"The Monster We Live In" - Zoharah Simmons, Michael Simmons and Dan Berger (Stayed on Freedom Oral History Part 3)

This is the third installment of our conversation with Zoharah and Michael Simmons, and their biographer Dan Berger, as we discuss their lives in relation to Dan’s new book Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey.  

We discuss Michael and Zoharah’s organizing against the Vietnam War, especially the issue of draft resistance.  Along those lines, we talk a bit about Michael’s time locked up as a pre-trial detainee at the Atlanta Prison Farm, during the period where it served as a jail for Atlanta on the same location where Cop City has been proposed. Zoharah shares struggles against patriarchy and male chauvinism within movement spaces, specifically through her experiences at SNCC and the Nation of Islam. And she discusses her own efforts to combat it as a SNCC Program Director in Laurel, Mississippi. 

After Michael’s incarceration for his resistance to the draft, both Michael and Zoharah talk about their years struggling within the American Friends Service Committee both in terms of their jobs there, but also the organizing that they launched beyond the scope of their duties, their struggles to unionize the AFSC, and dealing with the complicated relationship that a predominantly white Quaker organization had to folks like Michael, Zoharah and others who were coming out of the Black Liberation struggle with deep organizing commitments, experiences, and international solidarity. In particular Zoharah’s discussion touches on her participation in work uncovering government surveillance, repression, and counterinsurgency. Michael discusses organizing predominantly Black workers and other workers of color while also building growing connections and mobilizing solidarity with movements in Africa and South America.

We want to thank Pluto Press again for donating 36 copies of the book Of Black Study by Joshua Myers. You can support shipping costs to send those books inside here. 

And we have set a goal of adding 28 new patrons to the show this month to keep up with non-renewals and maintain our support base for the show. If you like what we do and want to join the amazing listeners who sustain this project, you can do so by contributing as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. Also we do have a 3 week study group coming on Mao’s lectures On Practice and On Contradiction. If you want to find out more about that we’ll include a link to that in the show notes as well.

Even though this series represents one of our most sustained engagements with a subject, we also assure you that there are many wonderful stories and complicated struggle and issues covered in Stayed On Freedom that we were not able to get to in our discussion with Dan, Michael & Zoharah. We encourage folks to pick up the book if they haven’t already. 

Additional Links:

SNCC/Atlanta Project/Anti-Draft Protests 

The Draft Program / Atlanta's Black Paper