We lost a phenomenal writer in Maya Angelou.  While many will remember her as an inspirational poet, I will always recall her as a groundbreaking memoirist. She was the first writer whose multi-volume autobiography gave me a vision of the complexity and depth of black women’s lives.

I met Dr. Angelou in 2004, when we were both on the radio show “West Coast Live.”  I was promoting my solo show, and she was promoting her cookbook. How do you tell a living legend how much you admire her? I simply offered a polite thank you for her work, and didn’t take up any more of her time.  Her writing has inspired millions of people, and whatever I might have said about her honesty, her courage, or her fierceness had been said already.  She knew.  She knew who she was, and didn’t need me or anyone to tell her.

But it hadn’t always been that way, and her autobiographical testimony about how she had gone from rejected daughter to celebrated author is a crucial part of the canon of US literature. Since the publication of the first volume in 1969, she has impacted generations.

There are so many standout moments in her work, but in the moment of her passing, I would like to highlight three of them: her experience of sexual violence, her participation in the sex industries, and her determination to integrate the SF Streetcar conductors.

Angelou was the first black woman who wrote of being raped, and as a child.  In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she uses the biblical reference of the camel passing through the eye of a needle to describe the experience:

“The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator can’t.”

As painful as the experience was for her, she communicates clearly in her writing that she understands the context of the violation.  She highlights what—in a male-dominated society—is considered flexible and what is considered rigid and unmovable.

Her candor about her sexual experiences, chosen and unchosen, continues throughout her autobiographical series. Later, she describes her experiences in the sex industries.  Her accounts include working as a prostitute in a brothel for Mexican wage-laborers and as a pimp for two lesbian sex workers.  In our current era of respectability politics for black women, we might reduce Angelou to an uplift-the-race interpretation of poems like “Phenomenal Woman”:

When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
[….] ’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

But perhaps we catch a glimpse of her experience as a sex worker in “And Still I Rise”, where she offers a strong image of material wealth to be associated with female sexuality:

…I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs

Poet Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated African American poet while his identity as a black gay man is often erased.  Similarly, Maya Angelou needs to be celebrated as a complex writer who lived and chronicled her complex, sexual, and sexualized life as a black woman from childhood to elder, not reduced to a sexless role model of an “upstanding” black female.

Finally, I cannot help but recall an iconic moment where a teenage Maya Angelou decides to go to any lengths to get a job conducting streetcars in San Francisco, despite being rejected because she is black: “My mind shouted so energetically that the announcement made my veins stand out, and my mouth tighten into a prune.  I WOULD HAVE THE JOB.  I WOULD BE A CONDUCTORETTE AND SLING A FULL MONEY CHANGER FROM MY BELT.  I WOULD.”

That voice, that determined black girl voice has been crucial in my own black woman’s life.  I have counted on that determination, that way out of no way I WOULD to guide and sustain me in many things.  Most recently, that determination has sustained me in my quest against the odds to get a literary agent and sell a book.  Through perseverance – the kind that made sixteen year old Maya San Francisco’s first conductorette – I finally did get an agent.

In selecting a photo to accompany this essay, I chose the picture of a young Maya from the conductorette era that ran in the Huffington Post. With a sassy outfit and a book on her hip, I love this image.  May all black women hold this vision of ourselves in our hearts: having known both victory and defeat, but still determined, hopeful, and fierce.

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Feature photo: OWN

Burnt out. That was me in 2009, after thirteen-plus years working in social justice organizations—a walking cliché as a movement worker. Although I had a relatively cushy job as a Development Director at a great organization, feeling responsible for raising the budget for a staff of fifteen, working through executive transitions, and fretting about myriad organizational issues led to many nights of anxiety-ridden insomnia. I’d suffered bouts of migraines and vertigo that on some days made it impossible for me to do anything. I wasn’t always my best in the work, taking my frustrations out on colleagues, and most often on myself. I loved working for justice but I knew something needed to change. So when a friend encouraged me to apply to the Windcall Institute’s residency program, I jumped at the chance.

I was the person in my organization that always pushed for things like coaching for staff, urging people to stay home and rest when they were sick, encouraging folks to utilize our health insurance to get acupuncture and chiropractic treatments. More than once I’d spent more money on therapy and alternative healing sessions in one month than I had on rent! So I figured Windcall would be easy since I was already into all this groovy California self-help type stuff.

But once I got there—my Windcall retreat was in the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest—it wasn’t exactly easy. You see, my M.O. back then was to overload myself with “to do” lists—even when on vacation I always had an itinerary. Suddenly, in that wooden house perched on a hillside lush with green ferns and madrone and spruce trees above an isolated bay, I was confronted with more unstructured free time (just under three weeks) than I’d ever had in my adult life. Even with the company of two other movement folks, I was surrounded by the most immense quiet I’d ever experienced. And it gave me a bit of a panic. But I’d asked for this, so I had to decide how I was going to deal with all this space and time to just be.

So I decided to experiment with letting go, to live with the uncertainty and formlessness of each moment, with doing whatever I felt like doing at any given time, and with not judging whatever came up. It’s the kind of thing I never got to do in my regular life back home, but at Windcall, I finally had the chance. In this way, my whole Windcall experience was a meditation. And just like any meditation, it wasn’t always easy or pleasant. It was also at times difficult, challenging, even frightening.

On the third day of our stay, a cougar made its way to our front door. I wasn’t there to see it, but a fellow Windcaller, Shannon Sullivan, did. She was alone in the house while the rest of us were walking in the forest, and told us later how the big cat sauntered up to the window, sat on the front porch and scratched itself. When she went to grab her camera to try to take a picture, the cougar bolted.

Before this, I’d felt safe in that natural environment. Afterwards, things got hard. I felt homesick, even a little depressed, and for a few days I felt real fear—fear of walking down to the beach by myself or up to the main road via the driveway. A city girl, I’d never spent much time in such a wild, remote place before. Though I was unafraid of the many urban dangers I faced on a regular basis back home in Oakland, California, the cougar was an unfamiliar threat.

But I remembered my commitment to try and stay in the moment. I started a daily meditation practice, sitting in my room overlooking the forest or outside on the deck. I sat with my fear. Every night by the fire in the house, I read When Things Fall Apart by Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron. I came to the realization that the cougar had provoked a deeper fear in me, the archetypal fear of death that we all encounter. This realization made me want to face my fears head-on, not wanting to waste the few precious weeks of solitude I had been given, cougar or not.

So I did a lot of things I hadn’t let myself do for a long time, or ever. I played the keyboard in the loft, even bought sheet music in town so I could learn a few new tunes. I climbed up a tree house and read poetry out loud, my voice adding to the forest chorus of rustling leaves and chirping birds and insects. I had my first-ever horse-riding lesson. Flame, the gentle, pale brown horse I rode, was very patient with me.

I spent a lot of time doing something even more important, especially for burnt-out activists. I sat back and enjoyed the beauty and healing power of nature. I spent many hours sitting or walking outside, soaking in the green serenity of the forest, the pristine waters of Dabob Bay, the endless sky and clouds that came and went. During my eighteen days in the Olympic Peninsula I saw more wild creatures than I’d seen in my entire lifetime: a black bear down the road, countless deer, a herd of Roosevelt elk in the Hoh Rainforest, and even a bald eagle soaring past our living room window to its nest nearby. Being surrounded by so much nature at turns made me feel broken open and vulnerable, then strong and self-assured. And it renewed my burnt out spirit in a way that nothing else could have.

I also read the reflections of past Windcallers—which were given to us in a binder for our perusal—and came across entries by folks I knew from back home. People like Taj James, Nikki Bas, Jan Adams, Andy Robinson, Eric Quezada, and Francis Calpotura. I hadn’t even known that many of them had gone to Windcall. Many of those folks’ Windcall stories were similar to mine. They expressed gratitude for the solitude and time in nature, for the reminder to care for oneself in order to stay strong for our movement work. Reading their stories made me realize how much healing Windcall had brought to our movement over the years. They all described coming away from the experience feeling rested and rejuvenated, hopeful even, and with a renewed commitment to movement work.

And, perhaps most importantly, Windcallers come away with ideas and practices to bring back to our organizations and the broader movement.

Nikki Fortunato Bas, of Sweatshop Watch at the time of her residency in 2003, now with East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and soon to be with Partnership for Working Families, said, “Windcall erased my burnout, taught me I could work in a more sustainable way, and inspired an organizational culture shift, including our adopting a sabbatical policy. Windcall shows us we can, and should, focus on leadership longevity as part of strengthening our movements.” Windcall is about “big cultural shifts for us,” wrote Melinda Wiggins, 2004 Windcall alum and Executive Director of Student Action with Farmworkers. Shifts she believes “recognize how we work best as people and not machines.”

After Windcall, I shifted into supporting a broader range of organizing groups as a fundraising consultant, contributing to the movement in a way that fit best with my core strengths. I also integrated nature more into my daily life with gardening and hiking. I continue to encourage others to see the doctor or acupuncturist, eat well and exercise, and take care of themselves so that they can stay strong for the long haul.

With the 25 days of Windcall campaign, myself and other Windcall alumni are hoping to bring some of what we learned about self-care and staying power back to our everyday lives, and to our comrades and friends in the movement. It’s not necessary to go to the mountains for three weeks to have a clearer vision, a stronger sense of balance, and a more sustainable pace to our work. But I think it might be necessary to bring a little bit of Windcall into our lives every day to help us be the best we can be as organizers, movement workers, and warriors for justice.

All it takes is a little willingness and a lot of courage.

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Feature photo: Mural – Where the Wild Things Are, photo – Bruce Tanner, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Today our collective failure to provide real educational opportunity for youth of color leaves me shaken and emboldened to speak. It’s been 60 years since Brown v. Board struck down segregation laws in schools – and 16 years since I began organizing with low-income parents and students to achieve a decent education for youth of color.

In 2008 I took a job as Campaign Organizer for the “Campaign for College and Career,” launched by the members of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth in San Francisco. As Campaign Organizer, it was my job to educate, train, and organize African American, Latino, and Pacific Islander parents and students to work with allies to push for resources to ensure students’ access to the minimum requirements for entry into California public universities (called the “A-G” course requirements).

The campaign pushed for San Francisco Unified School District to graduate 60% of all students to be college and career ready by aligning the graduation requirement with “A-G.” We also demanded student access to socio-emotional supports, tutoring, alternatives to suspension and options for retaking failed classes.

When we started the campaign, lack of access and supports meant that only one out of six African American and one out of five Latino students in SFUSD were graduating with these courses completed. Each and every year we advocated and organized for increases in resources for students to be successful and graduate on time. Each and every year, we discovered barrier after barrier that went way beyond policy changes.

The results of this work have been bitterly disappointing: According to SFUSD’s New Graduation Requirement Task Force, in 2014 less than half of African American, Latino, and Pacific Islander students are on track to complete the A-G requirements needed for graduation. By comparison, more than two thirds of White students are on track, as well as more than four fifths of Asian students. Watching the presentation of these not-yet-released data to the school board I could barely contain my anger and frustration. The data showed that the goal we had worked so hard for – the goal of graduating more than 60 percent of all subgroups – had not been achieved.

I am outraged but not surprised. In my analysis of data during implementation – and every conversation with principals, teachers, counselors, department chairs, and countless other staff and adults at all levels in and out of the classroom – the biggest barrier was people who did not believe African American, Latino, and Pacific Islander students should be college and career ready, who blatantly did not follow policy, who would not change their interpersonal practice, and who refused to give students access to the courses they needed to stay on track to graduation. More difficult to witness were the adults who did shift their interpersonal practice, who advocated and coached their colleagues, but were too few to have impact or who did not feel they had the power to be the whistleblower on their colleagues’ destructive behaviors and practices.

As the campaign organizer who fought so hard for these policies, I am enraged and disappointed that everything we did resulted in so little change for my community.

My personal experience in the education system has taught me that oppression creates the tracking system so many education justice organizers, parent leaders, and youth leaders are fighting to dismantle. For example, I entered public middle school after a year of being homeless and transitioning from my Catholic elementary school. Right away I noticed that sixth  graders in “General Education” were covering material from my fourth  grade lessons in Catholic School. My biggest shock was when I was identified for the Gifted And Talented Education (GATE) Program, then skipped to seventh grade Honors, that I quickly recognized as the college prep track. I learned that in public school someone was clearly deciding who would and wouldn’t get the opportunity to be college or career prepared. In fact, from eighth to eleventh grade, I was among fewer than five African American students each grade year who were in the Honors track. This was not my decision, nor was it the decision of those left behind.

How did “the system” get so entrenched in tracking? How do we accept that a school-to-prison pipeline exists? How are we okay with a majority of graduates struggling for low wage work and glass ceiling careers? How did education become the home of data-driven practices rather than the well being of every student?

I believe that the US education system has an ugly problem: it is a system run by adults. Adults don’t change quickly, unless the most critical reality is brought to their face and they are forced to make changes.

Oppression in the education system has everything to do with adults whose ideology and interpersonal and internalized oppression impact their actions. Adults create the majority of the laws, regulations, and policies, and perpetuate the practices that make it possible to have an institution. The tracking system exists because adults hold beliefs about who will be college or career prepared.

As an education justice movement, we need to be better at articulating what the school-to-prison pipeline is — a tracking system. We must go beyond throwing more money at a system designed to track. Tests are no longer needed for the tracking system to work because individual adults in the system — proponents or not — sustain tracking as a standard practice due to their personal ideologies.

In my new position as Program Director for Parent Leadership Action Network (PLAN), an organization that works primarily in the Oakland Unified School District, I continue to find that true change in education – and any other movement sector – requires us to shift the beliefs of adults to see all humans have the capacity to learn. At PLAN, we believe that increasing the skills, knowledge, and confidence of parents is critical to empowering them to transform schools so that all students have access to an education. We create trainings that require both parents and school staff to learn about how to navigate the system, how to talk about institutional racism, and how to begin building relationships that change behavior and improve school climate.

I applaud the work of groups like Kenwood Oakland Community Organizations and Journey for Justice who supported cities across the nation to file civil rights complaints with the Department of Education, demonstrating how school closures and disproportionate suspensions and expulsions are devastating Black and Latino neighborhoods. Campaigns such as these begin to call national attention to what discrimination looks like today.

All education organizers, parent leaders, student leaders, and community leaders need to tell the truth about how discrimination and adults’ personal ideology are deciding the future of students. We must never stop telling the stories of our members, leaders, and schools that live through the discrimination. We must tell the truth that oppression is so normal that it is indeed unconsciously accepted in our communities and supported in the US education system.

Education organizing is a critical element for achieving any level of justice within any sector. It is where oppression beats down the sparks of light in the next generation and trains them to believe they cannot learn, they do not matter, that they belong in prison or dead. It is our organizing, our leadership development, and our faith in our students and parents that, in the darkest times, keeps their hope alive for creating a different life for themselves,

A movement that cares about every child can look amazing. It can look like boycotting percentages being used in data and seeing every student as more than a number. It can look like honest conversations about oppression – across roles and jobs  – that are beautiful, uncomfortable, and dynamic.

A movement that cares about every child does not look like silence. Silence is compliance, permission for the end result of students of color to be in the school-to-prison pipeline. I am thankful every day that I was trained to be an organizer, that I am blessed with the chance to remind our parents and students that collectively we can transform education.

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Feature photo: twbuckner, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Do you believe in youth organizing? Do you want to see youth organizing take leadership in shaping My Brother’s Keeper – the national initiative President Obama launched to “measurably improve the expected educational and life outcomes for, and address the persistent opportunity gaps faced by, boys and young men of color”?

Then please – right away – spread the word about a national survey of boys and young men of color (ages 13-25) being conducted by the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FCYO) and Movement Strategy Center, the co-facilitators of the “youth table” that is gathering recommendations of youth themselves for My Brother’s Keeper.

The deadline for participating in the survey is Tuesday, May 6, 2014.

FCYO and MSC are asking youth organizing groups to get young boys/men of color (ages 13-25) to take a survey and to complete the organizational survey.

In February President Obama announced the creation of My Brother’s Keeper, asserting that, “Groups that have had the odds stacked against them in unique ways…require unique solutions.” The centerpiece of My Brother’s Keeper is a policy task force that will put together national, state, and local recommendations. In tandem with My Brother’s Keeper, a group of foundations announced a five-year $200 million investment in programs for Black and Latino boys and young men.

Youth organizing is crucial for boys and young men of color — and must be a core strategy in any effort to address the racial inequity that has been built into every institution, system, and structure. According to a recent FCYO study, 80% of students involved in youth organizing “felt confident that they could research a problem in their community, create a plan to address the problem, and get other people to care about the problem,” 90% “expressed a desire to stay involved in activism and remain committed to long-term social change efforts,” 80% “noted their grades improved,” and 60% “reported that they took more challenging coursework due to their involvement in organizing.”

“The diverse and collective efforts to transform the conditions, lives, and leadership of boys and men of color in California hold great transformative promise,” writes Jeremy Lahoud in What Works: Transforming Conditions & Health Outcomes for Boys and Men of Color. “Through on the ground efforts in places across California, young activists, adult allies, systems leaders, and nonprofit organizations are creating ‘best practices’ that exemplify pathways to pivot toward more effective movement building.”

Please help ensure that youth organizing – among Black, Latino, Asian, queer, immigrant, and other boys and young men of color – plays a leadership role in My Brother’s Keeper.

For more information please contact carmen[at]movementstrategy.org.

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Feature photo: City Heights BMoC Camp. Photo: Mid-City Community Advocacy Network