The 'Til Victory Manifesto was written by Brian Tate on the occasion of “Til Victory is Won: 400 Years on Making Revolution and Inventing Utopia,” a five-hour teach in on race in America, produced by Brooklyn Public Library.
Brooklyn Public Library issues the Manifesto as a pledge made by all of us who stand against racism and other forms of inhumanity. We invite you to add your comments to the Manifesto. What will you do to honor our history and make a more just future for America? Below, write one sentence that you think is missing from the manifesto.
There has been some question as to who we are.
We are people of color and people of conscience. Troublemakers. From city to countryside to all points between, there we are, troubling the water, bringing life. We are the seeds planted by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer and Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown, Joseph Cinqué and Crazy Horse. We change the culture. We make the future. And we grow wild.
We have experienced loss that is measured only by the spaces of the people who were taken: Atatiana Jefferson. Botham Jean. Muhlaysia Booker. Lonette Keehner. Sandra Bland. Tamir Rice. Trayvon Martin. Emmett Till. Countless more, a scroll that could touch the sky. Also the 60 million whose stolen labor was made to harvest stolen land and who were shoved into the grave. We hold them all close. We are anchored by that history and we honor them each time we take flight.
There has been some question as to what we stand for.
Is it hard to know? We stand for the Dream: Life. Liberty. The world made better for people who care about the world. The opportunity to tell our own stories of glorious achievement. The right to vote and to drink clean water. We stand for the right to survive a routine traffic stop, to not go missing while walking to the market, to not turn up inexplicably dead, to not have our children hauled off in handcuffs for having a tantrum in grade school or be snatched from us at gunpoint and warehoused for profit. We celebrate our capacity for greatness and our ability to do the unexpected. To become the unexpected. We stand up for everyone in our boundless community to experience all the abundance that they are due, and we will summon all our courage and mettle to see that made real.
Which brings us to where we are now: In the fight of our lives.
Our opponents are astride an engine that is hundreds of years old, fueled by greed, grievance, and white supremacy. They are invested in it. Their lives depend on it. To keep that position they have united their hateful ideologies behind one banner. And they are winning. We are banned at airports, blocked at border crossings, accosted in public spaces. Their armed factions have come for us in churches, synagogues, mosques, and shopping malls. Each violation is made possible because they have changed the culture. Policies and rhetoric once thought abolished are now commonplace. And when more black and brown people are ground to bits beneath that machine, more refugees turned away, more immigrants criminalized and deported, more houses of worship defaced, more rights stripped from the vulnerable, more of the world’s resources shifted unsustainably in one direction, more environmental protections pitched into the fire, and the Dream reduced to something hazy and fleeting, will they pause?
No. Race hatred is the X factor, the xenophobia factor behind which all reason pales. Their greatest fear: Being replaced. Their oldest tactic: Turning us against each other.
We refuse. We choose to unite around moral truth and a vision of the future worth fighting for: the Beloved Community described by Dr. King, the earthly place covered in glory that awaited Harriet Tubman. We know that when one of us is threatened, we are all put at risk. So we will come together. Then we can defeat them, as our grandparents and ancestors did over the decades and centuries time and time again.
Together we can win.
Today we vow to take up a cause bigger than ourselves. We understand that the solidarity it will require will not come easily. We know that our efforts to gather will be imperfect because we are imperfect. But we are compelled. Today we make a vow to selfless listening and cross-cultural healing, and calling things by their trues names: Racism. Fascism. Xenophobia. When confronted by forces we’re told cannot be changed, we will change them. We will follow the lead of women of color, the first to experience and understand white supremacy. We will give ourselves to the furious clamor we must raise and prepare ourselves for deployment, each of us playing to strength. We pledge to mobilize at the voting booth and in the street, on every stage, page, and canvas we can find.
Before us is the Mountaintop, the same one climbed by all the freedom fighters and visionaries from our history. Once we address the business at hand we’ll meet there, and dance to our legacy of revolution and utopia. Along the way we’ll listen for the truths that we hold to be self-evident, starting with these:
Dr. Brenda Greene: “We must reshape the master narrative and ensure that our stories are told, as Toni Morrison tells us, from the Black gaze.”
Judy Richardson: “If we do nothing, nothing changes.”
Ian Brennan: “Inequality itself not only leads to violence. It is violence.”
Liza Jessie Peterson: “Black Love is Kryptonite for white supremacy.”
Sherman Fleming: “We wear the noose everyday.”
Kali Holloway: “We fight because white power cannot be reasoned with or politely asked to share. And frankly, there is no ‘happy medium’ between oppression and our full humanity.”
Ira Wechsler: "Racism can only be finally put to rest when the capitalist system that profits from it is put out of its misery."
Norma Williams: "We pledge to remember the atrocities and to educate our children so they will know and not become victims for slavery is still an ongoing threat."
Mary Feyijinmi: "We will continue to listen, pay attention and honor the stories nestled in the rhythms of our feet and our hands, our throat and our hips not to mention our lips."
Today we honor the past and look toward the future.
All we have is each other and that will be enough. We are the people we’ve been waiting for. And despite any reports to the contrary, tomorrow will still be ours. As for this fight we’re currently in, how long will we keep at it? Until earth and heaven ring. Until victory is won.
—Brian Tate, 10.25.19
In memory of Charles & Florence Tate