Activist, author and academic Barbara Smith has worked since the 1960s for change through causes as diverse as racial justice, anti-imperialism, opposition to the death penalty, feminism, the LGTBQI+ movement and worker’s rights. She was a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, and was named as a Public Service Professor at the state University at Albany; she served two terms (2006-2013) as a member of the City of Albany’s Common Council. Her books include “The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom” (1998, Rutgers University Press), and her career is the subject of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith,” published by SUNY Press.
Q: How did you get to be the Barbara Smith?
A: (Laughs) I’ll try to respond in an appropriate fashion: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and I was born in 1946. And — I always then quickly add — that means that I was born into Jim Crow. And even though I was growing up in the north, it absolutely affected us. We lived an almost absolutely segregated life.
My family came from Dublin, Ga., which is a rural little town between Macon and Savannah. I’m a twin, and my sister and I were the first children in the family to be born in the north. I grew up as the civil rights movement was unfolding. And I guess I just got politicized because of what was happening. My family was very racially conscious — or, as we say, they were “race women” and “race men” as well. The church that we attended in Cleveland had a very socially conscious minister and a kind of socially conscious way of doing things, even more so than other churches in Cleveland, because there were certain churches that would host civil rights rallies and civil rights organizations and ours was one of them.
There was a major school boycott in April of 1964 that my sister and I participated in and our family supported us. They didn’t say, “You have to go to school.” They understood: This is a day for Black kids to stay out of school, because this board of education was continuing to build and place new school buildings in ways that would maintain segregation.
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Q: What does it mean to be an activist?
A: A political activist is somebody who is willing to speak out, and also to do work around the causes and issues that they are committed to, and that they believe in. They don’t just sit on the sidelines and comment. Because I have an academic background, I know lots of people who have really insightful thoughts and perspectives about what’s going on politically, but they don’t ever lift a finger. That’s not to cast aspersions on any particular group of people.
Being an activist may mean you only come out for protest, or rallies or onetime things. But if you’re an organizer, you’re pretty much at it on a consistent basis. I hope that I’ve reached the organizer stage.
Q: What keeps you energized, doing this over 40 years?
A: The success that I have actually experienced over the decades in the movements — plural — that I’ve been a part of. I haven’t just been a part of anti-racist organizing, or Black liberation organizing. I’ve been involved in multiple movements, including the movement to end the war in Vietnam. I have been centrally involved in building the Black feminist movement in the United States, and also have been a committed feminist since the 1970s, when it was very, very challenging to even say that because there was so much pushback, and so much hostility toward the politics of the women’s movement, feminism, women’s liberation.
I’m also a part of our LGBTQI+ community. And I’m also a person who questions the current economic status quo, and define myself as a socialist. I’ve been involved in a lot of different movements including anti-imperialist struggles, such as supporting the work to end apartheid in South Africa. And I was supportive of the Central America Solidarity Movement, because of things that were happening in Latin America in the 1980s.
Jim Crow — at least legal Jim Crow — was ended by the Black civil rights struggle of the mid- and late 20th Century. But now we have all kinds of new Jim Crows — as Michelle Alexander defined it in relationship to the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration; we also have voter suppression all over the United States to make sure that certain people like me don’t get to vote. So it’s not like the practices of Jim Crow were eradicated. We still have much work to do.
Q: With so much new energy around social movements today, what do you say to new activists and organizers?
A: How do you keep your spirits up and keep engaged when you’re doing really hard work? I talked about how the successes keep me going. But most days, you’re not going to have successes. You’re just going to keep on doing the work and trying to figure out how to get more justice and more transformative change.
But one of the things that I always advise people about is that you should not be miserable doing your activism and your organizing. If it’s making you miserable, you need to move on. And that doesn’t mean move out of being in movements. But if the issues that you’re working on are not a good fit, or if the group of people with whom you’re working just get on your last nerve on a regular basis, then you need to move on — you need to find a place or places where you feel wholly seen and fulfilled, and can actually get really good work done.
If you’re miserable, you really do need to change the environment and just find your place — and you absolutely will, if you’re committed to everyone having the quality of life and the opportunities, and the things that they need and the things that they desire. If you’re committed to that, you’ll find your place.
This transcript has been edited.
Lift Every Voice
Lift Every Voice connects young Black journalists with Black elders in our communities to celebrate and learn from their life experiences — deepening connections with the past to position us all for a better future. Hearst newspapers, magazines and television stations across the nation have joined together to publish dozens of profiles as part of the project.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written by brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, began as a poem in 1900 for schoolchildren. Before long, the song spread across the nation at NAACP events, within Black churches, and in community meetings, gaining prominence each time it was sung. Known as the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a triumphant story that chronicles and acknowledges the past while marching forward toward freedom.
This story originally appeared in the Albany Times-Union.
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Barbara Smith Reflects on Changes Achieved, and Those Still to be Won
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