Comrades, kindred, family,
Last night, I took a drive through my neighborhood counting the number of yard signs on the front lawns of my community. The sun was beginning to set and it struck me that those signs would come down in the coming days to a changed political landscape, but not a change in who my neighbors are and have been to this community. I call them by name as a personal reminder that the work of organizing in community—to shift local, state, and regional conditions—is tied to “the folk”—Mrs. Stephans around the corner…Mrs. James across the street…Coach Thomas at the end of the block.
For many of us, we feel danger in the air. We know this election season will be more than just a topic of discussion across dinner tables, in barber shops, and at halftime during the high school football game. Therefore, we recommit ourselves to the mandate. We invoke the spell to take care of ourselves, each other, and our people. We relentlessly organize to create a world worthy of our people and a world that we are able to live in free from fear.
SONG’s organizing work goes far beyond ballots or political cycles. This has always been the case. The Southern organizing tradition that guides and informs our work is rooted in the tireless, sacred, and devotional community-building work that strengthens kinship and deepens connection to one another. Our relationships rebuke the forces that attempt to fracture or isolate us. Our organizing work is about resistance and resilience. It is about building a beloved community that, without question or pause, knows it right to drop off a plate of food when someone is sick or call just to see “how ya’ doin?” Knows it right to clean up the mud, pull up the carpet, and rip out the walls in rooms overtaken by flood waters. Knows it right to defend your neighbor when ICE rolls through your town.
Our work is deeply personal, communal, and requires we show AND tell what a political home looks, feels, and sounds like. We do not make home at the ballot box. We make home in the hollers, the hills, the swamps, Appalachia, the Bayou, the Delta, the coast. We make home on back porches, back roads, and back woods. Home is where love abounds.
Our fight is a long one. So let us continue to reach for one another, resist death-dealing systems of oppression, tear down the walls that separate us, and reimagine a South and a world worthy of our people.
Our ancestors deserve it. Our elders deserve it. Our babies deserve it. We deserve it.
Yours in the struggle and fight,
Carlin
