Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons and Lucas Johnson — The Movement, Remembered Forward

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Society, Spirituality, Society & Culture, Sociology, Culture, Science, Religion & Spirituality, Krista Tippett, Social Sciences, On Being, Arts

4.7 • 10.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2015

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wisdom for how we can move and heal our society in our time as the Civil Rights Movement galvanized its own. Lucas Johnson is bringing the art and practice of nonviolence into a new century, for new generations. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons was an original Black Power feminist and a grassroots leader of the Mississippi Freedom Summer.

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0:25.6	I can never give up on the idea that we the people can organize and bring change because we did
0:36.4	it and we can continue to do it. One of the things about what we call the Civil Rights Movement
0:43.5	that I think was so phenomenal is that folks weren't afraid to experiment and I feel like we
0:49.5	were in a fascinating time right now. I feel like there I do see those experiments so to speak
0:54.6	because there's so much to be done. Yeah. There's so much to be done.
1:00.9	Lucas Johnson is a 30-something minister who's bringing the art and practice of non-violence into
1:06.5	a new century for new generations. Gwendolyn Zahara Simmons was one of the original Black
1:12.4	Power feminists. Together across generations, they bring little remembered nuance of the Civil
1:18.9	Rights Movement into relief. It's history I discovered I scarcely knew, a messier, more human
1:25.4	history that reveals how much more powerful we are than we know to bring the great lessons of
1:31.3	that time into practice in our own. I'm Krista Tippet and this is on being.
1:43.2	Reverend Lucas Johnson was born into an army family in Germany and grew up in coastal Georgia.
1:54.3	He's a leader of the century-old international fellowship of reconciliation. Dr. Gwendolyn Zahara
2:00.2	Simmons became a leader while still in her teens of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.
2:06.5	Today she's a professor of religious studies at Florida State University and a student of
2:11.5	sufism. She was raised by her grandmother who'd been a sharecropper and whose own mother had been
2:17.2	a slave. I spoke with Lucas and Zahara in 2013 at NPR headquarters in Washington DC before events
2:25.1	in Ferguson and beyond reignited racial language. But the perspective they offered that night has
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