We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance by Kellie Carter Jackson
This 2024 book asserts that Black Resistance took many forms: Revolution, Protection, Force, Flight, and Joy. At only 245 pages, the book covers so much ground. There are so many facts about historical figures and events that we all thought we knew about, but really didn’t know much at all. What’s more, many of the revolutionaries, the protectors, the enforcers, and leaders were women. Ten of us met on Saturday May 3rd to discuss this book that was filled with descriptions of how our people have resisted during the idea of white supremacy ever since we landed on this continent. This author has added so many details and nuance to the Black history events we all thought we already knew about.
Barb started us out saying, 'This author reminded me a little bit of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, the book about the great migration, where she personalized the movement, putting people’s faces and stories into the historical flow. Like Wilkerson, the author of We Refuse gave us so many details. I knew about the slave rebellion in Haiti, but did I know about the one in Guadeloupe. So, I liked how the author personalized it with people whose stories, some of which I knew but most of which were totally new to me.'
Marian followed up with, "Shelara had told us about Robert Williams in Monroe, NC. But we never knew about Robert’s wife Mabel. That chapter called “Force” that talks about Carrie Johnson, Daisy Bates and Mabel Williams, that was the best chapter to me. Number one because I didn’t know any of these women and number two the fact that Carrie Johnson was just shooting from under the bed to frighten off the intruders in her house. She wasn't trying to kill anyone. She was trying to protect herself and her father. The mainstream press made it sound like she was such a pariah, but they wouldn’t admit that she was a teen-aged girl.”
Joy added, "I also like how the author put in her own story, how she infused each chapter with a little bit of her piece.”
Bonnie proclaimed, “I can’t get this book out of my head. Two themes came out to me in this book. They are, ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ and ‘the more things change the more they stay the same.’”
Bonnie then had us look at the following passages:
On page 30 we read about Stephanie Camp, who argued, ‘Women’s history does not merely add to what we know; it changes what we know and how we know it.”
On page 161, we learn about Gloria Richardson, who influenced Malcolm X to include the phrase the ballot or the bullet into his famous speeches. ‘The phrase “the ballot or the bullet” became not only the clarion call but the title of Malcolm’s speech.
We learn about Elizabeth Freeman of Massachusetts p.69: ‘was able to sue for her freedom after hearing the Massachusetts Constitution read aloud.’ There was also a discussion in the book about Haiti and the revolution. A recent story in the New York Times with included, ‘Macron Calls for Study of fees exacted from Haiti,’ and it ends with the following paragraph: While Haitian students know about the French Revolution, few French students know about the Haitian Revolution. I also never knew about Daisy Bates who wrote a detailed account in her book Long Shadow of Little Rock about the nine students integrating into Central High School. I read the book, and the hatred was palpable and what they did to those kids and thinking about how shocked we white liberals are thinking about what is going on under the current administration, an op-ed in the New York Times was titled “Black Americans are Not Surprised.” The author writes, “Black people have seen this America before.” Finally, I found this book, The Worst First Day written by Elizabeth Eckford, who we read about in this book, We Refuse, and the mix-up that happened the day that the nine were supposed to not show up at Central High, but she didn’t know and ended up going alone. “
Nancy shared, "I think I had mentioned when we discussed the book Medgar and Myrlie that I went on a trip like a civil rights tour, and on that same trip we met Elizabeth Eckford. It was really incredible to meet her, she’s quite elderly now. The original High School is now a Historical Site. We went first to a Visitors Center and met her there and then walked with her in the area she had to walk on that first day. We then met with her in a meeting room and talked with her. We were all instructed beforehand not to speak in a loud voice and no applause because she has suffered all these years with PTSD...Some of the people in my group were kind of fawning on her, but she wasn’t having it. She said, ‘I did what I needed to do.’ I was just impressed with her courage and her dignity. She didn’t like people fawning over her. She just wanted to talk about what the issues were, what they faced then and what we all still face.”
Joy commented, “Like the author said, ‘non-violence has been presented as the best way and a lot of times we don’t hear about the resistance and the conflict. We don’t get to hear about all the different voices that were saying ‘there are other ways to go about this.’”
Shelara added, “And there is a method to that madness of only emphasizing the non-violent approach to Civil Rights. We never hear about Robert Williams or the Deacons of Defense, because the non-violent movements are comfortable. If you can frame Rosa Parks as being ‘tired’ and about Dr. King having a dream about little Black kids and little white kids holding hands but avoid talking about the economic justice Dr. King spoke about and not mention that Rosa Parks was a radical and that her refusing to give up her seat on the bus was part of a strategic plan. If we can frame her as just a little old lady with glasses who was tired, it’s comfortable. The scholarship has now changed; writers are now describing the resistance.
What I love about this book is that the author centers the experiences of how we resist. The quote that stands out to me is on page 6 where the author says, ‘White supremacy in America can be summed up by these two diabolical options: live a life in bondage or refuse and limp.’"
Alejandra gave us, “I have two points, and the first one is what I really appreciated about her is the embedding of the newspaper stories, the way the news was portrayed, particularly the differences between what mainstream newspapers were saying and what the Black press was saying. Particularly in the Christiana Resistance. I found it funny how many times the same sentiment came up in the Black paper like: ‘It’s really a shame he died but it’s kind of his own fault.’
The other thing was I went to the May 1st demonstration because my union was there. It was really interesting just seeing the posters people were holding up. There were people who come from the immigrant community with banners saying things like ‘no one is illegal,’ and then a lot of white people with banners that seemed to be against the president specifically. It reminded me of Bonnie’s article (the NYT guest essay with the headline, ‘Black Americans are Not Surprised.’ by Dr. Christina Greer.) In other words, I wonder if the whites would be okay with this mass deportation plan if it wasn’t done by this current president. It’s not the president, it’s the United States, and a lot of people feel very excited to fight against him, but I think it’s not the injustice that enrages people. It’s easier to focus on a person. This is the same way we talk about non-violent protests being more palatable to whites; it’s easier to avoid acting on it.”
Nancy remarked, “What I kept thinking about throughout this book, I’d say the author’s fundamental point is that what passes for normal and the status quo in our society, is itself incredibly violent. It isn’t that resistance to it is violent, but that the basic fabric of this society is violence. I think that fact is invisible to a lot of people, sometimes intentionally, not always intentionally. Once you start to see it, you can’t unsee it, the violence is just there.”
Joy questioned, "Where could you go and not be affected by white supremacy and capitalism? Even if we were to leave, we would still have to disrupt the status quo. This work would have to be done anywhere we go. Colonization is a result of the global capitalism."
Ann replied, "I lived in Liberia for two years and that was the only country that wasn’t colonized, and I was in a village and a lot of what the author says in terms of collaboration, community, dance, music, people helping each other was really the truth. The African culture was much healthier.
Shelara went further, saying, "Capitalism and colonialism have been experienced everywhere, but there’s something about this experiment that practices it differently. I’m part of communities that include Black expats. They’re going away. I just listened to a woman who lived in Rwanda, she lived in Mexico, and she was just saying how her nervous system got reset. It was clean, it was safe, and there was no danger to her for just living her life and I think that’s the peace that’s not found here in the US. I think that there are going to be issues with colonialism and capitalism everywhere; that’s the engine of this world, but I think the US codifies the racial animus in such a way that it is baked in. It is the foundation, starting with the land theft from and the murder of the Indigenous, the kidnapping of the Africans. It has infiltrated in such a way that they made it into culture. Germany said, ‘Oh we messed up, so we are going to make sure that we educate ourselves, we know that we were wrong, and we should have never done it. The US never said, ‘we were wrong’ and we’re going to do justice from here on out. There’s always been these little stops and starts.”
Barb said, "This book summarizes a lot of what we’ve been talking about for almost ten years. Marian said, ‘there’s a new book called We Refuse, and I look at the cover and I’m like whoa. Whether this is somebody’s idea of cover art or a historical moment!"
Alejandra agreed, saying, "Yeah, and I think there’s something about that picture, because she’s not saying, ‘I’m going to go fight,’ instead she’s saying, I’m waiting! (In case you come for what’s mine.)'"
Barb, commenting on what's going on in our government now, said, I keep feeling like we’re in Germany in the late 1930s. You know that saying by Pastor Martin Niemoller:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Barb continued, “Right now it’s immigrants and trans people. I have trans people in my family, in my world. We all have immigrants; we all are immigrants. I feel terrified.
Bonnie mentioned, "I found on page 175 just this idea of stealing bodies. The enslaved, wanting freedom, were stealing their own bodies.
"For enslaved people, leaving-or 'stealing away'-robbed the planter of his economic assets and threatened the very foundation of the institution."
Maria reminded us,"They were burning some African Americans alive. While all the others were screaming, one of them just went and put his feet in the fire and refused to scream. Instead of this being a story of extraordinary courage, the white people twisted his resolve into ‘Africans don’t feel pain.’ Just part of the mythology white people used to endorse the whole system."
Laura said "the thing that really bites I think is the ability for people to dehumanize other humans. It’s around the world, but the thing that stands out in the US is the hypocrisy, All this talk about the American Experiment or American Exceptionalism. We claim to be doing something the rest of the world can’t do. We claim the high ground. That adds this whole element to it. One of the things I was struck by in the book We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehesi Coates, where I learned that during Reconstruction there were African Americans being brought into the government and then it flipped. Coates was saying that that is what is happening now. There was President Obama for eight years. I used to think (up until the last ten years,) that it was baffling how Reconstruction was allowed to collapse.
Shelara pointed out that the Federal Government watered down the Civil War ‘Revolution’ by giving reparations to the former slave holders.
Ann, summing up her response to We Refuse, said, "I liked the comprehensive nature of the book. The author talked about so many different aspects of resistance and power and the collaboration of women. It just made me think large groups in collaboration are very powerful. I’m not sure but maybe women have extraordinary power that and I think there is evidence of that. The power of working together also brings joy. It comes out of collaboration.
Laura followed up on this idea of joy, pointing out that everyone wants writers of color to write about their suffering, and ignore the idea of joy. She gave us copies of us copies of Ada Limon’s poem:
Give Me This by Ada Limón
I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.
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