A look at the biographical book by Dan Berger

by Elizabeth V. Hallett

The Fellowship of Reconciliation’s “Gathering Voices”  program this week, was a remarkable gift. It was an online interview with long-time civil rights activists Dr. Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons on the crest of a new book that reflects their lives as civil rights activists. On the Zoom call were several dozen nonviolence and civil rights activists – many with gray hair! – many of whom the honored guests worked with over the years. 

While Zoharah was the principle honoree of this interview, her former husband also spoke. As parents and comrades they bore witness to the abiding love they share and their pride in having raised their daughter and filmmaker Aishah Shahdidah Simmons. 

This new publication from Basic Books reveals precious stories and historical perspective from the life of sacrifice and a deep-seeded commitment to rise above the suffocating racism of the deep South by breaking with traditions that reinforce oppression. In this week’s interview, Zohara described how terrifying it was to break with her family and to plunge headlong into the freedom struggle despite the killing Freedom Summer activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney on June, 21 of 1964 in Mississippi.

In the process of her growth as an activist, Zoharah mentioned, she was inspired by, and aligned with, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Alice Walker and a host of others to organize for voter registration in the south and stay in the civil rights movement for a lifetime.  

A new history of Black Liberation, told through the intertwined story of two grassroots organizers,  ​”Stayed on Freedom,” is a powerful account of Zoharah and her family’s ongoing 60-year journey as activists moving from SNCC through the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement up until today. It is a story of both continual change and fidelity to an unwavering value.  -Basic Books

“The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. 

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.”

Author Dan Berger writes:  

Stayed on Freedom, is a powerful account of Zoharah’s ongoing 60-year journey as an activist as well as the journeys of her ex-husband, Michael and their daughter, filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons.   

Love has long been associated with the Christian pacifist tradition, an unquestionably large influence on the Southern civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

 But the love I speak of here is not turn-the-other-cheek endurance. I mean something both more basic and more expansive. Love—for people, for struggle, for possibility—is where we seek to unify what we believe with what we do, to bring our best selves in service of another.

I can’t think of a more apt description of Zoharah herself who has been a spiritual seeker involved in the struggle for freedom since she was a teenager known as Gwendolyn Robinson.

Raised in Memphis by a grandmother who herself was raised by a formerly enslaved person, Zoharah worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in 1964.

After that summer, much to her grandmother’s anger, Zoharah dropped out of Spelman College–leaving her full scholarship behind– to work for SNCC full time. She eventually went to work on SNCC’s Atlanta Project, which was an early grassroots expression of Black Power that focused its efforts on political mobilization and urban improvement.

Along with her husband at the time, Michael Simmons, she converted to the Nation of Islam in the late 1960s, but her fiercely independent thinking and feminist beliefs were a poor fit within the NOI. By the early 1970s, having split up with Michael, she became a practitioner of Sufi Islamic mysticism and was given the name Zoharah. She went on to do research and get her doctorate in the study of the Islamic feminist movement.

Before retiring a few years ago, Zoharah taught for decades at the University of Florida where her work centered on issues of race, gender, and religion, particularly on African American religious traditions and women’s relationship with Islam.

Throughout all those years, her work for justice and freedom changed forms but never wavered. She worked for the American Friends Service Committee for 20 years and also served as treasurer of the National Black Independent Party. She is a founding member of the National Council of Elders.

Most important to me however is that fact that I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Zoharah and collaborate with her over the past couple years and I consider myself lucky to call her my friend.

Stayed on Freedom, is a powerful account of Zoharah’s ongoing 60-year journey as an activist, as well as the journeys of her ex-husband, Michael and their daughter, filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons. 

— from the introduction by author, Dan Berger