[106] Conjure.

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“In the face of unremitting political evil and despite overwhelming odds, African people in America fought for freedom with the conviction that every problem has a solution, that willingness and work can change the world, that collective co-creation can make a way out of no way, and that disadvantage can be turned into advantage, poison into medicine, and humiliation into honor.” – Johari Jabir, Conjuring Freedom (2017)
In early May, Lindsay and I drove out to the Poconos in Pennsylvania to visit our dear friend Erinn. We got lost in deep conversation on several power walks through her neighborhood, along the river and on the Appalachian Trail.
We were really craving that kind of in-the-flesh camaraderie.
On our way home, Lindsay and I called the audible. We dipped down South. We stayed for a few nights in a little cottage in Hampton, Virginia. It was four blocks from the beach. We just wanted to sit in the sand and soak up a little sun.
It was a long winter in Detroit.
One afternoon, I drove over to Hampton University, an HBCU built right after the Civil War to provide an education for formerly enslaved people. In front of the college, there’s an enormous tree called Emancipation Oak. Before Hampton University was established, Black people gathered right there, under its shade, to listen to the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.
I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.
In the mid-19th century, a local woman named Mary Peake was recruited to teach Black folks how to read. It was undercover work. Because Black literacy had literally been prohibited by law since the Nat Turner rebellion decades earlier.
But when the Civil War started and the Union army took over nearby Fort Monroe, Mary hauled her classroom outside, to teach her students under this enormous oak.
Unfortunately, Mary Peake died of tuberculosis a year before the Emancipation Proclamation. But most likely, it was her students who read the document out loud, in the shade of that oak, to Black people gathering there for some good news.
When I visited Emancipation Oak, I stood alone, under that tree, in the shade of a seventy-five degree day. I put my hands on its massive trunk and prayed for the emancipation of those who remain enslaved all over the world.
I also prayed for my own emancipation – and that my own emancipation might contribute to the emancipation of others. Because I believe that personal healing is rooted in collective liberation – and vice-versa.
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In the Preface of his book Conjuring Freedom, my friend and comrade Johari Jabir writes about another Emancipation Oak, four hundred miles down the coast in Beaufort, South Carolina.
On January 1, 2013, Johari gathered there, under that oak, with a small group of people commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
At the start of the Civil War, the First South Carolina Volunteers stood under that oak in Beaufort for an initiation ceremony. They became the first all-Black regiment of soldiers to join the Union Army.
Most of the soldiers of the First South Carolina Volunteers came from the Gullah people of the Georgia Sea Islands. Gullah culture is the confluence of many west and central African tribes that came together and syncretized traditional African spiritualities, Islam and versions of Christianity they brought with them to the new world.
These Gullah soldiers did not have much in the way of material means. But they could conjure.
They believed that they could tap into an invisible magical power and use it for healing – or harm.
They believed that they could summon Something Else to transform reality.
Conjuring was crucial for Africans in the new world because institutions were not created to protect and serve them. They did not have access to medicinal, social, legislative and legal help. But they did have access to the spiritual realm.
Johari says that Africans in the new world put faith in their “collective will to conjure.”
They conjured to heal their bodies. They conjured to heal the body politic too.
In fact, for the past four hundred years, African peoples have been the leavening of liberation working through the dough of America.
In the midst of all this supremacy, Something Else rises up.
For the First South Carolina Volunteers, music functioned as a form of magic.
Every night, they conjured a “cosmic vision of freedom” in the nightly ring shout, a counterclockwise movement of singing, dancing and drumming where they expressed both individual difference and group allegiance.
The ring shout summoned a syncretized roster of bible characters, African deities and ancestral spirits, who - when conjured - would assist their "gospel army" in their battle for freedom.
The First South Carolina Volunteers transformed conventional notions of masculinity, solidarity and citizenship – through the “spiritual militancy” of song and dance and drum. Their masculinity was not performed by possessing, mastering and controlling. It marinated on mutuality, trust and emotional expressiveness.
The First South Carolina Volunteers did not reject the state, the military and religion, even though these had been used as weapons of white supremacy in the new world.
They embraced a dialectical posture of both/and instead of either/or.
Johari says that their spiritual liberation was rooted in “repositioning and resignifying” masculinity, the state, the military and religion.
Johari says that, in the new world, enslaved Africans cultivated the skill and will "to turn the toxic into a tonic."
They salvaged remnants of cloth from garbage dumps and transformed them into exquisite quilts that kept their families warm.
They kept hunger at bay by taking the intestines of pigs that plantation owners refused to eat and turning them into cooked chitlins.
And this is what they did with the bible too!
 “Slaves took the words of their masters’ sacred book,” Johari writes, “and inverted them so as to read light out of darkness.” They did not quote the good book verbatim, but used it as a performative script of improvisation within the dark context of their lives.
Johari writes:
Slave owners deployed the Christian religion as a form of social control over their chattel, but the slaves attempted to transform the religion they had been given into a means of envisioning, enabling and enacting their liberation. 
Every bit of Conjuring Freedom is compelling. But this part about what Black people did with the bible really bowled me over.
This week, I was re-reading Johari's book right after I checked out Huey P. Newton's Revolutionary Suicide from the library.  Newton was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, an organization I have immense love and respect for.
In his autobiography, which was published the same year that George Floyd and I were born, Newton says that the Judeo-Christian God and religion have always meant submission for Black people in America.
Newton wrote that, when Christianity was imposed upon them, Black people assumed another burden, what he called “the tyranny of the future.” It increased their sense of hopelessness. It taught them to believe that justice would not come until heaven.
Johari says Something Else.
Johari says that Black folk tapped into a “slave eschatology” that was not obsessed with someday in heaven, but right now on earth. It was a subversive theology that empowered them to take action to secure their own freedom, trusting that God would show up in the process.
In other words, enslaved Africans did not only deconstruct the evangelical Christianity of plantation owners. They dialectically engaged with the biblical text to reconstruct faith in an exodus God of love and liberation.
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In the postlude of his book, Johari says that when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached, he was conjuring.
On the eve of his assassination in Memphis, MLK delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech to striking sanitation workers. In it, he commanded “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Dr. King wielded a passage from the Hebrew prophets and invoked a flood.
Quoting the Muslim journalist Steven Barboza, Johari says that this kind of rhetoric was a “jihad of words” against institutional racism.
There are many ways to manifest the collective will to conjure.
When he stood under Emancipation Oak, Johari says that it was the collective singing that conjured a cosmic sense of the “we."
Johari was standing in a powerful American counter-cultural tradition of organized protest that conjured alternative social visions of democracy through song.
This is the emancipatory tradition that I am standing in this week as America celebrates 250 years of "independence."
A dozen years ago, in The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Dr. Gerald Horne argued that white American colonialists declared independence in order to maintain and expand slavery. Because they feared that Britain was becoming more abolitionist.
In an exquisite reflection this week, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley wrote that it is crucial that we remember the true origins of the American Revolution, but also that the Declaration of Independence is most powerful "when the people it was never meant to represent grab hold of its language and toss it back like an undetonated grenade."
Talk about turning the toxic into a tonic!
Robin D.G. Kelley says that this is exactly what Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ho Chi Minh did with the Declaration of Independence. If it is self-evident that all men are created equal, then it must include all men - and every other gender that God created too.
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This weekend, Lindsay and I are in Washington DC for the Interfaith Action for Palestine. These are the perfect people for us to be with in the belly of the beast on its 250th birthday.
The Interfaith Action for Palestine is a multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial coalition that gathers in DC every summer to disrupt the Christians United for Israel conference. We come together, from all over the country, to conjure a world where everyone is free.
Much of our conjuring is manifested through music.
Last year at the Interfaith Action for Palestine, on the day after Israel murdered thirty-nine Palestinians at a beachside café in Gaza City with a 500-lb bomb built in the US, about seventy people of faith and conscience got arrested for blocking the cash registers at the cafeteria that feeds those who work for Congress.
That day, hundreds of members of Christians United for Israel were there lobbying congressional representatives to keep sending billions to bomb Gaza.
Our friend Alana Alpert, a rabbi who serves a synagogue in Detroit, led us in a prayer that started with this chant:
Congress doesn’t eat,
Until Gaza eats. 
Lindsay and I joined the cash register blockade until the Capitol police warned us, for the second time, that we would be arrested if we did not cooperate.
While the huge flat-screen TV in the cafeteria blared Fox News coverage of Senators voting on Trump’s big ugly bill across the street, we watched rabbis, pastors, priests, professors, therapists, social workers, community organizers and a Palestinian Christian grandmother get hand-cuffed by Capitol Police.
The rest of us got pushed out of the cafeteria singing this:
My ancestors they taught me
to say “Never Again.”
When I cry out for Gaza,
it’s because I honor them.
We sang it over and over and over again.
What did this collective will to conjure actually do?
This is an important question. After all, for the past one thousand days, all of these kinds of actions, all over the world, have not stopped the genocide.
When we engage with the spiritual realm, effectiveness can be awfully hard to measure. However, ever since our collective will to conjure in the cafeteria, I've seen glimpses of a great awakening. A lot of folks are starting to see America and Israel for what they actually are.
We weren't supposed to see any of this. But we are seeing this and it is freeing us.
This kind of emancipation does not just happen unless Something Else is working with us behind the scenes.