Rev. Sekou is the hero 2018 needs
“You know there’s people obsessed with the new film Black Panther? I was raised by superheroes,” Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou tells me late in our interview from early last week. “Some of them who couldn’t write their name, who were functionally illiterate but who taught me to be an intellectual.” He added, “I come from a mighty, beautiful, loving, dignified, black southern community who held heaven and earth in their tongues.”
So is the origin story of one of the our important and essential voices today.
St. Louis native Rev. Sekou is a civil rights activist, musician, documentary filmmaker, author, and preacher, and he’s incredibly prolific at all those. Cornel West called him “one of the most courageous and prophetic voices of our time,” and he’s not wrong. I’m still not quite sure how he found twenty minutes to talk with me by phone; it was shortly after appearing on the radio. When writing about Rev. Sekou, I find that quoting from his written words and interviews (like the one he did with me last week) makes a stronger case for listening to him than any expository writing I can come up with.
While Rev. Sekou is a brilliant and thoughtful writer, and his debut, solo album, In Times Like These, is an uplifting and beautiful blues record, what I find most inspiring about him is that he absolutely puts in the work away from the media with his activism. I asked him about this because he’s not a social media celebrity, but a real-world activist. He said, “nothing beats labor-intensive, low technology organizing.”
He elaborated on that point:
Will you look at the studies of, say, Black Lives Matter, right? The Black Lives Matter [movement] doesn’t really take off until the people are in the streets in Ferguson. It laid dormant for two years. And so … Social media in part functions like traditional media in that it can articulate a certain form of public opinion, serve as an information sharer. They’re just kind of mixed between social media activism like around the Arab Spring. So when you think about the Arab Spring, people were saying that Facebook and Twitter did it but the night that they occupied Tahrir Square, they had four stages set up in like two hours. Twitter can’t do that. That’s unions. Unions did that. Twitter becomes an air campaign for a ground campaign.
Rev. Sekou was on the ground, working as an activist in Ferguson (where he was arrested for teaching nonviolent, civil disobedience), Baltimore, and Charlottesville (“ I continued to do that work four weeks in Charlottesville before the Unite the Right rally,” he told me), among other places. He goes where his knowledge and activism are needed, and is unafraid to tell people hard truths they may not want to hear. For example, he told an audience of white Christians in Portland in 2015, “Martin Luther King ain’t coming back. Get over it. It won’t look like the Civil Rights Movement. It’s angry. It’s profane. If you’re more concerned about young people using profanity than about the profane conditions they live in, there’s something wrong with you.”
In Al-Jazeera, he wrote, “White anxiety cannot become the measure of this movement or of the nation. Our movement must not be guided by the need to assuage white discomfort in the face of righteous black rage. Too often, there has been minimal or fleeting efforts by many in the liberal white community to address police brutality and the bone-crushing poverty exacted upon black bodies across this nation. If we rush to accommodate and appease those white liberals whose presence on the streets of Ferguson has been negligible, we betray the blood of the innumerable Mike Browns of America.”
When I say that he’s a prolific writer, I mean he released two books this month (Gods Gays and Guns: Religion and the Future of Democracy, and the reissued paperback of his great Urbansouls: Reflections on Youth, Religion, and Hip-Hop Culture.), and has four more in the works. He told me, “I’m working on a manuscript now called The Task of the Artist in the Time of Monsters.” He also said, “One called This Ain’t Your Dad’s Civil Rights Movement: Ferguson Black Lives Matters and The Letters Sealed by Martin Luther King, Which I actually began the book on King before Ferguson and Black Rights Matters emerged. And then the book took a turn once that happened and I’m attempting to show the similarities in the politics, King’s radical politics and Black Lives Matter. And then lastly there’s a book called The Liberation Theology of Ferguson, which is a more academic book where I’m trying to do a theological read of what emerged in the streets of Ferguson.”
Even a cursory glance at his website shows he’s written eloquently and passionately about James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, Bob Marley, Barack Obama, Danny Glover, the gay rights movement, clergymen remaining neutral during Ferguson, and a host of other issues/people. His Oxford American essay from last year has one of the most striking opening paragraphs I’ve ever read. The more time I spent diving into his writing and activism, I become more in awe of his tirelessness and effectiveness.
Rev. Sekou’s website notes prominently towards the top his versatility as a public intellectual, saying “musician | writer | theologian.” In Seattle, we have the opportunity to witness those dimensions of Rev. Sekou’s activism. He says, “I’m speaking at the Search for Meaning Festival (on Saturday). Then at Hillman Collaboratory, I’m preaching for a church there, that Sunday morning. I’m teaching a class at Seattle Theological School that afternoon and then preforming back at Hillman City Collaboratory that evening. So I’m going to be working hard that Sunday.”
Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou is such an important voice right now, and one that we desperately need in the public conversation. He has a wealth of knowledge and the generosity to share it with people who need it, through his sermons, his writing, his music, and his activism (whether they know they need it or not). He provides a path towards liberation that we would all be well advised to follow. And I can’t think of anything more hopeful than when he writes, “Just because a movement isn’t popular, doesn’t mean it isn’t working.”
See Rev. Sekou while he is in Seattle this weekend, speaking at the Search for Meaning Festival at Seattle University on Saturday, and playing music from In Times Like These at the Hillman City Collaboratory on Sunday evening.
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