STAYED ON FREEDOM

A history of the civil rights movement from the 1960s to the present as seen through the lens of two longtime activists.

Zoharah and Michael Simmons met in Atlanta in 1965, serving as student activists, and they soon transformed politically, becoming Black Power activists. As ethnic studies scholar Berger writes, that stance “is the bridge connecting the twentieth-century battles against Jim Crow to the ongoing fights against war, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism,” and to have these long-term participants as witnesses affords a further bridge between past and present. Zoharah and Michael, writes Berger, went from organization to organization as the Black Power movement evolved, working with and alongside the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and Black Lives Matter. Early on, both acquired an awareness of “Black consciousness” that joined Black America to “Third World” peoples and their struggles around the world. Michael became a representative for the American Friends Service Committee, traveling the world to study democratization movements. While observing the status of residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he became aware “that people were being treated worse than Black people,” and he extended the aims of the civil rights struggle. Zoharah, meanwhile, engaged in anti-drug activism and worked to establish a Freedom School to “empower kids to make positive decisions.” There were as many defeats as victories on those institutional fronts. As Berger notes, even some of the devout Quakers of the AFSC seemed taken aback that Michael became the organization’s Director of European Programs, and he was soon laid off along with “troublemakers of Michael’s generation and temperament.” Now in their 70s, both continue to follow an activist path, with Michael proclaiming that he “still enjoyed, as he put it, being a pain in somebody’s ass.”

Both personal and with a big-picture view—a welcome contribution to the literature of the civil rights movement.