by Elder Frances Reid for the National Council of Elders
I moved through the shiny high-tech environment of the new terminal at Newark airport. Everyone I interacted with was surly, only grudgingly responding to my attempts to give them cheerful acknowledgement. I didn’t blame them, given what they were having to endure with the government shutdown, the lack of pay, flight reductions, impatient passengers worried that their flights would be cancelled.
But the surliness was jarring. I had just spent four love-suffused days with a cohort of my comrades of the National Council of Elders and an equal number of young (well, young relative to us anyway) organizers, in the magical, beautiful space of Kirkridge, on a spectacular forested ridge of the Poconos, on Lenape land, in eastern Pennsylvania. We had come from Philadelphia and Atlanta, Gainesville and Houston, Nashville, and Detroit, Greensboro, Montgomery, Memphis, Providence, Wilmington, Cleveland, Charleston, and Oakland.
Together we watched the full moon rise, caught in the branches of the bare trees that surrounded our retreat. We sang—old civil rights standards mostly—acknowledging it was time for new songs to meet the moment, the youngers accepting our challenge to create some. We laid stones on a makeshift altar, inscribed with the names of elders who had gone before us: Chief Richard Welker and Clan Mother Phyllis Donovan, elders from the Lenape; Dorothy Day, and Phillip and Dan Berrigan, elders who had been the radical peacemakers that had met on this land countless times before; and our own elders who have joined the ancestors since the founding of NCOE: Bernice Johnson Reagon, Gus Newport, Dorothy Cotton, Vincent Harding, Grace Lee Boggs, and so many, too many, more. We clustered over meals carrying on the intense, engaged, passionate conversations that had begun in the circle of our meeting room before a blazing fire, where we heard deep, engaging stories from Zoharah Simmons and Nontombi Naomi Tutu about the moments that sparked their lives of political resistance and activism, where we heard from Shea Howell a clear and alarming timeline of the past 100 years of right wing organizing that has brought us to this moment, and we heard a call from Suzanne Pharr to the youngers to carry forward the work by engaging with the next generation that are coming behind them.
And most powerfully, we heard from each of the eleven young activists about the work they are doing in their communities and the questions they had for us about that work, about where they feel stuck, feel fear, feel conflict, about how to get from the places they are to building a mass movement, about how to survive this moment and make permanent change, about how to nurture and grow the young people in their lives, their work, and with their families. We heard about their plans, their doubts, challenges, and victories. And we learned about their incredible work: We heard about youth news organizing in Houston, about Greensboro Mutual Aid, about working across the state on racial equity and food security, about creating spaces for intergenerational learning and cultural organizing, about the Strategic Non-Violence Academy, about re-directing white people to interrupt racial harm within their own neighborhoods, work, and families, about developing ICE rapid response systems, about Korean decolonialization organizing, about preparing the way for encountering the revolutionary divine modeled on tent revivals, about developing deeper and more connected relationships with family, about accompanying those facing the criminal justice system, about the creation of smaller organizing spaces. In general, the themes that emerged were about generating learning spaces, about place making and keeping, and about creating alternative media platforms. Many saw their work as “creating a brave space, not a safe space.”
The questions that the youngers had for us were about how to build out, how to grow, and how to sustain their work for the long haul, how to maintain political integrity, and how to navigate conflict when your goals are essentially aligned, as well as knowing when to quit.
We talked about where to go from here. Many connections were made for the furthering of the work and we agreed to quarterly zoom meetings to continue to hash out the questions that were brought to us. All of us left hungry for more.
I headed for the long flight back to the west coast energized by the mutual learning and support that had been generated by all of us together, nurtured by the sacred land of Kirkridge. As I walked through the airport, disoriented by impersonal interactions, winding my way through the security line, two of the youngers who had been dropped at the airport with me, Nedra and Bevelyn, were ahead of me in the distance; as the line moved we came closer and closer together as if in a spiral dance. And as we passed one another we stopped for huge loving grateful hugs that filled my heart, dispelling all the weirdness of the airport and sustaining me all the way home.