Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis

Author:Angela Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

SEVEN

The Truth Telling Project: Violence in America

Speech given in St. Louis, Missouri (June 27, 2015)

Kudos to Pastor Cori Bush and Dr. David Ragland for their brilliant work on the Truth Telling Project. I deeply thank you for inviting me to participate in this gathering of Ferguson protesters and other activists in the St. Louis area. It is an honor to join you as you ponder the permanence of violence in America and as you explore old and new meanings and long-standing but unacknowledged truths about the vicious racism that has plagued our world since its beginnings. We know that the historical process of colonization was a violent conquest of human beings and the land they stewarded. It is thus essential that we identify the genocidal assaults on the first peoples of this land as the foundational arena for the many forms of state and vigilante violence that followed. Moreover, the violence of European colonization, including the slave trade, constitutes the common history of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the American hemisphere. In other words, there is a longer and larger history of the violence we witness today. Our understandings of and resistance to contemporary modes of racist violence should thus be sufficiently capacious to acknowledge the embeddedness of historical violence—of settler colonial violence against Native Americans and of the violence of slavery inflicted on Africans. Our work today is evidence of the unfinished status of planetary struggles for equality, justice, and freedom.

I thank all of the presenters for their truth-telling presentations, including my sister Fania Davis, who has been working with this project since her first trip to Ferguson. It has been almost one year since the protests last summer following the police killing of Michael Brown. This morning my sister and I touched the ground where he was slain and followed the path of the protesters through the Ferguson community. I know that there are many Ferguson protesters among you and I want you to know how honored I feel to be here in this place at this time. Like everyone else who identifies with current struggles against racism and police violence, I have uttered the words “Ferguson” and “Michael Brown” innumerable times. Both inside and outside the country—for me as for people throughout the world—the very mention of Ferguson evokes struggle, perseverance, courage, and a collective vision of the future.

Let me share a story about the global resonances of your perseverance. Last September when I traveled to Savona, Italy—a town of about sixty thousand people in northwestern Italy near Genoa—where I was invited to speak on the Cuban Five, the people there were eagerly following the Ferguson protests. The group to which I spoke had been working for many years to free the five Cubans who were arrested by the US government in 1998 for attempting to prevent terrorist assaults on Cuba. As you may know, the last three were released this past December in a prisoner exchange. As we gather here this evening, the city of

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