Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

What is your North Star? What are you fighting for, and what are you struggling to overcome, or leave behind? The goal is not a precise and detailed roadmap—that way lies dogma, orthodoxy, and worse—but rather a vision and a hope with which to gauge and partially frame our work in the here and now. The great Uruguay revolutionary, Edwardo Galeano, tells a story of being confronted by a person accusing him of being a utopian, and asking contemptuously, “What good is Utopia?” Galeano says, “It’s true that if I walk 2 steps toward Utopia, Utopia walks 2 steps away, and if I walk 10 steps toward her, she walks 10 steps away. So what good is Utopia?” His reply: “It’s good for walking.” We’re joined in conversation by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, authors of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a novel that is so imaginative, so challenging, and so surprising that it reorders our conception of what’s possible to write—and to think.

When a popular leader emerges from the whirlwind of a struggle for justice, power always stands in opposition—ignoring the rising demands where possible, ridiculing and coopting, and eventually fighting with everything in their arsenal. When the popular leader is gone—murdered or passed on—power makes them into a mythical hero while simultaneously working furiously to strip away the radical content that energized and guided the struggle. Joining us this week are Jeanne Theoharis and Erik Wallenberg, one of Pilsen Community Book’s worker owners who co-authored a dazzling guide to Chicago’s Black Freedom Struggle which appeared in The Chicago Tribune. Jeanne is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, and author of the bestselling book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and the new King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South (The New Press). 

James (Jimmy) Soto was released from Stateville Prison in November, 2023, after suffering 42 years and 2 months in custody for a crime he did not commit. A month before his release he had received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. He and his co-defendant, Tyrone Ayala, also exonerated, were the longest serving wrongfully convicted people in Illinois history. At our Homecoming Party for Jimmy several men toasted him, and thanked him for the legal research he did as a jailhouse lawyer for them while inside. Knowing that Jimmy was planning to pursue a law degree, one of his compatriots said, “I saw what this brother did with a yellow pad and a pencil, now with a law degree, Look Out!” After his release, Soto said he felt “elated” but also full of “righteous anger…It should not have taken 42 years for this to happen.” A talented writer, artist, public speaker, and thinker, Jimmy Soto is a Justice Fellow at Beyond Prisons at the University of Chicago, and a paralegal at Northwestern School of Law.

Barbara Smith is a Movement legend— the kind of courageous activist, powerful thinker, persistent organizer and whole-hearted doer who keeps the Movement moving. She is co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and co-author of the acclaimed 1977 statement that has been one of the most influential Black feminist documents of the twentieth century—“Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work.” She’s been a freedom fighter for over half a century—a long time in the life of a person, but, as she knows, the blink of an eye in the life of a struggle, and so she is neither nostalgic for a ship that’s already left the shore nor interested in burnishing a legacy. Rather, she is leaning forward—on the move and in the mix—still fighting for peace and freedom and joy and justice, still asking the most insistent and burning questions: How do we name this political moment? Where do we go from here? What does the known demand of us now? Here is Barbara Smith in conversation with Bill Ayers on December 5, 2024 at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York.

Human beings are suspended in webs-of-significance—we make sense and we make meaning—and culture is nothing more nor less than the webs. Those webs-of-significance are alive, forever trembling and vibrating, evolving and regenerating, changing and developing as messages and stories and ways-of-being vibrate across the surface. So culture can never stand still, never sit static or inert; rather it is always on the move, in the mix, and on the make—dynamic and churning and charging forward. The joy of the churn, and the burden of resistance, re-imagination, and reconstruction lives within the counter-culture. We’re joined by Alex Zamalin in a wide-ranging conversation about culture, counter-culture, and the quest for revolutionary freedom.

In America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan describes his good fortune at landing a job in a library where he could be close to books: “I was beginning to understand what was going on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life was lifting.” Ursula Le Guin writes of a library’s sacredness: “its accessibility, its publicness.” She calls the public library a public trust, and continues: “A great library is freedom,.” We’re honored to be joined in conversation with Emily Drabinski, past president of the American Library Association, and a brilliant and intrepid defender of the public square.

Comix is a distinct art form—sequential art—that expresses ideas with multiple images, most often combined with text. It's a hybrid (think co-mix) and, importantly, it’s a medium not a genre—don’t confuse the two in the presence of a comix creator or you might get your head bit off (for a real-life dramatization, see the opening of To Teach: the journey in comics). Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, and the medium has been creatively deployed to communicate non-comedic content—see Maus or Persepolis or Fun Home. They’ve taken over the world in this golden comix age, and you can find them everywhere—classrooms, special sections in bookstores and libraries, and, yes, still hidden in that secret drawer in the closet—and still the medium retains a sense of its insurgent origins. The word “comix” (or “comics”) is a “non-count noun” like “politics” or “economics” referring to the medium itself. We’re joined by two old friends in conversation about comix and the world—Eve Ewing, poet, playwright, scholar, teacher, author of the Ironheart series for Marvel comics, and the first Black female author of the Black Panther series; and Ryan Alexander-Tanner (www.ohyesverynice.com), illustrator/comics artist and educator, co-author of To Teach: the journey in comics, and author and artist of Muhammad Ali: The Greatest Comics Biography of All Time Volume One: Cassius Clay. 

When Freedom is the Question… was published on September 10, and we had a book launch that night at our home-away-from-home, Pilsen Community Books, in conversation with Eve Ewing. We traveled to Women and Children First, Seminary Coop, The Wooden Shoe in Philadelphia, Book and Puppet in Easton, PA, Riff Raff in Providence, Firestorm in Asheville, NC, Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Busboys and Poets in DC, the PIT (Property is Theft!!) in Brooklyn, and more. I read at public libraries, coffee shops, and Movement venues like Haymarket House, Hasta Muerte, and The James Connelly Social Club. A couple of the events were taped, one at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY where I was in conversation with the legendary thinker and activist Barbara Smith, co-author of the Combahee River Collective statement, and one at La Pena in Oakland where I was in conversation with Cat Brooks, organizer, activist, and KPFA radio host---Under the Tree will drop those spicy conversations in the future. I was honored and often awed to be in conversation with several other powerful comrades and dazzling friends: Lisa Lee, Danaka Katovich, Alice Kim, Damon Williams, Jacqui Lyden, Daniel Kisslinger, Martha Biondi, Adam Bush, James Michael MacDonald, Jeff Jones, Martha Swan, and more.

The word “racism” can apply to a specific person or to the social structure, and in our hyper-individualistic culture, the word most commonly devolves to a singular individual who did something obviously prejudiced: Cliven Bundy, the Nevada cattle rancher, Amy Cooper, the New York person who called the cops on a bird-watcher who’d asked her to keep her dog on a leash. Racism is this or that person or particular act or behavior, and it means“bigoted, backward, stupid, and offensive.” But since I’m not backward and bigoted and stupid like them, “I’m not racist.” Convenient for white liberals, but not helpful in repairing the harm. We dive into that  wreckage with the brilliant thinker, writer, and teacher, Janine de Novais who explores and engages human liberation as a cultural project. Her book, Brave Community: Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination, illuminates practices that confront racism and empower and edify everyone involved.

This is the country we live in…no doubt about it: white nationalists well-organized and rising; a fascist in the white house surrounded by his loyal Renfields; a preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza underway, funded and fueled by our taxes; raging, racialized police violence unchecked; capitalist-induced climate collapse on full display; fragile and anemic democratic institutions on life support; religious authoritarianism on the rise; women’s bodily integrity under sustained assault. The day after the recent election, the 10 richest Americans added $64 billion to their personal wealth, and extreme right-wing para-militaries armed up. The overlapping crises threaten to overwhelm us. We’re joined in conversation with Davarian Baldwin, a leading historian and cultural critic from Trinity College, and David Stovall, engaged scholar and legendary teacher/activist from the University of Illinois at Chicago, to reckon with the wreckage, and to discuss  where we might go from here.