Dearest Unravelers and Unravelers-to-Be ā
Greetings from down Southā¦ Look who we ran into on our flight from New York to Atlanta: WNBA legend Teresa Weatherspoon, aka T-Spoon! A Hall of Famer, a trailblazer, and an absolute force. My editor pal Mari spotted her, and yes, we were those girls, chasing her down for a photo in the Atlanta airport. Zero shame. šš
Mari, T-Spoon, Me, ATL Airport on Friday
And what timing. The WNBA Finals are tied 2ā2, with Game 5 tomorrow night in San Francisco against my hometown Atlanta Dream. Every one of those players is running through doors that women like T-Spoon kicked open first.
Which is kind of the whole story, isnāt it? Nine days from the midterms, 250 years after this country declared that āall men are created equal,ā we are still fighting over who gets through the door, and who gets a voice.
Iām writing to you from a place that knows that fight in its bones: Birmingham, Alabama. Iām back in the thick of my project… spending Sunday filming with two dear friends, a mother and daughter. Theyāre two freedom fighters from two different generations, and weāre talking about ALL of it. The South. Voting rights. Erasure. Reclamation. What it means to claim our rightful place in this country, throw open the doors for the women coming behind us, and fight like hell to keep those damn doors open.
Marian and Peaches, mother and daughter, Birmingham, AL
Iām a daughter of the South, and thereās no place more beautifully complicated. (I wrote about first stepping on hallowed ground in Selma, Alabama just a few months ago here.) Itās also where this countryās ugliest truths were written into law, and where ordinary people, children among them, rose up and rewrote them. Here in Birmingham, Kelly Ingram Park, where Bull Connor turned fire hoses and dogs on marching children in 1963, sits across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a Klan bomb killed four little girls that same yearā¦. and two days later, Peaches (above) was born. The beauty and the brutality share a single city block.
My friend LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, says that in many ways weāre back in Reconstruction. Think about that. After the Civil War, Black Southerners voted, ran, and won. Then came the backlash: in 1901 Alabama rewrote its constitution with the openly stated goal of white supremacy, and the South wouldnāt send another Black member to Congress for more than seventy years.
It took the Voting Rights Act, won on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to pry those doors back open. Now the U.S. Supreme Court is closing them. In 2013, SCOTUS gutted federal oversight of states like Alabama. This spring, in Louisiana v. Callais, it hollowed out most of what was left. A federal court right here in Birmingham found that Alabamaās congressional map intentionally discriminated against Black voters, and the Supreme Court let the state use it anyway. So in nine days, Alabama will vote on lines that erase one of only two districts drawn so Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice.
In other words, from Reconstruction to right now, weāre still fighting over whose history gets told, whose humanity gets recognized, and who gets to participate fully.
I keep thinking about John Lewis, born in Troy, Alabama, and beaten bloody in Selma. In his final essay, published the day of his funeral, he wrote: āDemocracy is not a state. It is an act.ā
Democracy is not a state. It is an act.
Selma, Alabama 1963
And now to something this week that brought me ABSOLUTE JOY.
This was my apartment three days ago:
Pelican cases. Lenses. Light stands. Every corner of my apartment taken over by gear to continue filming my project. And somewhere between tripping over a sandbag and searching for my coffee mug, I stopped cold, because Iād seen this exact scene before. Years ago. In my head.
The story behind that moment is below, plus two more things Iāve learned about chasing the big, scary, beautiful thing. Two videos from my apartment just for you.
KEEP READING.āØāØāØ