Radical idea lives on
Freedom for everyone
Lewis DIUGUID, McClatchy Newspapers
Issue date: 3/3/10 Section: Opinion
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Angela Davis shared many of them recently during the Second Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Keynote Address at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Davis, an author, 1960s radical and retired professor, said the civil rights movement originally was called the freedom movement.
"Full citizenship does not by itself accomplish everything a person needs to be free," Davis said. Having civil rights, including the right to vote, is a pre-condition for freedom.
Black History Month is a time to show that freedom is more than civil rights. Freedom includes equal opportunity, access to good health care, stellar schools and good housing without the barriers of bigotry.
"Black people are still not free," Davis said. The freedom movement, she said, was "a continuation of the 19th century campaign to end slavery."
Davis asked people to think of Civil War-era leaders. Most people name Abraham Lincoln. Some remember Frederick Douglass, a former slave and fiery abolitionist. But people often forget the workwomen did to end slavery and in the civil rights movement.
Those women include former slaves such as Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman and abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Women in the 20th century freedom movement included Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson. Parks is credited with being the mother of the civil rights movement for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in December 1955.
Robinson fueled the effort that followed, mimeographing thousands of flyers calling for a boycott of the buses used mostly by blacks. The women who joined her and Parks to birth the freedom movement were servants, maids, cooks, laundry women and other domestic workers. They bore the burden, but history forgets. "We have a skewed historical memory," Davis said.
King was assassinated, she said, because his vision of the freedom movement was becoming larger. He was about to launch a campaign for poor people and was pushing for economic freedom and worker freedoms. King also spoke out against Vietnam.
Davis said the freedom movement today should include people respecting all species' right to live without industrialization forcing many of them into extinction. Freedom must include human rights for immigrants, people who've been in prison and lesbians and gays. Same-sex couples should be allowed to get married, and people should support them.
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