Start here. Once you cross the threshold, you’re home. The door

is what brings you from out to in. The door:


the only unit of measurement, not how “poor,”

not four walls, not foundation or drywall or chimney or roof. A door


opens a place into home. Remember, on Gorée

Island, they walked us through that unknown mouth, the Door


made our own bodies a home, made doorways

out of our voices in the air, their undeniable treasure.

each other. How a nod can mean you’re home — home in feet planted, freely, on the floor.

My grandmothers made homes out of things that were not houses — the fervor

of their Blackmother spirits filling the Bessemer projects, the Greensboro trailer —

no fireplace but the warm TV set, no yard but the red clay. The splendor

of what lives beyond what you call welfare, inner city, blight. Don’t you know our

words are a way home? We even bend language into a liberating door.

I used to think my proper tongue meant I leaned toward

the thing that stole our culture. But we can’t outgrow our home. Or,

we have never left in the ways that matter — home in our flavors,

our dances, the languages we live. Home is in us, behind a locked door.

We bent the blue cries of this place into full-bodied song, bent frail walls into shelter.

We bent the cast-off portions into a meal, we bent two cents into a dollar.

We bent redlines and tenements into a sanctuary you can’t enter.

If you want to know how Black folks find our way back to heaven, start here. Open the door.

Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, N.Y.

Come In 

e live in a time of catastrophe. Tyre Nichols screamed for his mother as cops in Memphis beat him to death. Parents in the world’s richest country must drive for hours to find formula to feed their babies. Lawmakers are banning books and censoring knowledge in schools about race, gender, and sexuality. Around the world, millions of bereaved children have lost a parent or caregiver to the coronavirus, while capitalism accelerates the climate crisis — as flash floods wash away towns, and the elderly and disabled people die first during otherworldly heat waves.

But we also live in a time when there is enormous potential for change. Millions of people rebelled after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, demanding a new kind of politics, one that attends to people’s basic needs and establishes a sense of common purpose. They risked their lives during a deadly pandemic to call for collective care, for an end to evictions, for reinvesting police budgets into housing for all — demands situated in a critique of capitalism. Mainstream media and the political class shrugged off the rebellion, and multinational corporations tried to co-opt it, but the conditions that propelled millions into the streets are still with us. People still yearn for a radical new future.

We created Hammer & Hope out of the urgency to make a practical contribution toward those efforts, from Brooklyn to Bahia to Botswana. “If there’s a book that you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” Toni Morrison counseled in 1981.

We are inspired by the Black women and men who made up the Communist Party in Alabama. Their lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white supremacist terror in the 1930s and ’40s are memorialized in Robin D. G. Kelley’s book 

. Those Communists came up with shrewd methods to spread radical ideas in a hostile environment; they hid stacks of literature in hollow trees, circulated leaflets in baskets of laundry, and one even dropped papers into the breeze for passersby to come along and pick up.

Ours is a magazine of Black politics and culture with roots in radical political traditions. We will invite people engaged in local struggles to share knowledge with one another. People like the workers in low-wage retail, call-center, and fast-food jobs who have inspired one another to strike for decent wages; like the public bus drivers who refused to let police commandeer their vehicles to transport people arrested at demonstrations; like the thousands of people held in Alabama prisons who withheld their labor in protest of deadly and exploitative conditions; and like the teachers who are resisting censorship as an act of solidarity with their students. People who are connected to one another possess the strategic brilliance and authentic urgency needed to take control of their own futures.

We are also indebted to the Black Panthers, whose newspaper promoted their free breakfast program, raged against police violence, and connected liberation struggles at home to those abroad. “We feel that information is the raw material for new ideas,” their de facto archivist Billy X Jennings told a reporter in 2019, adding, “We sought to find solutions to problems instead of just reporting the news.” Information begets ideas. Ideas expand imaginations. Imaginations fuel social change. The best ideas are rooted in action and practice.

We exist to publish deep reporting and to amplify the first-person stories of activists like those in Atlanta who have engaged in a range of tactics, from tree sits to carefully targeted property destruction, to stave off the destruction of the Weelaunee Forest. Political elites plan to build a $90 million complex there so that cops from around the country can sharpen their urban warfare techniques to kill more people like Tortuguita, Breonna Taylor, and Atatiana Jefferson. We want to host boundary-pushing debates between organizers working to close local jails and stop the construction of new ones and anti-pipeline activists, so that people can learn from their insights to strengthen their own efforts. By publishing stories from movements around the world, we hope to provide a platform for a politics of struggle that is built from the bottom up.

In fighting for an alternative political future, we also turn to the creative visions of artists and culture makers to help us conceive of a new world — from 

, one of the largest cultural events ever held on the African continent; to Afrofuturist literature; to the toppled, graffitied monuments to colonialism and the Confederacy; to the women, queers, femmes dominating rap today — with the knowledge that shifts in culture often precede shifts in politics. As Claudia Jones wrote, “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.” We want to hear from and publish reviews of the work of artists who push the culture rather than just reflect it.

We believe in the hammer of struggle and in the power of hope. Hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba reminds us, not unfounded faith. It is the deeply held belief that a better world is possible if we fight for it. This magazine is an attempt to create what we desire to see in the world: a radical and evolving vision we can collectively work toward. There is no barrier to entry. A desire to change the world is all that you need to participate. Let’s build together.

Illustration by Jon Key. Photographs from Dream Defenders.

Hammer & Hope: Toward a Radical New Future

udge Kyndra Stockdale opened her courtroom in Independence, Mo., on January 5, 2021, and tried to call the first eviction on her docket. Before she could read the defendant’s name, a voice erupted from the speakers that connected the remote eviction proceedings to those inside the courtroom.

No one should be evicted during a pandemic. This is not justice. This is not due process. This is violence. All evictions must end. People are dying. Tenants on the line: this is not your fault. You deserve a decent home; you deserve shelter during the pandemic. You are not alone. KC Tenants has your back. Judge Stockdale, you are complicit with every eviction you hear. You are making people homeless during a pandemic. You are killing people. It doesn’t have to be this way. You have a choice. End evictions, people are dying.

The court clerk scrambled to boot the disrupter from the phone line, but as soon as they were gone, a new disrupter began using the same script. A deputy sheriff arrived to alert the clerk that a group of people had formed a human chain outside the building, blocking the court doors. Within 30 minutes, the judge closed her courtroom for the day; everyone’s evictions were delayed by at least a month.

Kenneth Gobble, a line cook whose eviction had been scheduled for that morning, exited the courtroom and grabbed a megaphone to address the crowd outside:

My name is Kenneth. In March, because of the virus, I lost one job and then I lost another one. My pay was cut and my hours were cut…. I lost electrical power around Thanksgiving…. I sit by the oven to keep warm.

All of this was enough to break my heart. Literally. I had a heart attack at my job recently. I wasn’t feeling good, but I was afraid to take time off from work. I needed that money.

Don’t break my heart again, Kansas City. We can’t do this to each other. I can’t live in the street. Thank you for having my back today. We need to end evictions.

One phone disrupter called the judge’s clerk.

Disrupter: I’m calling about the evictions this afternoon. … Every case has been delayed?

Clerk: The protestors have interfered with the court processes and we can’t conduct court business.

Disrupter: So no evictions can happen today?

C Tenants is the citywide tenant union in Kansas City, Mo., founded in February 2019 by Tiana Caldwell, Diane Charity, Brandy Granados, and Tara Raghuveer. At the time of our founding, Tiana lived in a hotel, homeless after a cancer diagnosis. Brandy’s landlord evicted her after she called the city because her heater exploded. Diane, a longtime community leader on Kansas City’s east side, was sick of seeing her neighbors mistreated and put out. Our founders made lists of people they knew who couldn’t afford the rent and invited them to a meeting in a local union hall.

Every Saturday we hold a tenant meeting, a vehicle for our strategy and a point of coherence for leaders across the union. Our meetings run for two hours, these days in a church basement. A dozen tenants meet two hours beforehand to finalize the agenda and divide facilitation assignments. The length and frequency of the meetings matter less than the outcomes: tenants leave feeling less alone, like their time was respected, like there is a plan, and with clarity on their role in it. Somewhere between 50 and 80 people join and they return week after week. Our meetings are effective and soulful; we play music, share stories, poke fun at one another, and sometimes engage in fiery debate. We evaluate everything, reserving space for tensions and outstanding questions to be spoken into the room before the meeting ends.

Each tenant meeting begins with a meditation on inevitability. We consider what can feel inevitable — rent increases, unfair leases, moldy bathrooms, luxury apartments replacing our childhood homes. Every week we say, “None of this is inevitable, not if we organize.” This section of the meeting is part pronouncement and part prayer; some weeks we believe it, and other weeks we hope for it to be true, reminding ourselves that another world is possible if we are willing to fight for it.

Just months after our first meeting, our leaders wrote and won a Tenants Bill of Rights. In 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we started a tenant hotline and a mutual aid fund. We organized tenant unions in buildings and across whole neighborhoods. We experimented with eviction defense tactics. By the end of 2021, we had won free legal representation for every tenant in eviction court. Last year, we organized to pass a $50 million bond for housing with rents between $550 and $750. Along the way, our tenant leaders have won air conditioning, ramps for their wheelchairs, payouts from their landlords, and seats on city boards. Our tenant union now includes more than 5,600 members.

Others organize around ideology; we organize around mutual interests. We have unionized trailer-park residents and yuppies, Trump voters and anarchists, Black tenants and white tenants, young people renting their first apartments, and seniors with decades of gripes with the landowning class. KC Tenants believes that the people closest to the problems are closest to the solutions. Our union, always under construction, is something none of us have experienced, but all of us deserve. Some say it’s magic. It’s not magic. It’s organizing.

This is the story of how, in the midst of a pandemic, an organized group of tenants created our own inevitability in Kansas City. Not through magic, but by taking extraordinary risks and by having one another's backs. It is the story of direct action as strategy, and the irrevocable transformation of a group of people once we have felt power in our bodies and souls, as part of a union.

oday’s housing market is a catastrophic failure, built through land theft and chattel slavery and shaped by the relentless prioritization of those who profit from our basic needs. Our homes are treated as commodities, and tenants’ lives are reduced to line items in our landlords’ budgets. The results should horrify us: in the world’s richest country, hundreds of thousands sleep on the streets, and for millions the rent is too damn high, forcing impossible choices between feeding ourselves and keeping a roof over our heads.

We must reject the premise that a person should lose their home because they can’t pay for it. Eviction is a tool invented and deployed by the state to protect private interests, namely capital, over public needs. Eviction courts aren’t venues for justice — they are arenas for state violence. In processing evictions, judges mostly side with landlords and, just like that, tenants lose their homes. Every eviction is an act of violence.

In 2020, we were told to stay home to keep ourselves and our neighbors healthy, but many tenants lived in unhealthy conditions, or they simply could not afford to pay the rent. As the stay-at-home orders took effect, KC Tenants called for and helped win a local eviction moratorium in March. Despite our best efforts, the courts allowed the moratorium to expire two months later.

When our courts reopened eviction hearings, they heard a majority of eviction cases remotely, using a conference call line or a teleconference platform for each judge’s courtroom. The courts provided no guidance on how tenants should participate if they didn’t have a phone or access to the internet, if they spoke a language other than English, or if they had a disability. Even in-person evictions can take just a few minutes; by phone, evictions went down in what felt like seconds.

By July 2020, we found ourselves at a crossroads. We’d continued to call for the eviction moratorium to be reinstated, trying every tactic we could dream up. KC Tenants held vigils and die-ins, made phone calls, and wrote emails. We distributed flyers in the condo building where the presiding judge of the 16th Circuit Court lived. We identified a member of his Bible study group, called, and asked that person to appeal to the judge’s morality. But by mid-summer, we had little to show for our work.

Our tenant meetings became tense. Covid-19 cases remained high, but our landlords filed evictions against us and our courts processed them. Some leaders lost faith in the idea that KC Tenants could achieve anything. Others grew tired of endless Zoom meetings. Still others became sick or were in a brutal survival mode, unemployed and hopeless. We were living some of the worst days of our lives.

In a meeting involving about 20 leaders one Wednesday night, we asked ourselves: What is our goal? A few tenants responded that the goal was to win an eviction moratorium. Was that still true? We checked our instinct to double down. In a moment of collective brilliance (there are so many in this story), we clarified that our goal wasn’t to win an eviction moratorium; our goal was to end evictions. A court-ordered moratorium might have been one way of getting there — the cleanest route, maybe — but by then it felt impossible to win.

It wasn’t the policy that we needed; it was the material outcome. It wasn’t the decision makers we needed; it was one another. We channeled the energy of one of our chants: “If we don’t get it, shut it down.” We believed we had no choice but to shut the eviction system down, to end evictions by any means necessary.

KC Tenants organizer Jenay Manley and other organizers inside City Hall protesting a new set of housing ordinances on August 18, 2022. Photograph by Barrett Emke/The New York Times, via Redux.

n July 30, 2020, we rallied outside of the downtown courthouse in our yellow shirts and with an extra-large painted banner. The rally provided cover while our leaders got in formation to disrupt both in-person and virtual courtrooms. The remote disrupters, about seven per courtroom, included elders, tenants who were immunocompromised and couldn’t attend the rally, and supporters from out of town we recruited on social media. We had trained the night before on Zoom, simulating the courtroom with an organizer playing the judge while the disrupters got familiar with the disruption script. When the courtrooms opened, they read from the script whenever the judges tried to call a case and shut down two of the court’s phone lines. The remote actions delayed dozens of evictions by several weeks.

As the remote disruptions began, six KC Tenants leaders, who had entered courtrooms as though they were tenants appearing for their hearings, stood up one by one and read from the same script, creating chaos. A lawyer had warned us that the in-person disrupters could be charged with contempt of court and held without bail. Those leaders made an informed choice to take action anyway, chanting in the courtrooms and then in the hallways and elevators as they were escorted out. Ultimately, the court deputies arrested Jenay Manley and Maya Neal, charging them with trespassing. The rest of us marched the four blocks from the courthouse to the jail, waiting outside for our comrades. When Jenay and Maya were released, we ate pizza in the twilight, the disrupters crouched against the brick wall, and the group sang “Lean on Me.”

The July 30 action was a success on one front: We delayed over 100 evictions. (Our leaders meticulously analyzed court records to calculate eviction case delays, which the 16th Circuit Court claims it does not track.) But it was a one-off, an experiment with a new set of tactics, disconnected from longer-term strategy. Meanwhile, Jackson County judges processed evictions through the courts twice a week. What we’d achieved felt ephemeral. A collective weariness set in. In a Zoom strategy meeting some days later, Ashley Johnson — a tenant whose landlord had recently removed appliances from her home, which forced her out — compelled the union to consider further action. Usually soft-spoken, Ashley took herself off mute, her voice ringing with urgency: “Some of you can afford to take a break. I don’t get to take a break from this life. I can’t have you all do that now.” Support erupted in the chat: “Ashley, we got your back.” The mess of this moment was that we knew we had to do something, but we didn’t have a clue what to do.

A month later, in September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a nationwide eviction moratorium. We began “lit drops” — every weekend, we hit up apartment complexes, leaving half-sheets that explained how tenants could seek the moratorium’s protection and join KC Tenants. But evictions continued as our local judges exploited the many loopholes in the national policy. With support from the ACLU, we filed a lawsuit against the presiding judge, but we knew we wouldn’t win justice through the very system perpetuating the violence.

We needed to escalate, and we considered our options. Some suggested eviction blockades, borrowing from a playbook used a decade ago to stop foreclosures. We tried one, with a tenant whose eviction was scheduled to be executed on a Monday morning. We used our bodies to block her doors as the deputies pulled up. They called the cops for reinforcement; two of our leaders were handcuffed, and we couldn’t stop the landlord from changing the locks. It was completely botched. The tenant lost her home. Our leaders were reeling. We felt we had failed. This failure forced uncomfortable reflection in our Saturday meeting: This experiment had been doomed from the start because we lacked a pre-existing relationship with the tenant, we had mismanaged her expectations of the action (and our own), and we didn’t have a plan for the scenario that played out. Sloppy. More than that, harmful.

Initially we thought we needed something new and different, but we emerged with clarity that escalation could mean returning to tactics that we knew worked. The point of experimentation wasn’t to continuously experiment. We had already discovered an effective way to end evictions. Instead of moving on, we needed to sharpen.

On October 15, just before eviction hearings began for the day, a group of us rushed the doors of the downtown courthouse and chained them shut. This time we had teams dialing into every eviction docket in the Jackson County courts, in the morning and in the afternoon. The disrupters read from the same script; we stopped 138 evictions that day. The remote disruptions stopped the evictions, while the action outside created direct confrontation with the violent institution. The video of the action went viral on social media, garnering some pearl-clutching critiques, but mostly appreciation: “More of this, everywhere.” “This is how you will get the ruling class to listen.”

Most important, we connected with tenants whose cases we had delayed. The action worked. People could stay in their homes, at least for a while longer. We pounded tables, punched our fists in the air. We felt a thousand feet tall. It was a revelation. We were on to something. We felt vindicated and powerful as we honed our tactics and finally saw the outlines of a real strategy.

In November, we came back for more. Escalation meant expansion: We sustained remote courtroom shutdowns over the course of a few weeks. These actions led the judge with one of the largest eviction dockets in the 16th Circuit Court to close down her eviction hearings for the remainder of the year, delaying hundreds of evictions. Our ranks ballooned with tenants who called our hotline or whom we met at the courts. They joined our disruption teams, taking part in the same actions that had changed their lives. The summer’s defeatism wore off and momentum took hold. We gained confidence in our ability to end evictions, at scale and over longer stretches of time.

Could we shut down the whole eviction system for a month? 

Someone posed this question in a midweek meeting. January would be cold as hell, and Covid cases were likely to spike again. We sketched a plan. Beyond the material goals, we aimed to grow our union and polarize the public against the profiteers and their enablers in the court system. We figured we would need a team of at least 60 tenants in coordinating roles — press liaison, remote disruption trainer, Covid safety lead — over the course of the month, not including the hundreds of people we would need to activate alongside our core team. Tenant leaders had questions and tensions, a few felt the plan was delusional or misdirected, but by mid-December, after deliberation in our weekly tenant meeting, the KC Tenants base approved the proposal. Over the holidays, the planning team recruited for the necessary roles, built spreadsheets to plan each action, scoured electronic court records, and alerted the media. Tenants who were able to do so took off from work, arranged childcare, and otherwise began orienting their lives around the month of action.

Posters and handmade signs on a bulletin board inside KC Tenants headquarters in midtown Kansas City, Mo. Photograph by Barrett Emke/The New York Times, via Redux.

 snowstorm hit Kansas City on New Year’s Day 2021. KC Tenants had planned to rally on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse. Our press advisory, sent before the storm, read, “KC Tenants stands firm: Every eviction is an act of violence. Evictions are a death sentence for our most vulnerable neighbors. KC Tenants is resolving to intervene in every single eviction in January. We will be in the streets, in the courtrooms, on the phones, online.”

The storm initiated the first of many pivots during Zero Eviction January. The streets were unsafe, so we called off the rally, deciding instead to launch on the first day the courts opened to hear evictions. A small group of us met at the downtown courthouse anyway, sharing anxieties about the month ahead. Would people get too scared to act? Would the courts respond with violence? The risks involved with our plan were terrifying, but after nine months of brutal displacement during a public health emergency, the potential stakes of our inaction felt too high to entertain. We threw snowballs at a statue of Andrew Jackson and left for the day. When we returned the next Thursday, we delayed some 219 evictions.

We planned for a daily virtual action throughout the month, as well as two in-person direct actions each week, coinciding with the days the courts heard evictions — on Tuesday at the Independence courthouse and on Thursday at the courthouse in downtown Kansas City — as well as phone disruptions for every single courtroom.

On Friday January 8, after our first two actions, a court deputy shot a tenant during an eviction. His family told the media that he had been experiencing a mental health crisis and arrived at his door with a BB gun.

In every instance of this violence — the bureaucratic and the brutal — we had made a commitment to show up and shut it down. By 2 pm that day, we made a plan to take action, our third of the week. Because of our month-long commitment, we had the infrastructure in place to spin it up within a few hours: someone to scout the location, people to offer remarks, four tenants on security to monitor the perimeter, a team to bring a banner and signs, our turnout crew, who called through our lists and blasted a simple flyer on social media.

Four hours later, a crowd of about 100 tenants gathered in the parking lot of El Torreon, an events venue in midtown Kansas City. We practiced chants, reviewed security protocol, wrote a lawyer’s number on our arms in Sharpie. Then we marched, stopping traffic in the streets, until we arrived at the presiding judge’s quiet neighborhood. Someone must have tipped him off — yellow caution tape surrounded his yard. The first of us to arrive ripped down the tape and directed everyone to fill in on the grass, facing the street. Jenay hung a banner off the porch. Charles Bishop and Diane addressed the crowd. A white woman who said she was a neighbor shouted at us, shoving her phone camera in our faces to film us. The police ordered us off the lawn, threatening arrests. We stayed put until our program was over, about 30 minutes, took to the streets again, debriefed back in the parking lot.

After our weekly tenant meeting, we released this statement:

We don’t take action for symbolism’s sake. We don’t take action cuz we’re bloodthirsty. These aren’t protests. We take escalated direct action to show solidarity for our neighbors, to intervene in and stop acts of violence, to take our crisis to its creators, and to build sustainable power to unravel the systems that oppress us all.

It’s simple: No justice for the people, no peace for the oppressors.

The following Monday, after months of telling us it was impossible, the presiding judge ended evictions for two weeks, citing his concerns for the safety of the court’s employees. We claimed victory — hundreds of evictions scheduled for those two weeks would be pushed into February or even March. But we knew courts would reopen to hear other evictions by the last week of January.

It was time to bring the crisis to its creators. During those two weeks, instead of pausing our operation, we marched on each of the judges’ houses, reminding them that they had a choice, they could exercise discretion and end evictions, and reminding them that we weren’t going anywhere. A tenant named Dom spoke out at the house of the judge who was evicting him:

We’re gathered outside of Judge Weir’s home. Where she sleeps peacefully every night, before waking up to decide who deserves the ceiling above them.

It’s all about power, and in the past few months I’ve felt the power of this collective. I first joined the KC Tenants court disruptions to help others in my city. Using my voice to disrupt these gross virtual courts was exhilarating. It felt bold and impactful.

I am facing my own eviction, but due to the same action I took part in, my case is among hundreds that have been delayed. KC Tenants has my back.

We found time to intervene in another step of the eviction process, too. A tenant named Anthony called us. Court filings indicate he was served but he said he never saw the summons. When he didn’t appear in court, a judge issued a default eviction judgment against him. The landlord changed the locks, with Anthony’s medication, phone charger, food, and other belongings stuck inside. We rallied with Anthony at the Office of Civil Process on January 12, at one point surrounding a deputy’s car, demanding answers. The deputy agreed to go with Anthony and retrieve his stuff the next day.

On January 25, the presiding judge allowed the short-term moratorium to expire again, but we were prepared. We were back in action for that last week of January, applying the same disruptive tactics inside and outside the courtrooms. Some courtrooms had figured out how to keep us in waiting rooms on Webex, but we found workarounds. Even when our disrupters were stuck, they mucked up the process enough to delay start times, which got cases rescheduled. We blitzed the waiting room chatbox with the KC Tenants hotline number so that tenants on the line could reach us.

By the end of the month, we had blocked over 900 evictions — more than 90 percent of the hearings attempted by the courts. We earned 48 local news stories. More than 465 people took roles throughout the month, joining us at the courthouses or dialing in as remote disrupters. Sixty-four KC Tenants leaders took on new roles during the month — leading teams, facilitating meetings and trainings, coding eviction data. We recruited at least 22 new leaders to our base — people like Kenneth and Anthony, whom we met at the courthouses and who had been directly impacted by our disruptions.

e have kept a rich account of Zero Eviction January. There are hundreds of pages of meeting agendas and notes from evaluations, photos and videos of each action, audio of tenants disrupting remote evictions, Tweets, Instagram posts. What the records fail to capture is what the month made possible.

The people who held roles and led trainings still organize among us today. Tenants whose evictions we delayed have become core to our union, their presence a reminder of what happens when we commit ourselves to action with material impact, and a mandate to continue doing so.

Our spirits transform when we exercise power, when we experience solidarity. That’s the revolutionary potential of Zero Eviction January and actions like it. Everything is different once people feel the power of collective action: when their heart pounds in the moments before it will go down, when they speak to people whose lives are changed by the actions they have taken, when they look around and realize it was us — neighbors and friends — who pulled it off. What once felt inevitable no longer feels that way. What is or is not inevitable becomes instead a question of whether we believe something else is possible. Whether we are willing to fight for it. Whether we can tolerate the discomfort of not knowing what to do, at least long enough to try something. Whether we’re willing to learn from failure. Whether we trust one another.

ani Baltimore’s landlord tried to evict her four times between 2020 and 2021. Disruptions by KC Tenants delayed more than one of those evictions, keeping her housed during an extended period of unemployment. Remembering the disruptions, Dani shared:

“I cried. I praised God. Each time, it was such a pressure lifted off me. It gave me more energy to fight for my children. KC Tenants had been putting flyers at my door, and I wanted to join so bad but was spread so thin with everything going on. Each time I saw the flyer, it ignited something in my soul. I was just happy… happy knowing somebody out there was fighting for me.”


Dani, a mom to four, has a job now and is on her way to a more stable housing situation. In December 2022, almost two years since KC Tenants disrupted her evictions, Dani logged onto our monthly orientation meeting. Soon, she will join the KC Tenants hotline team, referring other tenants to resources and inviting them into our citywide tenant union.

Demonstrators at a KC Tenants rally outside the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City, Mo., on July 30, 2020. Photograph by Chase Castor/Bloomberg, via Getty Images.

Could We End Evictions?

hen I heard that this magazine was going to be named Hammer & Hope — a riff on my 1990 book, 

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

I’m a sucker for puns. But I also recoil at anything resembling a tribute to my work. The title, which was suggested by a friend, the legal scholar Derecka Purnell, is one of the highest honors I’ve ever had to swallow. I relented because it fits, perfectly encapsulating the magazine’s aim of covering Black politics and culture. Let me explain.

 was obviously a play on the Communist movement’s hammer and sickle, first adopted by the fledgling Soviet Union in 1918, less than a year after the October Revolution. According to some historical accounts, the Moscow City Council asked the artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin to create a symbol for the May Day banners that year. His simple, dynamic sketch of the hammer and sickle illustrated Lenin’s call for unity between workers and peasants. In the Southern United States, the “peasants” were Black, and their tool was the field hoe.

That hoe showed up in other socialist countries’ iconography. 

 examined the history of the People’s Republic of the Congo (P.R.C.), a “Marxist-Leninist socialist state” whose flag featured a hammer and a hoe. The article was quite critical, arguing that the P.R.C. was neither a workers’ state nor a popular democracy but a military dictatorship claiming Marxist bona fides. President Marien Ngouabi, assassinated in 1977, sought to educate Congolese workers in Marxism-Leninism while insisting that trade unions function as arms of the state. I argued for an independent labor movement that could “begin to build strong political links with the peasantry.” The hammer and the hoe expressed this idea of a militant, independent labor movement uniting city and countryside.

I carried this unbending belief in the capacity of working people to make their own history and build a genuine democratic socialist movement to my doctoral dissertation on the Communist Party in Alabama. I discovered in the people who joined the party and its various auxiliaries, in their culture, aspirations, ethics, beliefs, and liberatory dreams, what the late political theorist Cedric J. Robinson called “the Black Radical Tradition,” which he described as “a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people,” not just from our oppression. For example, Black people brought their prophetic Christianity to the Communist movement. They frequently invoked God and initially opened party meetings with a prayer. The Bible was more important than Marx and Engels’s 

. John Garner recalled being recruited by Communist “agents” who told him the same thing that “Jesus Christ himself told us”: that “our burden was gonna be heavy like this.” In a letter to Southern Worker, the party’s regional paper, a Black woman from Orrville, Ala., wrote: “Your movement is the best that I ever heard of. God bless you for opening up the eyes of the Negro race. I pray that your leaders will push the fight. … I am praying the good Lord will put your program over.”

he political lessons I took from those courageous folks who risked their lives to bring revolution to Dixie reflect many of the core principles behind Hammer & Hope and the movements that inspired it. Black Communists taught me that we need not choose between anti-racism and class solidarity; they are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually constitutive. The same holds true for the fights against all forms of oppression: sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. The Black Communists of Alabama also taught me that local struggles exist in a global context. The forces arrayed against us are no respecters of nations, and the same ought to hold true of our movements.

Perhaps the most important lesson of all is that ideas, and the radical movements that produce them and are informed by them, really do matter. This band of rebels took time to think, read, and sometimes write. They had their journals, such as Southern Worker, The Daily Worker, The Negro Worker, Labor Defender, and The Liberator, to tell their stories, connect with struggles around the world, and wrestle with ideas. Hosea Hudson and his Birmingham comrades loved The Liberator because it “always was carrying something about the liberation of Black people, something about Africa, something about the South. … We would read this paper and this would give us great courage.” At the same time, party organs are constrained by the party line; they are not spaces for free-wheeling debate, disagreement, or provocation. Hammer & Hope belongs to no party.

The symbol of the hammer has its limits. Its arcane, masculinist imagery makes it an unsuitable representation of a working class that today is concentrated in health care, the service sector, and the apparel industry, and, especially if we count unpaid household labor, is overwhelmingly female. White nationalists march behind Thor’s hammer, while cops have used “the hammer” as a symbol of their authority. In 1988, the Los Angeles Police Department launched Operation Hammer, ostensibly to address gang violence in South Los Angeles. All it did was criminalize Black and brown youth by charging them with minor offenses or stopping anyone who looked “suspicious” and lodging their names and addresses into the L.A.P.D.’s gang lists. Three decades later, Clay County, Fla., a majority-white county outside Jacksonville, introduced Operation Hammer and Hope, meant to be a kinder and gentler strategy in the war on drugs. They would use “that hammer to take drugs off the streets” through arrests, while the hope takes the form of treatment programs offering free doses of buprenorphine, the treatment drug for people suffering from “opioid use disorder,” overwhelmingly associated with white drug users. Prison and methadone were reserved for “addicts,” Black, brown, and crime-prone. The ghettos and barrios get the hammer, not the hope. Meanwhile, the biggest drug dealers — the pharmaceutical companies — suffer nothing more severe than fines, settlements and a little public shaming.

ur Hammer & Hope has a different goal. It aims to expose the system of racial capitalism tearing up neighborhoods, filling the state’s cages, and extracting value from working people while leaving them in a state of insecurity and precarity. Our hammer will smash myths and illusions. It will tear down the master’s house, as Audre Lorde would say.

And our hope? It is not the false optimism of liberals or the fatalism of armchair revolutionaries or the pessimism of pundits waiting for the end of the world. James Baldwin understood hope as determination in the face of catastrophe: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” The Alabama Communists knew the odds of a socialist revolution in the Black Belt were damn near impossible, but they fought anyway. They understood that victory is never certain but if we don’t fight, we can only lose. Hammer & Hope is here to fight.

Illustration by Jon Key. Based on original artwork by Diedra Harris-Kelley.

Why We Are Called Hammer & Hope

 The New York Times says that 2020 saw the largest protest movement in U.S. history, with polls suggesting that anywhere between 15 million and 26 million people participated in various protests over the summer and into the fall. I think for many people this was viewed as a turning point in the ongoing struggle for racial justice, particularly in the movement for Black lives that had seemed to be in a lull after the election of Donald Trump — 2020 was a kind of wild, roaring affirmation that Black lives matter. There has been very little protest since then, though, certainly nothing on the same scale. So what happened? Why do you think those protests with millions of people on the streets did not produce the kind of change that people thought it would?

My frustration with The New York Times calling this the largest movement is that it conflated the number of people going into the streets in the United States with organization. Organizers at Dream Defenders and elsewhere realized that those people weren’t absorbed into organizations in such a way to build campaigns toward eliminating some of the kinds of violence that put them into the streets in the first place. What is exciting is that the 2020 protests also made abolition and defund the police mainstream conversations, which I think is huge. Those ideas were met with a lot of curiosity. A lot of people learned about abolition through podcasts, through tweets, and through articles. Organizations, especially Black organizations, are grappling with what can be done with all of that energy that was on the streets. I think a lot of people were excited about defund and abolition but weren’t necessarily connected to a political home that was able to transform that mobilization into strategic organizing.

And then I think people were just up against a lot, in terms of reforms being offered as a solution. They were up against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which felt like a real solution that people think at least is something; or they saw that some cities decided to take funds away from the police. They didn’t anticipate that Florida and Texas would try to make it illegal to defund the police and take that power back.

There’s a resource issue, knowing, again, that sometimes we’re up against The New York Times, which let Bill Bratton say that we have “defunded the police,” which isn’t true. Sometimes we’re up against fascists who are banning books; sometimes we’re up against liberal politicians pushing bad policies like community policing. People who tout reform as a more “realistic opportunity” to make social change have resources to push those reforms — more resources than people with more radical ideas about how to change the world. In 2020, I think some people went to the streets because it was anti–police violence but also anti-Trump. Now you have Joe Biden as president. Trump isn’t there anymore as a polarizing figure to resist. And now the new people who were in the streets have to figure out how to fight for causes when Democrats are in office, because there is a lot of “anyone blue will do”— but how do we hold them accountable? How do we push the people we mobilize to think and organize long term, beyond electoral politics?

 Definitely agree that there’s a resource issue. But I think there’s also a more basic tactical issue. You can protest your way to making an issue politically important and attention-grabbing: People talk about policing more and in more charged ways than 10 years ago. We have the mobilizations in the streets to thank for that progress, obviously alongside the organizers who have been keeping consciousness alive between eruptions.

But there’s still the question of who decides what the issue’s importance means and what systemic responses are going to fly — questions that usually get settled well after the protests themselves have been repressed. And that’s the stage when organization really matters. To me, this is why unions are so crucial to making any of this work — not because they are magic or because every member of every union has perfect politics — but because unions are one example of an organization with strategic options that many other kinds of organizations don’t have. They have a group of people who can decide, in democratic processes, what the group’s demands are — politicians don’t get to pick their favorite protest sign and just decide what the protest is really about, as we’ve seen post-2020. If those demands aren’t met, they can respond by withholding something that the people on the other side of the negotiating table want and need, rather than just writing clarifications insisting that the other side has misunderstood why people were picketing or what “defund” or “abolish” really means.

These are the advantages that explain why unions are so potentially politically powerful and have been crucial to movements for justice historically — why they were so pivotal to dismantling Jim Crow, why Dr. King was shot while he was linking up with them. To be clear, other kinds of organizations can play this kind of role too: attacking banks and politicians with debtors’ unions, going after energy companies with ratepayers’ unions, going after landlords and developers with tenants’ unions.

It also shows us what trouble we’re in now that unions are on the defensive. Less than three months after President Biden signed a bill shutting down the rail workers unions’ strike, there was a catastrophic derailment outside of East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled potentially deadly toxins into the air. Train safety had been one of the 

 the unions were pushing for. But corporations like 

, the rail company responsible for the derailment, continue to 

profit. At this point of the climate crisis, who really thinks this is going to be the last environmental disaster enabled by protecting big business’s right to risk all of our lives?

The important part is being able to decide on and build power together, and to do so by using leverage and not just expressing displeasure to people who don’t care. The stronger the organizations are that can do that, the better off we’ll be. Exactly like Derecka said: It’s organization that lets you do this in a stable way alongside and in between spontaneous uprisings.

I want to ask about the resistance. Some of what you all describe are internal debates within the given movement. Should we accept the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act as some means of change, or do we need to do something more radical? So there are those debates. But there’s also tremendous resistance from the right. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, because even as 2020 looked like a high point of resistance to the ineptitude of the response to the pandemic — and to this monumental racism — it also was a moment of mobilization for the right that has gathered momentum in the months since. Most of that looks like the attacks on what they describe as critical race theory, which is part of a discussion about institutional or systemic racism. The attacks on the 1619 Project, which is being literally banned in schools in some states. Derecka, you mentioned the Dream Defenders, who are based in Florida, where Ron DeSantis has created what historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad has described as a laboratory of fascism. A lot of those political attacks have been directed at either trans teenagers or the study of Black people, Black history, anything about contemporary Black America. What do you think the right is doing? Why have this particular response, and what do you think is significant about it?

Protesters outside the U.S. Supreme Court while the justices consider Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2018. Photograph by Yuri Gripas/Reuters, via Redux.

 When the Muslim ban happened in 2017, do you remember the protests? Another thing also happened that I thought was very fascinating. Donations to the A.C.L.U. exploded. Legal organizations became the vanguard for how to resist white supremacy. If you look at these bans targeting queer and trans kids and families, who are prevented from getting gender-affirming care, the way that people are responding is to outsource the resistance to lawyers and have them go fight: donate, sue in court, threaten to file an injunction. I think that outsourcing resistance lets fascism flourish because then it becomes a problem that we are not confronting with mass mobilization and organization. Instead we’re telling people to let lawyers, legislatures, and the courts work it out.

Do we need a legal strategy? Of course. But we need mass resistance by everyday people. We need to go to the libraries where people are banning books to say, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to allow this.” We need strategic, disruptive, direct action. We need protests to push back and to show in numbers that this is wrong. I fear that we now just expect a lot of lawyers to do that work. That makes me particularly nervous because the right wing has taken over the courts and several facets of government. You have lawyers who are afraid to bring lawsuits in federal court because of the Supreme Court. How do we reconcile that with what’s been happening since 2017 — the urge to simply donate to the Legal Defense Fund, donate to the A.C.L.U., donate to other legal organizations to go fight — instead of the kind of mass mobilizing we experienced in 2020 as forms of broader resistance to what’s happening?

And along with the anti-trans bills, alongside banning critical race theory, we have also witnessed since 2014, when Michael Brown was killed, the criminalization of dissent, the introduction of laws to remove access to health care and food stamps for people who decide to go and protest. Some states have passed legislation that have enhanced protections for police, so that police have become essentially a protected class. We are up against states criminalizing dissent, and states banning and criminalizing the ideas that encourage people to think differently and act more courageously about the world, all while Biden calls on Congress and states to give more money to the police and increase the number of cops on the streets by 100,000. Who do you think will be enforcing the criminalization?

It’s also worth pointing out that what we’ve seen on the right are just the latest outcomes of an extremely long-term organizing strategy. Derecka, you mention the takeover of the courts — the Federalist Society started incubating the legal careers of the people who would control the Supreme Court decades ago — for at least one justice, as early as the 1980s. ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, formed in the early 1970s and has been laying the groundwork since then to mobilize police violence against the exact kinds of protest that Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita — a forest defender who was killed by state troopers in January — and comrades were doing in Atlanta against Cop City. The right wing is ahead of us by decades, not just by dollars.

But what do we do? I had not thought about the way the different levels of governing are working here — Trump spent the entirety of his presidency packing the courts with young conservatives, unqualified right-wing judges, who are just there on ideological missions. Then you see Republicans across the country just doing blatantly unconstitutional, illegal things, in hopes of sparking lawsuits that go to these corrupt courts, taking a local issue and making it national. And then the only recourse within this framework is to the reactionary, undemocratic, monarchical Supreme Court. It seems like liberals have played right into this by deciding, We’re just going to sue, we’re going to file a lawsuit here and file a lawsuit there. It is a sophisticated web that has entangled people who think that because these things are so outrageously unconstitutional, of course we must challenge them and get them off the books. But instead it becomes more complicated because of the shape of the judiciary. So what do we do?

 In early February, I had an event with Amna Akbar, Bernard Harcourt, and Cornel West. We discussed Dr. West’s law-review article on the role of lawyers and progressive social movements that he published in the 1990s. What he says in that piece is that lawyers need to continue to fight defensively, to protect and safeguard the rights that we have struggled to secure over time, and remind people about the suffering that we had before those rights. But we, lawyers and the public, have to understand that litigation is not the most radical intervention we all can make; it’s just a very specific role for some lawyers to protect what we already have. To me, it makes a clear case for movement lawyers to be supportive of and in political homes with grassroots organizations who engage in mass resistance to state violence. But we also need to do what Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs call us to do, which is to project — and then build — the alternate vision of the society that we want. I’ve been thinking about that over the past couple of weeks. I think broadly, for people who care about freedom and justice, we can’t be afraid and should be encouraged to be more explicit in our bold ideas about the society that we deserve.

We have to identify and condemn hypocrisy and the criminalization of our ideas. When I hear liberal and corporate Democrats criticize defunding the police and abolition because they say they are losing electoral seats — and go on to sign resolutions that condemn socialism — it’s as if they almost blatantly ignore that whatever sort of language or narratives they use in their campaigns, the right is going to paint it as the most radical thing ever. You cancel a measly $10,000 in student debt, it’s “socialism,” so you may as well just cancel it all — it can’t be that much more “socialist,” right? But Dems pretend that student-debt cancellation and abolition are narrative issues; they hide behind language to obscure why they don’t support the substantive reasons that lead members of the public to organize for these causes. They are not interested in social transformation, and they benefit personally, professionally, and politically from the status quo. So we must be much more energetic, powerful, strategic, experimental, and organized.

We need to continue to explicitly name the radical ideas that we’re struggling for and to take time, as many organizations do, to be in conversation with the public through political and popular education; through art in various mediums; through media that explains what we mean when we say socialism, abolition, feminism, internationalism. We’re struggling and fighting for these concepts, right? So what are they? Why do they exist? Where are people experimenting with them? We need to use these spectacular incidents of violence that have brought people to the street as an opportunity for everyday door knocking, canvassing, and reaching out to people to strengthen our bases. This is why I’m so excited about what Dream Defenders is building, because we need a national membership-based organization that organizes people and invites them to think more critically about politics and what they could be. They can go on to put pressure on the establishment through electoral politics, through protests, through mutual aid, and building alternatives.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) rallies hundreds of young climate activists in Lafayette Square on the north side of the White House to demand that President Joe Biden work to put the Green New Deal into law on June 28, 2021. Photograph by Chip Somodevilla, via Getty Images.

We have to train people to engage in all kinds of direct action, train people to vote, train people to run for office, and train people to organize. These are not my ideas. These are the conversations I’m having with other organizers, with other human rights lawyers, with scholars, with artists, because not only do we have to think about what we need to do, we have to take the risk and go experiment and try it! And then evaluate, and try again. It is an iterative process. But I think one beauty of that, part of the Black radical tradition that makes me and my work possible, is knowing that we’re not doing that alone. We have to do that not only with people across state borders but in deep solidarity with people who are resisting other kinds of fascism across international borders and learn from their struggles — be in conversation with and think critically about what’s happening in India, in Brazil, in South Africa. We have to be ready to understand and also see ourselves as students of movements who are rejecting the kinds of fascism and neoliberalism that we see in other parts of the world and who are embracing new kinds of relationships and potential futures for us all.

 It’s a tough predicament. Unlike the people whose interests they’re protecting, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the short term to focus only on the long game — the movement is fighting against murder and caging and evictions and deportations, not the very livable disappointment of getting stuck in a job at a lower federal court. But I think we can probably all agree that the legal organizations, whether the Legal Defense Fund or A.C.L.U., are not the organizations that are going to get us over the finish line. So it’s worth figuring out which fights can do double duty — which organizations we can support that will help build long-term power while and through fighting the needed short-term campaigns. I’m glad that we get to hear from KC Tenants in this issue, because that definitely seems like the kind of organizing that could do both.

I’m teaching a course on the civil rights movement right now, so I’ve been reading a lot about tactical questions, questions of strategy and social movements. The legal strategy versus the mass movement was so profound in the civil rights movement. The N.A.A.C.P., of course, championed a legal strategy that targeted Jim Crow laws; just the whole legal edifice in the South was an affront to the 14th Amendment. So the N.A.A.C.P. believed that the movement should let the lawsuits work their way through the courts to have a more secure victory. But King, and the activists in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], argued that the legal strategy makes no sense without a mass movement. In other words the 14th Amendment had been the 14th Amendment for nearly 100 years by 1965. And that didn’t matter, even after the Voting Rights Act. Often histories of the civil rights movement or this period of the 1960s almost immediately pivot outside the South after the Voting Rights Act — we go elsewhere, we go to Watts, we go to the urban rebellions in the North. But if we stay in the South, you see that even though the law changed, there was not the kind of transformation where the law was this on Tuesday, and on Wednesday all the new regulations went into effect. And we thought we overcame; we were singing “We Shall Overcome.” The law doesn’t matter if people aren’t on the ground, making its enforcement reality. King makes a particular point: that the legal strategy relies on the passivity of those who are most impacted by these decisions. Because you’re telling people to wait for the courts to solve this question, wait for the law to change. And meanwhile, you know, life is hard on the ground. I think those are powerful points. 

I also think that part of the power of the protests against the Muslim ban in the winter and spring of 2017 was not just that people weren’t just sitting around waiting for lawyers, even though that may have eventually been the result, but that it did three things. One, it showed the authorities that no, you can’t just get away with this. Two, it forces the mainstream media to have not just this kind of surface, drive-by coverage but a deeper engagement with the issues bringing all of these contradictions to the surface, the main one being that we are supposed to be a country founded on religious freedom. Protests create the conditions so that people are able to see the contradictions that usually exist beneath the surface. And then third, and perhaps most importantly, is that it imbues a sense of confidence among those of us who are horrified about what the state is doing. Because it can absolutely seem overwhelming if you’re just sitting with your newspaper or watching the news. And seeing people do blatantly illegal things. This is supposed to be a country based on religious freedom, right? That is one of the core tenets in the Bill of Rights: freedom of religious association. There is no state-sanctioned religion; you’re free to practice whatever your religion is. You know this, but if there’s no one doing anything to protect it, it feels like maybe I’m not sure about what I know. Maybe no one cares, or maybe this is just the fate of our society. But when you see hundreds and then thousands of people protesting, it affirms that you know what you know. And it is a way to encourage resistance; it is a way for people to build confidence. It is a way of demonstrating that we are many. And so I feel like that combination of things is part of what we need now. I completely hadn’t thought about it until you said it, but this whole idea that we’re just going to fight this out in the courts isn’t enough.

It’s not something we can just litigate or legislate our way out of, as you both have acknowledged. I’ve been frustrated with the silence of a lot of the popular leadership in the Democratic Party — not surprised, because they are the leadership of the Democratic Party, but frustrated because they are further proof why we need mass public resistance and can’t simply vote our way out of this problem either. For example, as a gesture toward countering the fascist and racist critical race theory bans, why aren’t liberal Democrats rushing to affirm the thing that’s been banned by Republicans? Grants from the Biden administration to affirm racial justice in our schools — where’s that? Where’s that program? What resolutions are being passed to highlight the importance of Black study? Why is this the time to pass a resolution to condemn socialism? Where’s the resolution at least acknowledging “diversity” in educational thought? Because the banning of books and ideas, in addition to the silence coming from the Democratic Party, leaves even liberals feeling isolated and overwhelmed that this is happening. But when the masses are being told that the right way to approach this is to “go vote” or “go sue,” they are implicitly being told not to “go resist,” “go fight.” But that’s what we all need to do — go fight.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 7, known as the “Stop Woke Act,” to ban critical race theory on April 22, 2022. Photograph by Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images.

This is where the liberal political establishment and the conservative establishment often intersect. The Democrats are more than willing to criticize DeSantis for his authoritarianism, but they don’t actually want to talk about the content of what is being banned. They don’t want to talk about critical race theory. They don’t want to talk about African American studies. They don’t want to talk about Black feminism. They don’t want to talk about the Movement for Black Lives, because it brings to the surface the same issues that the Republicans also want to avoid. Because if we deal seriously with Black history, with African American history, and nearly 300 years of slavery, 100 years of legal subjugation, maybe these Black people have a point about redress. Maybe they have a point about reparations, and maybe they have a point about the need for programmatic institutional interventions to repair the inevitable harm and financial devastation that would come from nearly 300 years of slavery and 100 years of legal subjugation. Neither party is interested in having that conversation, because that’s a trillion-dollar conversation. More than a trillion dollars goes to the military now. It doesn’t go to reparations; it doesn’t go to housing, health care, education, and all of the forms of redress that are owed as a result of nearly 400 years of legalized oppression and exploitation. So neither one wants to talk about it.

And what we get instead is, “Look at this Black woman I put on the Supreme Court. Look at my vice president, look at what I do for Black people” — which is through these individual appointments of Black people —“look at my press secretary.”

Yeah! “Look, here’s a holiday. I’ve surrounded myself with all of these Black women, surely I hear you. And I’m committed to this.” I think it’s important that we continue to polarize people who support the Democratic Party around these issues. We should help reveal how racial representation and political power are actually dichotomies presented by the Democratic Party. Do you want a Black Supreme Court justice? Or do you want student-debt cancellation for HBCU students? Because Biden promised both and reneged on the latter. Do you want him to choose a Black woman running mate so that he can keep your votes, or do you want him to champion universal health care so that you can keep your life? Do you want an additional 100,000 diverse cops on the streets? Or do you want investment and the proper infrastructure in your neighborhood to keep you and your community safe?

Biden is not the only target. We experience this directly with Black politicians, too, who are willing and excited to play into a certain kind of racial-representation politics in exchange for more transformative demands. Keeanga, you write about this so well. I think that’s such an excellent point. We have to continue to remind each other what we are owed, what we deserve, and what we can build together.

A memorial to George F​loyd in Minneapolis on June 2,​ 2020. Photograph by Joshua Rashaad McFadden/The​ New York Times, via Redux.

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

here is one image that defines my childhood like no other: a young Black girl, her hair braided in pigtails, flying above the George Washington Bridge while her family enjoys a summer night on their Harlem rooftop. The roof is a hub of activity: a picnic table with watermelon and drinks dominates the right side, four adults sit playing cards in the middle, a clothesline stretches along the left side of the roof, and two children lie nearby on a quilt, staring up at the stars.

, Faith Ringgold’s masterful and, arguably, most enduring children’s book, released in 1991. It tells the story of Cassie Louise Lightfoot, an 8-year-old girl who dreams of freedom and finds it one night when she discovers she can fly. Flying doesn’t just give her freedom; it also gives her power. She flies over the George Washington Bridge, built by construction workers like her father, and declares it to be hers. Resources long denied to her family, like membership in the local union, become hers for the taking. “Daddy is going to own that building,” she says, floating above union headquarters, “’cause I’m gonna fly over it and give it to him.”

Freedom is a straightforward proposition in 

. You ask for it and the universe delivers. Then you use your freedom to free others. As the scholar Dr. Elleza Kelley argues in her forthcoming book, 

Flight Lines: Making & Marking Black Space

, Cassie’s flight serves a collective purpose: She wants dignity for her father, rest and relaxation for her mother, economic security for her family. Kelley suggests her imagination turns an ordinary rooftop into a launch pad to a new world, one unburdened by the rules and exclusions that define her own.

 was published two years before I was born. It’s one of the earliest stories that I remember loving. My mother, a truly insatiable reader, surrounded me with stories about magnificent women who ran for president, invented revolutionary products, defied the odds, and freed themselves and others from slavery. But Cassie was different; she was ordinary. Her story was proof you didn’t have to be extraordinary to be free.

I was struck anew by Cassie’s power while visiting 

, a groundbreaking retrospective at the New Museum in New York City. I thought I could do the exhibition in a day and found myself gobsmacked by more than 50 years of radical art. Ringgold’s influence spans decades, genres, and mediums. She’s a painter, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, activist, illustrator, and author. Her name graces the covers of over 17 children’s books. In many ways, Cassie, Ringgold’s first young literary protagonist, embodies the characteristics Ringgold gives the children in her art. Many are poor, their families struggling under the weight of racial capitalism. Children witness and experience violence, often at the hands of the state and their communities, but their imaginations are limitless, as is their ability to liberate themselves and others. Throughout Ringgold’s expansive career, Black children remain at the center of struggle and possibility. In art and in life, Faith Ringgold sees children’s struggles, imaginations, and dreams as sites of revolution.

inggold, like so many path-breaking artists, is a teacher. She began her career as an art teacher in Harlem about a year after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. New York City leaders largely ignored the Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate public schools. Black parents, fed up with underfunded and overcrowded schools, responded with a barrage of legal, political, and direct action. They defied segregationist zoning laws, sued the city, and organized school strikes. Black mothers were beaten by police, thrown in jail, and threatened by child welfare agencies. Children faced violence and intimidation as well, regardless of their age.

It was during this time that Ringgold began working as a commercial artist. You can see her fears and anxieties as a parent in one of her earliest paintings, 

 (1966). At the time, her two young daughters, Michele and Barbara, attended the New Lincoln School, a private, experimental, majority-white school in Manhattan. In the painting, her daughters hide in a bush with their new white friends, smiling serenely and temporarily safe from the violence that plagues Black children in white spaces.

Soon, a new political movement would emerge and change the trajectory of Ringgold’s life. “It was in 1967 that for the first time I heard the chant ‘Black Power every hour, Black Power every hour,’” she wrote in her 1995 memoir, 

. “I could hear it in my classroom like background music while the children painted.” This soundtrack cemented a truth that would go on to define Ringgold’s politics, pedagogy, and parenting: the centrality of children within Black freedom struggles.

Children struggle in Ringgold’s work. They undermine hierarchies, sabotage societal norms, and even, in the case of her devastating sculpture 

 (1981), die at the hands of white violence and indifference. Her art forces hard questions about the nature of Black childhood. For example: If Black children are not spared the violence of white supremacy, do they have a right to take up arms in self-defense? Ringgold certainly thought so. One of her earliest posters, “All Power to the People,” created in 1970 to support the Committee to Defend the Panthers, depicts a Black family — mother, father, and child — resplendent in Black Power–era apparel and armed to the teeth. The parents carry rifles and ammunition. The child, a little boy, has a different kind of weapon: a long, silver stick. He is shielded by his parents, but also armed and ready to defend himself. Ringgold and the Panthers both saw Black children as worthy of fierce protection but also revolutionary forces in and of themselves.

hallenging the social order was something of a rite of passage in Ringgold’s household. Some of her most famous acts of civil disobedience were family affairs. Her 1970 arrest at the People’s Flag Show at New York City’s Judson Memorial Church, for instance, is largely remembered as a rebuttal of authoritarianism at the height of the anti-war movement. But it was also the story of a Black mother and daughter confronting state repression together.

The show, which sought to challenge flag desecration laws through public art, was a collaboration between Ringgold and her 18-year-old daughter, Michele Wallace. The handwriting that figured most prominently in the poster promoting it, supplanting the stripes of a red and black American flag with an invitation for artists to express what the American flag meant to them, was Wallace’s. On the penultimate night of the show, plainclothes detectives raided the exhibition. Wallace was among the first to be targeted. Ringgold recalled the terror of witnessing her daughter’s arrest in 

Clearly, [the police] had been sent there to arrest two or three men and a woman, and that’s what they had … An arrest of my daughter was not something, however, I could tolerate. Let them take me instead. “She’s not a member of anything, but I am,” I announced, stepping out in front of Michele. It was ransom — me for Michele, a mother for a daughter — and I had no choice.

The swap worked. Ringgold was arrested in her daughter’s place along with her People’s Flag Show co-organizers, Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche of the Guerrilla Art Action Group. The trio, dubbed the Judson Three, were charged with desecration of the flag by the U.S. attorney general’s office, found guilty the following year, and forced to pay a fine of $100 to avoid jail time.

Earlier that year, Wallace had founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL) alongside her mother. Their goal was to combat the erasure of Black women in New York City art institutions. In her memoir, Ringgold describes having turned to her eldest daughter for strategic advice as they developed demands for the 1970 “Liberated” Venice Biennale.

“What percentage of women do you think we should demand to be in the show?” I asked Michele. She looked up from her reading and said abruptly and matter-of-factly, “Fifty percent.” I was stunned. I had never heard anyone suggest that much equality for women … I asked again, “what percentage for the show … I mean of women?” This time I listened more closely. Michele looked up and, raising her voice, looked me dead in the eye. She repeated herself, “Fifty percent women, and fifty percent of those women have to be black and twenty-five percent have to be students.”

Wallace’s demand soon became the central rallying cry of the 1970 Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee. Founded by artists Lucy Lippard and Poppy Johnson, among others, in response to the Whitney Museum’s nearly all-white-and-male annual exhibition lineup, Ad Hoc joined forces with the Art Workers’ Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and Ringgold and Wallace’s WSABAL to pressure the Whitney to increase its percentage of featured women artists from 8 percent to 50 percent. For two and a half months, they staged surprise sit-ins, deposited eggs and sanitary napkins emblazoned with the words “50 percent” in gallery corridors, and distributed fake tickets to educate museumgoers about their campaign. On weekends, they led marches in front of the Whitney with chants supplied by Ringgold’s younger daughter, Barbara, then 17 years old.

By the time the Whitney Annual opened in December 1970, representation of women artists had jumped to 20 percent and included — for the first time ever — two Black women artists, Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud. In 

Optimism and Rage: The Women’s Movement in Art in New York, 1969–1975

, the art critic Carey Lovelace argues that Ad Hoc served as an incubator for a new generation of radical women artists. Many members went on to lead collectives committed to transforming the political, economic, and social conditions artists faced.

Without Michele Wallace, would Ad Hoc have demanded equal female representation at the Whitney? It’s impossible to say. But what is certain is that the radical ambitions of Ad Hoc can be traced back to the mind of a Black teenager.

evolutions, the historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes in his 2002 opus 

Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

, are not forged only through political struggle; they are dreams in action, imaginations unleashed. In this way, transformative social movements share much in common with great works of art. Both require what Kelley terms “poetic knowledge,” or the ability to “enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way.” This knowledge opens the door to what Grace Lee Boggs considered the true nature of revolution: redefining our relationships to one another and the Earth, loving people beyond borders and boundaries, and creating something new in place of the old.

Love, artistry, and transformation are also the primary ingredients in Ringgold’s children’s books. Her young protagonists are reservoirs of poetic knowledge; their imaginations propel them through time and space, enabling them to encounter new ways to live.

Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky

, Ringgold’s second children’s book, Cassie takes to the skies with her brother Be Be and the abolitionist Harriet Tubman. But unlike in 

, Cassie isn’t eager to take the trip; she’s a reluctant passenger. She travels through the Underground Railroad to find her brother, who has boarded “Aunt Harriet’s” train without permission. Like her ancestors before her, Cassie escapes slavery, sleeps in safe houses, and follows the North Star while Be Be leaves her notes of encouragement and adopts a baby sister named Freedom. When the siblings finally reunite in Canada, Cassie chastises Be Be for leaving in the first place. Be Be responds firmly but gently: “I love you, Cassie, but I had to go ... Freedom is more important than just staying together.”

, a boy called Lonnie discovers the liberatory power of art. He and his Uncle Bates travel to 1920s Harlem and spend the day surrounded by the greats, including Louis Armstrong, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, and Zora Neale Hurston. Immersed in Black artistry and genius, Lonnie has an epiphany. “Black people didn’t come to America to be free,” he tells his uncle. “We fought for our freedom by creating art, music, literature, and dance.” His uncle, smiling, responds, “Now everywhere you look you find a piece of our freedom.”

It’s easy to read Ringgold’s stories as compact Black history lessons for young readers, but Cassie, Be Be, and Lonnie are not simply vehicles to understanding the past; they are embodiments of the transformative power of imagination. I don’t know how old I was when I first picked up 

, but I know it made me feel free. It made the impossible feel tangible, and ordinary life magical. And that’s exactly how Ringgold planned it. “Cassie doesn’t take flight because she wants to see the world,” Ringgold later wrote, “but rather because she envisions a better life for her family. Already at eight years old she wisely recognizes that all good things start with a dream.”

 series), 1988. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, N.Y.

Revolution Is a Great Work of Art 

hen I texted Tyeise Bellamy last December, she replied, “Give me a minute. I have The Tribune on the phone. They found another person frozen to death.” It made sense that a reporter would want a reaction from Bellamy on the day that 

 was found dead in a tent during a blast of winter chill in Salt Lake City. As the founder of an advocacy group called 

 from city officials and providing services to those living on the city’s streets. “I know all their names and all their stories,” she told me.

When I finally got her on the phone, Bellamy linked the housing crisis to redevelopment interests that have boomed in Salt Lake. Over the past nine years, thousands of apartments have been built and rents have skyrocketed. 

 of nearly 2,500 residents, almost 1 in 5 reported being displaced from their neighborhoods due to rent increases. Another 13 percent said they were on the verge of moving. Rents are rising 

, with no sign of slowing down. The result has been 

 or crowding into homeless shelters. “They’re warehousing people in shelters and trapping them into cycles of poverty,” Bellamy said. “People need permanent housing.”

Bellamy also drew a direct connection between the redevelopment agenda and policing. One campaign was known as Operation Rio Grande after the name of a former train station in a west side neighborhood. In 2017, city officials met 

 with law enforcement to devise a plan for 

 and their support services from the area. A Salt Lake Tribune investigation later 

 that nearly 80 percent of the money spent on what the city called an effort to “

restore public safety” and help “individuals seeking supportive services”

No. 1

Winter 2023

Taja Cheek, a.k.a. L’Rain, on “the Sonic Equivalent of a Feeling”

The Brooklyn singer and songwriter creates a playlist and reflects on two songs she can’t stop thinking about.

Taja Cheek

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