“I’m More Determined than Ever”

Sometimes young African agents of social, economic, environmental, and political change in the South feel like the Children of Israel, just out of physical bondage, wandering in the wilderness, trying to find the promised land. Questioning, doubting, and wondering about what we have truly gained. This feeling became familiar to me again when I started thinking about the “gains” we’ve made over the last 25 years.

I am exactly 25 years old. Before I officially entered the world and very soon thereafter, I was on picket lines. I have been doing this work as a leader for the last ten years. When I started counting back, it became clear that a lot of the changes happened in the years before this period. Initially, this was a little discouraging — particularly when you take into account the idea that, as a friend of mine puts it, “the solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow.” As I struggle over what our “gains” have been, I become more determined than ever to contribute to the movement for major change within my lifetime.

There have been accomplishments, however, and those who want so much for things in their communities to greatly improve must take a moment to look closely at the social landscape. In many communities, there have been changes in teen pregnancy and school dropout rates, as well as an increase in some opportunities. And while even these accomplishments have been small steps toward the promised land, they have been steady steps.

Also, the analysis of change agents has deepened over the last 25 years. The complex web of racism, classism, sexism, hetero-sexism, capitalism, and other oppressive “isms” is looked at as part of the overall strategy for freedom and justice. In addition, an important lesson that even those of us filled with the passion, idealism, and zeal of youth have to come to learn and embrace is that freedom is a constant struggle. This knowledge changes how we fight the fight, hopefully for the better.

The challenges we face are numerous. Each day, another tool is invented or recycled — from bills (legislation) to billions (money) — to impede our progress toward transformational change. Technology is both a curse and a blessing, and our charge is to forge ways to make it a blessing more often than a curse. We must seize and use more mediums of communication in order to do this. The whole world would think we were in the middle of a high-powered movement if the media covered half of the things going on in communities across the South.

We must understand the nature of our money: most of the foundations that fund our work were created for charity at best, not transformation. Grassroots fundraising can be done and must be done, if we are to have a people’s movement.

We must find ways to make our institutions responsive to the call for a better way of life. We must fight to make our families, schools, businesses, and places of worship catalysts for social change.

We must connect the individual needs and aspirations of the people of the South to its collective needs and aspirations. We must not forget that transformation starts with us, with our institutions. It is hardly likely that an organization crippled by internal classism will help to greatly improve class-related issues on their block, much less in their city or state. We who dare to change the world around us, must dare to change ourselves.