Markeshia Ricks Photo
Newsome at Battell Wednesday: Human rights is question of our time.
When activist Bree Newsome climbed into the history books by scaling a flagpole on the South Carolina statehouse grounds and removing the Confederate flag, many people assumed that one very fed up black woman had taken spontaneous action.
Newsome disabused a crowd gathered at Yale University’s Battell Chapel of that notion Wednesday evening. She told them that her act of resistance three years ago — which sparked a national reconsideration of honoring the Confederacy — wasn’t spontaneous at all but the result of meticulous planning and collective decision-making by nine activists.
Those gathered heard the story as the North Carolina native delivered this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Keynote Address sponsored by Yale College Dean’s Office, the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, the Office of the Secretary & Vice President for Student Life of Yale University, Yale Office of New Haven & State Affairs, and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. (You can watch the address in the Facebook Live video at the bottom of this story.)
“Once we settled the first matter of who would scale the pole, which was largely a matter of who could physically do it and who could risk being arrested … we as a collective thought more about what we wanted to communicate visually and symbolically with this action,” Newsome said. “We would be attacking a symbol of white supremacy with an action that symbolized it’s dismantling.”
The activists knew that Newsome and anyone with her that day would likely be arrested. Someone who could withstand an arrest needed to be with her.
A fellow activist named James Tyson volunteered to accompany her that day as she scaled the four-foot tall spoked fence that surrounded the flagpole. He helped her get over the fence and stood guard, waiting for police.
“As I neared the top of the pole and prepared to remove the flag, the officers on the ground trained their Tasers on me and threatened to shoot me with bolts of electrical currents,” she said. “Given that I was attached to a metal pole, they could have potentially electrocuted me.”
Tyson would grab the pole that day, telling officers if they were going to electrocute Newsome, they had to electrocute him too. He also would be arrested with her after their mission had been accomplished. Tyson is white.
“It’s become common to hear social justice advocates say that they don’t need white allies, they need white accomplices,” she said. “An accomplice is what James was that day. History will rightly remember him alongside the many white accomplices over the centuries who have risked their own safety and in some cases spilled their own blood in defense of black life and in the name of freedom.”
Newsome said that her action that day was never just about removing the flag. She said it was “about abolishing the spirit of hatred and oppression in all its forms.”
“What we see today, what King called for in 1968 is greater than a constitutional right,” she added. “It is the issue of human rights.”
A Time of Counter-Revolution
The New Haven African Dance and Drum Group encourages audience participation.
In her address, Newsome drew a line that connected the civil rights movement, to the Black Power movement to today’s Black Lives Matter movement. She used the theme of the keynote, “Chaos or Community: Fifty Years Later, Where Do We Go from Here?,” and King’s own writings, including the words that he wrote that would become his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?.
“King in that last book made the salient argument that counter-revolution inevitably accompanies revolutionary progress,” she said. “In 2016, Make America Great Again emerged as the counter-revolutionary movement to Black Lives Matter. With America’s two steps forward, one step back approach to addressing racial injustice a person eager for change can easily slip into despair.
“But between pessimism and optimism resides a healthy realism that organizers activists and dreamers alike must embrace if we are to successfully bring about change. Being realistic means recognizing how much effort it takes to achieve equality and justice in a nation built on slavery and genocide.”
Newsome noted King’s own frustrations with white allies of his day, who effectively gave up on the cause of racial equality once their efforts at unity had defeated the outright barbarism visited on black people. She noted that King also chastened the black middle class, whom he said met the plight of their impoverished brothers and sisters with indifference. She said she sees similar patterns in today’s fights for racial justice and equality.
“The problem is never when folks show up but how they show up,” she said. “Many that have shown up have defined the resistance as beginning and ending with the Trump administration. But resisting the Trump administration is not necessarily the same as resisting white supremacy or advocating for racial equity.”
She said King foresaw the fight for racial equity as one made up of many small, even quiet victories such as the centering of mass incarceration and police brutality as part of this fight in such a way that it drives national debate and leads to formal investigations by the U.S. Justice Department into police departments.
But two steps forward, one step back.
“It must be understood that a system built on anti-blackness cannot be reformed into a system that values black lives,” she said. “And that the system instead itself must undergo a radical transformation in its values and organization.”
Reclaiming A Radical Legacy
Newsome with New Haven’s own Corey Menafee, who smashed his way into national headlines the summer after she did.
Newsome said she was deeply disturbed at the way King’s message of nonviolence has been “weaponized” to “stifle legitimate protest” over the years.
“It’s become a popular practice to invoke King and nonviolence to criticize uprisings and even moderate nonviolent civil disobedience,” she pointed out. “When Black Lives Matters protesters began blocking traffic and disrupting commerce, many including black leaders said they disapproved because this is not what King would have done.”
Such acts of disobedience happened all over the country, including here in New Haven touching off furious debates about the efficacy of such protest. Further fuel was added to such debates when a Yale University dining hall employee, Corey Menafee, knocked out a stained-glass panel of window in the former Calhoun College, a year after Newsome removed the Confederate flag in South Carolina.
“First of all …”
Before she could go on, the crowd burst out laughing. In popular culture, when a black woman starts a sentence with “first of all,” it is the verbal equivalent of her balling up her fist and preparing to land a blow.
“First of all,” Newsome continued, “we can’t say with certainty how King would respond to these modern protests. We can’t say with certainty because despite living a life of nonviolence, King was targeted by the FBI and ultimately murdered by white supremacists.
“Secondly, if the only time officials are invoking the name of King and the spirit of nonviolence is to criticize those protesting injustice and not to call out the violence and evil of police and prisons and poverty and racism that is an hypocrisy and an offense to everything that King stood for,” she said.
She made the case that an uprising — a more accurate way, in her mind, to describe what the media often calls a riot — is “more than the misdirected chaos that it is so often portrayed to be.
“It’s actually an informed and targeted rebellion against the oppression of racism and capitalism.”
She said one of the main arguments leveled at people who react in rebellion and destroy property is “that people are destroying their own communities.”
“But this argument overlooks the reality that in many of these communities, those who live there own practically nothing,” she said. “They don’t own the housing they live in or the stores where they shop. They don’t even own the streets and the sidewalks where they are subjected to heavy policing.”
“I’m not saying that I reject nonviolence,” she added. “What I am saying is that I do reject the notion that there is any moral equivalency between police depriving Eric Garner of oxygen in a chokehold and a black teenager smashing the window of a police vehicle in protest of racism.”
Newsome said the question of human rights is the question of our times.
“And it is up to us, all of us, to provide the answer,” she said.