Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

This is a transcript of Davis’s speech given at Birkbeck University on October 25, 2013. The year contained key anniversaries, such as the 50th anniversary of major events of the civil rights movement. However, she warns particularly of the risk of viewing pivotal events in history as “historical closures” that mark certain social problems as resolved when in reality, they persist (64). Hundreds of streets are named after Dr. King, but such cultural changes only deflect from unresolved social problems, such as mass incarceration or lack of affordable housing. Davis argues that by keeping certain movements only in the past, closures give people only superficial understandings of the Black freedom movement, like knowing “little more than the fact that [Dr. King] had a dream” (65).

Davis believes we must recognize the continuities between struggles of the past to contemporary ones, and the connections between all the freedom struggles throughout the world today. Davis rebukes history’s obscuring of the collective effort, especially the role women played in the freedom movement, by focusing on the efforts of single, typically male, individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. She also rejects the idea that President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves because such an idea “erase[s] the agency of Black people themselves” (70).