Sublime

CHAPTER 9 TEAR DOWN THE WALLS

it is flagrantly unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we do so; and we simply cannot afford to do without women’s expertise, whether it is in technology, the economy or social care.

“[When] they kicked me off the plantation,” Hamer reportedly told a fellow worker, “they set me free.” She added, “It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.”43

1965 alone, an estimated sixty Black women were forcefully sterilized at the hospital in Sunflower County immediately after giving birth.78

Since 1980, when the victims’ rights movement took off, higher-education spending in California has decreased by 13 percent, while investment in prisons has grown 436 percent; the state now spends far more money on prisons than it does on colleges and universities.

Today, we depict blacks as dangerous, a portrayal that perverts the true direction of violence between whites and blacks since the founding of this country.

What the White South confronted in the movement era was a paradigm shift. There was a model for sustaining White supremacy: terrorizing Black folks, the dispassionate acquiescence of the White North and the federal government, economic control, and an ideological hold on its ranks managed by humiliation and cruelty. But a model only holds as long a

For twenty years, I had been on a mission, part of a movement designed to bring black people into full citizenship. What did that mean, if not that blacks on an individual basis would be free to chart their own courses in life-to figure out for themselves what role they