OUR INSPIRATION
"Collaging is a historical practice of Black imagination,” wrote Sasha Bonét recently for The Paris Review. “It has helped us to envision unfathomable futures in the face of violence and uncertainty. It has been a creative way to love each other even though we haven’t been shown care, to express the depths of our experiences even when no one ever asked how we felt, to give evidence to all the things unseen." Further, radical historian Barbara Ransby meditates on the organizing approach of civil rights activist Ella Baker under the framework of political quilting. Ransby writes: “Ella Baker did not advocate forging coalitions of convenience: short-lived and limited. Instead, she wanted to create a movement and nurture the kind of long-term relationships that would sustain it. She tenaciously stitched together fragments of a progressive community into a patchwork of a movement.”
In this book, we plan to draw on these conceptual anchors, relics of the Black Radical Tradition, to produce a Philly-driven literary mixtape/anthology-in-action that will stitch together the activism and emotions of the 2020 Uprising. This project will be rooted in an intersectional analysis, believing it important that we celebrate the differences within our Black communities to make resolute that ALL Black lives matter. We recognize that by archiving these stories, it allows us an opportunity to contextualize this moment alongside other eras and instances of Black resistance in Philadelphia, promoting an intergenerational threading of Black activist labor, demands, and freedom dreams.