Sublime

our system of civil rights law and enforcement ensures that racial progress occurs at just the right slow pace. Too slow would make minorities impatient and risk destabilization; too fast could jeopardize important material and psychic benefits for elite groups. When the gap between our ideals and practices becomes too great, the system produces a

Grace Lee Boggs

“The only thing we can do, women and men, whether you [are] white or black, is to work together,” Hamer explained.35 She celebrated the power of each individual action and believed that singular acts of courage would accumulate over time to dismantle racist structures.

While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights.

This meant having working relationships with students in activist organizations—the

now know that my existence is a manifestation of Black women’s resistance against the criminalization of poverty and the devaluing of Black lives. For

The ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people are normative and, for this so-called democracy, necessary; it is the ground we walk on. And that it is the ground lays out that, and perhaps how, we might begin to live in relation to this requirement for our death. What kinds of possibilities for rupture might be opened up?

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

describing them as “tool[s] of the Johnson administration.”68 For Hamer, compromise with white public officials, whatever the motivation, left Black people empty-handed. “Fannie Lou Hamer . . . didn’t seem to be interested in how we won the ’64 election or how we kept our dignity,” American politician Walter Mondale later observed, “she just wanted