BAR Book Forum: Robin J. Hayes’ “Love for Liberation”
Love for Liberation examines the links of international solidarity in the Black power movement.
BAR Book Forum: Robin J. Hayes’ “Love for Liberation”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Robin J. Hayes. Hayes is a contributor to the Atlantic, writer and director of the award-winning documentary Black and Cuba, and creative director of Progressive Pupil. Her book is Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Robin J. Hayes: Today’s political and social climate is similar to the period chronicled in my book — Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground. Now, as in the late Sixties/early Seventies, racial justice movements have transformed the public conversation about the value of Black lives and how institutions (such as the police, mainstream media, and schools) need to become more accountable, inclusive, and democratically resourced. Legislation, practices, and attitudes are observably shifting. However, activists, community members, and their allies are increasingly and understandably frustrated with the persistence of prejudice and the slow pace of change.
Love for Liberation reveals how during the mid-twentieth century African independence and Black Power activists—including Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer—addressed their similar exasperation by forging international connections. They exchanged ideas and tactics in emancipated spaces that were curated by Black social movements and liberated from the White supremacist gaze. They were inspired by each other’s successes and perseverance, which they learned about from community-based institutions such as the Black press and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). These experiences and relationships helped activists understand themselves as connected to a global movement that was solving the international human rights issue of racial injustice. The cultural and political links they established between Black communities in the US and Africa constructed a circuit of sustained transnational anti-racist struggle and solidarity—a diaspora underground.
As discussed in the book, reaching beyond borders is currently empowering the Black Lives Matter movement to heighten the visibility of anti-racist activism, decrease the isolation of community members, and develop international strategies to advance equality.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
I hope the Black Power and African independence activists who are still with us, as well as their children and grandchildren, take away my profound respect and gratitude for their hard work and sacrifice. While Love for Liberation focuses on some of the more well-known leaders of these movements, the book clarifies that the freedoms and enhanced community self-esteem created by that cycle of protest were made possible by many men, women, and nonbinary folk whose names we may never know. Most of the dozens of activist veterans I interviewed for the book continue to be of service to their communities today. They helped us understand the many ways that Black is beautiful, institutionalized our communities’ Black studies tradition in colleges and universities, and built the foundation for the Black Lives Matter movement. They may not have fulfilled all of their freedom dreams, but their bold example continues to awaken revolutionary hopes in youth across the globe.
I hope Millennial and Gen Z activists will take away from Love for Liberation that, in spite of whatever discouragement and fatigue they may be feeling, their sacrifice and dedication to creating the better world we all need are indeed worth it. To fight for racial justice in any era, including the present one, is to have the courage and vision to try to move a mountain. The only way is one pebble at a time. It is impossible to fully predict how contributions to social justice today will change tomorrow. However, the long-lasting influence of African independence and Black Power indicates that this work inspires action across oceans and generations in ways that should never be underestimated.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
I hope Love for Liberation will help readers un-learn the false notion that the Black community is a homogeneous monolith. In the documentary I directed, Black and Cuba, the narrator defines the Black community as “people who identify as being of African descent and who contend with the everyday consequences of anti-Black racism.” To be African American, or descended from Africans who were brought to the US as part of the trans Atlantic slave trade, is just one way to be Black. One can also be Ghanaian, Jamaican, Brazilian, French, Puerto Rican, Chinese, or a combination of some or all of the above. African independence and Black power activists discovered that our community’s international diversity is a tremendous political, cultural, and economic resource. My book shows we gain nothing by competing with each other or policing each other’s identities. In contrast, we receive solidarity and empowerment when we expand our vision for freedom beyond borders.
My book also illuminates how any community member can be revolutionary. Sporting a voluminous natural hairstyle like Kathleen Neal Cleaver or a respectable press and curl like Fannie Lou Hamer, having skin as deep as Kwame Nkrumah’s or as light as Malcolm X’s, being as openly straight as Huey P. Newton or as openly gay as Bayard Rustin has no bearing on what contribution one can make toward advancing equality. The more a movement welcomes different perspectives and honors its participants’ observable acts of service, the more robustly it can sustain itself.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
My work is equally inspired by intellectuals who are grounded within and outside of the academy. Scholars Walter Rodney, Paul Gilroy, Robin D.G. Kelley and W.E.B. Du Bois have had a tremendous influence on my writing and filmmaking about transnational relationships between Black social movements. Kimberlé Crenshaw profoundly impacted my book’s discussion of how attitudes about gender and sexuality shape internal dynamics of power within the Black community. Angela Davis’s writing encourages me to consider the ways in which an abolitionist mindset can expand my social justice vision and practice.
Several of my activist intellectual heroes are featured in Love for Liberation. Frantz Fanon—author of the beloved classic Wretched of the Earth—was also a psychiatrist, and leader of the Algerian independence movement. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper’s daughter and respected spokesperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who once famously remarked, “Whether you have a PhD, or no D, we’re in this bag together.” Huey P. Newton—co-founder of the Black Panther Party—taught himself how to read using Plato’s Republic after overcoming years of racist harassment by teachers in Oakland public schools. Once his time leading the Black Panther Party ended, he earned a doctorate at University of California, Santa Cruz and wrote the memoir Revolutionary Suicide.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
This book helps readers imagine a world in which Black people unite in common cause across their differences; while being fully aware that we deserve freedom and can attain liberation through activism. We are bamboozled with messages and images from mainstream institutions into believing that inequality is too intransigent to be transformed and that we’re not cunning or committed enough to be leaders. Love for Liberation reveals how African independence and Black power activists, through their willingness to take action to impact what they could (whether it was a lunch counter, an intersection, or a Casbah), showed themselves and their communities that change was not only possible, it was on her way. By chronicling the successes, challenges, and courage of activists, Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power and a Diaspora Underground shows how powerful we can be when we stand together and define ourselves for ourselves. The more democratic policies and practices created by the movements for African independence and Black power have made equality reign more for everybody. A world in which Black people collaborate across borders, genders, and sexual orientations and enjoy self-determination must be imagined (and is also necessary) because that is the world in which everyone fully enjoys their human rights.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.