The Voices That Carry Us Forward

“And I wonder,” Angela Davis asked in a 2013 lecture at Birkbeck University in London, “will we ever truly recognize the collective subject of history that was itself produced by radical organizing?” The narratives we tell ourselves, the myths we construct, obscure the foundations and erase the stories of countless individuals and moments in history. We seek a clear path for our narratives, a firm beginning and a solid closure, eschewing what came before we entered the story or what follows after the last sentence appears on the page.

Speaking about the fiftieth anniversary of the events in 1963, Davis states, “What I fear about many of these observances is that they tend to enact historical closures.” The “historical closure” eliminates anything that occurs beyond the end; it serves as a punctuation mark, closing off any indication of a future beyond that final mark on the page. When we come to the “historical closure” of a narrative, we fail to see that time moves onward, forever marching beyond the end of the book, long past the last breath we exhale as we recite the narrative. Davis continues, “[Historical closures] are represented as historical high points on a road to an ultimately triumphant democracy; one which can be displayed as a model for the world; one which perhaps can serve as justification for military incursions, including the increased use of drones in the so-called…