reading our statement and we look forward to a long and fruitful relationship forging our freedom and liberation as a United Front of oppressed people in the USA.

In struggle and solidarity,

Respectfully submitted by the Ella Baker Organizing Fund

Open Letter From Curtis Muhammad on Upcoming Civil Rights Movement Anniversary Commemorations

Below we are reposting an open letter from civil rights movement veteran Curtis Muhammad, a founder of People's Hurricane Relief Fund and the International School for Bottom-Up Organizing, among many other projects and initiatives.

Dear friends and comrades,

We are fast approaching the time for the 50th anniversary of many important events and movements, including: Mississippi Freedom Summer; The murder of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba county Mississippi and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge of the Democratic Party in Atlantic City New Jersey to name a few. The below pated document was written four years ago as we prepared to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). What was at stake then and now is whether or not these events being planned will honor the primary role of the poor southern black communities and individuals who made this history possible. It is my hope and my prayer that those of you who are planning these events will make it your mission and mandate to bring forward the true history of our great movements fifty years ago. I and my comrades encourage you to credit and honor where credit and honor is due: The poor black communities of the south should not be ignored in order to further promote the elite.

Curtis Muhammad
International Organizing Trainer and Veteran of the Civil Rights Movement

Please read below:

Dear friends and comrades,

Some of you know that I have been writing a book on my life experiences for a few years now (since 2003). I spent about six months in 2003 living in a black community in Mexico writing on my book and collecting stories from some 300 black communities along the Pacific Coast (called “Costa Chica”) covering three states. 

Last night I opened the manuscript to begin adding this dialogue we are having about our SNCC experience and the 50th Anniversary to the manuscript. I re-read something I had written in 2003 as a forward to my book. I found it informative and interesting and thought I would share it with you in the context of the discussion about the 50th Anniversary conference.

I copy it here, and have a few further comments below it.

FORWARD

I believe elitist, arrogant people who look down on those with little access to the goods and services of the society have motivated me the most to write this story. Mississippi, where I grew up, was and is the poorest state in the union. It has the highest rate of illiteracy in the country, then and now. The rate of college graduates is and was the lowest in the U.S. Mississippi has the lowest number of black professionals of any state in the country. At the time of my growing up we had three black lawyers and less than twenty black doctors in the whole state. Mississippi’s education system is and was the worst in all of the U.S.A. So when SNCC came to Mississippi, I think most of the Northern students considered those of us who had grown up in Mississippi as poor little dumb uneducated black youth. 

I remember thinking that the students that had come to Mississippi were the smartest, most intelligent folk in the world. They spoke so beautifully in “correct English”. They also seemed to know so many words I had never heard spoken. I, who had been one of the most outspoken young folk in my school and community, was muted by this fantastic display of “genius”. I soon found myself becoming part of the voiceless, not because someone demanded it, but because I did not think I knew enough words to match the “genius” of the other SNCC folk.

The Northern students bought into the European notion that “genius” is based on your ability to grasp the “King’s English” and body of knowledge. I don’t blame them any more because I realize that they too are a product of American white dominated culture. Or as we used to say, they were products of the “white power structure”. At the time, we didn’t understand that the long legacy of struggle and self-sufficiency we came from was an even more worthy body of knowledge that we had inherited.

I think most of us from Mississippi found our comfort zone singing freedom songs and telling stories about our work, but often we were very quiet and frequently absent from SNCC strategy sessions. I remember going on a trip with more educated SNCC staffers to Washington DC, New York, Hamilton College and Yale University. We spoke at large gatherings at all of these places. After each time I spoke, one of the SNCC staff would sit me down and talk to me about the way I needed to talk. He suggested that I was trying to be some kind of intellectual instead of being myself. Another organizer was his favorite spokesperson and he pointed out that what that person was doing was talking about Mississippi and the work we were doing while I was trying to explain why we were doing the work; that I was trying to explain the movement to people who knew more about it than I did. I remember getting so angry that I refused to talk anymore. I remember being very traumatized by this. I wondered, did this person talk to Julian Bond, Marion Barry, James Bevel, Diane Nash, Paul Brooks, Dionne Diamond, Chuck McDew, Tim Jenkins, Reggie Robinson, Ruby Doris or any of the others like this? I finally figured out that what he wanted was to put on display a stereotype of what young Mississippians looked, acted, and talked like. 

This feeling of voicelessness and inferiority would later compel me to drop out of Tougaloo College in Mississippi and go to school at Roosevelt University and Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago seeking the “genius” I thought was only to be found outside the South.

The books that have been written about SNCC mention my name in about four or five different stories: 
1.The Bob Moses letter from the Magnolia jail where others and I are “talking mostly about girls”
2. The student walkout at Higgins High in McComb, Mississippi 
3. Hollis and I are mentioned as being the first Mississippi students to join SNCC’s staff after all but Bob left following all the violence in McComb. 
4. There’s sometimes a one liner about Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
5. There is a girlfriend story in Greenville, Mississippi with Charlie Cobb. 
And that’s about it: nothing serious about the organizing work I was doing. I can’t be sure but I would guess the index of most SNCC books have similar numbers and kinds of statements about SNCC folk in Mississippi. Guyot may be an exception because of his Chairmanship of the MFDP and his ability to add prefixes and suffixes to simple words to make them sound big. Can you imagine what will happen to our stories if we don’t find our “voice” and tell them?

So by now you’ve guessed why I am writing this story. I am writing to give hope and confidence to my children and children’s children; to encourage others who have shared in this struggle for freedom, but heretofore not heard from because they have been convinced that they didn’t have words good enough to speak. I write to give confidence to those who believe they are not writers, not educated, not intellectuals, not scholars, not professionals, or whatever “box” that has been placed around them by the “white power structure”. I say here and now, I am a writer because I choose to be a writer. I will write my story on these pages because I believe my story is important to the freedom and justice movement. 

My story is about my struggle to contribute to the liberation of my people and I will not allow the society any longer to hold me in bondage with the thought that I am unqualified to tell my story in a book, written by my hand. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Thank you

I have reprinted this for you to read not because I think my own experience is so important, but because the voicelessness I felt as a youth in SNCC still afflicts our people and our telling of history. SNCC folk had different roles and experiences, all of which were necessary to the Movement. My particular experience was on the ground organizing in my own home state, and most of the people we were organizing felt the same lack of voice. Their experience, their thoughts and ideas, even their very humanity, were not and are not respected by the society at large. And yet, SNCC organizers went about the task of organizing with great respect and humility, guided by elders within the community who knew the legacy of the struggle of these descendants of slaves. We collectively found, cultivated and developed new leaders and spokespeople from amongst them, people like Fannie Lou Hamer and Victoria Gray, among many others.

It was the heroism and martyrdom of these grassroots people that is at the core of what’s valuable about SNCC history, not so much the heroism and martyrdom of the organizers. It was the “bottom”, the poorly clothed, the illiterate sharecroppers standing up in their thousands, refusing to be intimidated, and demanding to be heard and respected that truly changed history.

There was a SNCC organizing model. It was a model of organizers who lived extremely simply and relied on the people of the community for food, housing and protection, and who took nothing from the community for themselves. It was a model of recognizing, respecting and lifting up the genius of the people, contained in a legacy of struggle flowing forwards in an unbroken river from the days of slave rebellions and the Underground Railroad, from Black Reconstruction to resistance to Jim Crow. It was a model of patience, of unglamorous days after days spent knocking on doors and sitting on porches.

I do not regard the SNCC 50th as primarily an opportunity to be nostalgic. I regard it as an opportunity to share that organizing model with those who recognize that the battle in which we were engaged 50 years ago is far, far from won, that our people still suffer the chains of racism, that they still contain within them the genius of how to create a just, new world.

History can be told in many ways, and there are many “histories” of SNCC. For example, there is the view that Freedom Summer, made up of Northern students and led by students brought in from Howard and elsewhere (not by the Mississippi SNCC staff, which was not regarded as competent for that task) changed history. And there is the view that the sharecroppers of Mississippi, with the assistance of SNCC organizers, rose up and changed history. Which view will be dominant in the planned conference? 

If this Anniversary conference reduces us to a sweet group of dedicated folk who paved the way for the ultimate victory represented by a black man in the White House, it will leave our people, once again, voiceless.

Which is why I am raising my voice in this conversation.