Black Liberation Is the Blueprint (And Anti-Blackness Attempts to Erase the Receipts)

For me, February is all about love and liberation, and to kick off BLACK HISTORY YEAR, I’m exposing something exhausting: pervasive anti-Blackness among justice campaigns, and even some recent “equity” efforts in the last five years, that are inspired by Black Liberation and Civil Rights movements, grounded in the tenets of Black feminist theory, and built on the labor of Black community organizers and activists.

Our words and ancestral strategies get copy-and-pasted into strategic plans, frameworks, toolkits, and “guiding principles,” but the webinars, panels, and presentations often lack Black representation. Even more than that, the proclamations and principles rarely align with actual practices and policies. Sigh.

Observing topics like abolition and authoritarianism being discussed on webinar panels in this political moment is both inevitable and interesting. Neither are new to those of us who know the true foundational history of this country… outside of the sanitized, pseudo version, that is.

Harriet Tubman, full-length portrait, standing with hands on back of a chair (between ca. 1871 and 1876). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

From slavery abolition to the current abolition movement of the Prison Industrial Complex, which are not separate from each other, Black folk, especially Black women, have been the backbone and foundational architects working collectively to get us all free.

Abolition in the U.S. was a major 18th–19th century social and political movement to end slavery and promote racial equality. Black women were essential to the U.S. abolitionist movement, founding early antislavery societies, operating Underground Railroad networks, lecturing, writing, and petitioning Congress, while also navigating the “double jeopardy” of race and gender oppression. They remained relentless.

The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) abolition movement is also a political movement and strategy aiming to eliminate imprisonment, policing, and surveillance, an extension of chattel slavery, while simultaneously creating sustainable, community-based alternatives where we take care of each other.

The purpose is to dismantle systems of oppression and rebuild with resources Black people have been fighting for since this country’s founding- adequate and fair access to housing, healthcare, and education.

Black women are and have been profound leaders in these movements, operating with the understanding that what’s best for Black women is best for EVERYONE. Black women move mountains for all of us. Often without acknowledgement or appropriate compensation, while also battling discrimination and exploitation within systems and a society that don’t see us or value our worth yet consistently co-opt and exploit our wisdom and ways.

As it pertains to Authoritarianism, for many Black folk, it’s as American as apple pie and bald eagles. It’s why abolition has existed and is continuous. The early, and ongoing, government treatment of Black people in the U.S. is a form of racial authoritarianism: a system where Black folk have lived under different laws, state-sanctioned violence, and designed disenfranchisement effectively operating as perpetual violence and exploitation within a “democratic” framework.

From slave codes and Black Codes to Reconstruction and Jim Crow, to present day mass incarceration, and the multitude of prison sentences by other names, Black Americans have always experienced a parallel, more repressive form of government and law compared to our white counterparts. Control of the Black mind and body is in this country’s DNA. There has only been momentary relief through intense and persistent struggle led by Black Civil Rights and Liberation movements. There’s always been a legacy of liberation existing and resisting alongside America’s legacy of lockout, with much of that progress is being challenged right now.

Malcolm X 1964 press photo, Wikimedia Commons

In his 1964 speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X discussed how, in a two-party government, both parties can be part of a racist system that fails to deliver civil rights despite receiving Black support. He described what I call, the American set-up, as a deceptive choice between a “fox” and a “wolf.” Quite frankly, not much has changed, only rearranged. Here we are in 2026, still caught up in the same conundrum. Bound by the binary. The way I view it is, no government that would’ve enslaved us is going to save us.

Over the course of history, multiple, if not most, justice campaigns have been inspired by and/or benefited from Black resistance and revolutionaries who pushed back against government terror and injustice of government-sanctioned oppression. Following, are a few.

I have several thoughts about the feminist movement that left Black women behind, but I’ll save them for now. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, the white women’s agenda gained traction and led to legislation making sex-based discrimination in the workplace illegal. The Civil Rights Act was eventually amended to include workplace discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was formed to enforce the law and investigate workplace discrimination complaints. When commissioners met opposition as they tried to do their jobs, a suggestion for a group to speak on behalf of women like civil rights groups had done for Black people led to the formation of the National Organization for Women.

When the Supreme Court determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional in 1954, it also opened the door for the inclusion of people with disabilities. Additional efforts led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Something many people don’t know about the Black Panther Party in the California Bay Area was its involvement in the burgeoning disability rights movement in the 1970s. In 1977, the BPP supported a 26-day occupation of a federal building in San Francisco during the nationwide “504 Movement” demanding that legislation pass to outlaw ability-based discrimination in federally financed programs.

While Civil Rights activists centered racial justice, they also highlighted environmental racism and exposed the dangers Black people faced in our own communities (and still do today), like when the Federal Highway Act passed in 1956 and highways were built over Black neighborhoods across the country, subjecting residents to increased pollution and other harms. This led to other resistant stances for environmental justice, which in my opinion, can’t be achieved without racial justice.

Pauli Murray: legal architect, truth-teller, and target of erasure. Photograph of Dr. Pauli Murray sent to Eleanor Roosevelt in December 1955

The nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights Movement also inspired gay rights activists in the 60s to organize sit-ins and protests. Historians often acknowledge that many elements of Pride and gay rights were borrowed from the Black Freedom Movement. The groundwork laid for same-sex marriage was modeled after Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Legal interracial marriage was the precedent used to legalize same-sex marriage in 2015. I’d also be remiss not to mention Marsha P. Johnson and Pauli Murray, two powerful pioneering Black LGBTQIA+ activists that I admire, who have been recently targets by federal insecurities and backlash.

Last, but certainly not least, as we currently face the freeze of ICE’s presence and pandemonium, immigrant reform is also important to note. A majority of immigrants in this country came from Europe and Canada prior to the Civil Rights Movement which inspired an effort to eliminate discrimination in immigration. In 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act was signed, removing quotas based on national origin, it shifted demographics. The efforts of Civil Rights made it possible for many immigrants to start a new life in the United States. This is rarely acknowledged, if even known at all because Black erasure is real.

Fannie Lou Hamer seated at a table at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Library of Congress, photo by Warren K. Leffler

Credit line: Library of Congress, photo by Warren K. Leffler, Fannie Lou Hamer… Democratic National Convention, 1964

Today, we are witnessing silos of seemingly single-issue problems which are actually connected at the root. As a constant reminder from Fannie Lou Hamer: nobody’s free until we are all free (a quote I see frequently used without credit to the Black woman who said it #CiteBlackWomen).

Long story, shorter: RACIAL JUSTICE is gender justice is disability justice is environmental justice is LGBTQIA+ justice is immigrant justice is economic justice is land justice is housing justice is education justice is birth justice is health justice is (fill in the blank) justice…

As long as there are Black people who have other/and multiple oppressed identities, all injustices are interconnected. The root cause is always RACISM.

Black liberation is the blueprint, and the ongoing effort and sacrifices of Black people are the reason so many others have rights and freedoms they may sometimes take for granted. Yet anti-Blackness remains an American obsession and a global phenomenon that diminishes Black contributions and achievements in advancing rights for everyone.

Black history is American history. There’s no you without us.

My invitation: before you head out to the next protest with your fight-the-power fist proudly in the air, do your homework. Freedom ain’t free, but Google is (for now)!

Reading is resistance. Learning is love. Educate and emancipate your mind.  “To educate is the practice of freedom.” -bell hooks