Stayed On Freedom
The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey
Dan Berger and Michael Simmons with Hafizah Augustus Geter
We are thrilled to welcome Dan Berger and Michael Simmons in a conversation facilitated by Hafizah Augustus Geter to celebrate the publication of Stayed On Freedom, a new history of Black Liberation, told through the intertwined story of two grassroots organizers.
"Stayed On Freedom is a triumph of storytelling. Dan Berger generously offers an ever-blooming portrait of two people's struggle without reducing their story to struggle alone. This is a deeply loving, deeply caring text that is both tender and ferocious in approach."—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America
The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom.
Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.
Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.
Dan and Michael will be joined by Hafizah Augustus Geter, the author of the powerful The Black Period and Un-American, for a conversation you will not want to miss.
Dan Berger yet again brings together superb research, a deep commitment to justice, and beautiful writing in Stayed On Freedom. This is a rare intimate portrait of the stakes, evolution, and expansiveness of the Black freedom movement that will join classic texts on this period. —Imani Perry, New York Times bestselling author of South to America
“Dan Berger is one of our most gifted historians of Black radical thought and activism of the 1960s and 1970s. By way of a political biography of two relatively unknown organizers, Michael Simmons and Zoharah Simmons, Berger casts the spotlight away from already known figures and unearths the work of ordinary Black people in sustaining the Black radical movement known as Black Power in the late 1960s and beyond... An original and necessary book.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Dan Berger is professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell, curator of the Washington Prison History Project, and author of several books--including Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey. danberger.info
Michael Simmons has been a domestic and international human rights activist for 60 years. Beginning as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as Director of European programs for the American Friends Service Committee, Michael’s work has taken him to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. For 18 years, he co-founded and ran the Ráday Salon, an independent human rights learning and discussion program in Budapest, Hungary. He also taught courses on African American History and US Elections at the Budapest campus of McDaniel College.
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian U.S. writer born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, (Random House, 2022) is a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, and an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, Boston Review, The Believer, The Paris Review, Salon, The Funambulist, among many others. She is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit and lives in Brooklyn, NY. hafizahaugustusgeter.com
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